[SLASHDOT] Dynamite Sound!: Audiophiles - Vinyl War

http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/15/01/02/1850253/vinyls-revival-is-now-a-phenomenon-on-both-sides-of-the-atlantic
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6598491&cid=48719809



Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:5, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, 2015 @03:00PM (#48719183)
peace.
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Re:Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:3)
by jellomizer (103300) on Friday January 02, 2015 @03:27PM (#48719431)
If you were to copy your Vinyl you will need to use the Analog copy method, which you can do with every other form of digital music.

I can take music off my phone, plug in the headphone jack to a Tape Recorder or to one of many digitial recorders. Then you can copy your music from one media to an other.

However being analog every copy will be degraded, so each copy of a copy will have limited sharing resource. Vinyl being all Analog makes it the perfect DRM.

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Nah... (Score:5, Insightful)
by fyngyrz (762201) on Friday January 02, 2015 @04:11PM (#48719809) Homepage Journal
...what makes Vinyl the perfect DRM is that it starts out degraded. Far less open dynamic range (not to mention a dynamic range that depends on the amount of data you're trying to pack onto the surface), concomitant shorter playing times, lower signal to noise ratio, poorer channel separation, less resistant to injury and corruption by everything from dust to hair to poor tracking angle, improper tracking force, wow, flutter, warping, groove wear, non-linearities in the stylus coil assemblies, inherent vulnerability to acoustic feedback, and in almost every case, low frequency limits you *can* sense, and soon-to-be-work-off high frequency capacities that you can't sense, but which won't matter if you simply play it a few times in a row, as you'll destroy the fine detail as the tiny, steep modulations in the vinyl haven't had time to recover (spring back into place and recover their elasticity) from the last time the stylus slammed into it, so they will instead, erode.

Of course you do have room for better album art and liner detail/notes, and you just can't knock what came with Cheech and Chong's Big Bambu, truly a watermark event in consumer relations.

And don't even get me started on the tube mythologies.

What this boils down to in the audio sense, in all cases except for two exceptions -- when you're playing vinyl you simply don't have a digital source for or when the digital source has been compressed and the vinyl hasn't -- is that consumers have been duped by Audiophile mythology. Badly duped.

There's every reason to have a turntable in your system, as high-performance as your budget can stand, so you can manage those two exceptions. No point in depriving yourself of something just because there's no adequate digital version. But barring those use cases, if your ears are actually working, you want a CD or better.

signed (Musician, music lover, engineer, recording engineer), me.

PS: You want to hear what a CD is actually capable of (and so also learn what crappy recording techniques and mastering houses have been cheating you out of), go get yourself a few CDs from TELARC [concordmusicgroup.com], and listen on a good system. No vinyl on the planet can even come close -- and that's just how it should be. Why don't all CDs (and up) sound like that? The vast majority of it can be attributed to bad recording practice and far too much compression (but I repeat myself.) Google "Loudness wars" and learn the ins and outs. It's both fascinating and sad.

PPS: Not associated with TELARC, except they've gotten a lot of my money already, and are going to get more. :)

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Re:Nah... (Score:1)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, 2015 @04:26PM (#48719949)
" Far less open dynamic range ("

Which all doesn't matter since speakers don't exactly have 120dB range either... I always wonder why such illusory specs are important to a certain set of geeks. It's like arguing about the handling of a 1960s muscle car near light speed. It barely gets to 55 MPH, so what's the point?

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Re:Nah... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, 2015 @05:04PM (#48720265)
What range DO speakers have?

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Re:Nah... (Score:5, Funny)
by newcastlejon (1483695) on Friday January 02, 2015 @05:15PM (#48720357)
What range DO speakers have?

Depends. I can get my PC speakers about thirty feet. As for the floor standing ones, I have to toss them like cabers... so about ten feet.

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Range Improvement (Score:2)
by fyngyrz (762201) on Friday January 02, 2015 @07:13PM (#48721297) Homepage Journal
Better range for your speakers. [wikipedia.org] Guaranteed.

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Re:Range Improvement (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, 2015 @08:27PM (#48721753)
Just don't buy them from Acme, in which case they launch straight up then fall on your head.

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Re:Nah... (Score:2)
by jones_supa (887896) on Friday January 02, 2015 @05:56PM (#48720743)
What range DO speakers have?

Typical home loudspeakers have sensitivities of about 90 dB for 1 W at 1 m, but as you play louder the noise floor from distortion rises and therefore masks very low level sounds.

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Re:Nah... (Score:2)
by LynnwoodRooster (966895) on Friday January 02, 2015 @11:14PM (#48722537) Journal
Most decent gear can reach 96+ dB SPL with inaudible distortion, for frequencies above 50 Hz. For getting that first octave and a half, you'll need something bigger or a dedicated subwoofer. But in general, good mid-fi (meaning around $1000 for the set) speakers can give you 96 to 102 dB SPL with minimal distortion over nearly all the audible frequency spectrum. SOURCE: me, designing speakers professionally for the last 25 years (including for monster names in consumer and professional audio markets).
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Re:Nah... (Score:2)
by sound+vision (884283) on Friday January 02, 2015 @05:22PM (#48720421) Journal
A vinyl record gets you 40 - 60 dB of dynamic range, not 120. It can be less if you are trying to fit lots of material on the record, anything more than 20 minutes per side and you'll need to start lowering the volume of the music in order to reduce the spacing between the grooves (damaging signal-to-noise ratio in the process). 16-bit PCM like you have on a CD delivers 96 dB of dynamic range, regardless of running time.
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Re:Nah... (Score:5, Informative)
by fyngyrz (762201) on Friday January 02, 2015 @05:25PM (#48720453) Homepage Journal
Which all doesn't matter since speakers don't exactly have 120dB range either

No.

