I got into a discussion with a friend of mine and we were talking about CDs and he kept bashing them saying that Records are alot better and you can watch movies off of them and they have the best quality for music than anything else... now i wanted to see if anyone else was crazy like him so go a head and tell me what you think

Nothing like a good vinyl to retain all the quality. Too bad they degrade as time goes on.

Whoa, since when can you watch movies off of records?

Tell your friend to STFU, he clearly knows nothing if he thinks that. The only thing he's right on is that sound quality is better than a CD... at least the first time you play it (ever heard a CD get scratchy and worn out? I thought not). Not that anyone can actually hear the difference (anyone who thinks they can is imagining it).

Watch movies off of records?

Your friend is a retard. Murder him and loot his corpse.

it is possible to hear the difference... since most recordings available on vinyl and CD were recorded with analog equipment and to be put on CD had to be tranfered to a digital format

and usually when transfered it was done poorly

and movies? maybe he got laserdisc and vinyl confused

You can, actually. I've seen the...machine for it. But they obviously weren't very popular.

records sound better

Really? How interesting.

The point is moot anyway. Vinyl would make a very poor data storage format and so do magnetic audio tapes like we used to use.

CD transfers aren't always the best, but that's mainly because they have some mouthbreather working the controls. I'm looking forward to when music is recorded to floating point formats. Those should be much closer to vinyl.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]You can, actually. I've seen the...machine for it. But they obviously weren't very popular.[/QUOTE]

are you sure it wasn't a laserdisc player... those things were about the same diameter as a record

Positive, because he had movies for it. They were vinyls.

Seirously. Movies from a record? WTF is this guy talking about?

he has been known to say really retarted things

http://www.vinylvideo.com/

it's true.

This link is better: http://www.kempa.com/blog/archives/000951.html

My computer can't play records.

CDs ftw.

vinyls are more awesomer simply because of people like thrawn who let us get funky to em

I love listening to vinyls when I can, but they just aren't as practical as CDs. I usually listen to all my parent's old records when I need a vinyl fix. Lots of Pink Floyd and Beatles.

CD is technically superior to vinyl in every way. EVERY WAY. Vinyl does not sound better. EVER. A Wikipedia article on PWM. A Wikipedia article on digital-to-analog converters.

Not to mention to get them to sound anywhere near as good as a CD you'll need to spend hundreds, if not thousands on vinyl equipment.

The whole "vinyl is better" BS can be attributed to the following:

1. Placebo, psychoacoustics, etc. I.e. there is no real difference and idiots are just holding onto the past.

2. When CDs came around, recording engineers were used to mastering for vinyl, which typically meant boosting the treble to compensate for the treble loss that comes with vinyl. They tended to do the very same thing with CDs, hence the "digital harshness."

3. People who have heard and prefer vinyl probably heard it on a really GOOD stereo system where ANYTHING would have sounded better because the other components in the system were what sounded so good, not the vinyl itself.

4. People are comparing well mastered vinyl albums to poorly mastered CD albums.


That said, there is nothing BAD about vinyl. Vinyl has a nostalia to it which I completely respect. It is just an inferior storage medium. It's the same with the tube vs transistor debate (excluding instrument amplification).

Although personally it doesn't matter to me at all if I'm listening to CD or vinyl, as a musical experience, the 16-bit dynamics range of CD audio is limiting. There's no denying that. Some say the 44.1 kHz sampling rate is also too low, but I haven't found it lacking, so I won't personally comment that. But obviously since DVD audio has a much higher sampling rate, some experts have been thinking it's less than optimal.

But like Emon said, it's easy to talk about the supposed shortcomings of digital CDs. Since vinyl format and player are analoque, measuring them or trying to figure how good quality they produce in practice is much harder.

Even though vinyls are pretty awesome, mostly during late 80's and 90's I messed around with cassettes, and I'm too clumsy to treat vinyls carefully. Gotta prefer CD's.

My dad has quite a collection of classic rock records he's collected since he was 8... but he owns more CD's I think...

Hmm? You get 96 dB of dynamic range with 16-bit PCM audio. Vinyl is around 60-80, although enthusiasts (read: idiots) will claim dynamic ranges well over 100. Not to mention that most modern music is recorded so terribly and has little dynamic range.

