The Rise of "Hybrid" Vinyl-MP3s 258
Khyber writes to let us know that First Word Records, a U.K.-based record label, is now selling vinyl records that come with codes that allow you to download a 320-kbit MP3 of that record's content. The article mentions another independent label, Saddle Creek, that also offers DRM-free downloads with some vinyl records. The co-founder of First Word is quoted on why they didn't DRM the download: "Making a legal, paid-for version of the file less useful than a copied or pirated one doesn't make sense."
vye....null? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:vye....null? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:vye....null? (Score:5, Funny)
Possibly better than CDs? (Score:5, Interesting)
If the MP3s are coming straight from the record label, maybe they could be encoded straight from the master mix, rather than a down-sampled 24-bit, 44.1kHz CD. My understanding is that CDs go up to 20 kHz (which is pretty close to the highest pitch humans can hear), but that the bit-depth is somewhat course at that range.
Is there an audio engineer around who can explain if there's much to be gained this way?
Re:Possibly better than CDs? (Score:5, Informative)
For the most part humans focus on the 300Hz-3.3kHz range which is why the phone companies only give you about 3k Bandwidth and sample at about 8k samples a second over POTS.
Re:Possibly better than CDs? (Score:5, Informative)
A 44.100kHz sample rate will theoretically get you up to a 22.050kHz max frequency in the audio signal. Humans can focus on any part of the audible spectrum, but voices won't typically fall outside the 300-3300 Hz range. Thus aLaw (US) and mu-Law (outside the US, a.k.a. "uLaw", since the Greek mu looks like a u with a tail) are typically 8000 Hz sample rate, 8-bit-sample, monophonic (who has a stereo telephone?) signal when digitized.
The GP was worried that the bit depth is "coarse". This is not the case. Bit depth "distance" is constant for a given depth.
CD's are 44.1kHz, 16-bit, stereo. Always. So there are always 44100 samples per second per channel. There are always two channels (stereo, one left, one right). And each sample in each channel is always 16 bits. A 16-bit integer can represent numbers from 0-65535 (2^0-1 through 2^16-1), and since there's no need for negative numbers (this is Pulse Code Modulation, or PCM, so no, you don't need to represent a +/- of a waveform) you get the full 0-65535 swing. From there, the value is directly translatable into a DC voltage that goes to the speakers. (Most of the heavy lifting is done in the A/D phase, D/A phase is a simple value-to-DC conversion.) The change in DC voltage over time is what causes the magnets to move, which moves the speaker cones, which moves air, which moves your tympanic membrane, which blah-blah-blah... eventually you hear sound.
So there's no need to worry. Nothing gets coarse. Nothing loses fidelity. Nothing loses audible quality. This is why vinyl fanatics get laughed at by people who know how and why digital audio works. The limits of even now-mundane CD audio are far above the possible limits of even hypothetically perfect human hearing. Nobody can hear 22kHz. Nothing below 22kHz is misrepresented in CD-quality audio. For mastering work, where effects will be applied later, higher quality recordings are wonderful, since you can guarantee that it will stay high-quality when downsampled to CD-quality, but other than that (and "economies of scale" where better parts are just as cheap to produce), there's no need for anything better.
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The REAL reason behind 44.1 kHz (Score:5, Informative)
"The sampling rate of 44.1 kHz is inherited from a method of converting digital audio into an analog video signal for storage on video tape, which was the most affordable way to get the data from the recording studio to the CD manufacturer at the time the CD specification was being developed. A device that turns an analog audio signal into PCM audio, which in turn is changed into an analog video signal is called a PCM adaptor. This technology could store six samples (three samples per each stereo channel) in a single horizontal line. A standard NTSC video signal has 245 usable lines per field, and 59.94 fields/s, which works out at 44,056 samples/s/stereo channel. Similarly, PAL has 294 lines and 50 fields, which gives 44,100 samples/s/stereo channel. This system could either store 14-bit samples with some error correction, or 16-bit samples with almost no error correction."