Vinyl's dynamic range is about 70 dB on its best, never-been-played before, coming to you on monstrously expensive equipment, precision-mastered day. IOW, you almost certainly don't own any vinyl that is that good, and if you've played it even once, it's not that good anymore, anyway.

A CD's dynamic range is 90 dB until the disc itself fails, and most any CD player will give that to you, or very close to it (buy a good CD player, it's easy and inexpensive to do.)

A good amp/preamp combo can beat 100 dB easily these days (actually since about the late 1970's), so that's not an issue.

Your ear's dynamic range is about 120 dB from threshold of audibility to onset of pain.

The dynamic range of a properly designed, good-sized, mid line (handwaves... $500-$1000/speaker) moving coil multi-driver speaker system (pretty traditional stuff) often reaches 95-100 dB (in an anechoic chamber, at one meter... not your environment, but you still get what you need with a CD.) Tip: You can get some AWESOME classic speaker systems on EBay these days for a fraction of what they're worth.

Bottom line is that a CD player, a decent amp, moderate or better speaker systems, and you can have the whole 90 dB dynamic range of your CD. You'll need a good listening environment (quiet, mainly -- and quieter than you're imagining right now, most likely) and it's not a bad idea to have had a pro control the reflections, either, but it can certainly be done and on a reasonable budget, too -- more than reasonable if you love music, as opposed to just listen to it.

Additional tip: The higher the noise level in your listening environment, the more you have to turn the audio up so that the lowest sound exceeds the noise level. Let's say the noise level in your room is 40 db; then the 90 dB, to be all useful, has to start at 40 and reach 130, which you will hate, your ears will bleed, and you'll probably get arrested to boot. If you can afford the monster gear to hit those SPLs, which most of us cannot. There are limits to how quiet you can get it: your heartbeat, breathing, etc. set a permanent low-limit you can't defeat, even with headphones.

But. You get the ambient noise down, and then your 90 dB can "sit on" a lower starting point, and you can have the quietest sound, much quieter and still hear it, and the loudest sound at something under ear-bleedery. It takes some knowledge and planning, but again, it actually is 100% doable, and if you can't manage it, there are consultants who can. They live for that stuff.

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Re:Nah... (Score:3)
by Prune (557140) on Friday January 02, 2015 @08:13PM (#48721673)
While a CD has a 90 dB range, typical players don't achieve that SNR, except maybe within a narrow subrange of the audio band, and the THD is several dB worse yet. You forget that the digital side has all the bits, but you need to convert it to analog. The DAC chip and the subsequent stages are the issue. At the digital/analog interface, signal jitter remains a problem, especially since phase noise performance of the cheap clocks used in even mid-upper range players is rather poor. There are many other issues, including poorly designed upsampling filtering before the DAC and so on. Moreover, you're forgetting that there's increasing amount of 24 bit, 96 kHz/192 kHz content, so the goal there is 120 dB, not 90. This far the only commercially available DAC chips that handle jitter issues, filtering, and the actual analog conversion sufficiently well for that target are the ESS Sabre models (ES9008 etc); the white papers are interesting. There are also some hobbyist stuff built with Sharc DSPs that can be found at the diyaudio forum.
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Re: Nah... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 03, 2015 @12:48AM (#48722877)
This is nonsense. Just about everything can really approach or exceed 90dB these days. And yes, I tested a selection of 'players' and DACs while working on an ADC characterization project.

And some things don't, and you can immediately tell because in my testing it has always meant something has failed, and so it distorts noticeably.

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Re: Nah... (Score:2)
by Prune (557140) on Saturday January 03, 2015 @10:02AM (#48724553)
They exceed it in a limited frequency range, as I pointed out. I'm pretty sure you measured at say 1 kHz and "done deal", instead of sampling the full 20-20k range and noting how especially at the higher end SNR degrades. You also completely ignored my point that 90 dB is not the right target, as the ear does 120.
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Re:Nah... (Score:2)
by kimvette (919543) on Friday January 02, 2015 @08:20PM (#48721707) Homepage Journal
Good receivers now adapt for reflections and standing waves so there is no reason one cannot set up a good reasonably-priced component system that sounds absolutely fantastic.

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Re:Nah... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 03, 2015 @12:56AM (#48722913)
"Your ear's dynamic range is about 120 dB from threshold of audibility to onset of pain.

Except not at the same time. Therefore irrelevant.

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Re:Nah... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, 2015 @06:10PM (#48720855)
If speakers are so awful, what's the point in preferring vinyl for "audio quality" reasons?

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Re:Nah... (Score:3)
by fyngyrz (762201) on Friday January 02, 2015 @07:09PM (#48721257) Homepage Journal
If speakers are so awful, what's the point in preferring vinyl for "audio quality" reasons?

First of all, speaker issues almost uniformly impact the music in quite different ways than vinyl does. So this isn't really a "thing" as you present it.

More generally, speakers are "what we have", or at least, most of us (there are some cool things in the labs, and these days, the term "speaker" covers a lot more ground than "moving coil transducer" when you start spending uncomfortable amount of money.) So almost everyone has to put up with them, at least at this point. Not true for vinyl at all.

