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Could you please pull this latest video and reupload once you have done a bit further research/fact checking into the Nyquist sampling rate? This video does not meet the quality standards we as a community have come to expect.
i love sci show and all, and id love to support what my favorite creators are doing, but sponsorships in the middle of my show really annoys tf out of me. i pay for YT premium to get no ads. ik, it's not nearly enough to match what sponsors pay, but man, ij wish theres a way to get rid of sponsorships in my videos.
I'm an audio engineer and in my opinion, in modern music at least, the most difference that you can make to being able to enjoy your music fully is in the last step of the chain - aka the DAC, your speakers and any processing device you may have in between. It's astonishing how different different speaker, tweeter and woofer designs, materials, and other adjustment sound with the same track. Also don't be afraid to use an EQ in your room, or measure it and use adaptive EQ if you want to get the best possible experience. For me, vinyl is more about the ritual of listening and not skipping; and I like the "craftsmanship" aspect of it
True, the rubber meets the road. This is empirically demonstrable. People like Glenn Fricker have demonstrated this with guitars (and more) on his RUclips channel. Electric guiatrs - tonewodd isn't a thing, pickups make not very much difference at all, netiher do strings. But speakers in the cab - yes that's where the biggest sound difference comes from because that's the last link in the chain.
Yep, DAC! As I started pre-SBLive of 80's, so, a great many dozens of systems comparisons. My current top-shelf, a FireFace II, is supreme when recording and playback. My synths (a bunch of Rolands, top on down) have a most breathtaking expanse ever heard, even on mid-grade monitors, of such sonic fidelity and frequency separation in all my decades of practical listening. The tightest of booms amidst an ethereal of singing angels in the grand canyon . My current others, a Steinberg 824, is very nice pro unit for the era, and my Presonus 1602 mixer is only adequate as it has that tininess that digital audio rightfully gets hounded for (and the main argument for the warmth created by analog tapes and circuits of its followers). As for me, the Presonus has a bunch of channels and is cheap...
One of the reasons why I hate that phones no longer have 3.5mm jacks is because if you do want to plug them into an old amp, the sound quality of the DAC in every adaptor I've tried is awful! I would have thought DAC quality was a solved problem by now but it's dramatic!
2:05 No Hank, digital sound is _not_ staircase shaped. Experienced electronics engineer here. There is no approximation and there is no information lost. It’s true that the sound is sampled, but those samples technically have no width in time. They are discrete impulses, not staircase steps. And when those samples are sufficiently frequent to capture all the frequencies contained in the original sound, (just over two samples for the period of the highest frequency in the signal), and are played back in a competently designed player with a reconstruction filter that meets the Nyqvist criteria, the result is a _perfect_ analogue signal reproducing the original sound. There are no steps in the resulting signal at all; it’s technically _perfect!_ This is testable; just look at the playback signal on a good oscilloscope, there are no steps. So please don’t perpetuate this terrible and unfounded myth about digital sampling being stepped or staircased - it just isn’t true. Technically speaking, it is absolutely superior in fidelity to every analogue recording medium ever implemented, ever. Period!
Honestly this post could be made in one form or another for at least half of Sci shows library. They over simplify, regurgitate myths, and just plain get it wrong a lot.
@@rutgerhoutdijk3547discrete signal is a point in time, meaning it has no duration, so "staircase" which has a width is not an accurate representation of the discrete signal
@rutgerhoutdijk3547 interestingly enough, no. For more information I'd encourage you to look up "Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem". Its very interesting, but the short version is from discrete samples you can perfectly reproduce a continuous function.
I’m an audio engineer, and the question of what sounds better is individually subjective. As to whether analog music is more accurate, linear, or truer fidelity? No, in most cases it is not. Compressed digital formats may be worse, but it’s nothing inherent with their being digital, and analog media has its own long list of caveats.
Most streaming services offer lossless streaming now, anyway, so digital compression isn't even a worry. And a good mp3 is VERY difficult for even someone with well-trained ears to distinguish from a WAV, anyway. People like vinyl because of A: confirmation bias and B: the drawbacks of vinyl give it a specific vintage-y sound. If you like that, it's fine to enjoy it, but no one should pretend that a noisier format with inherent dynamic and EQ limitations is "objectively better."
Exactly. I have quite a few different formats of the same album that I've picked up over the years and some I just prefer for the sound they offer. Doesn't mean they're better just that I like them. For example, Kraftwerk The Robots - I prefer the vinyl remaster to the CD remaster even though they're the same source. Purely because my turntable, cartirdge, preamp, amp and speakers make it sounds nicer to me. Also I have certain things on 8 track cartridge I like not because it sounds better across the spectrum because you lose the top end, but the bottom end on some recordings is pretty nice.
I own cassettes, records, CDs, and 24 bit flac. I like everything. It's all special in it's own way. I would love to add in some quarter inch tape, but it's too expensive
I've been listening to lossless music, that was digitised from a vinyl, and have to say, I wasn't expecting it, but even from laptop speakers it actually sounded way better than other media formats. What surprised me, was the bitrate, which was extremely high. I might be wrong, but it actually sounded better than audiocd. It might have to do with the equipment that was used to "read" the vinyl.@@crunchyfrog555
I think all engineers with some background in signal theory cringed a bit at that explanation of signal discretization. Spend enough time with Fourier and Nyquist/Shannon and you know that sampling can produce a perfect reproduction without aliasing up to a given frequency. As for what people find more pleasing, I think that's subjective. Same argument why people like tube amplifiers etc. They are provably worse and introduce distortion, but people still find that distortion pleasing, even if it's not the artist's intent.
Most of the time that distortion was the thing people desired. Not just speaking of the attempt to recreate that distorted recording desk preamp module distortion sound for artistic purposes, but guitarists have come to like distortion on the best clean sounds as well for practical purposes. Partially because it's more controllable, it doesn't jump to great dynamic peaks as easily and as thus is more audible (because it also doesn't drop below the level you can tell apart from the rest of the performance). And nowadays that the production chain is mostly if not exclusively digital, it's very common for producers to introduce distortion and compression on tracks or even in the master to replicate the old flawed analog recording, amplifier and effects technology. Often times a little bit of distortion makes it more pleasant to ears due to removing those high spikes. It can be inaudible many times, but sometimes it can also work out to seem unnoticeable until you pay attention, say on drum tracks. Until digital modeling and technology became more advanced, analog distortion was often thought as pleasant and digital distortion awful, most likely due to that soft clipping and many times asymmetric clipping that's fairly common in tube amplifiers. Something about the asymmetric clipping is very pleasant to the ear compared to symmetric, perhaps because it doesn't ceiling all the signal, just smooths it a bit. Similarly to soft clipping not just cutting the head off but more like compressing it. You might also critique tube amplifiers for being very sensitive to abuse and breaking down and of course being heavy for all the transformers. That's probably the number one reason instrument players started moving to digital gear, first and foremost for practical reason and reliability. With digital you almost never fail and if you fail, you can get an identical piece from the nearest store, it's not your favourite tube amplifier and even if you get the same model in the town, it might not sound the same due to part tolerances and whatnot. Got a bit lengthy, but distortion has a strong place in the audio we consume as both production tool and artistic tool. Our ears tend to also do similar things to my understanding with loud noises, which perhaps lends to why it might be preferrable. But something I've come to learn about audio is that we very rarely want or enjoy clinically pure and perfect replications. Something about the perfect replication feels often cold and soulless, unnatural, and as consequence we soften "the reality" experience. But I do agree with what you said, the signal critique and perfect versus imperfect reproduction and the experience being subjective matter.
@@rubenreyes2000 What people don't realize is that there is far more information loss in analogue sources. Even the best have noise floors far higher than even 16 bit analogue and that it's pretty much the same random noise as digitization errors, but only 20 or more dB louder.
@@rubenreyes2000He is correct. There is loss no matter what. It’s just that as long as the sample rate is high enough, the information loss & resulting digital artifacts are beyond the range of human hearing and therefore inaudible.
Nyquist sampling theorem only applies to idealized/perfectly band-limited signals. In reality, no signal is band-limited, therefore there is always loss no matter the sampling rate. Audio engineers use the nyquist rate for recording as it's "good-enough", but it is incorrect to say that it's a perfect reconstruction of the original signal.
No sampling does NOT create loss of information. The samples are NOT an approximation of the original signal. According to Shannon's theorem after filtering there is only one curve that can relate the samples: the exact original signal. Not an approximate signal.
There's a caveat though. Aliasing is still possible, it just happens at frequencies way outside of our hearing range. Within our hearing range there's indeed only one curve that can be produced from the samples, but above the cutoff frequency it's actually possible to have more than one solution
@@DracoMhuuh you mean because of the filter characteristics that can be variable and not perfect? I agree some aliasing can be created but as you say at higher frequencies than the hearing range, and at a very low level also.
@@jeanmichel2642 I'm specifically referring to Nyquist's Sampling Theorem. It is the one guaranteeing a unique match between analog and digital signals up to half the sampling frequency. Frequency components above those are likely always present in real sound even if we cannot hear them. So for our human hearing it really doesn't matter but ~technically~ there's still high frequency aliasing. So the match is not ~technically~ unique. Unless of course the original sound is actually bounded im frequency and sampled at twice the maximum
@@tomlxyz you mean physically right? As in that anything that can record/detect/measure has a frequency dependent response function and limitations? Or do you mean mathematically?
Real audiophiles know that since the sound wave travels through the air, you have to pump in pristine air direct from the Italian Alps into your listening room to help mitigate random molecular compression (RMC) that you get from sub-optimal air, which tends to muddy up those higher frequencies
Don't use that visualization for sample to sound conversion. That's not what it does at all. Mathematically we know sound is a sinwave so it fits a sine to the discrete datapoints. It is not a derivative "area under the graph". That would totally leave a ton of noise on the signal. Sine fitting at regular sample frequency does not. That visual is used so much and is so wrong it reinforces People's perception that digital storage of analog signals is bad. I really would have expected scishow not to fall into this pitfall because it's quite literally the most common error made in this music format discussion... This deserves a reupload...
I do not see that problem at all. Analog sine is made digital by sampling, and such a graph does not look bad to me at all. So - I am really curious how you would represent the a-d conversion in a nice visual.
@@batuhancokmar7330 thank you. I was in the middle of looking for that Wikipedia article to reply myself 🤣. Although I wouldn't go as far in the competitive claims because people have made incredible work in noise reduction and dynamic range enhancing on analog formats. Those are unfortunately all proprietary and only vintage equipment and vintage recordings support them (both degraded over time). And also sound signatures and preferences of the mainstream have changed over time. Bottom line is that the things that make tape and vinyl nice to use has nothing to do with the analog or digital format. Actually even CD is making a comeback right now because zoomer kids see it as vintage...
@@batuhancokmar7330 OK. Thanks for clarifying the point, appreciated. However I don't feel the video has all 'nonsense claims' as you state it. I want to point out that in general Veritasium does a pretty damn good job translating technic stuff to the main public. So you may overcook things a bit in your statements here ;)
I prefer vinyl but i know there exists superior quality... what i prefer is the feeling of everything put together than Playing the song... not due to sound quality really =P
@@MsTatakai and that's completely valid. It's super nice to be able to touch the media and it does sound good on good equipment. My problem with the video is that they made the dumbest mistake in showing how digital sampling works. Scishow can make mistakes like everyone else, they've generally even tried their best to do reuploads and stuff when new information changes the understanding we have about a particular science topic. But in this case it's literally the first pitfall on very very old news. And that means this video wasn't written to have any scientific accuracy at all. It's basically equivalent to a clickbait video to fill 10 min with "guys it's all about your feelings and they're all valid" which is true... But that's never what this channel was about. So it's a huge L in my opinion.
Sorry Hank, but you're perpetuating a widespread but fundamental misunderstanding of digital recording. The sample rate defines the bandwidth of the signal that can be captured, the number of bits defines the signal to noise ratio present in the recording. So by increasing the sample rate you can make the bandwidth arbitrarily high, and by increasing bit depth you can make the noise floor arbitrarily low. No analogue recording technology has infinitely high bandwidth or infinitely low noise. The bandwidth and noise floor of good quality digital recording standards and equipment exceed the the performance of analogue recordings by some margin, and they are more "faithfull" to the original sound. Of course, incompetent use of the equipment or techniques can produce bad digital recordings, just as they can produce bad analogue recordings. People who claim that analogue is better are either just exhibiting a preference for the sound of the added analogue recording artifacts and distortions, or have allowed the spurious arguments of the "analogue is better" movement to unduly influence their subjective perceptions.
I feel like people who say analogue is better are a loud minority. Most people i have talked to admit they enjoy the imperfections of the sound, including myself
AS an engineer (in my 60s now) that worked in every major pro studio with a lot of world famous artists most of the time we used multi-track tape. And you are correct Pro digital systems are at very high bit rates and high clock frequencies and hundred of tracks that without those levels digital artifacts start to factor in.. I did plenty of tests on that back in my day. I also sat in sessions with the likes of John Mayer and he loved using 16 tack heads on a Studer to get that great fat sound out of it. (tape systems tend to smear the sound by wow and flutter adding to the effect) . The tape reverb and echos of the times have an ethereal sound due to these phenomenon of motors and tape drag. I even designed some plug ins that did this effect with great results.. And back in the day the tapes had been manufactured straight to vinyl and i believe john had that done to his vinyl releases. ..There are popular plugins audio pros use now trying to emulate the character of tape, some are even accomplishing it to an extent by adding in the anomalies through algorithm manipulation. . All this does not mean i don't like and use digital.. The level of editing makes it far superior even if i sorta (self harm ) miss the nostalgia of tape splicing ..
But then you get some studio jerk to compress the hell out of it and make the levels all weird, it's no wonder people hate digital. Analog truly is superior in this case, if you can deal with the clicks and pops. Raw digital as described above vs raw analog? No contest at all, digital wins. But you'll almost never see raw digital in the wild as described here.
The 44 kHz or whereabouts sampling rate is not coincidentally a bit over twice the theoretical 20 kHz upper limit on frequencies we humans can hear. Through clever mathematical shenanigans, one can use discrete samples to recreate perfectly all frequencies below half the sampling rate. As the world isn't perfect, the actual sampling rate is slightly higher than that to give leeway for the flawed methods we use. For anyone wanting to look deeper into this, it has to do with Fourier Transforms and with the Nyquist Limit EDIT: I'm a moron and mistook double for half. Twice.
I was shocked he didn't mention the Nyquist theorem and instead presented misinformation about how digital signals are reconstructed (those bars with gaps under the curve to represent "missing" portions of the signal was pretty ridiculous).
Technology connections has a very good sub-series on digital audio as part of his series on artificial sound and specifically on the bit that focus' on the CD
@@miawgogo Yeah! I was about to recommend it as well, but forgot. Watching those videos bwforehand really helped me when I did a course on digital signal processing
I can see the appeal for records that were originally recorded onto vinyl, because it's sort of like a direct preservation of the analogue sound, but I don't really see the point of putting music that was recorded digitally onto vinyl.
I get new vinyls for three reasons. They are bulky, they are expensive, and they are inconvenient. Bulky: I can see the album art and hang it on my wall. Expensive: I can directly support an artist by buying one. Inconvenient: Im more likely to listen to a full album, and less likely to spend 10 minutes picking out songs.
No music after 1970 was ever recorded directly into vinyl! It was multitrack magnetic tape. And even the very best was nowhere near as good as 44.1ksps digital.
I agree. and yet I contradict myself by having half of my vinyl collection having a digital step in their production. They are definitely well mastered though.
The big advantage to me of vinyl is that they require no technology to play. A perfectly preserved DVD discovered ten thousand years from now will be indecipherable without a complex understanding of codecs (not to mention, in many cases, DRM). Sound waves can be produced from a record-even a degraded fragment of one-using purely mechanical means.
As others have pointed out, a signal with a specific maximum frequency can be sampled in time, without loss of fidelity. Its actually the sampling of the signal level into discrete voltage steps that introduces noise. For 16-bit (CD) audio the signal to noise ratio is 96dB which might be audible under rather contrived conditions. 24-bit audio theoretically gives you 146dB which exceeds that capability of human hearing. Techniques like noise shaping can substantially improve these figures. Suffice to say that under normal conditions you will not detect the noise in either case.
Some would argue that the crux is where you say with a specific maximum, which means there is a cutoff somewhere about what information is valuable and what not. Is frequency content above 20khz relevant or not. But I am not going to argue that😃
False information: "16-bit (CD) audio the signal to noise ratio is 96dB". Reality: "16-bit (CD) audio the signal to DISTORTION ratio is 96dB". The error signal in rounding (quantization) doesn't have a characteristic of noise (statistically independent from the signal) but of a distortion (statistically dependent on the musical signal, actually trivially predictable from the musical signal).
The debate itself is totally pointless because the number 1 factor that determines audio quality is the speakers or headphones through which you listen to the music (and the quality of your amp/dac to a lesser extent). Even assuming that analogue has some marginal advantage over digital, you are much better off spending all the money that fancy vinyl prints and turntable cost and invest it instead on speakers or headphones. Even MP3 played from high end equipment going to beat vinyl hooked to cheap speakers every single time, there is even no comparison. People waste their time and money.
