Vinyl (Destiny)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Friday, January 18, 2019, 12:11 (1936 days ago) @ Ragashingo

...Mike sent Marty a physical copy of the retail release numbered #001. So there's at least that.

Wasn't that on Vinyl? It's a lossy format and doesn't preserve all of the original :-p

Isn't vinyl technically a lossless format? I agree with your overall point, but that vinyl release has some sweet art!

Vinyl is not lossless AT ALL. There is analog noise / distortion and a loss of dynamic range. You can take a redbook audio file, copy it a bazillion Times, and still be able to perfectly access the original waveform as recorded.

The phrase "perfectly access" is problematic because the equipment you use matters. On the cheap, digital sounds "better" by most measures, but arguably not all. There's a subjective aspect. Vinyl and digital sound different. On the high end, digital can sound more like vinyl and they can be less distinguishable, but you also have to consider how the recording was made and mastered. You can claim digital supremacy based on specs but the quality of the listening experience can't always be quantified that way.

Meh. To me, this is crossing definitions.

On a technical level we have gotten so much better about recording music. We capture more of it and we can reproduce what we captured perfectly. Obviously, playing a digital recording on a $5 pair of speakers results in a different sound than playing it in a perfectly tuned concert hall, but the same is true of analog recordings. With digital, every sound that was made originally is contained in the digital file.

It should be said that most of the ~1,000 vinyl records I own were pressed before full digital recordings were common.

With analog, the very end medium the audio is recorded on degrades. What you heard 20 years ago is not the same as what the same record or tape will get you today. And there were various level of quality loss getting it from the original instruments to tapes to the those end vinyl records.

Listening experience of digital vs vinyl is also a strange comparison. I will not buy any modern music on vinyl because stamping those tracks to a physical analog medium is inherently changing the sound of the music. You aren't getting Music of the Spheres when you put it in your record player. You're getting Music of the Spheres + vinyl distortion. For old stuff, stuff that was recorded before the digital age, people say it has a different feel, but I often find they mean that they have simply grown use to the pops and hisses and other sounds that were not original part of the music.

To me, the slight speed up and slow down of a cassette tape or the distortion and pops that come with a record are imperfections that should not exist at all in modern recordings and would not have existed in classic recordings if they had the technology we have now. It is my opinion that anything else, any talk of subjectives like listening experience or richness or warmth comes from nostalgia and not from the physical reality of known specifications and facts.

I don't know, man. Millions of 20-something hipsters can't be wrong.