The irredeemable issues that speakers do have that we run into audibly are in the harmonic distortion class of problems; the character and amount of these distortions vary enormously with about every factor that relates to speakers at all: Environment, placement angle, distance and height, frequency response, number of drivers, amp damping factor, crossover technology and frequency and order and nearness to each driver's 3 dB down point, cabinet and baffle and damping and porting and directionality and phase linearity and... well, you get the idea.

Some speakers also don't get down into the lower end very well, or become highly directional at higher frequencies. For instance, I have a pair of JBL-L100's, completely restored, that you'd think sounded great... until I A:B them for you with my Marantz HD-880's and suddenly you realize that the JBL's were completely losing a lot of the low and high end program material.

The end result is that our choice of speakers will sonically "color", that is, audibly alter, the music we hear. That's generally a bad thing (unless you're selling speakers and you can convince your audience that your color is better than the other guy's color or lie to them and claim you have none) but it is a constant thing and because we all have various tastes -- as amply demonstrated by the up-front differences in settings of simple things like bass and treble and loudness and volume and so forth -- we will generally prefer one set of speakers over another when they are fairly compared. Once you pick and install, that's the color you're going to get. (which, because of your installation environment, probably isn't the color you heard in the showroom.... argh... this is where consultants can make big bucks.)

Something else many people don't realize is that with a turntable, moving-coil and moving-lever pickups have exactly the same kind of problems for many of the same reasons, and produce their own THD, and therefore audible color. Changing a pickup -- not just the stylus -- can change your whole perception of a familiar recording. All kinds of ways. Transient response, frequency response, THD, stereo separation... it can be profound. And that adds to what the speaker is going to do on the output end of all this.

The recording techniques used on older vinyl were generally either very light-handed with, or completely lacking in, intentional compression. Some recordings -- the aforementioned Beatles recordings are a good example -- were unintentionally compressed by virtue of being recorded on tape just a bit too "hot", which causes the tape to gently waltz out of the linear recording zone and slowly begin to decrease the changes in amplitude that exceed the linear zone threshold. Basically, light compression, and entirely a good thing or the music would have been badly damaged. This lack of heavy compression can make such a huge difference in how a performance "gets into your ear" as to be perceived as almost entirely another bit of music as compared to music compressed for playback on top-40 (and many other) stations these days*. And when a recording is only available on vinyl, or only available uncompressed on vinyl, it won't be the system coloration (call it stylus+speaker distortion) that you notice, believe me. What you'll notice is it can actually sound like you are there. That is absolutely the best way to describe it, and unlike most "audiophile" terminology and hand-waving, this is a very accurate characterization of a very real and in-your-face effect. Once you've heard it, you'll know it the next time you hear it too, and you'll be looking for it.

* Not only is the recording compressed, odds are excellent that the station will compress the thing AGAIN on the way out of the station. It's bloody horrifying.

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Re:Nah... (Score:3)
by thegarbz (1787294) on Friday January 02, 2015 @09:10PM (#48721969)
Which all doesn't matter since speakers don't exactly have 120dB range either... I always wonder why such illusory specs are important to a certain set of geeks. It's like arguing about the handling of a 1960s muscle car near light speed. It barely gets to 55 MPH, so what's the point?

Illusionary specs no longer remain illusionary when the difference is 96dB (for a CD) and 40-50dB for vinyl. For the record that's a 40000x difference in the volume of the noise floor.

While it makes no difference for 99.9% of the crap pressed onto CDs these days which consume about the upper 6dB for a typical pop track and 12dB if you're lucky there are many forms of music where volume is used to convey a message. Many classical records have movements where the quiet part of track is obscured by a not to pleasant hiss on vinyl records.

Now if you're arguing the merits of CD vs SACD then sure by all means call them illusionary specs, but try to understand the magnitude and its effects on music before you spout your "specs are for geeks" garbage. It's not a muscle car at light speed. It's a muscle car vs a lotus going 180km/h around a tight corner. Well worth the argument.

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Re:Nah... (Score:2)
by samwichse (1056268) on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @05:52PM (#48749823)
I kind of feel like this whole movement towards vinyl is because of CD overcompression... like people go running to it because it sounds better, but only because the producers want to give it "that vinyl sound" by maintaining the dB range for the pressing. Sort of a weird feedback loop touting quality in an outdated, lower-quality format.

Sam

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Re:Nah... (Score:2)
by thegarbz (1787294) on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @06:11PM (#48749995)
It's not that producers want to give it that vinyl sound, it's that they have no choice. If you take a CD master and just press it into the vinyl you'll run into all manner of problems such as running out of space or the needle hopping out of the track.

I saw an interview a while back I think it was with Alan Parsons who said that no sound engineer in the industry wants to ruin CDs the way they are doing and that several of them see vinyl as a way that they can truly display their skills as the studio idiots who insist it should sound loud only care about the CD and the single. Even the guitar hero versions of Metallica songs sound better than the Metallica CDs. Without oversight people end up doing a proper job.

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Re:Nah... (Score:2)
by Pentium100 (1240090) on Friday January 02, 2015 @05:18PM (#48720383)
Or I may want a reel tape, played on a tape deck that has vacuum tubes.

Yes, I fully understand that tubes have worse specs than transistors. A couple of tape recorders that I have (that use tubes) are objectively worse than my transistor tape decks. However, listening to older music (like the Beatles) is much more enjoyable on the tube devices, the sound is "different". At the same time, if I want to record a more modern song I'll use one of my transistor tape decks.