Not to mention that even on the highest end playback system, the average person isn't going to recognize the difference anyways, lol. You have to be directly listening to gain a benefit from a system like that. Most people are just fine listening to the speakers on their phone.
Around 2010 the NRC tested a variety of speakers, including some extremely expensive audiophile speakers. In all cases, distortion peaked at the crossover frequency by orders of magnitude! The cross over is the weakest link, but it's the thing almost nobody pays attention to.
This 100%. I'm an audio engineer who thinks vinyl is silly, but there's nothing wrong with enjoying the specific sound of vinyl. There absolutely IS an audible difference. But to pretend that vinyl is "better" in any technical sense is just the literal opposite of the truth.
The best explanation of digital audio and why it's as perfect a representation of audio as you'll ever get can be found if you search RUclips for "Digital Show & Tell" given by Monty Montgomery. He shows how there ARE *NO* STAIR STEPS in digital audio and that even a 20kHz waveform can be perfectly reconstructed at even a 44.1kHz CD sample rate. He also explains why a 24 bit sample depth is pointless for consumers.
When the CD audio standard was established, It's was OVER. We solved audio recording! ANY "flaws" (outside of those made when recording/mastering an album) are the fault of crap playback gear (DACs, amps. speakers...) I don't know when or IF video recording will be perfect, But we humans perfected audio recording DECADES ago. I say this as a legit "boomer" who experienced "Vinyl" (uggh they're RECORDS...) 4 track O.R. tape, Stereo 8-Track tape, Compact Cassette, Compact Disc, Mini DISC, DAT......
@@jamesslick4790well, ignoring compression, video is about as solved as audio is. its just a couple extra dimensions per sample and a couple million samples per timestep. it makes for an enormous amount of data, but thats why you dont see it often. compression is where video certainly falls behind, but audio compression isnt "solved" either. we're still finding new ways to compress audio signals, and sometimes that actually involves using new ways to sample them
@@jotch_7627 When I mention "perfecting" video, I was referring to resolution and aspect ratio. and frame rate. Is 8K the limit? 16K?? And aspect ratios are all over the map depending on if the video is for the theatre, television or phone. And 24fps, 30FPS, 60fps 120? Where as we got sound figured out (20-20k HZ) I don't have to give a thought to the final output when I'm recording and editing audio, But I got a metric butt ton of choices to make before even shooting video. In fact I personally just render my own personal videos at 1080p, 30fps and burn off some Blu Rays.
@@jamesslick4790 ah, yeah, i see what you mean now. video definitely has a lot more variables to contend with, some of which have zero upper bound (e.g., human vision might have a well-defined angular resolution limit, but videos are displayed on a wide variety of screen sizes and distances)
How can you create a video on this topic and not address the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem. Basically all the information you gave about the digital waveforms being "discreet" is misleading at best. The data stored in digital media is discreet, much like 2 set of linear coordinates. There is a theorem of geometry that 2 sets of linear coordinates uniquely define the infinite number of points of a line. The same is true with sinusoidal waveforms or any linear combination of them. The Nyquist-Shannon Sampling theorem similarly defines a waveform by the minimal number of points needed to define that form completely, NOT just approximately.
That is not how digital audio works. There is no stairstep pattern, samples describe 2 points of a sine wave. Every sound can be described with sine waves.
As with most people that think they kmow science they act as if computer quantization is the end all be all and forget about the physics of the real world which prove the Nyquist Criterion which wasn't even touched on.
Ever made and r-2r ladder? The basic dac? It has steps. We shape that away, but at some point they are definitely there. Every real world dac has limitations, nothing is perfect. So yes the representation with steps is fine. The problem lies with people thinking that it's the end of the story. Every commercial dac has a smooth wave at the end, but the conversion does include steps at the conversion point.
That's simply not true. I am a developer who made some projets that i have to implement digital sound. It's not dificult. You have an array of samples and that's it. Its like you cut the wave vertically and you store the amplitude on the position where the cut was made. Só everything is correct In this segment
This video pretty much didn't show the Nyquist-Shannon theorem at all when mentioned about the part about there's a lost, which incorrect about PCM, and also saying steps on representing digital audio sample? it's 2024, and there's a video about it from XiphOrg channel that you guys could have watch before making this video... digital audio is easy to research why the heck you guys skipped the very fundamental.
For me, vinyl records are like candles: It's not about them serving a practical purpose, it's about the coziness. A LED light does an objectively better job at lighting a room than a candle does, and is also better for the environment, but turning on the lights just isn't as cozy as lighting a candle.
BRILLIANT ANALOGY! 👏 High-quality digital is "superior" in many ways, but if you are a true music LOVER, you can not say the EXPERIENCE of listening to high-quality vinyl isn't "superior." (If you don't mind getting up over and over switching sides!)
If you want to understand why digital signals aren’t as described in this video, xiph has a great video called “Digital Show and Tell” that explains things really well in the first 8 minutes or so!
As an audio engineer. I would say. If the original recording has an analogue workflow. Then i Understand the argument for Vinyl(even if i dont partake myself). If there is a digital conversation somewhere in the chain. Then a High quality FLAC/WAV will be of better quality than the vinyl. This is assuming that your Dac is of sufficient quality.
YEP - its its analogue beginning to end then vinyl is significantly better and high-quality reel to reel is the best of all. But if you introduce digital at any point then 24/192 FLAC with a good 24 bit NOSDAC
Nope. Experienced electronics engineer here. Vinyl has far, far lower fidelity than the magnetic tapes on which almost all analogue sound was recorded since WWII, and degrades with every playback. The only benefits of vinyl are the nostalgia generated by the extremely poor quality of sound old people put up with decades ago, and marketing driven fashion. There is no technical merit in vinyl whatsoever!
@@BillySugger1965 Rubbish. You have just never listened to a quality HiFi - If you are listening to a $50k+ analogue system then no one on earth will tell you a $50k+ digital system is better - its just not. But if you are listening to a $5k system then the digital will be better - and lets be honest, most people are NOT seeking out vintage kiseki lapis lazuli cartridge's they are buying a system for day to day use. But NO ONE is listening to low fidelity out of nostalgia and paying $100k to do it.
Hank! C'mon, I cant believe you got this so wrong. The digital stair step concept is a myth. Yes, it is stored that way, however within the DAC the "stair step" is converted back to a wave. _It has to be_ because of the way speakers work. When analog music is fed into an ADC (using a lossless codec) it will _ALWAYS_ come out the other end (DAC) in a wave that is _EXACTLY_ the same because there is only *_one way to properly reconstruct the wave._* _There are no stair steps._ The DAC outputs an analog signal (that is _identical to the input)._ Then why is mp3 so bad? Because it is a lossy format that throws away information _on purpose_ in order to save space on your storage medium. You aren't (really) losing that much _to sampling,_ if any at higher bitrates. But, but, what if the sound changes faster than your sample rate? _It doesn't._ There are physical limitations at play here. Sound has wavelengths that have to fit within a specific physical space. Once you get to a certain sampling rate, you're so far past what is possible to create with sound that it just doesn't matter. And I don't mean you can't perceive it (although that is true too), I mean it can't physically happen. To use an analogy, the pixels you are using to record are smaller than the pixels that make up reality. So no matter what happens in reality, you have the resolution digitally without loss. Yes, we are at that point, where digital resolution is capable of capturing reality perfectly with respect to sound. (At least the microphones input) Records sound better because of their imperfection. They have a warmth that isn't present on CDs or Dsd. Although you can approximate that by running a tube amp. Another cool thing about analog is that it is like capturing a fart in a jar so long as you have an unbroken analog chain. While it makes no difference sonically, you are hearing the performers voice as it was. Waves go in. Waves are captured. Waves come out. No funny digital stuff. (Again, it's not sonically relevant, but it's like capturing a fart in a jar. You're hearing not a reproduction, but the actual wave, just frozen in time). I hate this stair step fallacy. It needs to go away. It sounds good if you don't think too hard, but falls apart with _actual science and engineering._ Which is why it's so sad to see it here.
False information: "it will ALWAYS come out the other end (DAC) in a wave that is EXACTLY the same". Reality: it will come slightly distorted, because numbers have to be rounded since they are stored in DIGITS that's where the word digital came from.
This is why Open Source projects like FLAC are so important. We get lossless compression, that is free for everyone to use. Not only does it allow people to rip their own CD's and retain the full 16bit 44.1KHz sampling rate. It allows CD quality audio to be streamed with relatively low data.
@@toastyburgerI could store my entire collection in uncompressed WAV in that amount of space. Also, there is absolutely no way to audibly tell lossless compressed audio apart from a modern lossy compression format. The only benefit of using lossless (like FLAC) is if you are going to remix or apply several transformations to the music.
@@xyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyz I was comparing it to uncompressed WAV files. Back in the day, that's how we had to rip CD's to get good audio. Flac are half the size if not smaller.
2:33 - sort of. In a purely bandwidth limited source, no information is lost. This is because only one possible sine wave can fit the curve, if the bandwidth is limited.
This is my opinion as a fan of classical music.Some very nuanced range of sound is always lost in Vinyl recordings.So digital is much better at recreating closest to original sound; It is noticeably different from a live concert hall but still closer than Vinyl.However the lost sound in Vinyls result in the sounding much sweeter, especially strings and vocals. That and the little crackles give it sort of a soul that makes it that much better for me personally.Also owning a vinyl and playing it seems to be more of an occasion than pressing a few buttons for a digital recording much like reading a real book us always better than reading an ebook.
So you like the aesthetics of the audio degradation. That’s fair. It makes vinyl subjectively preferable for you. But it doesn’t mean that vinyl is technically anywhere near as faithful as digital recording.
not to mention with vinyl noise floor are so high that classical music that has a variety of dynamics basically a turn off to listen, unless you like crackles and noise floor drowning the music
Pretty disappointed with scishow on this one, perpetuating the myth that digital recordings work by approximating a soundwave instead of being a precise and accurate digitisation of them. The mathematics of DACs make them reproduce sound within a given range (such as that of human hearing) *perfectly*, which wouldve been a good thing for scishow to give a simple overview of. Note that for most people, this would have been experienced via CDs which are encoded perfectly, MP3s however are NOT perfect, and are analogous to JPG but for sound. It's not the digital/analogue divide causing a loss in quality, it's the choice of using a lossy compression format (where for images PNG or RAW would remain perfect..but unlike sound, run into resolution and chromatic issues compared to analogue film). People I know that prefer records enjoy the romance of it, and like the *extra* "noise" that records and their players insert, that do genuinely insert a warmth (low static) to the listening experience. A bad amp or crumby speaker setup will also ruin the playback of a CD which is why a lot of people think those are bad, since it's easy to produce a cheap digital product that still otherwise works.
False information: "instead of being a precise and accurate digitisation of them". Actual fact: no digitization is precise and accurate. Every digitization rounds to a digit so the imprecision and inaccuracy is up to +/- 0.5 digits.
If you have an "analog" circle and describe it "digitally" as being three inches across, then draw it that way, it's not a jagged stair-step pattern. You haven't lost any information, except for some minuscule, random noise in the original and reproduced lines of the circle. Digital audio is not like digital imagery, which has discrete pixels. Digital analog is described and reproduced as a wave, exactly as analog. If the sample rate is high enough, there is no discernible difference.
Yep! Not add in no gen loss (important on the recording/editing end), No physical wear on the consumption end, And the only SANE conclusion is that LOSSLESS digital is superior to ANY analog audio recording/playback method. I say this as a 62 year old keyboardist/bass guitarist.
False information: "you haven't lost information in digitally describing diameter of a circle". Actual reality: you have lost information. Example: your digital has precision of 1. You have a circle of diameter 2.9. You round it to 3 and store it and then read it as 3 and produce a circle of diameter 3.0 which is wrong because the actual circle was 2.9.
"But there's gonna be a tiny amount of information lost no matter what." That just CANNOT be true. The digital sampling can be much higher than air's ability to reflect the difference between digital and analog. It boils down to how air vibrates and our ears pick it up, not the technology.
Which kinda makes it... not music? I mean if the vibrations are in such a configuration that they bypass the nature of physical sound, it's hard to call something music. More like signals which can become music. The difference isnt really important though, but it is interesting. Like how krakatoa was SO energetic that the waves moved faster than sound (at first) and therefore weren't actually sound until they decayed a bit. Or like how electric guitars don't really play music, they generate magnetic signals which get turned into electrical signals which is then turned into music, somewhat akin to a synth
@@anotherfreakingaccount "if the vibrations are in such a configuration that they bypass the nature of physical sound" I don't know what you mean by that. Sound isn't a physical thing, it's a physical thing hitting your ears in waves. Those waves are made up of individual molecules. How tightly those molecules can interact with each other determines the characteristics which we hear as sound. But the air can carry sounds that are well out of the range of human hearing and none of this has to do with music appreciation.
You're losing any vibrations faster than half the Nyquist sampling rate. HOWEVER, assuming CD quality, those vibrations are so high-pitched that they're beyond the range of human hearing anyway. So even calling them "sound" is dubious. At most you're losing high-pitch whine that only a dog, Superman, or baby could perceive.
@@Blackmark52 Right, sound is created by your perception of pressure waves in the air. Krakatoa's explosion was so energetic that the pressure wave created moved faster than the speed of sound near the event, basically overwhelming the air's ability to carry sound until it had traveled far enough to lose some energy. That is to say, it could only be heard after a certain distance, and it's not because of a limitation of the sound receiver, it's because of a limitation of the sound medium If there is an upper bound for the air's ability to carry sound, could there be a lower bound? It might not be immediately pertinent to your current focus in the pursuit of music appreciation. But to say that the study of sound has nothing to do with music appreciation does not seem accurate to me
5:50 correction. Vinyl will almost definitely sound better than a low quality MP3, it's absolutely not the same quality. There is noticeable loss, and some music will straight up be missing sounds you can objectively notice with your ear. It gets muddier with high CBR, VBR, or ABR MP3s. It's easier to talk about lossless digital like CDs, ALAC, FLAC, or WAV. The study using 192 CBR MP3 (I checked your sources) only tested using a single song, that was originally recorded analogue anyways, and it's clear with the participants involved that perception was the largest factor. However I strongly believe testing across a variety of genres will yield significantly more dramatic results as the encoder makes more tradeoffs to keep up with the information. Honestly I believe this whole video would be more clear if you left lossy encoding out of it, makes digital more of a clear winner. It's complicated enough for people to grasp the difference between analog and digital, throwing a compression algorithm on top just muddies it more.
That's really sad trying to compare an unaltered source with an MP3 or any other compression. Vinyl recordings were also subjected to compression, expansion and other tweaks to make the analog appear to have a dynamic range that it could not possibly support.
@@TRDiscordian You're comparing apples with oranges. Low quality MP3 loses a lot of information and distorts the original signal in a specific way. Vinyl loses some information and introduces its own changes to the original signal. It's just that usually vinyl reproduction produces more pleasant experience than low quality mp3. It has nothing to do with "quality" of the reproduced signal.
@@SpadajSpadaj no, the video did. That's my problem too (other than your nonsensical "it has nothing to do with quality" statement, it's LITERALLY a topic about quality), you're more or less just agreeing with me here...
2:15 That is simply wrong. There is very good, but old, Video from FL Studio explaining why this is not how D/A conversion works. This video is extremly badly researched!
He's right about the sampling process at 2:15, that's pretty much how digital sampling works. If your sample rate is too low you won't be able to get some frequencies ("that tiny amount of information lost"). That's technically true. But the thing is, it's totally irrelevant in this case since the audio industry already uses very high sample rates and bit depths. A high enough sample rate will have enough bandwidth to capture all the relevant frequencies.
As an audio engineer, I can confidently say.... it really depends on the mastering of the recording itself. Sometimes an analog vinyl master sounds amazing because a lot of care and attention was put into the mastering process so of course it'll sound glorious. But I've heard plenty of vinyl masters that sound like absolute crap compared to a CD or digital file. Additionally, the sound is going to be heavily affected by any of the equipment in the chain from the listener. The speakers/headphones being used, the source of the audio player, any sort of amplification equipment, etc. And then when it comes to a turntable, that gets even MORE complicated when you have to factor in the quality of the record, the kind of turntable being used, what sort of capsule and needle it's using, what kind of pre-amp it's hooked up to, the list goes on. To me, Vinyl is less about the sound quality and more about the ritual. Pulling a big ole disk out of a sleeve, setting it on a turntable, setting up the needle and lowering it down and then just having to let the record play it's whole side (no track skipping or shuffle here folks) before flipping it over to the next side. It's a nice way to just wholly experience an album, which is more about the artistic content of the music rather than how it sounds. And to me at least, that's worth the extra money and steps.
I just got back into vinyl a couple of years ago and the one thing I’m really appreciating about it is that is sort of forces you to sit with an album and appreciate the whole thing. I still stream digital music but when there’s an album with an overarching theme to it, I will get it on vinyl
I'm going to love digital because I grew up with record players and tapes. I heard the difference immediately the first time I heard a CD. One of my favorite memories is after trying to tell my mom CD was better, we went into a store that had a CD player giveaway. The CD was playing a symphony (forget which one). She heard it and started crying from joy because it sounded like it was a concert. Records and tapes don't sound like a concert.
