Is your analog audio contaminated by digital processing?
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Thursday June 1, 2023
David Mellor
David Mellor is CEO and Course Director of Audio Masterclass. David has designed courses in audio education and training since 1986 and is the publisher and principal writer of Adventures In Audio.
nrezmerski replies to A Toptip: They have to be cut at half speed, though...and very few records are.
David S: DDD was the only way for me back when - guilty
tutacat: Technically your ears convert audio to electricity
tutacat: Well, digital mastering codes are simple for the same reason food labels are complex. It's there to make money.
VWestlife: The Ampex ADD-1 digital cutting delay was introduced at the Audio Engineering Society convention in May 1979. It uses 16-bit digital audio with a sampling rate of 50 kHz and an audio lowpass filter that cuts off above 20 kHz. It was patented in 1980 as U.S. patent number 4348754.
xxxYYZxxx: For analog marketing, why aren't "albums" sold as albums, meaning each song gets the full side of a 45 rpm record, and the entire album is actually an album of multiple 45 rpm records, eh? Multiple 45 rpm's would give the best possible sound quality and jack up the price (and collector value) to boot.
Michael Irons: I’m trying to shed some light about the frequency response of vinyl. My understanding is that vinyl couldn’t exceed 20KHz because of the following factors…some geeky stuff for anyone interested 😊
I tried to post also links for everything but YouTube is deleting the comment.
Recording
Studer A800 series (the most successful recording machines)has a frequency range of 50Hz-20KHz
Mastering stage
Ampex ATR100/102 has a frequency range of 35Hz-28KHz just in only configuration - at 30ips (within +/- 2db) using Ampex 406/407/456 tapes. In any other configurations it’s up to 20 KHz
Some tapes themselves couldn’t record more than 20KHz
ATR Ampex Master Tapes specs are showing this.
Neumann VMS80 could go up to 20KHz, because that was the maximum frequency of AKS80 - the unit module responsible for the delay preview.
Bag Man: I rate your show AAA-A!
Thankyou for your interesting insights.
Most Intertaining!!
Ian Shepherd mentioned this (12 bit) digital delay in the Mastering Show podcast.
These details to the populace are like pearls of wisdom (Before Swine), but ultimately we produce our synchronous racket, and the swine don't care if it's been recorded and processed AAA, or DDD, or ADD
(A bit of a plus, that last one.😉)
The porcine cares not how the nourishment arrives, only that it does.
John C: IAbout 1990 I wanted to buy my first CD player and went with others to a demonstration at a local dealer. However, the dealer sold (and still sells) Linn products and the demonstration was really comparing a Marantz CD player, costing at the time £200, with a Linn Sondek LP12 turntable and SME tonearm costing several times more. The expectation was that we would all hear how superior the LP12 was compared to CD's but actually I thought it was just the opposite. Incidentally, despite eventually making a CD player themselves, I don't think Linn really liked CD's. I remember reading that at a HiFi show, people on the Linn stand had T-shirts with the logo "CD, its the pits". I assume that CD players must have affected sales of their turntables.
In fact at the time a friend had an LP12 and since he had bought a CD player his LP12 was consigned to collecting dust on the top of his wardrobe. I did eventually buy a CD player but not from that dealer. Music was increasingly being recorded and mixed digitally so it didn't make sense to me to transfer it to an analogue medium with all its inherent limitations. I already had a collection of vinyl discs and was irritated by the pops and crackles when I played them despite handling them very carefully and trying to avoid dust. I have a couple of friends who don't seem to know about DAC's and think that analogue must be superior because digital equipment outputs a square wave to the speakers!