And yes, I am sure that with enough DSPs it would be possible to digitally produce the "tube sound", but then I have to ask - why would I want it? I already have the devices, I can use them and also it's not just the sound, it's the whole experience of playing a record or a reel tape that makes it "better" than digital for me.

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Re:Nah... (Score:2)
by Nethead (1563) <joe@nethead.com> on Friday January 02, 2015 @05:23PM (#48720435) Homepage Journal
If your're playing anything under 15 IPS then it's going to be muddy.

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Re:Nah... (Score:2)
by Pentium100 (1240090) on Friday January 02, 2015 @05:35PM (#48720539)
19cm/s is good enough for me. In some cases even 9.5cm/s is good enough.

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Damnit, I knew this would happen. ok... (Score:5, Informative)
by fyngyrz (762201) on Friday January 02, 2015 @06:00PM (#48720785) Homepage Journal
However, listening to older music (like the Beatles) is much more enjoyable on the tube devices, the sound is "different".

It shouldn't be. Not unless either your tube amp, or your transistor amp, in a word, sucks, anyway.

Tube amps and transistor amps differ from each other in sound reproduction not at all in the linear zone used to reproduce music. A tube amp may have a slightly higher noise floor (and then again, it may not... but really low noise tube amps will cost ya.)

Where tube and transistor amps differ significantly (meaning, to your ear) are in what happens when you drive them so hard that they can no longer linearly reproduce the signal you're feeding them. A naive transistor amp will hard clip, generating a most unpleasant bunch of harmonics, along with a distorted version of the original signal. A tube amp (given an adequate power supply) will clip softly (by comparison), rounding off the signal instead of cutting the tops into flatlines or droopy reverse trapezoids, and this is much easier on the ear.

Now here is the thing: Anyone who likes music, much less loves it, would never, and I seriously mean never, not just "mostly wouldn't", manage music reproduction in such a way as to have our tube or transistor amplifiers distort. Because the second we do so, differences notwithstanding, the music would have to sound better to reach up through the resulting dreck to the standard of "sounding like shit."

So tube/transistor, difference meme, WTF? This WTF: For a musician, playing a single instrument, and usually that means an instrument producing a relatively simple waveform, the tube distortion *does* add interest (think electric blues guitar for the classic example), and so for the musician, the tube amp is a tool which does indeed get used in its distorted regimes.

But when that sound gets to YOU, the very last thing you would EVER want to do is add MORE distortion to it. You'll have some, because no sound production system is distortion free (the speakers are the worst culprit, followed by the stylus if you use vinyl) but man, you want that to be as near not-a-damn-bit-more as you can manage. Otherwise, your ear will shit in your auditory cortex and crown it with audio battery acid. Hate and discontent everywhere in your mind.

So, no. 1000 times no. Tube amps sound like transistor amps in hifi setups unless someone has completely screwed up your installation, or your ears.

Having gone that far, some caveats: That noise floor thing I mentioned, that's one. Lousy tube amps often hiss like angry snakes. If so, get rid of that POS (or at least try new tubes, and/or have someone replace the capacitors and old carbon resistors in your "classic" pride and joy.) Next, damping factor: For bass, a transistor amp may do a lot better, depending on your speaker systems. This is because transformer coupled outputs from a tube amp (these are typical) can't control the inductive kickback from a moving coil speaker as precisely and decisively as a direct coupled transistor amp can. However, from the tube days, there are speaker systems that were designed with this in mind, and which are extremely well behaved re inductive kickback, and so the end result is similar. This is a multi-variable issue (amp+speaker), and one that takes some knowledge to waltz around satisfactorily. So there's that. Finally, tubes are more likely to be microphonic; in a really high power system, that can cause feedback, which is intolerable; but the (good?) news is, there are very few hifi tube systems with that kind of whip-ass.

You like tube amps, I have no argument with you. I like them too, and I own some great ones. Plus, they glow in the dark, which appeals to my batlike nature. :) But when you say they sound different or better, just, no. Not unless something's been done very wrong, or something is broken.

If you want primo sound reproduction, the place to put your do

Read the rest of this comment...
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Re:Damnit, I knew this would happen. ok... (Score:2)
by Pentium100 (1240090) on Friday January 02, 2015 @06:20PM (#48720929)
The old tube tape recorder [narod.ru] I mentioned is a low quality device, probably even for its time. And yes, the Beatles and similar (essentially, the music that was produced and originally released as mono) sound better for me with the added distortion and limited frequency range. Maybe because it was mastered with a device like mine in mind (since it is similar to what people would have used to play their brand new records and tapes) maybe it's because I like the "different" sound for some music.

On the other hand, the tube heaphone amp I built sound more like a transistor amp and does not have that much distortion or limited frequency range.

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Re:Damnit, I knew this would happen. ok... (Score:2)
by fyngyrz (762201) on Friday January 02, 2015 @06:32PM (#48721015) Homepage Journal
Yeah, can't help you there. Was just trying to head off the audiophile tube argument at the pass.

What you're dealing with, I think, would be fairly characterized as things sounding like you're accustomed to hearing them sound, which pleases you, and there isn't squat I can say about that unless your actual preferences change. I can't do much about that remotely, much as I would like to try.

