CD Rebuttal
My last spotlight article, Vinyl Keep On Spinnin', generated a lot of interest and I would like to share with you a response I received from a distinguished Recording Engineer, which I am reprinting here with permission.
"I read with some interest your feature on the resurgence of vinyl. I have a couple of professional friends who hold a similar view that vinyl is the better medium for enjoying music. I've always held the opposite view - to me when I listen to music from CD or DAT it sounds like what you hear in the control room of a recording studio. It sounds like what the band/engineer/producer hear, and as such it's what I'd like to hear. Have you ever been to a vinyl mastering plant and seen what gets done to the master tape while it's being prepared for transfer ? The RIAA characteristic is pretty brutal !
I did make a DAT recording (on a Sony PCM7030 - £8,000) of the same piece of music from both vinyl (on a Pink Triangle turntable - £1,800 deck) and CD. My 'audiophile' colleague didn't realise that both pieces of music were coming from DAT - he correctly identified the source of each, but evidently the DAT was able to capture from the Vinyl whatever it was he loves so much. We were doing this blind test using DynAudio speakers and matched amplifier (whole lot £5,000) - as an aside how do people with sub-£1,000 set-ups in their living room make these quality judgements ? I only mention the value of the equipment used to make the point that this was serious trial.
My own thought is that people like the sound of vinyl - all those second-order harmonics and flabby LF response sounds comfortable to them in the same way that Technicolor movies from the forties and fifties are nice to look at - but Clark Gable never really looked that colour ! I don't criticise that but I do think that the tag HiFi should be reserved for DAT / CD (even though a 'Hi-Fi' vinyl deck costs more than a thousand whereas a decent CD player is only a couple of hundred).
You can't get away from the fact that CD has a dynamic range of 96dBs and is flat to 22Khz - signal to noise and bandwidth are the things that you hear when they aren't all there, and with vinyl recordings they aren't!"
Regards,
Phil Crawley, IEng, MIIE, Chief Engineer, The Resolution Post Group, +44 (0)7000 33 48 46 PhilC@resolutionpostgroup.com http://www.resolutionpostgroup.com
Thanks, Phil, for your comments on this topic.
The key to any good recording, whether Vinyl or CD is the mixing process in the recording studio. If a recording is mixed badly, it won't sound good on either CD or Vinyl. Also, with the RIAA characteristics, Vinyl must be engineered differently than digital recordings.
The CD has indeed made a signifigant impact on consumer audio. CD Players and software are available in abundance. And in terms of bringing good quality audio reproduction in an inexpensive consumer product the CD has succeeded. After all, you can't carry a turntable around with you like you can a Portable CD player. Also, products like the Portable CD have all but done away with the Portable Cassette Player, which, in musical terms, sounds pretty bad, having to depend on Dolby Noise Reduction just to lower the tape hiss and increase the dynamic range.
Another convenience of the CD format is the introduction and acceptance of CD Changers and CD Jukeboxes at the consumer level. Athough Vinyl Turntables can be of exceptional quality, the Vinyl Record Changer has always been a clumsy underperformer, having to compensate for the weight of each record dropped on the Turntable in succession.
The CD Changer and CD Jukebox gives the listener all day high-quality music listening without necessarily sacrificing sound quality.
With the street prices for CD Changers as low as $130 and CD Jukeboxes as low as $200, it is hard for a consumer to pass up the convenience of such a device. Even I forgo my Turntable when I need an uninterrupted afternoon of good quality background music while I work on my Website! My CD Changer of choice is the Technics SL-PD888, which I purchased new for $129. In fact the Single Disc CD player is getting harder to find these days, most of these players reside in the higher-priced, audiophile category.
Also, with the introduction of the CD Recorder and CD-ROM technology, the useful life of the CD format has been greatly extended. Even DVD Players and Laserdisc Players have the ability to play music CD's.
The CD is definitely here to stay (at least until the next format takes hold: HDCD, DVD Audio, or Super Audio CD). Against these innovations, Vinyl still maintains its presence, however.
One thing about Home Electronics products, there are always new innovations to make things more convenient and to bring better quality to the consumer, but the old ways will always remain to remind us where we started. After all, regardless of the benefits of the CD, the Turntable still paved the way for society's acceptance of recorded music.
