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COOL_WARMTH

                                             February 08, 2010

A quick outline of the vinyl/cd wars:

    Sound frequencies are (effectively)
    continuous, but representing them
    as digital numbers requires a
    "rounding-off" to the nearest
    even number... there's a granularity
    imposed by the digital medium,
    with a cost trade-off between
    fine-grained representation and
    the size of the data that needs
    to be stored.

    In theory, the sampling rate used
    in CDs is high enough that it
    covers the range of human hearing.
    There should be no audible
    difference between a good analog
    recording and a digital one.


    Me: I'm on side of vinyl

    Yes, thanks, I understand
    the nyquist theorem.

    (a) I don't care if it's just
        "surface noise"; I'm not a
        fidelity freak.

    (b) I also have a theory about our
        measurement of the "range of
        human hearing" being somewhat
        faulty.
                                                  RANGE_OF_HEARING

   But of course, the world has
   moved on from the vinyl/cd
   wars to the even lower-quality       SKULLFLOWER
   "mp3".


                          (March 11, 2009)

    I think it's impossible to talk about
    the merits of different sound formats
    in isolation, because music production            Phil Spector's
    practices change as the characteristics           "Wall of Sound" was
    of the formats and audio equipment change.        invented to come
                                                      through the tiny
             If you expect people to be               speakers of the
             listening on wimpy speakers              "transistor radio".
             via a lossy compression
             format, then you're going                Pink Floyd's long,
             to do things like lean on                low tones were like
             the highs to punch through               hi-fi stereo demos.
             those barriers...

             Or alternately, skip the highs
             altogether and work the midrange
             harder.


    There's been a trend in the CD era toward a
    very clean and bright sound that I don't           CLEAN_AND_BRIGHT
    like that much: I prefer a sense of "warmth"
    and "depth".

                             To hear that you need
                             some pretty good
                             speakers, and along           But then, this
                             with CDs came a fad           has become one of
                             for minaturization,           the rationales
                             and people don't              for public
                             listen to music on            gatherings like
                             major sound systems           raves: why pay
                             quite so much these           money for this?
                             days.                         Well, they have a
                                                           sound system I
                                                           don't have.







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