I will tell you this, though: Early Beatles recordings, suitably remastered, played back on my system, sometimes leave me in tears. Some of which is from the sheer pleasure of it, some of which is frustration that we've gone so far down the compress-it rabbit hole, and some of which is purest, reeking nostalgia, I have to admit.

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Re:Damnit, I knew this would happen. ok... (Score:2)
by Prune (557140) on Friday January 02, 2015 @07:30PM (#48721413)
I would hazard a guess that his headphone tube amp is output-transformerless. The truth is that what most people think of tube sound is really output transformer sound (the exception being the soft clipping, of course).
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Re:Damnit, I knew this would happen. ok... (Score:2)
by dryeo (100693) on Saturday January 03, 2015 @12:12AM (#48722741)
As I remember, some of my best sounding records (on a low to mid level system) were later Apple pressings, especially John Lennons Imagine and Mother albums. Even picking them up showed the quality, they were thick and seemed to have more dynamic range then most recordings.

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Re:Damnit, I knew this would happen. ok... (Score:2)
by Prune (557140) on Friday January 02, 2015 @07:26PM (#48721383)
The human ear has a 120 dB dynamic range. While we're not all listening in anechoic chambers, studies show narrowband signals are detectable as much as 20 dB below a broadband noise floor. Now, very few amps achieve distortion and SNR that can cover this range (indeed, I'm not aware of any commercial ones — only a DAC that exceeds that range, and a few circuits prototyped by a few crazed members at the diyaudio forum). This means that the suggestion that solid state and tube amps that are properly designed sound the same is incorrect. There is no "linear range"; only an approximately linear one, which is still not completely linear with respect to psychoacoustics. I think what you meant to say is that well designed solid state and tube amps sound practically the same to most people in typical listening conditions. Please see my comment here as well: http://entertainment.slashdot.... [slashdot.org]
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Re:Damnit, I knew this would happen. ok... (Score:2)
by fyngyrz (762201) on Saturday January 03, 2015 @12:42AM (#48722841) Homepage Journal
While we're not all listening in anechoic chambers, studies show narrowband signals are detectable as much as 20 dB below a broadband noise floor

Detectability is not an adequate metric for musical reproduction, narrow-band or otherwise. For that, we must operate above the noise floor.

[amps not reaching the ear's dynamic range] means that the suggestion that solid state and tube amps that are properly designed sound the same is incorrect.

No, it doesn't mean anything of the kind. All it means is that our ear has more dynamic range. It doesn't mean it has more resolution within any range segment (and in fact, it doesn't -- we kind of suck at absolute amplitude discrimination.) Anyway, regardless of our ear's dynamic range, all we will hear is the dynamic range the audio system presents. And the most that will be with a CD is about 90 dB.

There is no "linear range"; only an approximately linear one, which is still not completely linear with respect to psychoacoustics.

It's linear in human terms. It's not linear in absolute terms. Other than that, no -- given the same tone contours, filter orders and Q, or the lack of any, as long as the amps are running in the range they were designed to, and the input and output devices are identical, and match the amplifier's output impedances, the audio will sound the same within the limits of the caveats I already provided, primarily damping factor.

As the subject line hopefully intimated, I consider this horse beaten to death and condemned as unfit for consumption before I even posted. Therefore, the last word is something you are most welcome to. :)

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Re:Damnit, I knew this would happen. ok... (Score:2)
by Prune (557140) on Saturday January 03, 2015 @09:46AM (#48724485)
Let's be more specific about the notion of "sound the same". I don't know what it means to you, but I take it literally: that it is impossible to distinguish for any human in a set of blind tests, let's say ITU-standard ABC/hidden reference form, between these amplifiers or whatever other DUT we have (let us suppose that we can agree on a reasonable sample size of trained listeners, and a reasonably long time limit — I would push for several hours, split over a few experiments.) The 120 dB provides an upper bound to the noise and distortion, a guarantee that any reproduction equipment that meets that distortion spec will cause no possibly detectable change in the sound. I don't suggest that my bound is tight. However, you have failed to present an argument for a significantly tighter bound. You might argue against my basing of my argument on listening in ideal conditions, but such can be approached to varying degree in practice, and so I'm discussing the limiting cases, not the typical ones.
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Re:Damnit, I knew this would happen. ok... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, 2015 @07:36PM (#48721457)
Sorry, but this is partly misinformation.

It is hard to make amplifiers linear. It's even harder to make transistor amps (without some feedback or PWM step) linear. It's even harder, if not impossible to make tube amps linear.

Of course, tubes are used for overdrive effects. Same as that diodes can be used for overdrive effects. But that not means that a tube amplifier is linear in it's optimal range. Far from, even.

Having said that - you are right about transistor amps late 70's - they are already having very good specs with often less than 0.5% harmonic noise and 0.2% dis-harmonic noise.

But for anything better new types of amplifiers were made - using FET transistors or using opamps (self-correcting feedback) or using '1-bit' technology (pulse-width modulation marketed with a consumer-friendly name).

Almost any tube amplifier will have this 'tube-sound', even when used in its linear range, simply because `linear` exist for tubes only as 'close to linear'.

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Re:Damnit, I knew this would happen. ok... (Score:2)
by fyngyrz (762201) on Saturday January 03, 2015 @12:18AM (#48722759) Homepage Journal
It is hard to make amplifiers linear.

Nothing is perfectly linear in this regime. However, and as should have been obvious, the question, and the answer, resides in the realm of "linear enough." What I said is exactly correct as far as it applies to humans listening to audio. And that's all I meant to address. Within that scope, my presentation was not only accurate, it was conservative.