JaKeAFC09: Signals that may not be heard or detected, once injected on a signal path can cause a waste of space on the physical medium and headroom on the signal processing causing overload on the electronics, including saturation up to overheating and burning of those hair-sized wires driving cutter heads, tape heads or speakers voice coils. Below 20Hz it's getting close to DC, supersonic frequency is used in DMM lathes to excite the stylus to actually cut into the copper disk.... I think engineers who designed audio equipment intentionally limited the frequency response, not by means of the device being capable to handle them theoretically but indeed to prevent erratic behavior on other devices, such as self oscillation. The same principle where manufactures of lamps (should) make them to stay within a certain wavelength of the visibile light without stepping into UV or infrared where such radiations could be either a waste of energy and potentially a physical harm, that doesn't mean they are not capable to produce specialty lamps for such spectrum for other purposes, and same as hearing capabilities also eyesight is different.
Stephan Franck: Wondering what your take is on RIAA recording and playback filtering and the possibility to obtain something that has non lossless compression artefacts contamination.
Audio Masterclass replies to Stephan Franck: RIAA EQ on vinyl is necessary to achieve duration. The side effect is it boosts rumble and other LF noise. Overall though it’s a good thing. DM
carl Jung: this is a dishonest video, i know you know better than what you say in it. digital is an inherently "lossy" process; all of the signal between sample points is lost. converting from one analog format to another (your broadcast example) is not inherently lossy. it was very possible to have high quality FM broadcasts, even if in practice it was rare. once you take the source material into the digital domain, you might as well leave it there and release a file (instead of vinyl). what are you really listening to when you press a digital source into vinyl? i won't buy any new pressings because of this issue; see Mofi scandal. even if the label says AAA there is a good chance they are being sneaky. original pressings still sound great, and if not, might as well listen to the album in digital form. if don't have golden ears and i can clearly hear the special qualities of a well produced vinyl recording. what i do have is a decent hifi system to listen on. you have lost a lot of credibility with this video, AFAIAC.
Audio Masterclass replies to carl Jung: Well if you're going to accuse me of dishonesty I'm going to accuse you of being an idiot. AFAIAC DM
X2O: I had totally forgotten about the A&D standard we had back then. I remember clearly looking for CDs that had the holy grail of DDD, thinking to myself: This is as pure sound as we,can produce! Interesting to see the opposite happen today with ‘audiolites’ analog enthusiasts looking for pure analog sound 😂. Truly the quest for ‘pure’ sound has become a new religion.
Lenny: You touched the issue of the loudness war. For me that was the turning point in pop music, and is infinitely worse to my music enjoyment than digitization ever was.
If there's something that audiofiles and non-audiofiles probably agree on is that digitzation means filtering because of the Shannon-Nyquist theorem. That's needed to prevent aliasing during the recording stages, but there's no need for it during the reproduction stages.
I own a non oversampling, non analogue filtered DAC. I appreciate the aliasing problem, but I simply can't hear any difference between a OS and an NOS output. Sure, on a 100 MHz bandwidth oscilloscope, I can see the difference, but I can't hear it. To me this means that what many audiofiles think they hear is not actually what they do hear.
To me the vinyl revival is just like the valve/tube equipment revival/continuation, quite similar.They distort in a way we find pleasing, but it may not actually be truthful in a HiFi sense.
Frank Heuvelman: 'Analoggies'
Like in: 'You are such an analoggy'
namegoeshere: Another great instruction from Mr. Paul McCartney. 👍
Ian L.: What about the optical audio track along the edge of films?
Laelz Dunk: The problem is good DAC is really pricey. R2R DACs are bare minimum to my ears multibits are really flat sounding and bass-lesss. So yeah you can have nice turntable for like $200 but DAC at this pirce point will sound rubbish.
John H: I was a turntable guy for decades, I enjoyed all the pops, crackles, scratches, and skips that inevitably occur over time. First play... nirvana! Now, IMO digital is the way to go.
Ronny Reiß: The amazing Thing is: After 40 Years-the good old Compact Disc ist still good enough for everything.
Audio Masterclass replies to Ronny Reiß: It was an amazing technology for its time and still quite good now. DM