According to Rolling Stone magazine, sales of vinyl albums continue to grow, setting a new record in 2010. Does vinyl reproduce sound better, or is it just a trend? Two audio experts join guest host John Dankosky to talk about the science of audio, and how perceptions can shape the sound experience.
JOHN DANKOSKY, HOST:
Up next: how to tell your CD from your MP3, from your AAC. But first, let’s start with the LP. When I was a kid, music took up a lot of room – not in your hard drive, but in your life. Being an audiophile meant devoting shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves to your album collection. And when you moved out of your parents’ house, out of your first apartment, you hauled milk crates filled with your music collection onto your next life. And these days, most of us probably get our music in the form of downloads – no heavy boxes, but no fancy cover art, either.
Lots of audiophiles say that when it comes to sound quality, nothing beats vinyl. These purists wonder if digital files can really give you that analog sound of our youth. For the rest of this hour, we’ll be talking about the science of audio, what all those bit rates and sample frequency terms mean, and we’ll find out how your perceptions could affect what you hear.
DANKOSKY: Sean Olive is director of acoustic research at Harman International. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Olive.
SEAN OLIVE: Welcome, John. Thank you for inviting me.
DANKOSKY: And Scott Metcalfe is director of recording arts and sciences at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. Thank you so much for joining us, Scott.
SCOTT METCALFE: Thank you, John.
DANKOSKY: So, first of all, I’ll ask you, Scott: vinyl or CD?
METCALFE: I enjoy both formats, but my preference is definitely CD.
DANKOSKY: Now, why CD?
METCALFE: Well, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I’m primarily a recording engineer, as far as working with music. And it’s – the closer thing to what I’m sending into the recorder is very much what I’m getting back out. With analog formats, although the sound can be very pleasing in certain styles, it’s definitely imparting its own sound on it. And I think, to an extent, it’s that sound that some people are really drawn to. But it’s nice as an engineer to have the confidence of knowing that what I’m putting into – in most cases these days, the computer – is pretty close to what I’m going to get out.
DANKOSKY: Sean Olive, I have to ask you. I think I know your answer, but vinyl or CD?
OLIVE: Definitely CD.
DANKOSKY: Yeah? So tell me why.
OLIVE: Well, I mean, I grew up listening to records up until about ’85, when the CD was already out. And I was involved in testing loudspeakers up at the National Research Council in Canada. And we were testing cartridges at that time, and it was quite apparent that the amount of distortion coming out of these devices was very high compared to CD. So what we found was that vinyl was a limiting factor in our ability to do accurate and reliable listening tests on loudspeakers, and we had to find a more reliable and more accurate medium.
DANKOSKY: I just wanted to say quickly, I’m John Dankosky, and this is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR. So when we’re talking about all of this digital technology, there’s a lot of terminology that I don’t think everyone completely understands. Maybe I’ll ask you, Scott Metcalfe, first. What is dynamic range?
METCALFE: Dynamic range we can think of initially as a musical term, meaning the range from the loudest notes being played to the softest notes being played. And when we talk about dynamic range in a recording medium, we’re talking about the range between the noise floor – sort the bottom point where the noise becomes a distraction – to the top point, where it starts to introduce harmonic distortion, where the, technically, the waves that are being captured start to change in their form, and they’re no longer precisely what we’re feeding into it.
DANKOSKY: How about dynamic compression?
METCALFE: Well, dynamic compression is a tool that we may apply to reduce the overall dynamic range. That can be done in a creative sense, where we can apply, say, dynamic compression to a vocal track that needs to sit over a jazz trio, for example. So if the singer gets too loud, it doesn’t jump out of the track, and if gets too quiet, it doesn’t get buried behind the other instruments.
The term can sometimes be applied to vinyl in that the physical limitations of what the medium is able to store and reproduce is such that it can be advantageous, particularly in the lower frequencies, to reduce the dynamic range – meaning the low notes that are being captured – to reduce the dynamic range to do a couple of things.
One, it’s going to prevent the needle from jumping right out of the groove if it gets too extreme. The other is that if we reduce the overall dynamic range going to the disc itself, we can actually fit more material, more length, onto each side of the disc.
With CDs, there isn’t that trade-off. We have a, you know, easily, 80, 90 dB or more of dynamic range to work from, and we don’t have to worry about any – although, unfortunately, it’s very popular to put dynamic compression on a lot of modern music, but it’s not a – it’s not necessary. Technically, it’s more an aesthetic choice or trying to be louder than the other band on the street.