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There's a
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"This is why vinyl fanatics get laughed at by people who know how and why digital audio works."
There's only problem with this: vinyl lovers are not worried about signal-to-noise ratios or the frequencies that are audible to the human ear. It is simply a matter of taste.
Vinyl records, if played in a decent setup (good turntables, good capsules, good speakers - but by no means audiophile gear), do sound different to CDs. They sound warmer, with more presence. That's what vinyl collectors are looking for.
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On a home system, I never heard a reasonably priced stock CD player produce the warmth and precense my turntable gives me. The filters used in stock CD players are too "commonplace" for my taste. My turntable gave just the right
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Bullshit. A 22kHz sine wave will be a 22kHz square wave when recorded onto a CD. They don't sound the same. Of course, humans can't hear that high, but the point is that if you're quantizing a wave you won't get the exact same thing out at any frequency. However, 22kHz is far enough above the limits of our hearing and even moreso above the limits of what is interesting to record that the effects are limited.
But the higher the frequency, the
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Bullshit. A 22kHz sine wave will be a 22kHz square wave when recorded onto a CD. They don't sound the same. Of course, humans can't hear that high, but the point is that if you're quantizing a wave you won't get the exact same thing out at any frequency. However, 22kHz is far enough above the limits of our hearing and even moreso above the limits of what is interesting to record that the effects are limited.
But the higher the frequency, the more it's going to look like a square wave after it't digitized.
I have to call bullshit on your call of bullshit.
You, and many other people, seem to forget exactly how sampling and reconstruction actually works. You do NOT draw a straight line between the samples!
Dan Lavry has an excellent paper [lavryengineering.com] that clearly explains how sampling and reconstruction work.
What's also interesting is that many audio editing programs, including ProTools, don't properly display waveforms. If you load a delta function [latke.net] (the sample at time t=0 is infinite, all other samples zero, but we r
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Well, not exactly so. The Red Book [wikipedia.org] standard explicitly specifies that the format is 44.1 kHz, two channels, with 16-bit signed samples. How you choose to represent the zero amplitude level in a PCM format is only a question of definition. Higher bit depth net
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Nothing below 22kHz is misrepresented in CD-quality audio.
Wrong. The Nyquist Theorem states only that a sample rate of double the highest expected frequency is the minimum required to avoid aliasing. Meaning that, if you sample 22kHz at 44kHz, it won't come out sounding like something other than 22kHz. But you could theoretically be sampling at the 0 every time. The Nyquist Theorem isn't really about faithful reproduction.
And in reality, there's no such thing as a perfect low-pass filter. This is wh
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I know how and why digital audio works. I even use and write digital audio software. I still think vinyl sounds better. Note that I'm not saying it's a more accurate reproduction - it sounds *better*, not more accurate. It's much the same way that a valve guitar amp makes your guitar sound better than a hifi amp.
Re:Possibly better than CDs? (Score:4, Interesting)
But nonlinear systems are quite different. The classic example is soliton waves [wikipedia.org]. When two of these meet, they don't simply combine additively. In particular, different harmonics don't necessarily pass straight through each other and its quite possible for two very high frequency signals to interact and produce a low frequency signal in the result. And of course there really is no reason to expect the ear to remain close to a linear system, even ordinary sound waves in air become nonlinear if the sound is loud enough.
So if you want to sound convincing, talking about nonlinearity is your best bet. I can guarantee that 90% of the engineers you talk to won't have a sensible response because they've never studied nonlinear signal processing, and they'll be less likely to laugh at you.
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For vinyl vs cd, the most damaging argument to vinyl is that it uses constant angular value in
Hmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, let's talk about the non-linearity of speakers! They're damped oscillators!
And you can prove to an audiophile (hearing is believing) that sound is sufficiently linear to make such arguments irrelevant.
Take two frequencies (say... 14000 and 14300). If you play them, you get a 300Hz beat.