As for sampling rate, you need at least twice of the bandwidth you're trying to reproduce. In this case, 20 KHz, which is the highest you can hear anyway...I mean high sampling rates and oversampling may have its uses in the studio, infact I'm sure it does, but in the end product? Seems like a gimmick to me.

Edit: I may be mistaken, but I'm almost certainly sure I'm right about the above...someone else feel free to chime in.

Well, perhaps I belong to those idiots, but since we are talking about an analogue technique, the dynamic range depends solely on the quality of workmanship. So, you must mean statistical measurements have been performed, and they gave that 60-80?

Anyway, I'm not too familiar with vinyl recordings, so I can't really argue with you, nor is there any need to, since you seem to know what you are talking about (at least far better than me).

But having edited 16-bit sound every now and then, I'm not totally convinced 16-bits is all you need. It has at least hindered my work, even though it hasn't probably made it any worse. I'm obviously no pro, and my methods and aims could be whatever they happen to be, but that's my personal experience so far.

how did I know ThawnNUmbaz would vote records :p

btw thrawn, whats your mixposure name? I wanna check out your album page.

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Unlike a record you can create something called a "Data CD". With this "Data CD" you can store many different file types. Some of which may or may not be a higher data rate than ordinary CD Audio!

(I think this is relevant to the discussion. While it's been demonstrated that you can, in fact, play video on a vinyl record..... you can play video back on CDs too. And encode floating point sound, or 24-bit fixed point 7-channel sound with a LFE track).

I think the choice here is simple.

Even if you did ramp up a CD to the same theoretical sample rate as a record (2x, given human hearing acuity?) you'd still get better data density.

My knowledge isn't too technical, but as far as I know, quality analog recordings are still superior to digital recordings. You're missing out on some ultra-low and ultra-high frequencies on digital recordings. Now theoretically those frequencies aren't audible for humans, ('isolated'), but when they're included with the audible frequencies they seem to affect listening to those, when playing back and listening to it.

But as far as any scientifical proof goes, I couldn't tell you.

I've been in bands for years, and my friend has built a recording studio in his home. He has great equipment, the best microphones out there, you name it. He's recorded lots and lots of bands over the years, digital as well as analog, and both can sound great... both can sound bad... it all depends on the quality of the worksmanship. In my personal experience though, I must say I've always liked the 'analog' sound better, and he too.

The debate will never end, lol.

but vinyl has that crackly awesome sound, and that noise when the needle reaches the end is unreal.

I prefer records more or less out of nostalgia. My parents have some Beatles albums and they sound really great.

I get more of nostalgia out of cassettes than records. I assume cassettes have lower quality than records?

I prefer Vinyl. No real reason, apart from I like the general sound quality more.

"Cassette" and "quality" don't really fit into the same sentence...

The dynamic range of cassettes is around 50dB. Without noise reduction (Dolby) that's quite bad in practice, and not good even with noise reduction compared to quality vinyls or cds. Yeah, cassettes are really inferior. And as everybody knows, they don't last very long. No matter if you use them or not (although if you use them, they last even shorter time...).

I listen to 128 kbit mp3s.

Does that make me a horrible person?

cassettes get scewed up easly

yes... :p

It makes you an average person. 96 kbit would make you a dubious person. 64 kbit would certainly make you a horrible person. 192 kbit would make you a decent fellow.

Oh I'm not saying that it is all you always need. DVD-A and stuff IS better, I'm just not convinced anyone will be using it, or that it will really be worth it.


See, I just don't buy that. You can't hear it, but it affects you when you hear it with other stuff? Ehh...sorry. There have been SOME studies on the effects of hypersonic (beyond 20 KHz) frequencies on the BRAIN, but nothing about being able to actually hear them.

Not to mention you may still be limited by the equipment you record with, and physical properties of vinyl records. Vinyl tends to have high frequency rolloff, I'd be suprised if you could produce a decent 20 KHz tone, let alone anything higher.

Take physics then. What he says makes sense, now that I think about it.

You studied the inner ear in physics? Wow.

More like the basics of wave functioning.

ugh... here comes the ego of an angry RITian. Thanks Yosh. :p