@@toastyburgerso did I, but I still have both reel to reel tape and vinyl. For nostalgia and because I like the physical part. Vinyl came in some very artistic sleeves and there's colored vinyl and all kinds of gimmicks that are just more fun than CD. We definitely lost in the album art part with the CD. Then there are the loudness wars. Some older recordings sounded a hell of a lot better, not because of the medium, but because bad sound engineers had not ruined them yet to accommodate for "modern" hearing damaged youth. Just the fact that it's on CD doesn't make something better, a bad sound engineer can ruin any medium.
Very similar to my experience in the mid 80's. When I bought my first CD player, probably around 1987 or so I immediately bought two albums, U2 Joshua Tree and a collection of baroque music. I'd never heard anything so life like outside of life music. While there are aspects I miss about records and tapes, what I don't miss is the sound quality. In some ways, we are living in the very best time ever for music. For $10 a month, I can listen to CD or better quality streams virtually anywhere and choose from roughly 100 million songs, or put another way, for less than I paid for that U2 album (and way less after accounting for inflation) I can listen to just about every song made in the last 75 years and many made before that.
@@kcgunesq so true, but personally I like some recordings better on vinyl and some better digital etc. I think it comes down more to the recording engineer than the medium for me. Might also be a music type dependent thing.
FWIW Once upon a time I had bought both the vinyl and CD versions of the same digital master recording. the vinyl version was surprisingly high quality, but the CD nevertheless delivered the cleaner sound, in part because of dust-induced noise on the record. Playback of a vinyl record will always include artifacts including wow and rumble because various mechanical elements of a turntable are susceptible to induced vibrations which will ultimately get transmitted into the stylus pickup and impressed onto the audio signal. Not to mention that even with the best equipment in the cleanest conditions, the vinyl will still wear and lose fidelity over repeated plays. This is reminiscent of an argument about tube vs transistor amplifiers. Some audiophiles preferred the "warm" sound from a tube amp over the "colder"/"crisper" sound of an transistor amp. Tube amplifiers were notorious for filtering certain portions of the audio spectrum to suppress hum and other artifacts inherent in the operation of tube circuits.
@@jordandino417long answer: digital signals pressed into vinyl have no advantage over a CD, but a tape that is recorded well, and in good condition will always be better quality, even if it is by a small degree. Digital audio recordings (as we have them today) are incapable of perfectly replicating sound waves.
It's probably similar to film vs. digital photography. People like film (and vinyl), because it's fun thinking about the analog and physical nature of it while you do it. In reality when each is done correctly, there is little to no difference that our bodily senses can detect between two.
Modern HD digital formats can have a much higher sample rate, as well as the complete audible range (no clipping) and no lossy compression. This makes them essentially indistinguishable from analog to human ears. Most people get their music from Spotify nowadays, which streams at a much lower quality. Probably should have included that in the video. You're getting old! 😁
Add in the fact that most folks are streaming it over Bluetooth to a speaker setup that is less than ideal compounds that even further. The majority of folks just don’t care that much.
The original red book audio format, 44.1khz 16 bit recording was lossless and actually indistinguishable from analog. The purpose of higher sample/bit rates is just headroom for the recording process. There is really no need to waste storage space on high bit rate audio, unless you are wanting to preserve additional information above and beyond the audio itself, such as positional information for surround sound. Spending money on 192/24 playback devices is a waste of time unless you're also willing to spend a factor more money on everything else in the playback chain, and even then, you need a proper listening space or all of that is wasted still. Like, putting one of those in a car, for example, is only ever going to sound decent when the car isn't moving (unless you own a bentley or rolls royce where you are sonically isolated from the outside world, of course)
@@hedruum the fact that streaming + bluetooth noticeably degrades the regularity of the time signature is more than enough to completely put me off. I mean if youre gonna maintain anything in music, timing is really really important
well as a kid of 90s, we kids used to be content with cassettes quality, and most of our music were recording from radio station new song releases lol... that's how untrained ears and the majority of people listening to music, until I actually got in to audio engineering, mix and mastering and also composing my own music, it gets to me that listening to a 128kbps mp3 was stupid and ripping my CDs archiving it at 320kbps mp3 was a mistake.
2:11 "You can use these data points to approximate that smooth, curvy roller coaster track" There's actually a theorem about this (the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem), which says that to accurately reconstruct a continuous signal from its samples, the sampling rate must be at least twice the highest frequency component in the signal (this minimum sampling rate is often referred to as the Nyquist rate). So at least in theory, it's possible to convert analong into digital without losing information.
People like the extra textural sound of the record, especially older ones, and the ritual of playing music in a record player. Also the physical collection of amazing albums is something that can never be replaced with digital.
There's a small subset of audio enthusiasts that sort of came to the conclusion that people like vinyl because the mastering process bringing warmth back into music, not the format itself. Digital formats are and can be just as good as vinyl, but how music is often produced, there's no real warmth to it.
@@matthijshebly There's a ton of different interpretations of what this means, but I think it's imperfections that add a human element to the track, improving the listening experience.
For us that lived during the vinyl era we know the possible addvantage of vinyl is a lost after the first play. I am a veteran of AR, THORENS , PANASONIC B&O and Shure,B&O, GRADO stylus
I feel like the main actual reason that vinyl would ever sound better than other formats is if the music in question was remixed in any way on its other formats. Example: In Styx - The Grand Illusion, the song 'Castle Walls' has a very sharp, very loud synth blast. In the remastered versions of this song, that synth blast has been essentially "turned down" a bit, and most of the music has been equalized in a way that is simply not respectful of the original album and how it was mixed upon its initial release. Similar problem, there would never be any point in getting a vinyl of Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication, because the original album was mixed for the "loudness wars," so they just pumped everything up and there's not really a difference between the sound levels throughout the album. Unless they go back and change that, or try to fix it somehow, the most authentic way to hear that music would be on CD, because that's what it was mixed for. If something was mixed for vinyl, it probably sounds better on vinyl. If not, don't bother.
This shows a really poor understanding of digitization, and I'm frustrated to see such bad misunderstanding presented here. Please pull this one, and research the topic before trying again.
As an avid vinyl enthusiast, I think a lot of it comes down to the experience. There’s some fantastic ritual in getting the record out of its sleeve, enjoying the often stunning art that is big and in my hands, as well as any inserts. The record goes on the spindle, I check the speed, brush off the static, and queue up the (usually) first track of the side. It’s best to enjoy a side at a time rather than skipping around songs, so only albums that flow well are put into the collection. Not all music entertainers consider this when assembling their album. It’s a designated time to enjoy music, rather than hitting shuffle on a music app. But there’s something even more important- in this digital era where many artist don’t own their masters and the app platforms reign, very little is received in the way of royalties by the artists. Vinyl is often considered merchandise rather than music, so the artists will often get a bigger cut of those sales. Buying an artist’s merchandise is often the best way of supporting them.
Pretty bad viz for “information loss” at 2:09. Area under between curve and bar is not informative wrt information loss; samples aren’t “held” as the bars imply, instead the mechanical properties of speakers automatically interpolate between points. The example you showed seemed to be one where sampling occurred at high enough frequency wrt the true signal that genuinely zero information was lost, yet the way things are being visualized with highlighted areas will always leave the impression of loss. You need to show a curve with high frequency wiggles between the digital samples to convey what is “lost” properly.
Technically, a reconstruction filter as it is called is already applied before the sound transducer gets to do any further filtering of the signal. For the electrical signal to actually appear as having those sharp edges, it would have to contain frequency content well into the ultrasonics. The reconstruction filter cuts off all frequencies greater than double the Nyquist limit (which is the maximum audio frequency that can be discretely sampled and perfectly reconstructed), leaving behind just the original smooth signal that was sampled. Top comments have already mentioned the Nyquist limit or sampling theorem.
Except that doesn't happen with any reasonable digital audio encoding. The sample and bit rates are high enough that no loss occurs "between" samples. The algorithm literally rebuilds the exact waveform, regardless of any "missing" data between two samples long before it ever reaches the speaker. This is why redbook audio was such a groundbreaking technology. It was literally the exact same output as a fully analog system, but without the drawbacks associated with the analog chain.
As those high frequency wiggles would exceed 20khz, it is debatable how much they contribute to the listening experience. But it does explain the interest in high definition audio and why music should be recorded at well above 44.1khz. I have read, however, that high sample rates can introduce quantization noise and anharmonic distortion. This is why we need talented audio engineers to master music and not just a bozo with a laptop.
Hank, you have a unique way of cutting through the noise, digital or analog with your comment, let people like what they like~~~ I try to watch every episode.... great work. My wife, also recently POST chemo, also had hair changes... It came back with almost NO grey hair !!!! Curly is OK... Like what it is.
You forget that the people who say the sound of vinyl records is "better" than everything digital graduated with PHD's in audio production from Dunning-Kruger University! /S
I like listening to records because it forces me to interact with the records and the player and basically turn off all TVs and such to get the audio to play over the speakers. Makes me focus on the music much more. I listen to mp3s like 95% of the time because it's when I'm driving or walking or at work. I also found I hated streaming services that played individual tracks. I never felt like I was connecting with the songs as well. I stick to buying albums and (mostly) playing them all the way through. I appreciate the music better that way.
And really, that precludes the vast majority of people. Most people are never going to make the financial or educational investment to get the kind of sound quality out of their media, regardless of what format it is in, lol.
Audio engineer here! I love how this video breaks down this endless debate and it summarizes my exact thought of letting people like what they like. I want to add that subtle distortion in analog playback systems can sound very pleasing and partially explain the preference for vinyl records and even analog recording to tape. Us audio folks usually call it saturation. Saturation is also used purposefully in music production though, so it's still a major part of great sounding albums no matter the format! And as if this comment isn't long enough, here's the shortest audio debate I've ever encountered, overheard in a music store: "I prefer CDs because I don't like the added distortion." "That's interesting, I prefer vinyl because I like the distortion!
As someone who's been about that def my entire life I can tell you it absolutely makes a difference. Enjoy however you want, but don't make illusions that things can't improve. It's fine to not care though.
I collect vinyl because it's physical and it's MINE. Streaming songs can be removed over legal battles, etc. and if I stop paying I can't have any more music... You can't stop me from listening to my records. I own them. Cool cover art can also be displayed! Bonus. It doesn't matter if it is the same sound. That's not the point. My collection is mine. I'm not leasing it from a streaming service. Same goes for anyone who collects CDs. Doesn't matter what physical format it is. Physical copies are better.
@panelvixen: Coming from the vinyl world, one of the things that I absolutely hate, the pops, clicks, other other surface noise. The surface noise was due to the record companies reusing the rejected vinyl discs, since they didn't bother removing the center paper label. Later the premium vinyl LPs don't use recycled vinyl and they also use a type of specially developed vinyl called JVC Super Vinyl, which was developed for JVC's CD-4 quadphonic sound. At one time quadphonic was the rage, and to encode 4 channels of sound on a medium that was only meant to record 2 channels was quite ingenious.
As someone who grew up with little 45 records, was happy to switch to 33s. I even built my own direct drive record player, amplifier bought expensive speakers to get better sound. New needles frequently and the damned things still got scratches, muffled sounds. I was very happy to get a cd player and switch. So much easier, so much cleaner sound and if you were dancing the needle doesn't skip.
Feeling called out. I am "that friend" for sure 🤣 That said, as much as I enjoy the sound of vinyl, the vibe of intentionally listen to an album and the little pops and clicks to go with it...but I think even amongst us audiophiles, we know digital is "better". Provided it's CD quality or better, and a wired connection is used, it's excellent these days if played through a solid DAC. Love this topic tho. Really shows who finds what important
AS an engineer (in my 60s now) that worked in every major pro studio with a lot of world famous artists most of the time we used multi-track tape. Pro digital systems are at very high bit rates and high clock frequencies and hundred of tracks that without those levels digital artifacts start to factor in.. I did plenty of tests on that back in my day. I also sat in sessions with the likes of John Mayer and he loved using 16 tack heads on a Studer to get that great fat sound out of it. (tape systems tend to smear the sound by wow and flutter adding to the effect) . The tape reverb and echos of the times have an ethereal sound due to these phenomenon of motors and tape drag. I even designed some plug ins that did this effect with great results.. And back in the day the tapes had been manufactured straight to vinyl and i believe john had that done to his vinyl releases. ..There are popular plugins audio pros use now trying to emulate the character of tape, some are even accomplishing it to an extent by adding in the anomalies through algorithm manipulation. . All this does not mean i don't like and use digital.. The level of editing makes it far superior even if i sorta (self harm ) miss the nostalgia of tape splicing ..
Greetings, I have obtained the best results by recording with a Studer 800 MXIII running at 15ips on Ampex 456, through an SSl mixing board, as shown in your video, and then mixed down through an Apogee a/d converter unto a Sony DAT. The problem with digital recording is that the sampler recognises the harmonic overtones as residual noise making the sound coming from a Steinway almost the same as a Bösendorfer or a Yamaha; there is no "presence" in digital recording due to the output in decibels of certain frequencies that get most of the sample. There is also the impossibility to make an amplifier capable of reproducing the dynamic range of a digital recording; hence the compression on analog recording was a perfect match with a class A amp But Hey! Nothing is more personal than taste... In Peace and Friendship, Pierre Pagé
Vinyl fan here, figured I'd throw in why I like them for curious folks in the comments. Even before watching this video I already knew vinyl didn't *really* have a better sound, the reason I like it is how the technology changes the music listening experience. Records and record players are not portable, I need a dedicated space to listen to that music and at least part of that space's function is explicitly to listen to said music. Vinyl also changes the standard "unit" of music listening. Because you can't easily track skip even compared to something like a CD analog listening puts more focus on an album as a unified "thing", as opposed to a dozen or so individual "things" packaged for sale. This is especially fun for albums that are clearly intended to be listened to in order as the songs share an overarching theme/narrative (this is why every music geek you know won't shut up about Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. If you want a more modern example post-digital music becoming the norm, check out Lemonade by Beyonce).
6:55 Those imperfections are what makes vinyl so special. It's a mass produced commercial product, yes, but as it wears it becomes something more. When I'm putting on my favourite record, I know no other copy in existence has the exact same imperfections in the exact same places as mine does. This is an experience that belongs entirely to me, and anyone with whom I care to share it. This is my Revolver. There are many like it, but this one is mine. This is true of CDs as well, but those imperfections are far more obnoxious than the ones on vinyl. Vinyl is also a nice exercise in mindfulness. Rather than treating music as a thing that happens around you, the ritual of putting on a record, absorbing the album art, and Just Listening is a beautiful experience. Does it sound better? From a scientific perspective, probably not. But it creates a better experience.
I listen to LPs , CDs, MP3s, and streaming (phone only) I like the sound but also the hands on (picking the Turn table, cartridge, preamp, and most fun the LPs). I like the clarity of CDs playing through a transport to a DAC, as well as the longer music run. Plus I listen to CDs in the car, because for quite a while I was working so much I had no time for LPs. I also listen to MP3s in the car via thumb drives ( its cool to have 2600 tunes at your fingertips on one thumb drive) and if I am away from my car or home system, I listen to Pandora with high quality earbuds. I like them all. Beryl took out my internet for 9 days so I appreciated my LPs, and CDs because streaming wasn't going to happen. They all have their own quality of sound. But as a music lover it is all good.
When I last listened to music on a vinyl lp ,the cartridge on my turntable cost $350 in 1985, and the speaker cabinet had 5 drivers starting with a 16" woofer that were on sound isolating stands. The sound was amazing. All of that is in storage and I listen to mp3s with headphones now.
Physically speaking, sound waves are oscillating pressure waves that propagate through a medium, alternating between compression and rarefaction. These sound waves originate from vibrations of a source, such as a speaker, where the movement around a fixed point or equilibrium generates the pressure variations that we perceive as sound. So Sound waves are not vibrating by them self.
Analog is more accurate, it might have more noise floor and quality that degrades with each generation, but generally in terms of high frequencies, it's more accurate. Digital is basically "slices", it cannot reproduce the high frequencies accurately without adding artifacts into the sound, similar to the moiré pattern that can sometimes happen when you try to record a screen with a camera. From personal experience I can tell you when I was trying to test some speakers, it was fine at the low frequencies, but when I got up to about 10khz, there was weird subharmonic artifacts in the sound that would not have been there had I used a proper signal generator instead of my computer.
2:05. The graph of the digital data is *not* a staircase. It is a sample at a point of time and there is no information inbetween. Sampling the band limited signal above the Nyquest frequency, *no information is lost*. That filled in portion doesn't exist under the curve. The curve connects the actual samples in the middle of those bars. Converting the data back to analog recovers the smooth sound signal.
I have no idea which sounds better, but I have a ton of vinyl records as well as CDs so I need players to be able to listen to both. What I don't like is people telling me to get rid of one type or the other!