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OK. The CD, while providing decent resolution, has made digital music production more popular. Nothing bad about this until you realise who runs the record labels. There was a phenomenon in rock music during the 70s where the first 30 seconds of the vinyl were made louder than the rest of the record. That initial kick would make the listener think "Whoah, this is loud!" and tell all his friends "Whoah, that was a loud
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Nope, it's been proven that humans cannot hear ultrasonic sounds. Dogs, yes. Humans, no. Otherwise, you'll be reacting to a dog whistle.
The only argument against CD is that people are getting concerned that 16 bit is a little on the low side, and getting 24 bit or more is better. For the time being, there's no argument that the sampling rate is too low. What you hear coming out from your speaker is
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Nope, it's been proven that humans cannot hear ultrasonic sounds. Dogs, yes. Humans, no. Otherwise, you'll be reacting to a dog whistle.
When I was a wee lad of ~8 I could hear one of the high frequency sounds made by our TV remote control (way back it was done with high frequency sound). Our dog heard it, too. No one else in the family could hear it but we did tests where I'd have my back turned and could hear the sound of that one button. You'd hear the buttons being depressed but I only commented when
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Re:Possibly better than CDs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Modern digital equipment sounds far better than it should because of the tricks employed in the converters. Oversampling and noise dithering has a massive effect on the sound, and you aren't really hearing the true digital signal but a smoothed one. Before such techniques were used, digital equipment got huge criticism for being clinical sounding (quite rightly). Vinyl and other analogue systems don't have this problem obviously, but bring loads of others to the table (wear and tear, damage, static, etc).
For some material, 16bit is definitely not enough. It's fine for a lot of modern chart material, where the mastering has multiband compressed it to hell and back to make it sound louder than the competition, but those tracks don't need the dynamic range of a Chopin valse, or a Beethoven symphony. The quiet bits on 16 bit recordings definitely lose a lot compared to 24bit (side by side comparison using old and new gear) - but I think it is really the recording and production stages that need 24bit or more, not necessarily replay because of the tricks that can now be applied.
Anyway, what does it matter? It's the material played that is ultimately important, not the method of reproduction.
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Surely sounds that humans can hear aren't ultrasonic, by definition.
NOT better than CDs (Score:5, Insightful)
You are correct, the Nyquist theorem states that you must record at a sampling rate that's above twice the higher frequency in your recording.
All this debate over vinil is rather tiresome. Anyone who has studied electronics engineering like I did knows that vinil records have a rather low signal-to-noise ratio. I did a course on "Probabilistic Models in Electric Engineering" where we learned how to calculate noise due to the fact that electric charge is quantized. Now, get this vinil fans: ELECTRIC CHARGE IS QUANTIZED. There is no such thing as a charge smaller than an electron, which is 1.6e-19 coulomb.
There are no such thing as analog values in this universe, everything is quantized. You cannot possibly have an electric signal that's totally free of noise, what you get is a number of "clicks", one for each electron that goes by. The same way, you cannot even hear a sound without noise, what you get is a number of "plocs", one for each air molecule that hits your eardrums.
Now, I know people will say, "sure, but these effects are very small". Well, think again. Human hearing evolved to be as sensitive as it physically could be. Inside an anechoic chamber you can hear the blood flowing through your veins. The sensitivity of our ears is just short from hearing individual molecules hitting the eardrum. In any analog pick-up, be it moving coil or moving magnet, human ears are sensitive enough to hear the noise due to the quantization of electric current.
Digital equipment have much better signal-to-noise rations because they have high currents in low-impedance circuits, the effect of charge quantization is diluted by averaging a large number of electrons. In analog vinil pick-ups either the impedance is relatively high for moving magnet models or the voltage is very low for moving coil types.
And all this is considering only the most fundamental effects, not to mention problems as dust on the record. The cleanest cleanroom specified in the ISO-14644 standard has 12 particles per cubic meter. The lowest spec in ISO-14644 allows over 40 million particles per cubic meter. Does the room where you do your listening conform to an ISO "cleanroom" specification?
