What is behind a "warm" or "vinyl"sound?


I found an interesting article in The Saturday Toronto Star's entertainment section on the resurgence of vinyl.

What I found most interesting in this article was a description of why people describe vinyl as "warm". Peter J Moore, the famous producer/mastering engineer of the legendary one microphone recording of the Cowboy Junkies' Trinity Sessions recording says it all comes down to the fact that humans do not like square waves - ie. when you go from super quiet to super loud at no time at all. He gives the example that if someone was to slap two pieces of wood together right beside your ear would be about the only time one would feel a square wave - and that would make you jump right out of your skin! He says digital, particularly MP3s reproduce square waves like crazy, which triggers fear which also produces fatigue. He says if those same two pieces of wood were slapped together across the room, the square wave would be rounded off by the time the sound reached our ears. Turntables cannot reproduce square waves due to through time it takes for sound to get though the length of wire and the magnet that the wire is wrapped around in the cartridge. By the time the signal gets through that the sharpness, he ugliness, has been rounded and that, he says, is what people are talking about when they describe vinyl as "warm" sounding. Interesting!

I find there are a bunch of digital manufacturers, like Lumin, that are striving for a vinyl sound. I wonder if they are somehow rounding off the square waves in the digital signal to do so? If this is the case, "perfect" reproduction may NOT actually be beneficial to the sound...at least for someone who really wants a vinyl sound experience. Better may not actually be better when it comes to digital sound reproduction!
camb

Showing 2 responses by jakegt3

This is an interesting question and I don't think there is a simple answer to it because nobody really knows how and why the ear hears what it does in reproduced music. I agree that, in general, vinyl and tubes do have a "warmer" sound compared to digital and solid state.

I listen mostly to classical music and to my ears, tubes do a better job of recreating the sound of a live performance in a concert hall, at least as I hear it. I don't necessarily agree that tubes sound warm because the high frequencies are rolled off. I have laboratory test equipment at home and I have measured the frequency response of my tube amp (ARC VS115) into my actual loudspeakers (SF Cremona M). The rolloff at 20 kHz is only -0.5 dB. My high frequency hearing (at age 62) cuts off sharply around 11-12 kHz, so it's really doubtful that rolloff is audible to my ears. My solid state amps, by comparison, are down about -0.2 dB at 20 kHz, yet they sound much brighter.

Digital does something to the sound of massed violins, a real acid test for sound reproduction, that can make them sound harsher and grittier than vinyl does. This is not an original observation, but on the other hand, vinyl captures the sound of the actual instrument more accurately as I hear it. However, in truth I do most of my listening to digital because of the convenience and the fact that LP surface noise becomes bothersome when you are used to the silent background of digital.
"This is true for the vast majority of digital equipment, but not all. With very low jitter and noise, it can sound smooth and silky, just like analog."

Can you recommend a stand-alone CD player with these capabilities? I have over 1000 CD's in my music library and switching over to a different digital format won't help me get better sound from my CD's.