A minor point of contention. The way we do PCM do not lose information when translated from analog to digital provided it's bandwidth limited before and after the conversion. Look up the Shannon Nyquist sampling theorem. As long as the sampled information is limited to half the sampling frequency provided it is band pass filtered identically before and after conversion. Think of it as a byproduct of a Fourier transform. In order to "lose" information in a stair step pattern additional frequencies would have to be added. Frequencies that are explicitly filtered out, thus restoring the original. And yes it took me years to grok this :)
Hi I’m an audio engineer. A big reason People like records cause they usually use higher quality audio files and not mp3s, either uncompressed .WAV file or a lossless compression like FLAC where as most digital download music historically has been highly compressed mp3s. Spotify only uses mp3 and Apple Music defaults to aac, which is just mp3 with Apple branding. Although Apple Music also lets u change to lossless compression, albeit it’s also the Apple branded ALAC not the superior open source FLAC. While the difference between .WAV or FLAC on vinyl vs digital isn’t that noticeable the difference between compressed and non compressed is much easier to hear, and yes it’s that non compressed audio is “fuller”, exactly how hipsters describe vinyl
False information: "aac, which is just mp3 with Apple branding". Actual reality: aac is a different algorithm than mp3, it is a newer generation of algorithm than mp3.
back when CD burners first became mainstream here, my old man used to do LP to CD conversions. He found that if you gently (with a soft sponge) clean the LP with warm soapy water and play the record back with it still wet/soapy then it actually increases the audio quality and reduces the static/clicking sounds common to records. Sure it wears down the playback needle i guess but it was still quite interesting and a neat way to make some money on the side :)
The advantage I have found in my life is an ability to completely shutdown the digital part of my life. By occasionally choosing analog over digital, I feel like I can take back some of that time from the digital spaces that have become increasingly ever-present and frequently keep us from experiencing the present. It’s primarily symbolic but, it does reduce screen time. I don’t get distracted while looking for something to listen to. It’s primarily an issue of not listening to music on my phone, in anyway online or through an algorithm. The algorithm may imply passivity on my part, but it frequently deviates from what I really want and therefore requires me to engage with it to return to something I want to listen to. With a record, you just listen to one side, then listen to the other. Since the conditions of how, where, and when all strongly influence the experience, I occasionally choose to not have that experience mediated by a digital platform.
I'm sorry I know a million people have commented on your hair as well as yourself but my friend Todd went through the same thing you did and then it was a little before you and caught covid-19 after getting inoculated and then died from it so I think your hair looks great and I'm glad you're here with us I love you guys thanks for everything you do I wish I could contribute money LOL but some of us just don't have....
Fun video! I have a huge collection of vinyls, and for me listening to them is experiential in nature, not tied to a specific audio quality aspect. Though I would pose the question as to why the songs with the most punch end up toward the beginning of the record. No need to answer that for my benefit, I already know. I think from a non-technical standpoint what appeals to people about analog recordings is their tangible nature. With digital being so ephemeral and fleeting, people want something they can hold in their hands that will stick around for a while, pass down to their kids. As for the longevity of vinyl, I still have the soundtrack for Ghostbusters 1984 that I played hundreds of times, left in a car in the Summer heat and it got warped, which I put in an oven to flatten when I was like 11. Still sounds good even today.
Between the various media, what I do vastly prefer is a physical media versus one stored off site. A physical media I can make copies and transfer it around from device to device without a third party allowing or forbidding me. Not to mention a digital recording that is done online is only there as long as that company exists
No mention of Nyquist-Shannon, dynamic range, lossy/lossless encoding, differences in mastering, or any of the various ways that vinyl's imperfections give it a characteristic sound. Generally I like scishow but this was pretty weak.
I don't know about better but there is something about listening to an old Beatles record on an original vinyl from the 60s that is lost when you're pumping the same songs into your earbuds in hi-fidelity lossless digital audio format. I feel similarly about listening to 80s and early 90s music on a casette in my car radio. It's how the music was originally heard, on the format it was designed to be played on. What I do love about digital audio on headphones is being able to pick out musical parts that are deep in the mix that often got lost in the hiss of a vinyl. If you listen carefuly to old 60s rock recordings you can often hear people talking in the background, the drummer calling off a time signature change, that kind of thing.
the grooves in a physical reccord have a finite definition too. All the different features have a minimum resolution defined by the size of the needle. So in the matematical view point, they are discrete too, just like numerical storage
I would add that there is what I called clipping which occurs when the sampling rate frequency is not enough to sample the highest frequency, most of the time you can not even hear it happened, but the math shows it happened, as well a good oscilloscope will to. I'm just an old engineer, always calculating to Nth degree, you guys always have a good presentation, thanks for ya`lls hard work!!!
I think that's the biggest thing: the "ritual" and the tactile and somatic experience of handling the record or tape, slipping a disc out of and back into its sleeve and carefully placint the tone-arm, rewinding a tape, all bring more of your senses into play than just hitting a button or tapping a screen to hear the song you want. And then there's the feeling of nostalgia and that direct connection to the past. However, there's a LOT to be said for the convenience of digital!
I grew up with vinyl (born in 1961), but as soon as CDs became a thing, I celebrated and never looked back. I no longer had to worry about records warping in a hot room, cleaning off dust, accidentally scratching the record, maintenance of the turntable like needle alignment and replacement, gradual wear-and-tear of the grooves, etc. And CDs were much easier to handle and store - they had the portability of cassettes and the random access ability of records - a win-win. Unless you actually LIKE the scratchy sound of dust in the grooves, there is nothing superior about the sound of records. (Of course, if what you're comparing to are MP3 files with too much compression, that's a different story, but that would be an unfair comparison.) The only thing I might have a little nostalgia for is 12-inch covers and inserts, which were often quite cool.
I myself do not prefer the harshness of modern digital players(no eq adjustments fixes this for me). Especially the kind of recordings I listen to late 60s all the way to the early 90s - sound, to me, a lot better on vinyl than their cd counterparts. Or maybe I’m not listening to my cd collection on a 1000$ cd player/processor 😂 - is what some “audiofiles” would suggest. In short, listening experiences are VERY subjective.
I never really got into music before CDs, even though I grew up in the 80s, so I might be biased there, but I never noticed much of a difference between vinyl, cassette or CD. The only time I actually noticed a difference was early mp3s sounding completely inferior to the CD counterparts, especially with bands like Rammstein that had a much wider range of frequencies in their songs than other bands had. Their music ended up sounding flatter. But nowadays it really doesn't seem to matter anymore, our internet speeds allow for faster transfer of data, our harddrives allow us to save mp3s (if we even still use them) at much higher qualities - I don't notice a difference anymore between CDs and, for example, Spotify. And while I appreciate there are people who enjoy Vinyl and all the power to them because I also have my preferences when it comes to some of my hobbies, so I get it, but I am happy at the moment with the quality I get from streaming music. I'm an audiophile in the sense that I can quickly tell if something is off, which I suspect is actually a side-effect of my sensory processing disorder where I am oversensitive to lights and sounds, and I will spend money on good quality speakers/headphones.
This reminds me of the photography film vs digital conversation. There is always that ONE friend who is a film purist, mean while the rest of us don't care and just use what we want to use for the photos we want it for. The music thing all comes down to preference at the end of the day, and it is a very subjective conversation.
The debate about "what I like better" is purely subjective, hands down - and we can't say that someone is wrong. The debate about "what technology gives me the most accurate reproduction" isn't - and we can clearly prove that someone is right or wrong.
I am also a photo-nut, and the current crop of lenses will beat the pants off of any lens more than 20 years old. Years ago, rare-earth glass, aspheric lens surfaces etc were rare, today many lenses have that as a matter of course. And the big contributing factor was the computer which can do in minutes ray tracing that would take a human years. The classic Tessar took 10 years to develp. Until just recently many current Nikon lenses will work on older Nikon film cameras.
@@ronaldlee3537 It's just down to preference on artistic expression. I like film, it has a look, quality to it that I love but it is a different workflow completely from my digital work. Whether is the early 2000s point and shoot digitals, an expensive Leica and the glass with it from the 80s, or a 40mp camera, the photo being a good photo is all on the photographer and their artistic expression. I've seen good photography in Japan from flip phone cameras as stylistic choice. There IS an objective quality of "This is tack sharp, focus is good, bokeh, light fall off, blah blah blah". those metrics do matter but having a PhaseOne or Hasselblad as a shitty photographer is just going to make shitty photos with good fidelity purely based on tech. So I just don't really care much, there are very talented people who are in both communities and very talented people who shoot both digital and film. I personally like to adapt vintage lenses to my X-T5 as a stylistic choice situationally
I'm 65 in December so I'm the guy who'd wear out 33.1/3 LPs. from the early 70s till I was finally able to catch up to the CD revolution. I was constantly hanging out in used record stores looking for obscure Jazz while in music school. The only thing that was better about that time was the ease of making analog compilation cassettes for driving around or giving to yer current girl I turned so many people to jazz that way.
I have a relatively large record collection and I really enjoy listening to them, but rather than thinking the quality is any better or different from the digital music that I listen to even more frequently what I like about the records is their participatory and decisive aspects. When I listen to a record THAT is what I'm doing, not skipping songs ad nauseum until the algorithm eventually finds something that fits my mood
Before I get to the answer, I will posit that it all depends on the resolution of the digital recording and player. Below a certain level, no one will notice, in the same way that there is a step change at about 30m where the sound from an object suddenly has a noticeable delay. At 20 meters, there is still a delay, it's just that we don't notice (or our brain tricks us into thinking there is no delay).
OK. We're mixing two different things here. One is the ability to reproduce sound without loss in signal quality. And of course transmitting digital signal is inherently "better" than any kind of analog line (especially if you're using a protocol which has error correction and so on). Storing data digitally also means ability of replaying the same signal over and over again without data loss (there's still possible media degradation like wearing down the CDs but you can make infinite number of identical copies of digital media whereas copying analog records or tapes must introduce additional unwanted elements like noise and distortions). But there's another part of the puzzle. Actually two of them. One is simply the analog part of the whole audio "path" from the source of the sound(s) to the ear. There must be some. Even if we create whole source program painting sample by sample your waveform in your favourite DAW, at least on the output side you must have some speaker(s) which translates that to air pressure changes. And this speaker is powered by some amplifier (can be a relatively low-power headphone amplifier or a huge stage amp, depending on your use case). And each amp and each speaker simply sounds differently. And some people prefer some sound characteristics, some prefer other ones. And it has nothing to do with the original signal. There is another thing - some parts of sound production involve some forms of analog effects. Yes, some of those are nowadays emulated digitally but still many producers use actual analog devices - compressors, equalizers and so on. True, modern computers have quite a lot of computing power and can relatively well simulate some of those devices but still many people believe that there's no thing like the real thing. And sometimes rightly so because analog components, due to some unpredictable "inconsistencies" in production (or even plain flaws in some components) can produce unpredictable effects. And still most people prefer to use SM57 to record off JCM800 and some celestion-based speaker case than to simulate it via some digital multieffect - there are just too many subtle nuances to the sound that you can't simply reproduce in the simulation.
False information: "transmitting digital signal is inherently "better" than any kind of analog line". Actual fact: digital signal always loses information and creates distortion by rounding to nearest digit. Analog line can be much better and adds noise, not distortion. Every digital soundcard has many analog lines inside.
@@charlieangkor8649 You're not discussing with what I said but with some idea of your own. I was talking about _transmission_. Anyway, with sufficient resolutiion the problem you're mentioning is negligible (especially compared to noise and other unwanted signal modification during analog processing).
I had heard that the purported difference was in how analog and digital playback mechanisms handled clipping (specifically, what harmonics were created).
One of the most ironic findings in digital audio was a comparison run by C't magazine decades ago and it was to determine whether people could tell the difference in double-blind listening tests between CD audio and 256kbps encoded MP3s. They found that listeners COULD NOT reliably predict which was which. The one exception to this was a guy who was a military veteran and had lost a part of his hearing to a grenade blast - he had lost his ability to hear high frequency tones. He could easily tell he difference between them, probably because of the nature of the psychoacoustic masking used in MP3 compression. Ironically, to tell the difference between CD audio and MP3 audio, you had to have WORSE hearing than average!
I love my community of audio engineers! It’s about enjoying something and how we go about that is different person to person (economical reasons at play). There is a distinction between Hi-Fi and Lo-Fi which exist for both analog and digital formats. So just read a little into lossy audio, crosstalk, RFI, dither and more if you’re interested!
One thing not touched on is the playback device. The digital recording is still played with an analog device - a speaker with electromagnet. A digital signal pumping X current into a coil to move the magnet moves exactly the same as if being fed analog signals due to inertia. Of course cheap amps can cause audible problems, but they'll likely butcher a true analog signal too.
I loved Chicago 16 back when I bought it on vinyl in the 80s. When I got a cd copy of the same album a few years later, it was easy to make a back-to-back comparison. There are several points of silence in the music, and on the cd, there was absolutely nothing at those points, whereas with the vinyl, I had become used to the background hiss of the analog process that filled in the silence. It was a dramatic difference to me. Also, I don't really miss the pops and clicks that accumulate with vinyl records from small scratches, dust, and other imperfections.
So one thing not mentioned thats a huge roll here. Mp3s are compressed lossed content, as an AV engineer when im dealing with studios or listening rooms everything is designed around WAV, FLAC, ALAC, or specialized lossless digital audio formats that are uncompressed. When they press modern vinyl they typically arent using MP3, they're using lossless master quality audio thats had a team of engineers working to make sure its optimized for printing
I heard that on vinyl, it was customary to put the fast, energic songs as a first track or two (near the edge) and put the ballads toward the middle of the record as there was a difference in playback quality between the edge and the center of the record.
For years, I heard if the music is recorded analog, it will sound better on a Record. If it is recorded digitally, then it will sound better on a CD. Not to mention of all ofbthe variables of the music listening device and the speakers and/or headphones. A person could easily spend 100 to 200k+ on a music listening setup.
@SciShow - I think that some people like the low rumble that occurs with record playback as some kind of comfort sound. What I have noticed is that record players (typically ones from the 70s and early 80's) have filtering electronics that alter the sound in ways that may contribute to that "comfort" smoothing of some recorded sounds. These are not present on digital playback devices and are why some people may perceive them to be "crisper" or "colder" sounding.
Kind of neglects to mention that no matter what method of audio recording and reproduction is used, playback ALWAYS has an analog component. The conversion of digital signals back to analog signals always occurs because our ears are analog devices, so our sound generation devices (speakers) must also be analog. This means that even digital music will still follow those smooth curves mentioned for analog because speakers are physically incapable of reproducing audio with gaps. In summary, once the sampling frequency exceeds the response of your speakers, the resulting wave forms of the playback sound will become indistinguishable regardsless of the recording method, unless that method itself actually introduces audible variations of its own.
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With commercial popular music being almost all artificial with very limited range or dynamics none of it is REAL!!
LOL.......... No.
Could you please pull this latest video and reupload once you have done a bit further research/fact checking into the Nyquist sampling rate? This video does not meet the quality standards we as a community have come to expect.
i love sci show and all, and id love to support what my favorite creators are doing, but sponsorships in the middle of my show really annoys tf out of me. i pay for YT premium to get no ads. ik, it's not nearly enough to match what sponsors pay, but man, ij wish theres a way to get rid of sponsorships in my videos.
I'm an audio engineer and in my opinion, in modern music at least, the most difference that you can make to being able to enjoy your music fully is in the last step of the chain - aka the DAC, your speakers and any processing device you may have in between. It's astonishing how different different speaker, tweeter and woofer designs, materials, and other adjustment sound with the same track. Also don't be afraid to use an EQ in your room, or measure it and use adaptive EQ if you want to get the best possible experience. For me, vinyl is more about the ritual of listening and not skipping; and I like the "craftsmanship" aspect of it
True, the rubber meets the road. This is empirically demonstrable.
People like Glenn Fricker have demonstrated this with guitars (and more) on his RUclips channel. Electric guiatrs - tonewodd isn't a thing, pickups make not very much difference at all, netiher do strings. But speakers in the cab - yes that's where the biggest sound difference comes from because that's the last link in the chain.
Yep, DAC! As I started pre-SBLive of 80's, so, a great many dozens of systems comparisons. My current top-shelf, a FireFace II, is supreme when recording and playback. My synths (a bunch of Rolands, top on down) have a most breathtaking expanse ever heard, even on mid-grade monitors, of such sonic fidelity and frequency separation in all my decades of practical listening. The tightest of booms amidst an ethereal of singing angels in the grand canyon . My current others, a Steinberg 824, is very nice pro unit for the era, and my Presonus 1602 mixer is only adequate as it has that tininess that digital audio rightfully gets hounded for (and the main argument for the warmth created by analog tapes and circuits of its followers). As for me, the Presonus has a bunch of channels and is cheap...
One of the reasons why I hate that phones no longer have 3.5mm jacks is because if you do want to plug them into an old amp, the sound quality of the DAC in every adaptor I've tried is awful! I would have thought DAC quality was a solved problem by now but it's dramatic!
Was looking for the commenter smart enough to point out that music is more than just the object you script it onto
Craftsmanship?!? Do you know how much crafting goes into a computer, the microphone, the speaker.
