1. Home
  2. analog
  3. 197797-137065

The muddy waters of Analogue vs. digital today

With new technology, everything is changing so fast it is hard to keep up with new recordings. I have had a turntable all of my audiophile life, although I admit I played mostly CDs for many years. It was only since I upgraded my analogue system to a certain degree in the mid-nineties, that I could hear that records sounded better than CDs. It wasn’t a very expensive upgrade, a used Rega 3 with glass platter, new Sumiko Bluepoint Special, and a floor demo ARC PH-3. Probably somewhere around $3K. Mid-90s remember.

Now my system is very upgraded and I can hear more differences between vinyl and streaming at high resolution. CDs have kind of been left in the dust. 44.1 resolution sounds kind of tinny and flat. I listen if that’s my only choice, but I can easily hear the difference. I credit myself with a decent ear after doing critial listening for 30+ years. My ear is not as good as most reviewers, but you'll understand why it’s good enough to write a forward to this thread.

I won’t go through the differences I hear between analogue and digital, because you’ve heard it all before. What I want to talk about is my confusion in this new recording landscape. 

I had purchased Roberta Flack’s "First Take" when it came out and I’d kept the record for more than forty years when I realized it had really seen its better days. Basically, it was unlistenable, even after a few washes in the Degritter. I looked at near mint copies of the record and they were quite expensive. Then I saw that there was a new pressing for a reasonable price.

I was listening to the new pressing of "First Take" a few days ago when I realized it sounded overly compressed at the high end. I asked my new audiophile friend chatgpt if the record was pressed from an analogue source. Nope. I was basically listening to a digital recording pressed into vinyl. Chatgpt says that most records made after 1980 come from digital sources. So, I found a reasonablly priced orignal pressing of "First Take." My grandaugher in college can have the digital one.

Today I was playing a fairly new recording of Gustavo Dudamel and Yuja Wang playing Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme by Paganini. I live in L.A. and have been lucky enough to see Dudamel live many times and Yuga Wang several times. It’s a beautiful recording, wide and deep and detailed and musical. I pronounced it the best classical recording I owned. But it was put out recently. So, I checked with my audiophile buddy chatgpt. The record is from a very high resolution digital source. Chatgpt says that digital can sound more analogue on vinyl because the engineers roll off the high end a bit.

So, now things are more than a bit confusing. Do I buy a recording from before the 80’s on expensive vinyl or might it actually sound better streaming at 192 kHz? If you listen to Patricia Barber’s "Clique" at 172 kHz, it sounds pretty good. So good, i have not bothered to go out and buy it on vinyl.

Does anyone else feel a similar confusion in this modern market, and do you have any suggestions for negotiating it?

audio-b-dog
kofibaffour
717 posts
 

there is no confusion. the underlying factor which you seem not to broach is mixing and mastering differences. those hold greater sway than if the file is a 64bit, 768kHz file

audio-b-dog's avatar
audio-b-dog OP
805 posts
 

@kofibaffour 

True. But when we go out into the market to purchase a vinyl recording, how do we know how good the sonics on that recording will be? For analogue audiophiles, most new reissues or new music will probably come from a digital source unless the album says that it was pressed from an analogue source. How do we know the quality of that digital source, as well as how well the recording engineers pressed music from that source?  

kofibaffour
717 posts
 

there in lies the rub. it is up to the mix and mastering engineers to do good by us with decent to exemplary mixes. or you just have to listen to the mix like  that as that is what you get

also if you're obsessive like I am you look for the names of the mix and mastering engineers to know what to generally avoid

audio-b-dog's avatar
audio-b-dog OP
805 posts
 

@kofibaffour 

Maybe I can use chatgpt for that. It seems to know who the engineers were on all of the albums I've asked about. I am disappointed with the Roberta Flack reissues, though. I might as well stream the music if it's at a decent quality. 

When I put in a new Pass Labs XP-25 phono pramp my neighbor came over to hear it and asked me to play Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark." It sounded awful, and I thought I hadn't set up my phono preamp right. It did need a few tweaks, but it ended up that "Born to Run" was a terribly mastered album. From a digital source compressed for car radios. I think my system has become so revealing, I simply cannot play albums like that again.

That being said, I am an "Everything but the Girl" fan. Their albums made in the 90s that come from digital sources sound okay. I can listen to them. Possibly because much of the background to Tracy Thorn's voice is digital.

mulveling's avatar
mulveling
2,451 posts
 

It is very muddy waters, with a lot of hit and miss. I have some 44/16 redbook CDs (mostly from Japan) that sound almost as enjoyable as good vinyl. But the majority of rock/pop CDs sound AWFUL compared to vintage pressings. They sound flat, constrained, lifeless, and just don’t "breathe". You generally don’t need "first" pressings of vinyl. Just a good vintage pressing. There are always exceptions. 

  • With "new" music the sound gap has narrowed. I still typically prefer vinyl, by a bit. I’d have to guess my preference is caused by a combination of "pleasant" (low order) distortions from the vinyl playback chain, plus high quality mastering effort for the vinyl format.
  • A lot of 1990s era vinyl SUCKS. They were often cramming 50+ minutes of CD-length albums into 1 LP (45 minutes max for good quality), with awful results. Avoid these. 
  • A lot of vinyl reissues are disappointing ("audiophile" or not), though there are shining exceptions. 
  • Pre-1990s vinyl generally sounds good. Even after they started with digital masters - though you do start to see more incidence of bad sounding vinyl here - e.g. Rush vinyl of the 80s sounds like CRAP (sadly) compared to Rush of the 70s. Also note, the quality of vinyl took a nose-dive in the late 70s (i.e. more noisy). Japanese vinyl quality remained high.  
More to discover