Digital sound standards were created to be as good as they need to be. CDs have all the bandwidth and dynamic range one needs in the final recording. It's only when you are going to mix and resample the music that you may need better quality to avoid round-off error in the processing. Because of this, professional equipment normally use something like 24 bits @ 192 kbps. The widespread acceptance of MP3s show that the CD standard has actually a better quality than the majority of people need or want.
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Re:NOT better than CDs (Score:4, Interesting)
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That is BS. CDs are no where near "live". First tracks (as in individual instruments) are recorded separately and then mixed together, edited in production and then eventually mastered for final encoding. There are many steps between recording and pressing and at each step there is loss/enhancement.
If CDs were so perfect, why was there a need to spec out
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Re:NOT better than CDs (Score:5, Funny)
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This is incorrect. Human hearing evolved to be as sensitive as it needed to be. Evolution does not gear toward perfection but toward good enough. There are many animals out there that have the same basic sound set-up we do but hear much better because their survivability depends on it to find food or avoid being food. Human hearing is actually pretty mediocre compared to a lot of animals. We have found other ways to accomplish what som
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And how sensitive is that? Think of a deep, very quiet cave. Three living beings are inside. One of them has saber teeth. Of the other two, which one lived to leave descendants? The first one to hear the sound of padded paws, of course. Multiply that by a thousand, ten thousand, generations.
Human hearing is actually pretty mediocre compared to a lot of animals
Care to cite sources for that affirmation? As I mentioned, human hearing is so good that
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The only link I can find in your post is one that says dogs hear frequencies that are twice as high as humans do. I never said anything to contradict that. Sure, dogs can hear high frequencies, that's how dog whistles [wikipedia.org] work. And?...
What I said is that human ears are as sensitive to intensity as they can ever get. Because if human ears were more sensitive than what they are, we would be continually distracted by random molecules hitting our eardrums. And if they were le
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No, it doesn't. Definitely doesn't. First it says that "an investigator usually must first train the animal to respond to a presented sound stimulus by selecting between two actions using rewards" and "This is done with the animal hungry or thirsty to motivate responding". He excuses his poorly referenced sources with a hand-waving statement that "These audiograms are from a book compiling thousands of published references into a single difficult to find sou
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Have you ever tried this? Have you ever tried truncating a 24 bit recording to 16 bits and listening if you can hear a difference?
if you sit outside your grandson's bedroom with his door closed while he's on the phone with someone, you probably can't hear what he's saying very well; but if you sit there with a microphone attached to an amplifier, you can hear it very well.
Oh yes. Just put your ear wher
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Sorry, but there is something about the audio world which afflicts both beggar and king, both believing any sort of ludicrous assertion. A cursory glance at this entire discussion shows that quite aptly.
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At zero ohms impedance. You forgot to consider the effect of electrons randomly hitting atoms. What you described is more or less shot noise [wikipedia.org], but there's also johnson noise [wikipedia.org] to be considered.
Besides, your figures aren't quite exact. My Shure V15 Type IV pick-up, which was pretty much top of the line when I got it in the late 1970s, has a nominal rating of 0.0025 V and 47 kohm.
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A few numbers off a piece of scratch paper:
The power output of that Shure pickup is -74dBm
The thermal noise level for audio is -130dBm, giving us an SNR of 56dB at the pickup (decent)
A CD has an signal-to-quantization-noise l
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But you have to have a very high fidelity sound system to reproduce these frequencies, so for most consumers, the sampling frequency of a CD is Okay.
It is also true that for most pe
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So even if you reproduce two frequencies that are not audible by humans, their beat frequency often can be eared.
But you have to have a very high fidelity sound system to reproduce these frequencies, so for most consumers, the sampling frequency of a CD is Okay.
I think the more likely explanation is that if you own a "very high fidelity sound system", it means you've spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to get a slight improvement in sound quality, and you'll think you hear a difference whether it's actually there or not... because you know that if you don't hear a difference, you're just a sucker.