2:05 No Hank, digital sound is _not_ staircase shaped. Experienced electronics engineer here. There is no approximation and there is no information lost. It’s true that the sound is sampled, but those samples technically have no width in time. They are discrete impulses, not staircase steps. And when those samples are sufficiently frequent to capture all the frequencies contained in the original sound, (just over two samples for the period of the highest frequency in the signal), and are played back in a competently designed player with a reconstruction filter that meets the Nyqvist criteria, the result is a _perfect_ analogue signal reproducing the original sound. There are no steps in the resulting signal at all; it’s technically _perfect!_ This is testable; just look at the playback signal on a good oscilloscope, there are no steps. So please don’t perpetuate this terrible and unfounded myth about digital sampling being stepped or staircased - it just isn’t true. Technically speaking, it is absolutely superior in fidelity to every analogue recording medium ever implemented, ever. Period!
Isn't every sample a discrete measurement? Like pixels in a digital image? So if you keep zooming in, at some point there are discrete steps.
@@rutgerhoutdijk3547 Yes. The vinyl and stylus have their resolution.
Honestly this post could be made in one form or another for at least half of Sci shows library. They over simplify, regurgitate myths, and just plain get it wrong a lot.
@@rutgerhoutdijk3547discrete signal is a point in time, meaning it has no duration, so "staircase" which has a width is not an accurate representation of the discrete signal
@rutgerhoutdijk3547 interestingly enough, no.
For more information I'd encourage you to look up "Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem". Its very interesting, but the short version is from discrete samples you can perfectly reproduce a continuous function.
I’m an audio engineer, and the question of what sounds better is individually subjective. As to whether analog music is more accurate, linear, or truer fidelity? No, in most cases it is not. Compressed digital formats may be worse, but it’s nothing inherent with their being digital, and analog media has its own long list of caveats.
Most streaming services offer lossless streaming now, anyway, so digital compression isn't even a worry. And a good mp3 is VERY difficult for even someone with well-trained ears to distinguish from a WAV, anyway.
People like vinyl because of A: confirmation bias and B: the drawbacks of vinyl give it a specific vintage-y sound. If you like that, it's fine to enjoy it, but no one should pretend that a noisier format with inherent dynamic and EQ limitations is "objectively better."
Exactly.
I have quite a few different formats of the same album that I've picked up over the years and some I just prefer for the sound they offer. Doesn't mean they're better just that I like them.
For example, Kraftwerk The Robots - I prefer the vinyl remaster to the CD remaster even though they're the same source. Purely because my turntable, cartirdge, preamp, amp and speakers make it sounds nicer to me. Also I have certain things on 8 track cartridge I like not because it sounds better across the spectrum because you lose the top end, but the bottom end on some recordings is pretty nice.
let's begin with noise floor with analog media 😂
I own cassettes, records, CDs, and 24 bit flac. I like everything. It's all special in it's own way.
I would love to add in some quarter inch tape, but it's too expensive
I've been listening to lossless music, that was digitised from a vinyl, and have to say, I wasn't expecting it, but even from laptop speakers it actually sounded way better than other media formats. What surprised me, was the bitrate, which was extremely high. I might be wrong, but it actually sounded better than audiocd. It might have to do with the equipment that was used to "read" the vinyl.@@crunchyfrog555
I think all engineers with some background in signal theory cringed a bit at that explanation of signal discretization. Spend enough time with Fourier and Nyquist/Shannon and you know that sampling can produce a perfect reproduction without aliasing up to a given frequency. As for what people find more pleasing, I think that's subjective. Same argument why people like tube amplifiers etc. They are provably worse and introduce distortion, but people still find that distortion pleasing, even if it's not the artist's intent.
Most of the time that distortion was the thing people desired. Not just speaking of the attempt to recreate that distorted recording desk preamp module distortion sound for artistic purposes, but guitarists have come to like distortion on the best clean sounds as well for practical purposes. Partially because it's more controllable, it doesn't jump to great dynamic peaks as easily and as thus is more audible (because it also doesn't drop below the level you can tell apart from the rest of the performance). And nowadays that the production chain is mostly if not exclusively digital, it's very common for producers to introduce distortion and compression on tracks or even in the master to replicate the old flawed analog recording, amplifier and effects technology. Often times a little bit of distortion makes it more pleasant to ears due to removing those high spikes. It can be inaudible many times, but sometimes it can also work out to seem unnoticeable until you pay attention, say on drum tracks. Until digital modeling and technology became more advanced, analog distortion was often thought as pleasant and digital distortion awful, most likely due to that soft clipping and many times asymmetric clipping that's fairly common in tube amplifiers. Something about the asymmetric clipping is very pleasant to the ear compared to symmetric, perhaps because it doesn't ceiling all the signal, just smooths it a bit. Similarly to soft clipping not just cutting the head off but more like compressing it. You might also critique tube amplifiers for being very sensitive to abuse and breaking down and of course being heavy for all the transformers. That's probably the number one reason instrument players started moving to digital gear, first and foremost for practical reason and reliability. With digital you almost never fail and if you fail, you can get an identical piece from the nearest store, it's not your favourite tube amplifier and even if you get the same model in the town, it might not sound the same due to part tolerances and whatnot.
Got a bit lengthy, but distortion has a strong place in the audio we consume as both production tool and artistic tool. Our ears tend to also do similar things to my understanding with loud noises, which perhaps lends to why it might be preferrable. But something I've come to learn about audio is that we very rarely want or enjoy clinically pure and perfect replications. Something about the perfect replication feels often cold and soulless, unnatural, and as consequence we soften "the reality" experience.
But I do agree with what you said, the signal critique and perfect versus imperfect reproduction and the experience being subjective matter.
I was appalled about “there is always information loss no matter what” 😳😳😳
@@rubenreyes2000 What people don't realize is that there is far more information loss in analogue sources. Even the best have noise floors far higher than even 16 bit analogue and that it's pretty much the same random noise as digitization errors, but only 20 or more dB louder.
@@rubenreyes2000He is correct. There is loss no matter what. It’s just that as long as the sample rate is high enough, the information loss & resulting digital artifacts are beyond the range of human hearing and therefore inaudible.
Nyquist sampling theorem only applies to idealized/perfectly band-limited signals. In reality, no signal is band-limited, therefore there is always loss no matter the sampling rate. Audio engineers use the nyquist rate for recording as it's "good-enough", but it is incorrect to say that it's a perfect reconstruction of the original signal.
No sampling does NOT create loss of information. The samples are NOT an approximation of the original signal. According to Shannon's theorem after filtering there is only one curve that can relate the samples: the exact original signal. Not an approximate signal.
There's a caveat though. Aliasing is still possible, it just happens at frequencies way outside of our hearing range. Within our hearing range there's indeed only one curve that can be produced from the samples, but above the cutoff frequency it's actually possible to have more than one solution
@@DracoMhuuh you mean because of the filter characteristics that can be variable and not perfect? I agree some aliasing can be created but as you say at higher frequencies than the hearing range, and at a very low level also.
@@jeanmichel2642 I'm specifically referring to Nyquist's Sampling Theorem. It is the one guaranteeing a unique match between analog and digital signals up to half the sampling frequency. Frequency components above those are likely always present in real sound even if we cannot hear them. So for our human hearing it really doesn't matter but ~technically~ there's still high frequency aliasing. So the match is not ~technically~ unique. Unless of course the original sound is actually bounded im frequency and sampled at twice the maximum
@@DracoMhuuhanalog has a frequency limit too tho
@@tomlxyz you mean physically right? As in that anything that can record/detect/measure has a frequency dependent response function and limitations? Or do you mean mathematically?
Real audiophiles know that since the sound wave travels through the air, you have to pump in pristine air direct from the Italian Alps into your listening room to help mitigate random molecular compression (RMC) that you get from sub-optimal air, which tends to muddy up those higher frequencies
Go home
Yes that Alpine air is crucial. My personal tip for sound quality is to cup each ear in each hand and push them a bit forward. Works wonders.
Don't forget to stick gobs of putty on your $2 CD mechanism to "dampen vibrations" and sell it for $2000.
😂
Don't forget expensive copper
Don't use that visualization for sample to sound conversion. That's not what it does at all. Mathematically we know sound is a sinwave so it fits a sine to the discrete datapoints. It is not a derivative "area under the graph". That would totally leave a ton of noise on the signal. Sine fitting at regular sample frequency does not.
That visual is used so much and is so wrong it reinforces People's perception that digital storage of analog signals is bad. I really would have expected scishow not to fall into this pitfall because it's quite literally the most common error made in this music format discussion... This deserves a reupload...
I do not see that problem at all. Analog sine is made digital by sampling, and such a graph does not look bad to me at all. So - I am really curious how you would represent the a-d conversion in a nice visual.
@@batuhancokmar7330 thank you. I was in the middle of looking for that Wikipedia article to reply myself 🤣.
Although I wouldn't go as far in the competitive claims because people have made incredible work in noise reduction and dynamic range enhancing on analog formats. Those are unfortunately all proprietary and only vintage equipment and vintage recordings support them (both degraded over time).
And also sound signatures and preferences of the mainstream have changed over time.
Bottom line is that the things that make tape and vinyl nice to use has nothing to do with the analog or digital format. Actually even CD is making a comeback right now because zoomer kids see it as vintage...
@@batuhancokmar7330 OK. Thanks for clarifying the point, appreciated. However I don't feel the video has all 'nonsense claims' as you state it. I want to point out that in general Veritasium does a pretty damn good job translating technic stuff to the main public. So you may overcook things a bit in your statements here ;)
I prefer vinyl but i know there exists superior quality... what i prefer is the feeling of everything put together than Playing the song... not due to sound quality really =P
@@MsTatakai and that's completely valid. It's super nice to be able to touch the media and it does sound good on good equipment.
My problem with the video is that they made the dumbest mistake in showing how digital sampling works. Scishow can make mistakes like everyone else, they've generally even tried their best to do reuploads and stuff when new information changes the understanding we have about a particular science topic.
But in this case it's literally the first pitfall on very very old news. And that means this video wasn't written to have any scientific accuracy at all. It's basically equivalent to a clickbait video to fill 10 min with "guys it's all about your feelings and they're all valid" which is true... But that's never what this channel was about. So it's a huge L in my opinion.
Sorry Hank, but you're perpetuating a widespread but fundamental misunderstanding of digital recording. The sample rate defines the bandwidth of the signal that can be captured, the number of bits defines the signal to noise ratio present in the recording. So by increasing the sample rate you can make the bandwidth arbitrarily high, and by increasing bit depth you can make the noise floor arbitrarily low. No analogue recording technology has infinitely high bandwidth or infinitely low noise. The bandwidth and noise floor of good quality digital recording standards and equipment exceed the the performance of analogue recordings by some margin, and they are more "faithfull" to the original sound. Of course, incompetent use of the equipment or techniques can produce bad digital recordings, just as they can produce bad analogue recordings. People who claim that analogue is better are either just exhibiting a preference for the sound of the added analogue recording artifacts and distortions, or have allowed the spurious arguments of the "analogue is better" movement to unduly influence their subjective perceptions.
Exactly, so disappointing that they won't explain this
I feel like people who say analogue is better are a loud minority. Most people i have talked to admit they enjoy the imperfections of the sound, including myself
AS an engineer (in my 60s now) that worked in every major pro studio with a lot of world famous artists most of the time we used multi-track tape. And you are correct Pro digital systems are at very high bit rates and high clock frequencies and hundred of tracks that without those levels digital artifacts start to factor in.. I did plenty of tests on that back in my day. I also sat in sessions with the likes of John Mayer and he loved using 16 tack heads on a Studer to get that great fat sound out of it. (tape systems tend to smear the sound by wow and flutter adding to the effect) . The tape reverb and echos of the times have an ethereal sound due to these phenomenon of motors and tape drag. I even designed some plug ins that did this effect with great results.. And back in the day the tapes had been manufactured straight to vinyl and i believe john had that done to his vinyl releases. ..There are popular plugins audio pros use now trying to emulate the character of tape, some are even accomplishing it to an extent by adding in the anomalies through algorithm manipulation. . All this does not mean i don't like and use digital.. The level of editing makes it far superior even if i sorta (self harm ) miss the nostalgia of tape splicing ..
They have also probably heard too many compressed CDs that were victims of the loudness war.
But then you get some studio jerk to compress the hell out of it and make the levels all weird, it's no wonder people hate digital. Analog truly is superior in this case, if you can deal with the clicks and pops. Raw digital as described above vs raw analog? No contest at all, digital wins. But you'll almost never see raw digital in the wild as described here.
The 44 kHz or whereabouts sampling rate is not coincidentally a bit over twice the theoretical 20 kHz upper limit on frequencies we humans can hear. Through clever mathematical shenanigans, one can use discrete samples to recreate perfectly all frequencies below half the sampling rate. As the world isn't perfect, the actual sampling rate is slightly higher than that to give leeway for the flawed methods we use.
For anyone wanting to look deeper into this, it has to do with Fourier Transforms and with the Nyquist Limit
EDIT: I'm a moron and mistook double for half. Twice.
I was shocked he didn't mention the Nyquist theorem and instead presented misinformation about how digital signals are reconstructed (those bars with gaps under the curve to represent "missing" portions of the signal was pretty ridiculous).
Still sounds like crap
Technology connections has a very good sub-series on digital audio as part of his series on artificial sound and specifically on the bit that focus' on the CD
You said twice the sampling rate, but probably meant half the sampling rate.
@@miawgogo Yeah! I was about to recommend it as well, but forgot. Watching those videos bwforehand really helped me when I did a course on digital signal processing
I can see the appeal for records that were originally recorded onto vinyl, because it's sort of like a direct preservation of the analogue sound, but I don't really see the point of putting music that was recorded digitally onto vinyl.
Yes, this is why I have a small vinyl collection. To hear the album as it was in its time.
I get new vinyls for three reasons. They are bulky, they are expensive, and they are inconvenient.
Bulky: I can see the album art and hang it on my wall.
Expensive: I can directly support an artist by buying one.
Inconvenient: Im more likely to listen to a full album, and less likely to spend 10 minutes picking out songs.
No music after 1970 was ever recorded directly into vinyl! It was multitrack magnetic tape. And even the very best was nowhere near as good as 44.1ksps digital.
I agree. and yet I contradict myself by having half of my vinyl collection having a digital step in their production. They are definitely well mastered though.
The big advantage to me of vinyl is that they require no technology to play. A perfectly preserved DVD discovered ten thousand years from now will be indecipherable without a complex understanding of codecs (not to mention, in many cases, DRM). Sound waves can be produced from a record-even a degraded fragment of one-using purely mechanical means.
As others have pointed out, a signal with a specific maximum frequency can be sampled in time, without loss of fidelity. Its actually the sampling of the signal level into discrete voltage steps that introduces noise. For 16-bit (CD) audio the signal to noise ratio is 96dB which might be audible under rather contrived conditions. 24-bit audio theoretically gives you 146dB which exceeds that capability of human hearing. Techniques like noise shaping can substantially improve these figures. Suffice to say that under normal conditions you will not detect the noise in either case.
Some would argue that the crux is where you say with a specific maximum, which means there is a cutoff somewhere about what information is valuable and what not. Is frequency content above 20khz relevant or not.
But I am not going to argue that😃
False information: "16-bit (CD) audio the signal to noise ratio is 96dB". Reality: "16-bit (CD) audio the signal to DISTORTION ratio is 96dB". The error signal in rounding (quantization) doesn't have a characteristic of noise (statistically independent from the signal) but of a distortion (statistically dependent on the musical signal, actually trivially predictable from the musical signal).
The debate itself is totally pointless because the number 1 factor that determines audio quality is the speakers or headphones through which you listen to the music (and the quality of your amp/dac to a lesser extent). Even assuming that analogue has some marginal advantage over digital, you are much better off spending all the money that fancy vinyl prints and turntable cost and invest it instead on speakers or headphones. Even MP3 played from high end equipment going to beat vinyl hooked to cheap speakers every single time, there is even no comparison. People waste their time and money.
Not to mention that even on the highest end playback system, the average person isn't going to recognize the difference anyways, lol. You have to be directly listening to gain a benefit from a system like that. Most people are just fine listening to the speakers on their phone.
Around 2010 the NRC tested a variety of speakers, including some extremely expensive audiophile speakers. In all cases, distortion peaked at the crossover frequency by orders of magnitude! The cross over is the weakest link, but it's the thing almost nobody pays attention to.
I think Dankpods put it best
"It's not about sound quality, it's about VIBE quality."
Very similar to "its not about graphical fidelity, it's about graphical style"
This 100%. I'm an audio engineer who thinks vinyl is silly, but there's nothing wrong with enjoying the specific sound of vinyl. There absolutely IS an audible difference. But to pretend that vinyl is "better" in any technical sense is just the literal opposite of the truth.
exactly why im into it, i cant hear a difference but the vibe is immaculate
exactly
What the hell is vibe quality? Or is it a pun because vibe sounds like vibration, and sounds are just vibrating air molecules?
The best explanation of digital audio and why it's as perfect a representation of audio as you'll ever get can be found if you search RUclips for "Digital Show & Tell" given by Monty Montgomery. He shows how there ARE *NO* STAIR STEPS in digital audio and that even a 20kHz waveform can be perfectly reconstructed at even a 44.1kHz CD sample rate. He also explains why a 24 bit sample depth is pointless for consumers.
Agree, such a great video.