I will now leave you to argue the merits of your case as you understand them; however, I won't be picking up the argument. I am only interested in the facts, and I have already presented those, so I'm done. Cheers!

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Re:Damnit, I knew this would happen. ok... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, 2015 @07:51PM (#48721557)
Tube amps sound like transistor amps in hifi setups

That's plain wrong. You think your amplifiers are perfectly linear at normal volumes so harmonic distortion is always inaudible? Balls!

Great tube amps sound great. Great solid state amps also sound great. But they usually sound discernibly different. The closest to a "warm" tube sound in solid state are good MOSFET amplifiers.

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Re:Damnit, I knew this would happen. ok... (Score:2)
by fyngyrz (762201) on Saturday January 03, 2015 @12:12AM (#48722739) Homepage Journal
Your investment in mythology in way alters the facts. Sorry to have to break it to you.

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Re:Damnit, I knew this would happen. ok... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 03, 2015 @12:58AM (#48722917)
And your investment into Space Nutter mythology in no way changes the fact that no one is going anywhere. Sorry to have to break it to you.

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Re:Damnit, I knew this would happen. ok... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 03, 2015 @06:37AM (#48723951)
don't feed the geek. This is the typical "expert" who confuses specs on paper with the human experience. To the likes of these souless idiots, better numberrs always translate into "it must better", similar to the high definition morons who want us to think that the soap opera look is better than film. Ignore them and do what FEELS best

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Re:Nah... (Score:1)
by Jawnn (445279) on Friday January 02, 2015 @06:44PM (#48721083)
...what makes Vinyl the perfect DRM is that it starts out degraded.

Really? Compared to what? A well produced CD. Perhaps. It would surely take some serious high-end turntable components to get the best out of vinyl, but compared to the mp3 shit that (almost) everyone thinks is just fine? No. Not even close.

No point in depriving yourself of something just because there's no adequate digital version. But barring those use cases...

That's the thing, there's a lot of shitty CD's out there. Yeah, get off my lawn, but a lot of the music I like to listen to was just "dumped" to CD. The difference between my antique vinyl "Thick As A Brick" and my CD version is astounding. Yes, Telarc does good work. Superlative. But their catalog is small.

And don't even get me started on the tube mythologies.

Not a myth. I don't have a golden ear, but I am hear to tell you that my SET amp sounds far better than any solid state gear I have ever owned, by far. Yes, it has it's limitations, there's only so much you can do with 4 or 5 watts, but with the right program material, through the right speakers, the difference is nothing short of breathtaking.

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Re:Nah... (Score:2)
by Prune (557140) on Friday January 02, 2015 @07:14PM (#48721305)
>"And don't even get me started on the tube mythologies."

What do you mean? In the end, a tube is just a gain device, like a transistor. Given a distortion spec, one can just as much build a tube amp to match it as a solid state one. There are both SS and tube audio amps that achieve distortion levels in the part-per-million level. Multiple gain stages are required in either case to get very low distortion; the real fault in most consumer tube amps is not the use of tubes, but the use of circuits that are too simple — that's the audiophile fetishist fault. Indeed, a single (constant current source loaded) vacuum triode is more linear a voltage gain device than any single transistor. If you use as many tubes as transistors, you can easily match the low distortion levels of the SS design. Tubes have specific benefits including removing thermal memory distortion (modulation of gain device parameters by the temperature changes caused by varying power dissipation). See for example this AES paper:http://www.aes.org/e-lib/brows... [aes.org] With transistor designs, to deal with the issue you need to add more devices to even out the power dissipation at least in the differential pair input and the VAS, and in the case of chip power amps, add compensation for the effect of the output stage thermal dissipation affecting the previous stages. Then there's the issue that transistor gain curve is exponential whereas the tube's is power-of-two, which makes the distortion profiles of a tube and an SS amp that achieve the same THD quite different, with more of the THD in the tube case caused by lower order and even harmonics — the very ones that the human auditory system masks anyway (psychoacoustics what ultimately matters, and there is interesting research and AES papers on more relevant metrics than THD/IM). Tube's problem is simply one of practicality in regards to their size and the need for filament power. Other issues can all be dealt with. For example, in terms of typical speakers, the low impedance has been traditionally solved with transformers, which introduces phase nonlinearities and some hysteresis effects, so they add distortion. But this is unnecessary. One elegant solution is the replacement of the output transformer with a switching impedance converter that operates far above the audio band; see D. Berning's patent (I think it expires soon). While the converter is an active SS state, it has no gain and no distortion in the audio band. Another solution is to directly couple tube output to electrostatic speakers, which have very high impedance. A third solution is to use hybrid circuits with both SS and tube stages. It's possible to get the best of both worlds there. Here's a great hybrid circuit that achieves a few ppm THD for 1500 kV p-p output for electrostatic headphones:http://headwize.com/?page_id=7... [headwize.com] Note especially the hybrid third-fourth gain stage. One reason the amp gets such low distortion with only moderate NFB is that the third stage transistor's nonlinearity, in the operating range, is roughly inverse to the final tube stage's nonlinearity.
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Re:Nah... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, 2015 @07:25PM (#48721373)
So, for people who simply enjoy vinyl sound more, which real-time digital filter software can they try so that it sounds indistinguishable from vinyl? Not just something that algorithmically adds some obviously fake hiss or click atop an MP3, but something that has been demonstrated double-blind to be indistinguishable.