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Re:Possibly better than CDs? (Score:4, Interesting)
You are probably thinking of 'one-bit' (or bitstream) digital to analogue converters. (Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org].) It gets around the problem of producing 16 bits of resolution with a single bit by switching at a frequency many times that of the sampling frequency and averaging over time.
In its purest form, it would switch at 2^16, or 65536 times the CD sample frequency. If one CD sample value is 0, the DAC would be off for 65536 DAC output samples. If the CD sample value is 65535 it is on for 65536 DAC output samples. For intermediate values it is on for the given proportion of the time. In other words, the CD sample value determines the duty-cycle of the output from the DAC. The one-bit on/off output is then averaged over time. This results in a conversion with almost no non-linear distortion of the signal.
Unfortunately a frequency of 65536 * 44.1 kHz would be in the THz range, so the actual frequency that a 1 bit DAC operates at is somewhat lower. For lower frequency audio signals the averaging process is still very accurate, but it loses some accuracy for the highest frequency audio tones mostly when there are rapid transients in the high frequencies. You might refer to this as a 'coarsening of the bit-depth'.
A full 16-bit DAC doesn't suffer from this problem because each sample from the CD is converted straight into a voltage proportional to that sample value in a single step. But it is very difficult to make a completely linear 16-bit DAC, so the non-lineararity of the DAC introduces its own distortions. But these distortions do not depend on frequency as they do with a 1-bit DAC.
Sigma-Delta modulation (Score:2)
Fortunately, this can be solved with feedback. Wikipedia has a rather good article (there's a link in the article you mentioned) on what's called Sigma-Delta, or Delta-Sigma [wikipedia.org] modulation. This picture [wikipedia.org] shows how you can overcome the infinite sampling frequency problem. By a clever application of feedback, the sampling noise can be shifted upwards, out of the band of interest.
This is an interesting feature of what's called "quantization noise". Because i
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There is no doubt that a 320 kps MP3 encoded from a superior source to CD could potentially be superior to a 320 kps MP3 encoded from CD. The question is whether this is noticeable, and indeed, whether the MP3 in question could have higher fidelity than the uncompres
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It's often not the artist that makes this decision. Rather, it's whoever does the mastering that decides this. Sure, the label and artist sign off on it, but remember that the artist's ears are usually pretty shot from playing live music day in and day out. And the label doesn't want to have to pay to have it done again.
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With MP3 (or at least, with some unnamed but still lossy compressive scheme) it's possible to have your cake and eat it, too. You can specify the base volume level, and have your loud monstrosity, but with no skipping (as in the album) or loss of fidelity (as in the CD).
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And no, you can't get the same with an mp3. It still depends on the source CD, which is all the tracks already mixed together. The only solution would be to re-mix the source tracks so they weren't all loud as hell simultaneously [wikipedia.org], and an LP basically forces you to do that.
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You should record to a loseless format,.. (Score:2)
You should really be using a modern perceptual codec. I hear AAC and Vorbis are nice. And they support 48Khz recordings with arbitrary bit depths / dynamic ranges.
But if you compress at 6:1 - 8:1 using modern codecs, you WILL NOT notice in an A/B test. What you're 'hearing' is the knowledge that you used a lossy codec in the first place -- like people seeing Jesus in pieces of toast and tree bark.
Of course, there are some really s
Hybrids everywhere (Score:3, Funny)
I guess I will be looking forward to playing my hybrid vinyl records in my hybrid Toyota soon.
Pulseblack has done it for a long time (Score:4, Informative)
They've been doing this for a long long time with CDs. Very nice record label.
This is the future (Score:5, Insightful)
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But unfortunately, vinyl sales as a whole are still decreasing, although of course not disappearing... I really wish I could find a link to the stats, I remember seeing BPI figures a while back, but I can't easily google them up now. Anyway, LP and 12" single sales were down a bit quite a few % compared to the previous year, although for some odd reason sales of 7
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Funny coincidence (Score:3, Insightful)
My conclusion is that this is how things should work. Obviously there's a demand for vinyl, and the convenience of digital is undeniable. Somehow, music companies got this right.