When the CD audio standard was established, It's was OVER. We solved audio recording! ANY "flaws" (outside of those made when recording/mastering an album) are the fault of crap playback gear (DACs, amps. speakers...) I don't know when or IF video recording will be perfect, But we humans perfected audio recording DECADES ago. I say this as a legit "boomer" who experienced "Vinyl" (uggh they're RECORDS...) 4 track O.R. tape, Stereo 8-Track tape, Compact Cassette, Compact Disc, Mini DISC, DAT......
@@jamesslick4790well, ignoring compression, video is about as solved as audio is. its just a couple extra dimensions per sample and a couple million samples per timestep. it makes for an enormous amount of data, but thats why you dont see it often.
compression is where video certainly falls behind, but audio compression isnt "solved" either. we're still finding new ways to compress audio signals, and sometimes that actually involves using new ways to sample them
@@jotch_7627 When I mention "perfecting" video, I was referring to resolution and aspect ratio. and frame rate. Is 8K the limit? 16K?? And aspect ratios are all over the map depending on if the video is for the theatre, television or phone. And 24fps, 30FPS, 60fps 120? Where as we got sound figured out (20-20k HZ) I don't have to give a thought to the final output when I'm recording and editing audio, But I got a metric butt ton of choices to make before even shooting video. In fact I personally just render my own personal videos at 1080p, 30fps and burn off some Blu Rays.
@@jamesslick4790 ah, yeah, i see what you mean now. video definitely has a lot more variables to contend with, some of which have zero upper bound (e.g., human vision might have a well-defined angular resolution limit, but videos are displayed on a wide variety of screen sizes and distances)
How can you create a video on this topic and not address the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem. Basically all the information you gave about the digital waveforms being "discreet" is misleading at best.
The data stored in digital media is discreet, much like 2 set of linear coordinates. There is a theorem of geometry that 2 sets of linear coordinates uniquely define the infinite number of points of a line.
The same is true with sinusoidal waveforms or any linear combination of them. The Nyquist-Shannon Sampling theorem similarly defines a waveform by the minimal number of points needed to define that form completely, NOT just approximately.
That is not how digital audio works. There is no stairstep pattern, samples describe 2 points of a sine wave. Every sound can be described with sine waves.
Yeah, but we do need our Fourier transforms to take less time than the age of the universe.
As with most people that think they kmow science they act as if computer quantization is the end all be all and forget about the physics of the real world which prove the Nyquist Criterion which wasn't even touched on.
Ever made and r-2r ladder? The basic dac? It has steps. We shape that away, but at some point they are definitely there.
Every real world dac has limitations, nothing is perfect.
So yes the representation with steps is fine. The problem lies with people thinking that it's the end of the story. Every commercial dac has a smooth wave at the end, but the conversion does include steps at the conversion point.
@@zinckensteel Thankfully FFT was discovered. I still remember in the 80's that there was a big buzz around FFT
That's simply not true. I am a developer who made some projets that i have to implement digital sound. It's not dificult. You have an array of samples and that's it. Its like you cut the wave vertically and you store the amplitude on the position where the cut was made. Só everything is correct In this segment
This video pretty much didn't show the Nyquist-Shannon theorem at all when mentioned about the part about there's a lost, which incorrect about PCM, and also saying steps on representing digital audio sample? it's 2024, and there's a video about it from XiphOrg channel that you guys could have watch before making this video... digital audio is easy to research why the heck you guys skipped the very fundamental.
For me, vinyl records are like candles: It's not about them serving a practical purpose, it's about the coziness. A LED light does an objectively better job at lighting a room than a candle does, and is also better for the environment, but turning on the lights just isn't as cozy as lighting a candle.
BRILLIANT ANALOGY! 👏
High-quality digital is "superior" in many ways, but if you are a true music LOVER, you can not say the EXPERIENCE of listening to high-quality vinyl isn't "superior."
(If you don't mind getting up over and over switching sides!)
LEDs are not better. They have hazardous material inside them & are bad on your eyes.
Candles are more atmospheric
I've often thought that listening to records is like sitting near an open fire, a radiator is more efficient but not so enjoyable to sit near!
If you want to understand why digital signals aren’t as described in this video, xiph has a great video called “Digital Show and Tell” that explains things really well in the first 8 minutes or so!
As an audio engineer. I would say. If the original recording has an analogue workflow. Then i
Understand the argument for Vinyl(even if i dont partake myself). If there is a digital conversation somewhere in the chain. Then a High quality FLAC/WAV will be of better quality than the vinyl. This is assuming that your Dac is of sufficient quality.
YEP - its its analogue beginning to end then vinyl is significantly better and high-quality reel to reel is the best of all. But if you introduce digital at any point then 24/192 FLAC with a good 24 bit NOSDAC
Nope. Experienced electronics engineer here. Vinyl has far, far lower fidelity than the magnetic tapes on which almost all analogue sound was recorded since WWII, and degrades with every playback. The only benefits of vinyl are the nostalgia generated by the extremely poor quality of sound old people put up with decades ago, and marketing driven fashion. There is no technical merit in vinyl whatsoever!
@@BillySugger1965 Rubbish. You have just never listened to a quality HiFi - If you are listening to a $50k+ analogue system then no one on earth will tell you a $50k+ digital system is better - its just not.
But if you are listening to a $5k system then the digital will be better - and lets be honest, most people are NOT seeking out vintage kiseki lapis lazuli cartridge's they are buying a system for day to day use.
But NO ONE is listening to low fidelity out of nostalgia and paying $100k to do it.
@@piccalillipit9211 It appears you have no never studied the physics behind soundwaves, else you'd not be spewing such BS.
@@Ruhrpottpatriot Literally got advanced physics and hand-built tube amplifiers
Hank!
C'mon, I cant believe you got this so wrong. The digital stair step concept is a myth. Yes, it is stored that way, however within the DAC the "stair step" is converted back to a wave. _It has to be_ because of the way speakers work.
When analog music is fed into an ADC (using a lossless codec) it will _ALWAYS_ come out the other end (DAC) in a wave that is _EXACTLY_ the same because there is only *_one way to properly reconstruct the wave._* _There are no stair steps._ The DAC outputs an analog signal (that is _identical to the input)._
Then why is mp3 so bad?
Because it is a lossy format that throws away information _on purpose_ in order to save space on your storage medium. You aren't (really) losing that much _to sampling,_ if any at higher bitrates.
But, but, what if the sound changes faster than your sample rate?
_It doesn't._ There are physical limitations at play here. Sound has wavelengths that have to fit within a specific physical space. Once you get to a certain sampling rate, you're so far past what is possible to create with sound that it just doesn't matter. And I don't mean you can't perceive it (although that is true too), I mean it can't physically happen. To use an analogy, the pixels you are using to record are smaller than the pixels that make up reality. So no matter what happens in reality, you have the resolution digitally without loss. Yes, we are at that point, where digital resolution is capable of capturing reality perfectly with respect to sound. (At least the microphones input)
Records sound better because of their imperfection. They have a warmth that isn't present on CDs or Dsd. Although you can approximate that by running a tube amp.
Another cool thing about analog is that it is like capturing a fart in a jar so long as you have an unbroken analog chain. While it makes no difference sonically, you are hearing the performers voice as it was. Waves go in. Waves are captured. Waves come out. No funny digital stuff. (Again, it's not sonically relevant, but it's like capturing a fart in a jar. You're hearing not a reproduction, but the actual wave, just frozen in time).
I hate this stair step fallacy. It needs to go away. It sounds good if you don't think too hard, but falls apart with _actual science and engineering._ Which is why it's so sad to see it here.
False information: "it will ALWAYS come out the other end (DAC) in a wave that is EXACTLY the same". Reality: it will come slightly distorted, because numbers have to be rounded since they are stored in DIGITS that's where the word digital came from.
This is why Open Source projects like FLAC are so important. We get lossless compression, that is free for everyone to use.
Not only does it allow people to rip their own CD's and retain the full 16bit 44.1KHz sampling rate. It allows CD quality audio to be streamed with relatively low data.
FLAC allows you to play your CDs on any device that supports the format. I can store my entire collection on a 512 GB microSD card.
I wouldn't classify FLAC as *relatively low data*, unless you mean relative to uncompressed 60Hz 12bit/channel 8K video.
@@toastyburgerI could store my entire collection in uncompressed WAV in that amount of space. Also, there is absolutely no way to audibly tell lossless compressed audio apart from a modern lossy compression format. The only benefit of using lossless (like FLAC) is if you are going to remix or apply several transformations to the music.
@@xyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyz I was comparing it to uncompressed WAV files. Back in the day, that's how we had to rip CD's to get good audio. Flac are half the size if not smaller.
@@xyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyz no, relatively low compared to uncompressed CDs, which will usually be between 400-700MB before FLAC makes them smaller.
2:33 - sort of. In a purely bandwidth limited source, no information is lost. This is because only one possible sine wave can fit the curve, if the bandwidth is limited.
This is my opinion as a fan of classical music.Some very nuanced range of sound is always lost in Vinyl recordings.So digital is much better at recreating closest to original sound; It is noticeably different from a live concert hall but still closer than Vinyl.However the lost sound in Vinyls result in the sounding much sweeter, especially strings and vocals. That and the little crackles give it sort of a soul that makes it that much better for me personally.Also owning a vinyl and playing it seems to be more of an occasion than pressing a few buttons for a digital recording much like reading a real book us always better than reading an ebook.
So you like the aesthetics of the audio degradation. That’s fair. It makes vinyl subjectively preferable for you. But it doesn’t mean that vinyl is technically anywhere near as faithful as digital recording.
@@BillySugger1965 A friend's father preferred AM to FM. Go figure! 🙂
not to mention with vinyl noise floor are so high that classical music that has a variety of dynamics basically a turn off to listen, unless you like crackles and noise floor drowning the music
@@BillySugger1965 That s exactly what I said.
@@James_Knott I'm barely 17.Sooo age has little to do with this
Pretty disappointed with scishow on this one, perpetuating the myth that digital recordings work by approximating a soundwave instead of being a precise and accurate digitisation of them.
The mathematics of DACs make them reproduce sound within a given range (such as that of human hearing) *perfectly*, which wouldve been a good thing for scishow to give a simple overview of.
Note that for most people, this would have been experienced via CDs which are encoded perfectly, MP3s however are NOT perfect, and are analogous to JPG but for sound. It's not the digital/analogue divide causing a loss in quality, it's the choice of using a lossy compression format (where for images PNG or RAW would remain perfect..but unlike sound, run into resolution and chromatic issues compared to analogue film).
People I know that prefer records enjoy the romance of it, and like the *extra* "noise" that records and their players insert, that do genuinely insert a warmth (low static) to the listening experience. A bad amp or crumby speaker setup will also ruin the playback of a CD which is why a lot of people think those are bad, since it's easy to produce a cheap digital product that still otherwise works.
False information: "instead of being a precise and accurate digitisation of them". Actual fact: no digitization is precise and accurate. Every digitization rounds to a digit so the imprecision and inaccuracy is up to +/- 0.5 digits.
If you have an "analog" circle and describe it "digitally" as being three inches across, then draw it that way, it's not a jagged stair-step pattern. You haven't lost any information, except for some minuscule, random noise in the original and reproduced lines of the circle. Digital audio is not like digital imagery, which has discrete pixels. Digital analog is described and reproduced as a wave, exactly as analog. If the sample rate is high enough, there is no discernible difference.
Yep! Not add in no gen loss (important on the recording/editing end), No physical wear on the consumption end, And the only SANE conclusion is that LOSSLESS digital is superior to ANY analog audio recording/playback method. I say this as a 62 year old keyboardist/bass guitarist.
False information: "you haven't lost information in digitally describing diameter of a circle". Actual reality: you have lost information. Example: your digital has precision of 1. You have a circle of diameter 2.9. You round it to 3 and store it and then read it as 3 and produce a circle of diameter 3.0 which is wrong because the actual circle was 2.9.
"But there's gonna be a tiny amount of information lost no matter what."
That just CANNOT be true. The digital sampling can be much higher than air's ability to reflect the difference between digital and analog. It boils down to how air vibrates and our ears pick it up, not the technology.
Which kinda makes it... not music? I mean if the vibrations are in such a configuration that they bypass the nature of physical sound, it's hard to call something music. More like signals which can become music. The difference isnt really important though, but it is interesting. Like how krakatoa was SO energetic that the waves moved faster than sound (at first) and therefore weren't actually sound until they decayed a bit. Or like how electric guitars don't really play music, they generate magnetic signals which get turned into electrical signals which is then turned into music, somewhat akin to a synth
CORRECT! It’s *not* true!
@@anotherfreakingaccount "if the vibrations are in such a configuration that they bypass the nature of physical sound"
I don't know what you mean by that.
Sound isn't a physical thing, it's a physical thing hitting your ears in waves. Those waves are made up of individual molecules. How tightly those molecules can interact with each other determines the characteristics which we hear as sound. But the air can carry sounds that are well out of the range of human hearing and none of this has to do with music appreciation.
You're losing any vibrations faster than half the Nyquist sampling rate. HOWEVER, assuming CD quality, those vibrations are so high-pitched that they're beyond the range of human hearing anyway. So even calling them "sound" is dubious. At most you're losing high-pitch whine that only a dog, Superman, or baby could perceive.
@@Blackmark52 Right, sound is created by your perception of pressure waves in the air. Krakatoa's explosion was so energetic that the pressure wave created moved faster than the speed of sound near the event, basically overwhelming the air's ability to carry sound until it had traveled far enough to lose some energy. That is to say, it could only be heard after a certain distance, and it's not because of a limitation of the sound receiver, it's because of a limitation of the sound medium
If there is an upper bound for the air's ability to carry sound, could there be a lower bound?
It might not be immediately pertinent to your current focus in the pursuit of music appreciation. But to say that the study of sound has nothing to do with music appreciation does not seem accurate to me
5:50 correction. Vinyl will almost definitely sound better than a low quality MP3, it's absolutely not the same quality. There is noticeable loss, and some music will straight up be missing sounds you can objectively notice with your ear. It gets muddier with high CBR, VBR, or ABR MP3s. It's easier to talk about lossless digital like CDs, ALAC, FLAC, or WAV. The study using 192 CBR MP3 (I checked your sources) only tested using a single song, that was originally recorded analogue anyways, and it's clear with the participants involved that perception was the largest factor. However I strongly believe testing across a variety of genres will yield significantly more dramatic results as the encoder makes more tradeoffs to keep up with the information.
Honestly I believe this whole video would be more clear if you left lossy encoding out of it, makes digital more of a clear winner. It's complicated enough for people to grasp the difference between analog and digital, throwing a compression algorithm on top just muddies it more.
That's really sad trying to compare an unaltered source with an MP3 or any other compression. Vinyl recordings were also subjected to compression, expansion and other tweaks to make the analog appear to have a dynamic range that it could not possibly support.
@@TRDiscordian You're comparing apples with oranges. Low quality MP3 loses a lot of information and distorts the original signal in a specific way. Vinyl loses some information and introduces its own changes to the original signal. It's just that usually vinyl reproduction produces more pleasant experience than low quality mp3. It has nothing to do with "quality" of the reproduced signal.
@@SpadajSpadaj no, the video did. That's my problem too (other than your nonsensical "it has nothing to do with quality" statement, it's LITERALLY a topic about quality), you're more or less just agreeing with me here...
2:15 That is simply wrong. There is very good, but old, Video from FL Studio explaining why this is not how D/A conversion works. This video is extremly badly researched!
Thank god we have FL studio bros to try to defy accurate explanations of digital audio.
He's right about the sampling process at 2:15, that's pretty much how digital sampling works. If your sample rate is too low you won't be able to get some frequencies ("that tiny amount of information lost"). That's technically true. But the thing is, it's totally irrelevant in this case since the audio industry already uses very high sample rates and bit depths. A high enough sample rate will have enough bandwidth to capture all the relevant frequencies.
As an audio engineer, I can confidently say.... it really depends on the mastering of the recording itself. Sometimes an analog vinyl master sounds amazing because a lot of care and attention was put into the mastering process so of course it'll sound glorious. But I've heard plenty of vinyl masters that sound like absolute crap compared to a CD or digital file.
Additionally, the sound is going to be heavily affected by any of the equipment in the chain from the listener. The speakers/headphones being used, the source of the audio player, any sort of amplification equipment, etc.
And then when it comes to a turntable, that gets even MORE complicated when you have to factor in the quality of the record, the kind of turntable being used, what sort of capsule and needle it's using, what kind of pre-amp it's hooked up to, the list goes on.
To me, Vinyl is less about the sound quality and more about the ritual. Pulling a big ole disk out of a sleeve, setting it on a turntable, setting up the needle and lowering it down and then just having to let the record play it's whole side (no track skipping or shuffle here folks) before flipping it over to the next side. It's a nice way to just wholly experience an album, which is more about the artistic content of the music rather than how it sounds. And to me at least, that's worth the extra money and steps.
Why not just load a CD into the player and let it play?
And digital recordings don't get dirty or wear out the grooves. ( Except CD's that are mistreated. )
I just got back into vinyl a couple of years ago and the one thing I’m really appreciating about it is that is sort of forces you to sit with an album and appreciate the whole thing. I still stream digital music but when there’s an album with an overarching theme to it, I will get it on vinyl
I once got yelled at for putting my roommate's CD of Sgt. Pepper's on shuffle play.
