Source: pitchfork.com
All my evidence is anecdotal, but I'm continually surprised by how
little people who are under 30 understand about the nature of sound. As
consumer electronics have done a better job keeping the details of music
reproduction "under the hood" (especially with iPods and laptops),
many listeners have lost contact with how the music goes from its source
(digital files or analog LPs) to actual sound moving through the air. Does it
matter? Not at all. I don't see people enjoying music any less. But for someone
who has long been interested in the nitty gritty of sound, the changes are
worth noting.
As a high-end-audio-obsessed teenager growing up in the 1980s, I
regularly read magazines like Stereophile and Audio. It was
near the beginning of the CD era, and these publications were grappling with a
big question: Do CD players really sound different? If you're talking
turntables and cartridges-- devices meant to extract sound from tiny grooves
and which involve a tremendous amount of physics-- it made perfect sense that
two set-ups would produce noticeably different results. But hi-fi magazines had
trouble with CD players because when two machines are extracting the same
patterns of 1s and 0s, there was a real question of whether they could be
distinguished.
One thing that was not in question, especially in the early days,
is that CDs sounded better than LPs. Hi-fi magazines, especially then, were
notorious for their number-crunching. Reviews of gear would include graphs that
showed the frequency range of the sounds produced, measurements of things like
channel separation (how much the information from the two stereo channels could
be kept isolated from each other), signal-to-noise ratio, and dynamic range
(the difference between the softest and loudest sounds the source was capable
of reproducing). And every possible measurement of the sounds-- which are,
after all, vibrations in the air that are quantifiable-- suggested that CDs
were superior to LPs. There were still some holdouts, especially among those
who had spent thousands of dollars on turntables, but the consensus was that
CDs had gone a long way toward "solving" sound.
Of course, when you listen in on casual discussions of sound in 2013,
you often hear that "LPs are back" because they "sound
better." This has happened, in part, because "digital audio" is
now considered as a monolith. In the time that the dominance of CDs started to
erode around the turn of the millennium, we've come to understand the wide
range of how mp3s can sound-- how cymbals on a circa-2002 128k mp3 sound like a
pixelated wash compared to a 320k mp3, for example. But since these
low-quality files were thrust upon people in the name of convenience and file
size, certain associations regarding digital audio as a whole began to develop
among a subset of record connoisseurs. For some, "mp3s are cheap and
bad" turned into "digital audio is cheap and bad compared to
LPs."
One of the often overlooked facts about LP reproduction is that some
people prefer it because it introduces distortion. The "warmth" that
many people associate with LPs can generally be described as a bass sound that
is less accurate. Reproducing bass on vinyl is a serious engineering challenge,
but the upshot is that there's a lot of filtering and signal processing
happening to make the bass on vinyl work. You take some of this signal
processing, add additional vibrations and distortions generated by a poorly
manufactured turntable, and you end up with bass that sounds "warmer"
than a CD, maybe-- but also very different than what the artists were hearing
in the control room.
There is a strong
suspicion in the audiophile community that LP reissues
are commonly mastered from a CD source. What this means is that, instead of
traveling to a record label's tape vault, finding the original master tapes and
a machine that can play them, and going through the painstaking and expensive
process of transferring that tape to a mastering disc in order to press LPs,
the starting point is actually a CD. And the LP pressing is essentially an
inferior copy of that CD. In these cases, the "warmth" you associate
with the vinyl record is completely up to the distortions added by the playback
process.
Is this a terrible thing? Not at all. For one, a properly mastered CD is
still capable of very good sound quality. But the other part of it is that the
experience of listening to an LP involves a lot more than remastering and sound
sources. There's the act of putting a record on, there is the comforting
surface noise, there is the fact that LPs are beautiful objects and CDs have
always looked like plastic office supplies. So enjoying what an LP has to offer
is in no way contingent on convincing yourself that they necessarily sound
better than CDs.
Few aesthetic experiences are as subjective as sound. When an iPhone has
a retina display with more pixels per inch, you notice it. But what we desire
in sound is much more of an individual thing. Some people want "accuracy"
and some people want a lot of bass; some people only care that it's loud
enough. Plus, we're very good at fooling ourselves when it comes to making
distinctions between sounds. At this point, you have your computer or your
mp3 player/smart phone, you plug headphones into these devices, and you listen
to what comes out. The tangle of variables behind a vintage stereo system has
largely been boiled down to: What kind of headphones am I using? The small
differences between sources of sound reproduction are, for most people, pretty
hard to differentiate, and wholly personal.
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