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Re:Nah... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, 2015 @08:11PM (#48721659)
For me, CDs have too much dynamic range, including TELARC CDs, of which I own a large number. That's not a problem for most rock, which is pretty limited in dynamic range to begin with, but for classical music it's a killer. If I put something on orchestral music and turn it up loud enough to make out the pianissimo passages clearly, then my wife or kids inevitably scream at me to turn it down at the next fortissimo. Vinyl actually tends to match my concert hall experience more closely.

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Re:Nah... (Score:2)
by AmiMoJo (196126) * <`ten.3dlrow' `ta' `ojom'> on Saturday January 03, 2015 @06:45AM (#48723975) Homepage
While on paper vinyl seems inferior to CD, in practice the vinyl release is often mixed better than the CD release due to the medium's limitations.

CDs can be very loud. The producers tend to ramp the loudness right up (google "loudness war"). Vinyl can't cope with music that loud, it just can't reproduce that kind of over-driven, clipped waveform. Hence the vinyl mix tends to be less loud, with more dynamic range and separation of the instruments than the CD release.

A decade later popular records often get a "re-mastered" released. Sometimes this release is even louder, sometimes it's properly mixed like the original vinyl was. I tend to buy the CD and then download a digitised copy of the vinyl version for actual listening, to save me the hassle of ripping it myself.

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Re:Nah... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 03, 2015 @05:25PM (#48726685)
Any medium has limitations on the absolute loudness. The loudness war is basically pushing music to or past that limitation. It can theoretically be done with vinyls or with CDs (or SACDs, or flac files, or mp3s, or cassettes, or laser discs, or Neil Young's gimmicky music player files, or ....). If anything, vinyls are much worse than CD audio for technical quality. The reason vinyl releases typically don't fall into the loudness war is just because vinyl releases aren't being mastered for radio play, they're being mastered for audiophiles. Some people then attribute this to some shortcoming of digital music, which is incorrect.

Although, because of this, in practice, vinyl releases may sometimes have better dynamic range than the same CD release.

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Re:Nah... (Score:2)
by Shirley Marquez (1753714) on Saturday January 03, 2015 @03:08PM (#48725995) Homepage
If you want to hear something even better than CD, try some high resolution downloads. You will need a sound card that can handle 24 bit samples and preferably at least 96KHz sample rate to take full advantage, but even many integrated sound interfaces can do that now. http://www.hdtracks.com/ [hdtracks.com] is a good place to start.

You have two more days to get the free high resolution holiday sampler from Linn: http://www.linn.co.uk/christma... [linn.co.uk] Get it even if you're allergic to holiday music; most of the songs in the sampler have nothing to do with any December holiday.

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Re:Nah... (Score:2)
by Shirley Marquez (1753714) on Saturday January 03, 2015 @03:34PM (#48726127) Homepage
At one time there was something to the superiority of tubes. Early solid state designs really did sound terrible, because of things like crossover distortion (that has nothing to do with the crossover in your speakers, it has to do with bad things that happen when signals cross the zero point in an amplifier) that those designers did not understand. Transistor amplifiers (even now) also sound worse than tubes if they are pushed past their limits; solid state designs in that situation distort in ways that are uglier to our ears than tubes do.

But... there isn't much excuse for pushing a solid state amplifier past its limits. Getting a given amount of power output with transistors is much easier than it is with tubes, so there is no reason not to design your sound system with ample reserve capacity.

There is one market where the desire for tube amplifiers makes sense - electric guitar amps. The characteristic distortions of tubes are a part of what we recognize as the distinctive sound of the instrument. When people are trying to fill an arena with guitar sounds, it's not uncommon to feed the guitar into a tube amp, put a microphone in front of that amp, and then feed that signal into the big sound system that fills the arena - a quality condenser mic and solid state amplifiers faithfully reproduce the distortions that the small tube amplifier contributed to the guitar sound.

Slight digression: blues harp (harmonica) is nearly always amplified with one of two vintage models of microphone: the Shure 520 "Green Bullet" or the Astatic JT-30. (A version of the Shure is still being made, though some harp players prefer the earlier versions.) The microphone feeds into a tube amplifier that is usually being pushed hard; for large spaces that amp would then be mic'ed and reamplified just like the electric guitar. Both the sound of the microphone (which is far from neutral) and the amp are part of the sound that we associate with blues harp.

Similarly, digital recording pushed past its limits and into digital clipping sounds horrible. But again there is no reason to let that happen; 24 bit recording has lots of dynamic range so you don't have to push the top limit. (No commercially available DAC achieves the theoretical limit of 144dB, but more than 120dB is available.) It's easy to normalize the recording when you master it for CD so you take advantage of all 16 bits of that medium.

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Re:Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:5, Funny)
by NotDrWho (3543773) on Friday January 02, 2015 @03:43PM (#48719571)
Yeah, but if you copy vinyl onto any other medium you risk losing that warm, rich sound you get from telling other hipsters how fragrant your farts smell.

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Re:Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, 2015 @03:56PM (#48719699)
i lol'd. thanks
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Re:Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:1)
by jellomizer (103300) on Friday January 02, 2015 @03:57PM (#48719703)
You will lose it if you copy it from Vinyl to Vinyl.
Digital media every copy is exact to the previous one. Analog you will not get a perfect match.