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Deadly accurate and spot on.
You could see the entire album and know where quiet sections are and how much to skip to to get past the annoying interlude or whatever.
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Wow, this is awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm in a small minority, but I'm a rabid music collector. Often times I'll buy both the cd and the vinyl versions of an album (the vinyl to listen to at home, the cd for the car or to rip to portable player). Basically, this allows me to only buy one version of the album (vinyl, the version I really want anyway) and just burn a copy for the car and drop one on the mp3 player. The only way this could get better is if they start supporting flac...then I can convert that to whatever format I want. This is great news for the indie / record junkie scene, though.
Really go retro: old tape recorder interfaces (Score:2)
If they're going to go retro with vinyl, they might as well go retro on the computer formats too.
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DRM - no sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, expading the "doesn't make sense" part is important. It's also critical for the surely-to-be analogizers below to realise that this has no usefulr real world (as in, tangible) comparison. If three clicks of the mouse provides you with something far more useful than something you've shelled out your hard-earned cash for, something is wrong. Lax enforcement -- not to mention the difficulty of enforcement -- and fuzzy laws make this so.
It's not as easy as saying, "Stealing a car has more utility than buying one, we should all steal cars!" since enforcement and history are so vastly different. See, the car analogy is wrong! Ha!
Been doing this for awhile (Score:2)
The Fools! (Score:5, Funny)
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Somewhat pointless (Score:4, Interesting)
Lossy compression is just as insidious as DRM when the bandwidth for CD-quality uncompressed audio is available.
And to those who say you can't hear the difference, if you slow the track down by 50%, you can. If you don't know why you would do that, ask a DJ.
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And lossless compression like flac [sf.net] makes even more sense.
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if you believe in vinyl you believe that analog reproduction is better than whatever sampling rate you've set your WAV to.
someone gets it (Score:3, Insightful)
BINGO, YES why can't the rest of them understand this?
320kbit/s noobness. (Score:2, Insightful)
320kbit/s CBR mp3 encodes are the ultimate "I have no idea what I'm doing" sign in the audio coding world. All the downsides of mp3 (lossy, huge files) with none of the benefits. "I'll just turn all the knobs to 'highest' and hope that's good".
Looks cool, and functional too (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, vinyl... (Score:2)
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*Yes I know what the D stands for.
Even better idea... (Score:2)
...distribute the MP3 files on vinyl [artsci.net].
The sky is falling, the sky is falling! (Score:3, Funny)
Someone selling content realizes the "value" of DRM? Excuse me for a moment, I gotta check for flying pigs. And could someone who has his number call the big red guy and ask him if the temperature in his home is still cozy?
BAH (Score:2)
There seems to be one album and 11 (sidebar says 8) singles.
That was a waste to follow that link
I did the same as another poster and grabbed new vinyl at random just too play a new one. Next time i'll be more careful, hehe. Full blown vintage Pioneer system with 4-channel 8-track player/recorders
I own Torq (Score:2)
Yes, it's an analog record playing a digital song. I don't think it's as the highest quality from playing a true record that has the real song imprinted in it.
Otherwise, Torq is amazing and I really like it.
Wish I could mod that up... (Score:2, Insightful)
Not a True Hybrid (Score:3, Funny)
They do have MP3 turntables you can use to 'scratch' recordings.
'digital' vinyl (Score:2, Interesting)
Daft Punk's Discovery Did Something Similar (Score:2)
I wish I had the time to DJ out and about these days.
What's the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
What's the point of a vinyl of a digital master?
As I've mentioned on a previous thread, I'm a huge fan of classical jazz and I have invested very seriously on a pile of records from the time, and I'm of the opinion that mastering was done more carefully back then and made to sound well with the way vinyl colors the sound.
But sheesh, if you're going to master an album digitally then why add noise of the line by converting it to a physical medium with a low S/N ratio?
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