Jeff Stevens
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5 months ago
in For The Love Of Vinyl on JRblog
I am an old timer (pre-baby boomer) so I too grew up with vinyl but still find all this attachment to vinyl illogical. I recently read an article in one of the science magazines "debunking the vinyl myth" and of course it struck a cord with my own feelings. The author pointed out that at 44,000 samples per second (for CD) the resulting recording more than covers the range of human hearing. And presuming you are using a lossless format and a play-back DAC of more than just 1 or 2 bits the signal's accuracy is very high, certainly higher than can be achieved mechanical by dragging a needle thru a vinyl groove whose side contours are different. And isn't the very definition of "hi-fi" (high fidelity) the faithful (i.e. accurate) reproduction of the original music?
The author went on to explain the "richer and warmer" aspect as a defect of the vinyl recording rather than a virtual. He said what people are hearing is "feedback" - because the needle is in intimate contact with the record the needle's vibrations are fed back into the record, where the large mass of vinyl acts as a sound board. Those altered vibrations re-enter the needle and are passed thru the playback system to affect the final auditory signal as "richer and warmer".
If the above explanation is correct, the "richer and warmer" component is really an "artifact" of the vinyl system and not part of the original music, again compromising the "hi-fi" aspect of vinyl recordings.
Ultimately I believe those who espouse vinyl do so for strictly psychological reasons (nostalgia, exclusivity, etc); I cannot believe they would try to maintain the scientific position that a purely mechanical, analog system could be "better" than a high quality digital one at achieving what a audiophile should desire - the ACCURATE, faithful capture and reproduction of the original audio signal (unless you happen to have been a TDC operator on a WW II American sub, when was the last time you saw an ANALOG computer).
The author went on to explain the "richer and warmer" aspect as a defect of the vinyl recording rather than a virtual. He said what people are hearing is "feedback" - because the needle is in intimate contact with the record the needle's vibrations are fed back into the record, where the large mass of vinyl acts as a sound board. Those altered vibrations re-enter the needle and are passed thru the playback system to affect the final auditory signal as "richer and warmer".
If the above explanation is correct, the "richer and warmer" component is really an "artifact" of the vinyl system and not part of the original music, again compromising the "hi-fi" aspect of vinyl recordings.
Ultimately I believe those who espouse vinyl do so for strictly psychological reasons (nostalgia, exclusivity, etc); I cannot believe they would try to maintain the scientific position that a purely mechanical, analog system could be "better" than a high quality digital one at achieving what a audiophile should desire - the ACCURATE, faithful capture and reproduction of the original audio signal (unless you happen to have been a TDC operator on a WW II American sub, when was the last time you saw an ANALOG computer).