DANKOSKY: We’ll be talking a bit about some of these new, modern ways of compressing music. If you want to join us: 1-800-989-8255, or 1-800-989-TALK. Vinyl or CD or MP3? Can you tell the difference? Jerry’s in Missouri. Hi, Jerry. Go ahead.
JERRY: I’m one of those old-school audiophiles that used to have the Discwasher and the expensive turntables and $300 cartridges. And when CDs first came about in the mid-’80s, some of the early digital recordings, even the digital recordings that were reproduced on LP – Pablo and Fantasy both did that with jazz groups – sounded kind of trebly. And I guess it’s the aural equivalent of looking at the dots or pixels of a not very fine photograph.
I still have friends that swear by vinyl records. My daughter is really into vinyl records. But to me, I have the recordings of the same – exact same things. And, of course, anything, I think, done in the last decade or more has a fuller sound. And, of course, you don’t have that problem of when you have a quiet passage in something, you’re hearing the mechanical sound of that needle going across the vinyl and/or – even as careful as you’ve been with your records – sort of pops and clicks.
DANKOSKY: Yeah. Sean, what do you say to him?
OLIVE: Yeah. Well, first of all, when CD first came out, a lot of the CDs that were released were actually recordings made for vinyl. And those master tapes, rather than remastering, they just made them into CDs. So a lot of the, you know, objectionable sounds of CD was actually because the record companies didn’t bother to remaster these old recordings. And this is something that I learned from Phil Ramone, who admitted this that, you know, there was a reason why these bad CDs first sounded bad, but it had nothing to do with the medium. And it was the actual recordings.
DANKOSKY: Well, we’re going to talk more. We’re going to give a little listening session right after this short break.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DANKOSKY: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, and I’m John Dankosky. We’re talking this hour about the science of audio. My guests are Sean Olive, director of acoustic research at Harman International, and Scott Metcalfe, the director of recording arts and sciences at The Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. OK. We’re going to do a little listening test, here, guys. We have an LP and a CD of the same song. We’re going to play each of them and see if you can hear the difference.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “FOOL IN THE RAIN”)
ROBERT PLANT: (Singing) Oh, baby. Well, there’s a light in your eye that keeps shining. Like a star that can’t wait for a night. I hate to think I’ve been blinded, baby. Why I can’t I see you tonight?
DANKOSKY: So we’re listening to, of course, some Led Zeppelin on the background. I’m sure that our guests down the line can hear pretty clearly which one is the vinyl and which one is the CD, huh?
METCALFE: Sure. Yeah.
DANKOSKY: Yeah. And the big thing is all this surface noise that’s on the front, but is that the big difference between these two recordings? If you were somehow able to take out all the scratches, the remnants of all these years of listening to Led Zeppelin, would you be able to really tell that much of a difference?
METCALFE: I think so. In fact, Sean kind of alluded to this a little bit earlier in talking about Phil Ramone. But one of the issues, too, when people say, well, I have this on CD and I have it on vinyl, and the vinyl just sounds so much better, it may not be an apples-to-apples comparison, because the flip was also true where – particularly stuff that’s been re-released, remastered onto CD, it’s gone through an entirely different mastering process and, I’m sorry to say, in some cases, without the original staff involved, you know, the original engineering staff or production staff. If it was really just a business decision, let’s get this off master and get it out there.
DANKOSKY: Well, and we wanted to ask you about that quickly, because we see these things. They come out after, you know, almost every 10 years, there’s a remastered version of the same record. What exactly is happening with this remastered?
METCALFE: Well, it’s – in some ways, it’s up to the mastering engineer what’s happening there. With – I would say, at best, an old recording, you know, any kind of noises or artifacts or anomalies from either the recording process or just from the ageing of the material, if that can be cleaned up, I think that makes a lot of sense. Modern recordings, though, are comparatively louder. That’s kind of a subjective term. But if you were to play a CD, let’s say, from 20 years ago and compare that to a CD that just came out recently, I don’t think many of the listeners would be, you know, they will have experienced this, that you have to turn a new CD down a lot.
There’s a lot of dynamic compression that we talked about before being used on modern CDs. And in some cases, the depth of field, the depth of sound that people talk about, enjoying about vinyl that they say is missing from the CD may, in fact, be a result of the compression to make that old recording more competitive for the modern market. I – in preparing for today, I though, jeez, this would be a great thing to do over at school, is do a recording and put it onto vinyl without any additional processing, put it onto CD without any additional processing, and that’s really gonna be the apples-to-apples comparison of those two. It’s two hard now to take something off the shelf and assume that they’re gonna be the same thing.
Originally posted on NPR.COM