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Re:Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:2)
by Opportunist (166417) on Saturday January 03, 2015 @12:10PM (#48725091)
Exactly, and that's what you want, hipster! It will be an individual copy. Not like all the hundreds of thousands of clones out there, your copy will be completely individual, just like yourself!

Yes, it will snap, crackle and pop and generally suck. But it's an individual! Just like the hipster that made it.

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Re:Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:1)
by hackwrench (573697) <hackwrench@hotmail.com> on Friday January 02, 2015 @05:36PM (#48720545) Homepage Journal
Hipsters weren't born before the first vinyl records were popular so there's no way they can say they were into it before it was hip, You must be thinking of some other stereotypical demographic.
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Re:Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:2)
by Hognoxious (631665) on Saturday January 03, 2015 @09:49AM (#48724495) Homepage Journal
That's never been a criterion. For example, few if any people are alive now who remember when daguerreotypes were state of he art - and yet there are 27 million different apps for making shit photos taken on phones look even more shit.

Indeed, the concept of anything that happened more than a decade ago would be totally lost on most of them.

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Re:Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:2)
by Opportunist (166417) on Saturday January 03, 2015 @12:11PM (#48725101)
Well, how could you do something before it was cool if you knew that your dad already did it long before you existed?

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Re:Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:2)
by rogoshen1 (2922505) on Friday January 02, 2015 @06:00PM (#48720781)
only if you run it through a DAC, rather than an amplifier that uses vacuum tubes. do you even audiophile? next thing you'll tell me is that you don't use directional Ethernet to ensure proper delivery and flow of electrons :(

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Re:Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:2)
by Michael Earls (3739983) on Friday January 02, 2015 @06:03PM (#48720819)
Stop with the hipster references. People other than hipsters buy vinyl. I am far from a hipster. I am a 42 year old developer without a beard. I like listening to vinyl and buying it. Though, the stuff I buy was probably pressed before 1990. Oh, and my farts do smell bad.
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Re:Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:2)
by fizzer06 (1500649) on Friday January 02, 2015 @06:14PM (#48720891)
I remember, when I was a child, my Mom had a collection of 78 rpm recordings. Those were made of a hard material, shellac lacquer I think. You could break them, but they didn't hardly warp.
Then came the soft vinyl 33 rpm albums, followed by even softer vinyl ones. DRM was inherent in that they didn't last unless you were obsessive in the care and handling.

I hate record companies.

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Re:Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:2)
by squiggleslash (241428) on Saturday January 03, 2015 @12:14AM (#48722747) Homepage Journal
I can also understand the attraction of vinyl, there's no more pleasant experience than putting a record on a turn table, lifting the arm, gently lowering it onto the outer groove aTHUMPlifting the arm, gently lowering it onto the outer groove aTHUMPlifting the arm, gently lowering it onto the outer groove aTHUMPlifting the arm, gently lowering it onto the outer groove aTHUMPlifting the arm, gently lowering it onto the outer groove aTHUMPlifting the arm, gently lowering it onto the outer groove aTHUMPlifting the arm, gently lowering it onto the outer groove aTHUMPlifting the arm, gently lowering it onto the outer groove aTHUMPlifting the arm, gently lowering it onto the outer groove aTHUMP...
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Re:Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:2)
by dotwhynot (938895) on Friday January 02, 2015 @08:13PM (#48721679)
Yeah, but if you copy vinyl onto any other medium you risk losing that warm, rich sound you get from telling other hipsters how fragrant your farts smell.

Although you were going for funny, the evidence (double blind tests + science) is that the warm rich analogue sound from LP carries perfectly over to digital recordings when ripped from LP source. Because it is an artifact of LP medium technical limitations and playback distortions, perfectly captured by digital reproductions.

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Re:Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:1)
by The Grim Reefer (1162755) on Friday January 02, 2015 @04:42PM (#48720099)
If you were to copy your Vinyl you will need to use the Analog copy method, which you can do with every other form of digital music.

I can take music off my phone, plug in the headphone jack to a Tape Recorder or to one of many digitial recorders. Then you can copy your music from one media to an other.

However being analog every copy will be degraded, so each copy of a copy will have limited sharing resource. Vinyl being all Analog makes it the perfect DRM.

Um, no. You aren't going to copy it from one vinyl record to another vinyl record. Nor are you going to copy it from cassette tape to cassette tape, like the old days. It will go from vinyl to digital . There will be no further degradation from one digital copy to another after that, unless more compression is used.

If you have new record, a decent turntable and stylus, feeding a good AD converter and something like Cool Edit. You're going to get a pretty good sounding digital file. Certainly no worse than 128 bit MP3's

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Re: Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:2)
by rsilvergun (571051) on Friday January 02, 2015 @05:22PM (#48720419)
True, but if you read the grandparent's link to Wikipedia it describes bluray players that can recognize the audio watermark and won't play the disc. According to the article all players released after 2012 are required to implement the tech. It's not much of a stretch to expect phones and mp3 players will get the same tech soon. It's like I keep telling my buddies: like it or not tech is gonna make crime obsolete, least the nonviolent variety...
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Re:Can't DRM or Root Kit Vinyl (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, 2015 @05:40PM (#48720593)
The signal can be intercepted directly at the transducer (i.e. stylus) and immediately digitized. The resulting digital copy could then be copied at will any number of times. The only degradation in quality would depend on the transducer but in the best cases (which is not hard to achieve) would be insignificant.

It is flatly IMPOSSIBLE to prevent copying.