@@michaelmicek lol
@@michaelmicek Justice was served that day. One does not simply shuffle one of the greatest albums ever.
@@MatsNorway mea maxima culpa
I'm going to love digital because I grew up with record players and tapes. I heard the difference immediately the first time I heard a CD.
One of my favorite memories is after trying to tell my mom CD was better, we went into a store that had a CD player giveaway. The CD was playing a symphony (forget which one). She heard it and started crying from joy because it sounded like it was a concert. Records and tapes don't sound like a concert.
I lived through the transition to CD, and I'm not going back!
@@toastyburgerso did I, but I still have both reel to reel tape and vinyl.
For nostalgia and because I like the physical part. Vinyl came in some very artistic sleeves and there's colored vinyl and all kinds of gimmicks that are just more fun than CD. We definitely lost in the album art part with the CD.
Then there are the loudness wars. Some older recordings sounded a hell of a lot better, not because of the medium, but because bad sound engineers had not ruined them yet to accommodate for "modern" hearing damaged youth.
Just the fact that it's on CD doesn't make something better, a bad sound engineer can ruin any medium.
You probably have better speakers now too, with higher fidelity.
Very similar to my experience in the mid 80's. When I bought my first CD player, probably around 1987 or so I immediately bought two albums, U2 Joshua Tree and a collection of baroque music. I'd never heard anything so life like outside of life music. While there are aspects I miss about records and tapes, what I don't miss is the sound quality. In some ways, we are living in the very best time ever for music. For $10 a month, I can listen to CD or better quality streams virtually anywhere and choose from roughly 100 million songs, or put another way, for less than I paid for that U2 album (and way less after accounting for inflation) I can listen to just about every song made in the last 75 years and many made before that.
@@kcgunesq so true, but personally I like some recordings better on vinyl and some better digital etc. I think it comes down more to the recording engineer than the medium for me. Might also be a music type dependent thing.
FWIW Once upon a time I had bought both the vinyl and CD versions of the same digital master recording. the vinyl version was surprisingly high quality, but the CD nevertheless delivered the cleaner sound, in part because of dust-induced noise on the record.
Playback of a vinyl record will always include artifacts including wow and rumble because various mechanical elements of a turntable are susceptible to induced vibrations which will ultimately get transmitted into the stylus pickup and impressed onto the audio signal. Not to mention that even with the best equipment in the cleanest conditions, the vinyl will still wear and lose fidelity over repeated plays.
This is reminiscent of an argument about tube vs transistor amplifiers. Some audiophiles preferred the "warm" sound from a tube amp over the "colder"/"crisper" sound of an transistor amp. Tube amplifiers were notorious for filtering certain portions of the audio spectrum to suppress hum and other artifacts inherent in the operation of tube circuits.
short answer: no
long answer: yes
@@averymavAre you high?
@@jordandino417 "Let people like what they like." -Scishow
@@jordandino417long answer: digital signals pressed into vinyl have no advantage over a CD, but a tape that is recorded well, and in good condition will always be better quality, even if it is by a small degree. Digital audio recordings (as we have them today) are incapable of perfectly replicating sound waves.
No with a but
Yes with an if
It's probably similar to film vs. digital photography. People like film (and vinyl), because it's fun thinking about the analog and physical nature of it while you do it. In reality when each is done correctly, there is little to no difference that our bodily senses can detect between two.
Modern HD digital formats can have a much higher sample rate, as well as the complete audible range (no clipping) and no lossy compression. This makes them essentially indistinguishable from analog to human ears.
Most people get their music from Spotify nowadays, which streams at a much lower quality. Probably should have included that in the video. You're getting old! 😁
Add in the fact that most folks are streaming it over Bluetooth to a speaker setup that is less than ideal compounds that even further. The majority of folks just don’t care that much.
The original red book audio format, 44.1khz 16 bit recording was lossless and actually indistinguishable from analog. The purpose of higher sample/bit rates is just headroom for the recording process. There is really no need to waste storage space on high bit rate audio, unless you are wanting to preserve additional information above and beyond the audio itself, such as positional information for surround sound.
Spending money on 192/24 playback devices is a waste of time unless you're also willing to spend a factor more money on everything else in the playback chain, and even then, you need a proper listening space or all of that is wasted still. Like, putting one of those in a car, for example, is only ever going to sound decent when the car isn't moving (unless you own a bentley or rolls royce where you are sonically isolated from the outside world, of course)
@@hedruum the fact that streaming + bluetooth noticeably degrades the regularity of the time signature is more than enough to completely put me off. I mean if youre gonna maintain anything in music, timing is really really important
well as a kid of 90s, we kids used to be content with cassettes quality, and most of our music were recording from radio station new song releases lol... that's how untrained ears and the majority of people listening to music, until I actually got in to audio engineering, mix and mastering and also composing my own music, it gets to me that listening to a 128kbps mp3 was stupid and ripping my CDs archiving it at 320kbps mp3 was a mistake.
I've never used Spotify.
2:11 "You can use these data points to approximate that smooth, curvy roller coaster track" There's actually a theorem about this (the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem), which says that to accurately reconstruct a continuous signal from its samples, the sampling rate must be at least twice the highest frequency component in the signal (this minimum sampling rate is often referred to as the Nyquist rate). So at least in theory, it's possible to convert analong into digital without losing information.
i love audiophiles, they will pay 10x for gold plated optical cables
Being an audiophile, or someone who cares how your music sounds, doesn't mean you're someone who buys into snake oil.
@@BrianMcKee to some it does, if you want a good setup for clean audio you want to go minimal
"A fool is born every minute....and two born to take his money."
They are called Gold-ends I got a bunch of those 3' RCA-cable when gold was $200/0z, they were like $35
cannot believe i haven't mentioned ever how immensely GRATEFUL i am that this channel has subtitles🙈💖thank you thank you thank you it matters a lot
0:27 Just me, or did Hank go full Yogi Bear on "as it turns out"?
Little bit...
People like the extra textural sound of the record, especially older ones, and the ritual of playing music in a record player. Also the physical collection of amazing albums is something that can never be replaced with digital.
There's a small subset of audio enthusiasts that sort of came to the conclusion that people like vinyl because the mastering process bringing warmth back into music, not the format itself. Digital formats are and can be just as good as vinyl, but how music is often produced, there's no real warmth to it.
Define "warmth"
@@matthijshebly im imagining the scratchy sound i associate the vinyl records. Which feels like texture.
@@matthijshebly There's a ton of different interpretations of what this means, but I think it's imperfections that add a human element to the track, improving the listening experience.
Ah the magical “warmth”. That word does a lot of heavy lifting justifying the thousands of dollars spent on niche audio equipment.
For us that lived during the vinyl era we know the possible addvantage of vinyl is a lost after the first play. I am a veteran of AR, THORENS , PANASONIC B&O and Shure,B&O, GRADO stylus
I feel like the main actual reason that vinyl would ever sound better than other formats is if the music in question was remixed in any way on its other formats.
Example: In Styx - The Grand Illusion, the song 'Castle Walls' has a very sharp, very loud synth blast. In the remastered versions of this song, that synth blast has been essentially "turned down" a bit, and most of the music has been equalized in a way that is simply not respectful of the original album and how it was mixed upon its initial release.
Similar problem, there would never be any point in getting a vinyl of Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication, because the original album was mixed for the "loudness wars," so they just pumped everything up and there's not really a difference between the sound levels throughout the album. Unless they go back and change that, or try to fix it somehow, the most authentic way to hear that music would be on CD, because that's what it was mixed for.
If something was mixed for vinyl, it probably sounds better on vinyl. If not, don't bother.
This shows a really poor understanding of digitization, and I'm frustrated to see such bad misunderstanding presented here. Please pull this one, and research the topic before trying again.
As an avid vinyl enthusiast, I think a lot of it comes down to the experience. There’s some fantastic ritual in getting the record out of its sleeve, enjoying the often stunning art that is big and in my hands, as well as any inserts. The record goes on the spindle, I check the speed, brush off the static, and queue up the (usually) first track of the side. It’s best to enjoy a side at a time rather than skipping around songs, so only albums that flow well are put into the collection. Not all music entertainers consider this when assembling their album. It’s a designated time to enjoy music, rather than hitting shuffle on a music app.
But there’s something even more important- in this digital era where many artist don’t own their masters and the app platforms reign, very little is received in the way of royalties by the artists. Vinyl is often considered merchandise rather than music, so the artists will often get a bigger cut of those sales. Buying an artist’s merchandise is often the best way of supporting them.
Pretty bad viz for “information loss” at 2:09. Area under between curve and bar is not informative wrt information loss; samples aren’t “held” as the bars imply, instead the mechanical properties of speakers automatically interpolate between points. The example you showed seemed to be one where sampling occurred at high enough frequency wrt the true signal that genuinely zero information was lost, yet the way things are being visualized with highlighted areas will always leave the impression of loss. You need to show a curve with high frequency wiggles between the digital samples to convey what is “lost” properly.
Technically, a reconstruction filter as it is called is already applied before the sound transducer gets to do any further filtering of the signal. For the electrical signal to actually appear as having those sharp edges, it would have to contain frequency content well into the ultrasonics. The reconstruction filter cuts off all frequencies greater than double the Nyquist limit (which is the maximum audio frequency that can be discretely sampled and perfectly reconstructed), leaving behind just the original smooth signal that was sampled. Top comments have already mentioned the Nyquist limit or sampling theorem.
Except that doesn't happen with any reasonable digital audio encoding. The sample and bit rates are high enough that no loss occurs "between" samples. The algorithm literally rebuilds the exact waveform, regardless of any "missing" data between two samples long before it ever reaches the speaker.
This is why redbook audio was such a groundbreaking technology. It was literally the exact same output as a fully analog system, but without the drawbacks associated with the analog chain.
As those high frequency wiggles would exceed 20khz, it is debatable how much they contribute to the listening experience. But it does explain the interest in high definition audio and why music should be recorded at well above 44.1khz. I have read, however, that high sample rates can introduce quantization noise and anharmonic distortion. This is why we need talented audio engineers to master music and not just a bozo with a laptop.
Hank, you have a unique way of cutting through the noise, digital or analog with your comment, let people like what they like~~~ I try to watch every episode.... great work.
My wife, also recently POST chemo, also had hair changes... It came back with almost NO grey hair !!!! Curly is OK... Like what it is.
You forget that the people who say the sound of vinyl records is "better" than everything digital graduated with PHD's in audio production from Dunning-Kruger University! /S
I like listening to records because it forces me to interact with the records and the player and basically turn off all TVs and such to get the audio to play over the speakers. Makes me focus on the music much more.
I listen to mp3s like 95% of the time because it's when I'm driving or walking or at work.
I also found I hated streaming services that played individual tracks. I never felt like I was connecting with the songs as well. I stick to buying albums and (mostly) playing them all the way through. I appreciate the music better that way.
Also important to note that it doesn't matter how good the recording quality if you're not listening to it over really good speakers
And really, that precludes the vast majority of people. Most people are never going to make the financial or educational investment to get the kind of sound quality out of their media, regardless of what format it is in, lol.
Wire quality matters a lot too
Air is basically the worst possible wire
Audio engineer here!
I love how this video breaks down this endless debate and it summarizes my exact thought of letting people like what they like.
I want to add that subtle distortion in analog playback systems can sound very pleasing and partially explain the preference for vinyl records and even analog recording to tape.
Us audio folks usually call it saturation.
Saturation is also used purposefully in music production though, so it's still a major part of great sounding albums no matter the format!
And as if this comment isn't long enough, here's the shortest audio debate I've ever encountered, overheard in a music store:
"I prefer CDs because I don't like the added distortion."
"That's interesting, I prefer vinyl because I like the distortion!
As a 76 year old with 60% hearing in one ear & 40% in the other it makes little difference how things are recorded. I still enjoy music.
As someone who's been about that def my entire life I can tell you it absolutely makes a difference. Enjoy however you want, but don't make illusions that things can't improve. It's fine to not care though.
I collect vinyl because it's physical and it's MINE. Streaming songs can be removed over legal battles, etc. and if I stop paying I can't have any more music... You can't stop me from listening to my records. I own them.
Cool cover art can also be displayed! Bonus.
It doesn't matter if it is the same sound. That's not the point. My collection is mine. I'm not leasing it from a streaming service. Same goes for anyone who collects CDs. Doesn't matter what physical format it is. Physical copies are better.
Hi-fi enhances all the sounds. Harp vibrations, piano overtones, clicks, scratches, surface noise.
-Stan Freberg
@panelvixen: Coming from the vinyl world, one of the things that I absolutely hate, the pops, clicks, other other surface noise. The surface noise was due to the record companies reusing the rejected vinyl discs, since they didn't bother removing the center paper label.
Later the premium vinyl LPs don't use recycled vinyl and they also use a type of specially developed vinyl called JVC Super Vinyl, which was developed for JVC's CD-4 quadphonic sound. At one time quadphonic was the rage, and to encode 4 channels of sound on a medium that was only meant to record 2 channels was quite ingenious.
As someone who grew up with little 45 records, was happy to switch to 33s. I even built my own direct drive record player, amplifier bought expensive speakers to get better sound. New needles frequently and the damned things still got scratches, muffled sounds. I was very happy to get a cd player and switch. So much easier, so much cleaner sound and if you were dancing the needle doesn't skip.
Feeling called out. I am "that friend" for sure 🤣
That said, as much as I enjoy the sound of vinyl, the vibe of intentionally listen to an album and the little pops and clicks to go with it...but I think even amongst us audiophiles, we know digital is "better". Provided it's CD quality or better, and a wired connection is used, it's excellent these days if played through a solid DAC. Love this topic tho. Really shows who finds what important
This is a terrific answer. With vinyl, the medium itself contributes to the sound. I prefer the neutral sound I get from a good DAC.
AS an engineer (in my 60s now) that worked in every major pro studio with a lot of world famous artists most of the time we used multi-track tape. Pro digital systems are at very high bit rates and high clock frequencies and hundred of tracks that without those levels digital artifacts start to factor in.. I did plenty of tests on that back in my day. I also sat in sessions with the likes of John Mayer and he loved using 16 tack heads on a Studer to get that great fat sound out of it. (tape systems tend to smear the sound by wow and flutter adding to the effect) . The tape reverb and echos of the times have an ethereal sound due to these phenomenon of motors and tape drag. I even designed some plug ins that did this effect with great results.. And back in the day the tapes had been manufactured straight to vinyl and i believe john had that done to his vinyl releases. ..There are popular plugins audio pros use now trying to emulate the character of tape, some are even accomplishing it to an extent by adding in the anomalies through algorithm manipulation. . All this does not mean i don't like and use digital.. The level of editing makes it far superior even if i sorta (self harm ) miss the nostalgia of tape splicing ..
they are the same people that say expensive wine taste better than inexpensive wine
Depends on the degree, but a $50 wine is definitely better than a $10 one on average.
Greetings,
I have obtained the best results by recording with a Studer 800 MXIII running at 15ips on Ampex 456, through an SSl mixing board, as shown in your video, and then mixed down through an Apogee a/d converter unto a Sony DAT. The problem with digital recording is that the sampler recognises the harmonic overtones as residual noise making the sound coming from a Steinway almost the same as a Bösendorfer or a Yamaha; there is no "presence" in digital recording due to the output in decibels of certain frequencies that get most of the sample. There is also the impossibility to make an amplifier capable of reproducing the dynamic range of a digital recording; hence the compression on analog recording was a perfect match with a class A amp But Hey! Nothing is more personal than taste...
In Peace and Friendship,
Pierre Pagé
Vinyl fan here, figured I'd throw in why I like them for curious folks in the comments.
Even before watching this video I already knew vinyl didn't *really* have a better sound, the reason I like it is how the technology changes the music listening experience.
Records and record players are not portable, I need a dedicated space to listen to that music and at least part of that space's function is explicitly to listen to said music.
Vinyl also changes the standard "unit" of music listening. Because you can't easily track skip even compared to something like a CD analog listening puts more focus on an album as a unified "thing", as opposed to a dozen or so individual "things" packaged for sale. This is especially fun for albums that are clearly intended to be listened to in order as the songs share an overarching theme/narrative (this is why every music geek you know won't shut up about Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. If you want a more modern example post-digital music becoming the norm, check out Lemonade by Beyonce).
6:55 Those imperfections are what makes vinyl so special. It's a mass produced commercial product, yes, but as it wears it becomes something more.
When I'm putting on my favourite record, I know no other copy in existence has the exact same imperfections in the exact same places as mine does. This is an experience that belongs entirely to me, and anyone with whom I care to share it. This is my Revolver. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
This is true of CDs as well, but those imperfections are far more obnoxious than the ones on vinyl.
Vinyl is also a nice exercise in mindfulness. Rather than treating music as a thing that happens around you, the ritual of putting on a record, absorbing the album art, and Just Listening is a beautiful experience.
Does it sound better? From a scientific perspective, probably not. But it creates a better experience.
