BillFitzmaurice.info

So there's been a lot of hype at SXSW about the Pono music player http://www.ponomusic.com/ . This is Neil Young's pet project, and he cares deeply about quality audio.

So has anybody heard digital audio at higher than CD resolution? There are a lot of celebrity musician talking heads in their propaganda materials endorsing the quality. I wonder if it lives up to the hype. Any thoughts about this out there in BFM land?

psjon wrote:So has anybody heard digital audio at higher than CD resolution? There are a lot of celebrity musician talking heads in their propaganda materials endorsing the quality. I wonder if it lives up to the hype. Any thoughts about this out there in BFM land?

CD resolution exceeds the resolution of our hearing, so no improvements are necessary there, despite what the Golden Ears (with Shit for Brains) might claim.
MP3 is a different story, and it looks like that's what this is supposed to be replacing. I don't think I'd miss MP3 any more than I miss cassette tapes.

wav quality (or flac) is definitely better than even 320 kb/s mp3.

Mp3 should have been gone by the mid 2000s. I blame the ipod and its "fit 10k songs on this device" advertising (esp considering Itunes STILL does not offer quality as high as even 320 kb/s mp3s.

that being said. FM AND AM are still around so perhaps I'm being naive.

24/192 offers no audible improvement over 16/44, so the player itself is mostly hype.

A loss-less codec, in this case FLAC, should provide audible benefits,

There are a number of FLAC and ALAC compatible players, so Young is just re-inventing the wheel.

IMO, there are two bigger problems:

1. Record companies are loathe to release loss-less downloads of their music.

2. The loudness wars are squeezing the life out of recordings.

Unless Young can get the record companies and the artists on board, his efforts will be quixotic.

psjon wrote:This is Neil Young's pet project, and he cares deeply about quality audio.

If he really cared deeply about quality audio, he would either invest in pitch correction software, or give up trying to sing.

byacey wrote:

psjon wrote:This is Neil Young's pet project, and he cares deeply about quality audio.

If he really cared deeply about quality audio, he would either invest in pitch correction software, or give up trying to sing.

Now, that's the DAMN truth!

Oh....and his guitar playing sucks too.

Wow! Shots fired.

What about records? I'd still rather listen to Darkside on vinyl than MP3 or CD.

Bruce Weldy wrote:

byacey wrote:

psjon wrote:This is Neil Young's pet project, and he cares deeply about quality audio.

If he really cared deeply about quality audio, he would either invest in pitch correction software, or give up trying to sing.

Now, that's the DAMN truth!

Oh....and his guitar playing sucks too.

That was funny. I SO needed a laugh after the day I've had.

jimbo7 wrote:
What about records? I'd still rather listen to Darkside on vinyl than MP3 or CD.

Make a CD-R copy of your scratchy vinyl records.
I've done double blind listening tests with people that were convinced vinyl sounded superior. It turned out they were unable to tell the difference.

Edit: In the past I've had some contracts to digitize master tapes for archival at various Universities. On occasion a small portion of the tape would be damaged and I would be forced to recover the damaged portion from archive vinyl. Never could I say the vinyl sounded better than the master tape, even though the tape was 30 to 40 years old and deteriorating.

One might be quick to blame the turntable, but I should explain it was a broadcast quality Technics SP10 MkII with a Stanton 680ELII cartridge fit on a Syrinx tonearm. The low noise preamp I built and adjusted to conform accurately to the RIAA EQ curve. It reproduced test disks very accurately across the audio bandwidth.

I just did this yesterday. I have a half speed mastered version of Supertramp's "Crime of the Century", so I hooked up my tt to the system in the shop with a cheapo RIAA preamp. Compared it to the CD of the same album, which is one of my reference recordings.

The cd was cleaner obviously, and overall sounded better. Not too surprising, considering I bought this album over 30yrs ago and it was used for countless demos when I sold home audio gear. But, and it's a big butt. The imaging from the vinyl was just stunning, better than the cd, which is fabulous. Deeper, wider, better. Now I'm jonesing for a moving coil cartridge and a high end preamp. Hadn't thought about that stuff in many years.

Keep in mind that most commercial CD releases of older material was remastered in an attempt to use more of the dynamic range that CD offers. Vinyl doesn't have much more than about 20db of useable dynamic range before you start getting into surface noise region of the record. The original master tapes probably had about the same, maybe an extra 10 or 15db if some sort of noise reduction was used when originally recorded. CD of course has a much wider range, perhaps 80 to 90 db with good equipment.
A master for CD would also have different EQ, usually some HF emphasis to make it sound more vibrant. It wouldn't likely be the same when it comes to comparison between the vinyl and CD copy.

Many cheap preamps approximate an RIAA EQ curve, but they aren't all that accurate. Additionally the capacitance of the cables between the preamp and the cartridge need to be taken into account and trimmed to avoid skewing of the HF component due to rolloff the capacitance creates. professional grade preamps will have trimmer capacitors to adjust this.

Cross talk between channels on a CD is far lower than what can be achieved with vinyl, so better stereo imaging is possible.

FWIW... Put me in the "Vinyl Sounds Better" camp. I have recorded old LP's and 45's to the computer and then burned to CD. To my ear these home made vinyl-to-CD CD's sound better than the commercial CD's of the same original recordings.

One aspect to me is the 44.1Khz sampling... this is only 2-3 times the frequency of the highest sounds we hear. Might we be missing something we would ordinarily feel at those frequencies.

I would love to hear of any double blind testing, CD's vs vinyl, on this subject.

Rickisan wrote: One aspect to me is the 44.1Khz sampling... this is only 2-3 times the frequency of the highest sounds we hear. Might we be missing something we would ordinarily feel at those frequencies.

I don't think so. Increasing the sampling rate to 48Khz is required to capture frequencies up to 22K instead of 20K.
The problem then becomes the ability of the playback device to reproduce that content, and our ability to hear it!

Rickisan wrote:FWIW... Put me in the "Vinyl Sounds Better" camp. I have recorded old LP's and 45's to the computer and then burned to CD. To my ear these home made vinyl-to-CD CD's sound better than the commercial CD's of the same original recordings.

If I understand your wording correctly, you prefer the sound of the original vinyl mastering compared to the commercially re-mastered CD.

If your CD-R reproduction of your own vinyl records sound as good or indistinguishable from your records, it's not the medium that is flawed, but rather the commercial remastering. The CD is meant to be nothing more than an exact faithful reproduction of the original source material.

Man I haven't done turntable geek talk in YEARS. Fun. I knew the preamp would be horrible when I bought it, but I just wanted to give a go. You are correct the dynamic range of the Supertramp cd was superior. It's by far one of the better cd's I have. I have many from the early days of cd mastering that are just unlistenable. My ELP stuff for example. Just terrible, compared to the vinyl, especially Trilogy.

One of these days my tube home amp is coming to the shop, and I'll do it the right way. Gotta fix it first though. No time to try, no money to send it off.