I listen to LPs , CDs, MP3s, and streaming (phone only)
I like the sound but also the hands on (picking the Turn table, cartridge, preamp, and most fun the LPs). I like the clarity of CDs playing through a transport to a DAC, as well as the longer music run. Plus I listen to CDs in the car, because for quite a while I was working so much I had no time for LPs. I also listen to MP3s in the car via thumb drives ( its cool to have 2600 tunes at your fingertips on one thumb drive) and if I am away from my car or home system, I listen to Pandora with high quality earbuds.
I like them all. Beryl took out my internet for 9 days so I appreciated my LPs, and CDs because streaming wasn't going to happen.
They all have their own quality of sound. But as a music lover it is all good.
When I last listened to music on a vinyl lp ,the cartridge on my turntable cost $350 in 1985, and the speaker cabinet had 5 drivers starting with a 16" woofer that were on sound isolating stands. The sound was amazing. All of that is in storage and I listen to mp3s with headphones now.
Physically speaking, sound waves are oscillating pressure waves that propagate through a medium, alternating between compression and rarefaction. These sound waves originate from vibrations of a source, such as a speaker, where the movement around a fixed point or equilibrium generates the pressure variations that we perceive as sound. So Sound waves are not vibrating by them self.
Analog is more accurate, it might have more noise floor and quality that degrades with each generation, but generally in terms of high frequencies, it's more accurate. Digital is basically "slices", it cannot reproduce the high frequencies accurately without adding artifacts into the sound, similar to the moiré pattern that can sometimes happen when you try to record a screen with a camera. From personal experience I can tell you when I was trying to test some speakers, it was fine at the low frequencies, but when I got up to about 10khz, there was weird subharmonic artifacts in the sound that would not have been there had I used a proper signal generator instead of my computer.
How did you get through that without mentioning the Nyquist theorem?!
2:05. The graph of the digital data is *not* a staircase. It is a sample at a point of time and there is no information inbetween. Sampling the band limited signal above the Nyquest frequency, *no information is lost*. That filled in portion doesn't exist under the curve. The curve connects the actual samples in the middle of those bars. Converting the data back to analog recovers the smooth sound signal.
I have no idea which sounds better, but I have a ton of vinyl records as well as CDs so I need players to be able to listen to both. What I don't like is people telling me to get rid of one type or the other!
A minor point of contention. The way we do PCM do not lose information when translated from analog to digital provided it's bandwidth limited before and after the conversion.
Look up the Shannon Nyquist sampling theorem.
As long as the sampled information is limited to half the sampling frequency provided it is band pass filtered identically before and after conversion.
Think of it as a byproduct of a Fourier transform.
In order to "lose" information in a stair step pattern additional frequencies would have to be added.
Frequencies that are explicitly filtered out, thus restoring the original.
And yes it took me years to grok this :)
Hi I’m an audio engineer. A big reason People like records cause they usually use higher quality audio files and not mp3s, either uncompressed .WAV file or a lossless compression like FLAC where as most digital download music historically has been highly compressed mp3s. Spotify only uses mp3 and Apple Music defaults to aac, which is just mp3 with Apple branding. Although Apple Music also lets u change to lossless compression, albeit it’s also the Apple branded ALAC not the superior open source FLAC. While the difference between .WAV or FLAC on vinyl vs digital isn’t that noticeable the difference between compressed and non compressed is much easier to hear, and yes it’s that non compressed audio is “fuller”, exactly how hipsters describe vinyl
False information: "aac, which is just mp3 with Apple branding". Actual reality: aac is a different algorithm than mp3, it is a newer generation of algorithm than mp3.
back when CD burners first became mainstream here, my old man used to do LP to CD conversions. He found that if you gently (with a soft sponge) clean the LP with warm soapy water and play the record back with it still wet/soapy then it actually increases the audio quality and reduces the static/clicking sounds common to records. Sure it wears down the playback needle i guess but it was still quite interesting and a neat way to make some money on the side :)
The advantage I have found in my life is an ability to completely shutdown the digital part of my life. By occasionally choosing analog over digital, I feel like I can take back some of that time from the digital spaces that have become increasingly ever-present and frequently keep us from experiencing the present. It’s primarily symbolic but, it does reduce screen time. I don’t get distracted while looking for something to listen to. It’s primarily an issue of not listening to music on my phone, in anyway online or through an algorithm. The algorithm may imply passivity on my part, but it frequently deviates from what I really want and therefore requires me to engage with it to return to something I want to listen to. With a record, you just listen to one side, then listen to the other. Since the conditions of how, where, and when all strongly influence the experience, I occasionally choose to not have that experience mediated by a digital platform.
I wish he would play a digital and analog sound on the video so we could hear the difference.
(yes, it's a joke)
I'm sorry I know a million people have commented on your hair as well as yourself but my friend Todd went through the same thing you did and then it was a little before you and caught covid-19 after getting inoculated and then died from it so I think your hair looks great and I'm glad you're here with us I love you guys thanks for everything you do I wish I could contribute money LOL but some of us just don't have....
Fun video! I have a huge collection of vinyls, and for me listening to them is experiential in nature, not tied to a specific audio quality aspect. Though I would pose the question as to why the songs with the most punch end up toward the beginning of the record. No need to answer that for my benefit, I already know. I think from a non-technical standpoint what appeals to people about analog recordings is their tangible nature. With digital being so ephemeral and fleeting, people want something they can hold in their hands that will stick around for a while, pass down to their kids. As for the longevity of vinyl, I still have the soundtrack for Ghostbusters 1984 that I played hundreds of times, left in a car in the Summer heat and it got warped, which I put in an oven to flatten when I was like 11. Still sounds good even today.
Between the various media, what I do vastly prefer is a physical media versus one stored off site. A physical media I can make copies and transfer it around from device to device without a third party allowing or forbidding me. Not to mention a digital recording that is done online is only there as long as that company exists
No mention of Nyquist-Shannon, dynamic range, lossy/lossless encoding, differences in mastering, or any of the various ways that vinyl's imperfections give it a characteristic sound. Generally I like scishow but this was pretty weak.
I don't know about better but there is something about listening to an old Beatles record on an original vinyl from the 60s that is lost when you're pumping the same songs into your earbuds in hi-fidelity lossless digital audio format. I feel similarly about listening to 80s and early 90s music on a casette in my car radio. It's how the music was originally heard, on the format it was designed to be played on.
What I do love about digital audio on headphones is being able to pick out musical parts that are deep in the mix that often got lost in the hiss of a vinyl. If you listen carefuly to old 60s rock recordings you can often hear people talking in the background, the drummer calling off a time signature change, that kind of thing.
the grooves in a physical reccord have a finite definition too. All the different features have a minimum resolution defined by the size of the needle. So in the matematical view point, they are discrete too, just like numerical storage
I would add that there is what I called clipping which occurs when the sampling rate frequency is not enough to sample the highest frequency, most of the time you can not even hear it happened, but the math shows it happened, as well a good oscilloscope will to. I'm just an old engineer, always calculating to Nth degree, you guys always have a good presentation, thanks for ya`lls hard work!!!
I think that's the biggest thing: the "ritual" and the tactile and somatic experience of handling the record or tape, slipping a disc out of and back into its sleeve and carefully placint the tone-arm, rewinding a tape, all bring more of your senses into play than just hitting a button or tapping a screen to hear the song you want. And then there's the feeling of nostalgia and that direct connection to the past.
However, there's a LOT to be said for the convenience of digital!
I grew up with vinyl (born in 1961), but as soon as CDs became a thing, I celebrated and never looked back. I no longer had to worry about records warping in a hot room, cleaning off dust, accidentally scratching the record, maintenance of the turntable like needle alignment and replacement, gradual wear-and-tear of the grooves, etc. And CDs were much easier to handle and store - they had the portability of cassettes and the random access ability of records - a win-win. Unless you actually LIKE the scratchy sound of dust in the grooves, there is nothing superior about the sound of records. (Of course, if what you're comparing to are MP3 files with too much compression, that's a different story, but that would be an unfair comparison.) The only thing I might have a little nostalgia for is 12-inch covers and inserts, which were often quite cool.
I myself do not prefer the harshness of modern digital players(no eq adjustments fixes this for me). Especially the kind of recordings I listen to late 60s all the way to the early 90s - sound, to me, a lot better on vinyl than their cd counterparts.
Or maybe I’m not listening to my cd collection on a 1000$ cd player/processor 😂 - is what some “audiofiles” would suggest.
In short, listening experiences are VERY subjective.
I never really got into music before CDs, even though I grew up in the 80s, so I might be biased there, but I never noticed much of a difference between vinyl, cassette or CD. The only time I actually noticed a difference was early mp3s sounding completely inferior to the CD counterparts, especially with bands like Rammstein that had a much wider range of frequencies in their songs than other bands had. Their music ended up sounding flatter. But nowadays it really doesn't seem to matter anymore, our internet speeds allow for faster transfer of data, our harddrives allow us to save mp3s (if we even still use them) at much higher qualities - I don't notice a difference anymore between CDs and, for example, Spotify. And while I appreciate there are people who enjoy Vinyl and all the power to them because I also have my preferences when it comes to some of my hobbies, so I get it, but I am happy at the moment with the quality I get from streaming music. I'm an audiophile in the sense that I can quickly tell if something is off, which I suspect is actually a side-effect of my sensory processing disorder where I am oversensitive to lights and sounds, and I will spend money on good quality speakers/headphones.
This reminds me of the photography film vs digital conversation. There is always that ONE friend who is a film purist, mean while the rest of us don't care and just use what we want to use for the photos we want it for. The music thing all comes down to preference at the end of the day, and it is a very subjective conversation.
The debate about "what I like better" is purely subjective, hands down - and we can't say that someone is wrong.
The debate about "what technology gives me the most accurate reproduction" isn't - and we can clearly prove that someone is right or wrong.
I am also a photo-nut, and the current crop of lenses will beat the pants off of any lens more than 20 years old. Years ago, rare-earth glass, aspheric lens surfaces etc were rare, today many lenses have that as a matter of course. And the big contributing factor was the computer which can do in minutes ray tracing that would take a human years. The classic Tessar took 10 years to develp. Until just recently many current Nikon lenses will work on older Nikon film cameras.
@@ronaldlee3537 It's just down to preference on artistic expression. I like film, it has a look, quality to it that I love but it is a different workflow completely from my digital work. Whether is the early 2000s point and shoot digitals, an expensive Leica and the glass with it from the 80s, or a 40mp camera, the photo being a good photo is all on the photographer and their artistic expression. I've seen good photography in Japan from flip phone cameras as stylistic choice. There IS an objective quality of "This is tack sharp, focus is good, bokeh, light fall off, blah blah blah". those metrics do matter but having a PhaseOne or Hasselblad as a shitty photographer is just going to make shitty photos with good fidelity purely based on tech. So I just don't really care much, there are very talented people who are in both communities and very talented people who shoot both digital and film. I personally like to adapt vintage lenses to my X-T5 as a stylistic choice situationally
I'm 65 in December so I'm the guy who'd wear out 33.1/3 LPs. from the early 70s till I was finally able to catch up to the CD revolution. I was constantly hanging out in used record stores looking for obscure Jazz while in music school. The only thing that was better about that time was the ease of making analog compilation cassettes for driving around or giving to yer current girl I turned so many people to jazz that way.
I have a relatively large record collection and I really enjoy listening to them, but rather than thinking the quality is any better or different from the digital music that I listen to even more frequently what I like about the records is their participatory and decisive aspects. When I listen to a record THAT is what I'm doing, not skipping songs ad nauseum until the algorithm eventually finds something that fits my mood
Before I get to the answer, I will posit that it all depends on the resolution of the digital recording and player. Below a certain level, no one will notice, in the same way that there is a step change at about 30m where the sound from an object suddenly has a noticeable delay. At 20 meters, there is still a delay, it's just that we don't notice (or our brain tricks us into thinking there is no delay).
OK. We're mixing two different things here. One is the ability to reproduce sound without loss in signal quality. And of course transmitting digital signal is inherently "better" than any kind of analog line (especially if you're using a protocol which has error correction and so on). Storing data digitally also means ability of replaying the same signal over and over again without data loss (there's still possible media degradation like wearing down the CDs but you can make infinite number of identical copies of digital media whereas copying analog records or tapes must introduce additional unwanted elements like noise and distortions).
But there's another part of the puzzle. Actually two of them.
One is simply the analog part of the whole audio "path" from the source of the sound(s) to the ear. There must be some. Even if we create whole source program painting sample by sample your waveform in your favourite DAW, at least on the output side you must have some speaker(s) which translates that to air pressure changes. And this speaker is powered by some amplifier (can be a relatively low-power headphone amplifier or a huge stage amp, depending on your use case). And each amp and each speaker simply sounds differently. And some people prefer some sound characteristics, some prefer other ones. And it has nothing to do with the original signal.
There is another thing - some parts of sound production involve some forms of analog effects. Yes, some of those are nowadays emulated digitally but still many producers use actual analog devices - compressors, equalizers and so on. True, modern computers have quite a lot of computing power and can relatively well simulate some of those devices but still many people believe that there's no thing like the real thing. And sometimes rightly so because analog components, due to some unpredictable "inconsistencies" in production (or even plain flaws in some components) can produce unpredictable effects. And still most people prefer to use SM57 to record off JCM800 and some celestion-based speaker case than to simulate it via some digital multieffect - there are just too many subtle nuances to the sound that you can't simply reproduce in the simulation.
False information: "transmitting digital signal is inherently "better" than any kind of analog line". Actual fact: digital signal always loses information and creates distortion by rounding to nearest digit. Analog line can be much better and adds noise, not distortion. Every digital soundcard has many analog lines inside.
@@charlieangkor8649 You're not discussing with what I said but with some idea of your own. I was talking about _transmission_. Anyway, with sufficient resolutiion the problem you're mentioning is negligible (especially compared to noise and other unwanted signal modification during analog processing).
I had heard that the purported difference was in how analog and digital playback mechanisms handled clipping (specifically, what harmonics were created).
One of the most ironic findings in digital audio was a comparison run by C't magazine decades ago and it was to determine whether people could tell the difference in double-blind listening tests between CD audio and 256kbps encoded MP3s. They found that listeners COULD NOT reliably predict which was which. The one exception to this was a guy who was a military veteran and had lost a part of his hearing to a grenade blast - he had lost his ability to hear high frequency tones. He could easily tell he difference between them, probably because of the nature of the psychoacoustic masking used in MP3 compression. Ironically, to tell the difference between CD audio and MP3 audio, you had to have WORSE hearing than average!
I love my community of audio engineers! It’s about enjoying something and how we go about that is different person to person (economical reasons at play). There is a distinction between Hi-Fi and Lo-Fi which exist for both analog and digital formats. So just read a little into lossy audio, crosstalk, RFI, dither and more if you’re interested!
One thing not touched on is the playback device. The digital recording is still played with an analog device - a speaker with electromagnet. A digital signal pumping X current into a coil to move the magnet moves exactly the same as if being fed analog signals due to inertia. Of course cheap amps can cause audible problems, but they'll likely butcher a true analog signal too.
I loved Chicago 16 back when I bought it on vinyl in the 80s. When I got a cd copy of the same album a few years later, it was easy to make a back-to-back comparison. There are several points of silence in the music, and on the cd, there was absolutely nothing at those points, whereas with the vinyl, I had become used to the background hiss of the analog process that filled in the silence. It was a dramatic difference to me. Also, I don't really miss the pops and clicks that accumulate with vinyl records from small scratches, dust, and other imperfections.
So one thing not mentioned thats a huge roll here. Mp3s are compressed lossed content, as an AV engineer when im dealing with studios or listening rooms everything is designed around WAV, FLAC, ALAC, or specialized lossless digital audio formats that are uncompressed. When they press modern vinyl they typically arent using MP3, they're using lossless master quality audio thats had a team of engineers working to make sure its optimized for printing
I heard that on vinyl, it was customary to put the fast, energic songs as a first track or two (near the edge) and put the ballads toward the middle of the record as there was a difference in playback quality between the edge and the center of the record.
The outer tracks will have a faster linear speed than the inner tracks. This will allow higher frequencies.
For years, I heard if the music is recorded analog, it will sound better on a Record.
If it is recorded digitally, then it will sound better on a CD.
Not to mention of all ofbthe variables of the music listening device and the speakers and/or headphones.
A person could easily spend 100 to 200k+ on a music listening setup.
@SciShow - I think that some people like the low rumble that occurs with record playback as some kind of comfort sound. What I have noticed is that record players (typically ones from the 70s and early 80's) have filtering electronics that alter the sound in ways that may contribute to that "comfort" smoothing of some recorded sounds. These are not present on digital playback devices and are why some people may perceive them to be "crisper" or "colder" sounding.
I remember when turntables went to direct drive, to reduce the various mechanical noises.
Kind of neglects to mention that no matter what method of audio recording and reproduction is used, playback ALWAYS has an analog component. The conversion of digital signals back to analog signals always occurs because our ears are analog devices, so our sound generation devices (speakers) must also be analog. This means that even digital music will still follow those smooth curves mentioned for analog because speakers are physically incapable of reproducing audio with gaps. In summary, once the sampling frequency exceeds the response of your speakers, the resulting wave forms of the playback sound will become indistinguishable regardsless of the recording method, unless that method itself actually introduces audible variations of its own.