The Rise of "Hybrid" Vinyl-MP3s

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?

What is this vye..null?

Re:vye....null?

It's an ancient musical recording that is etched into a circular rock. A bird presses it's beak to the stone and rotates it, producing sound.

Re:vye....null?

here is an illustration [deadsquid.com]

Re:vye....null?

It's turtles all the way down.

Possibly better than CDs?

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?

I'm not an audio engineer but from a telecom course I took the basic idea is that you sample at twice the highest frequency (IE. 20kHz frequency would require 40k samples a second).

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?

Yes. Nyquist. There's a Theorem, a Limit, and a Guy that discovered these, all by the same name.

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.

The REAL reason behind 44.1 kHz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD#Audio_format [wikipedia.org]

"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."

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

Look, if you're going to make up justifications for using vinyl, make them more convincing. Much of the theory about human hearing is based on the assumption that the ear acts as a linear system. If the ear were a linear system there is no way it'd be possible for "certain confluences of sound react with each other and produce further sounds". In linear systems harmonics at different frequencies simply add, there is no possible 'interaction' that can happen between them.

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.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

Not strictly true. If you play two frequencies, say 28000hz and 28500hz together, they will beat and you will hear that. Sure, you can't hear the frequencies but you can hear the effect. This could be why mediums that apply a hard filter appear dull at times.

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.

NOT better than CDs

I'm not an audio engineer but from a telecom course I took the basic idea is that you sample at twice the highest frequency

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.

Re:NOT better than CDs

No, "better" in this case is not subjective at all. I think you entirely missed his point. His point is that you can create any sound you want with digital. Any sound at all. If you wanted to make a digital version of a track that sounded like it did on vinyl, you could do that and put it on CD. The issue here is that CD audio is a lot closer to the original live audio. Therefore it's a better reproduction. Just as 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375 10 is a better representation of Pi than 3.14 is. So the question isn't so much "do you like CD or vinyl better". The question is "do you like live music or vinyl better". Because with CD, you've basically got the exact same sound as if you were actually at the concert.

Re:NOT better than CDs

There are no such thing as analog values in this universe

You tell that to my friend pi and his buddies. But be careful, I understand they can be quite irrational.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

My understanding is that CDs go up to 20 kHz ... but that the bit-depth is somewhat course at that range.

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.

Hybrids everywhere

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

http://pulseblack.com/ [pulseblack.com]

They've been doing this for a long long time with CDs. Very nice record label.

This is the future

As silly as it sounds with Indie Rock, Hip Hop, Jazz and to an extent, Classical, the sales of vinyl are growing at a quick rate and CDs are slowly massively. People value the sound quality and physicality of the vinyl and generally download the tracks from file-sharing to use portably or in the car. While I don't personally care too much for the free downloads, it will save a lot of people a lot of time and it keeps them "in-tow" with the record label's marketing. Everyone wins.

Funny coincidence

I just bought a turntable as an impulse purchase, a Pionner PL-516 for the curious. I have about 30 LPs lying around. I saw that HMV (a music store) had some new vinyl titles in stock, so I grabbed one at random, "The Arcade Fire". An abominable album to be sure, but it was just to hear how new vinyl sounds. Sounds pretty good. Got this famous coupon in there as well.

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.

That's not a hybrid

Any more than a book with an offer inside for an eBook version is a hybrid hard/soft copy.

Anyway, years ago magazines had flexidisks on the cover which could (if you were lucky) be used to load data into a home computer.

Wow, this is awesome

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

Codes to access an MP3 is so lame. I thought they were resurrecting the audio data file format used in early home computers that read data to and from a normal cassette tape recorder.

If they're going to go retro with vinyl, they might as well go retro on the computer formats too.

DRM - no sense

"Making a legal, paid-for version of the file less useful than a copied or pirated one doesn't make sense."

And herein is the best anti-DRM argument there is. Just this sentence and no further. If I were writing a thesis on DRM, this would be my main point.

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

I know I've seen various rekkids put out by Merge and Matador Records that had stickers on the front offering exactly this sort of thing. The thing is that I saw those albums about 1-2 years ago. This isn't exactly new...

The Fools!

Don't they realise that evil hackers will make multiple copies from the vinyl to audio cassettes and listen to it on portable tape players? Home Taping Is Killing music!

Audiophiles will be happy with this

I hope they took the MP3's from the same master as the vinyls. Will make some audiophiles happy since both actually will -do- sound good.

Somewhat pointless

Given that I can buy totally unmolested WAVs from Beatport [beatport.com], what's the point? I find it hard to believe that there are vinyl purists who want MP3s, or that those who would work with an MP3 wouldn't rather deal with a master-quality WAV which can be manipulated even more.

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.

Tenacious D

I bought the /Pick of Destiny/ picture disc LP, and it came with a code to download non-DRM MP3s as well. Can't remember who released it for certain; was it Sony? (Seems ironic, I know.)

someone gets it

"Making a legal, paid-for version of the file less useful than a copied or pirated one doesn't make sense."

BINGO, YES why can't the rest of them understand this?

320kbit/s noobness.

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".

'enhanced' CDs

They used to make these multi session audio CDs with the CD audio also encoded as WMA on the second session.

They don't make them anymore. The distributors had to pay out twice the royalties to the artists since there were two copies being distributed.

Somehow I don't think this new scheme will last long.

Looks cool, and functional too

Perfect, now audiophiles can look cool with their 'retro' collections of vinyl (even if they never listen to them), and still get easy access to the far-more-functional digital copy.

Ah, vinyl...

the original, rental model, of DRM!*

-
*Yes I know what the D stands for.

Even better idea...

...distribute the MP3 files on vinyl [artsci.net].

The sky is falling, the sky is falling!

Making a legal, paid-for version of the file less useful than a copied or pirated one doesn't make sense.

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

Sounds great....now if they only had some records to sell :(

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 :) My buddy never realized we were listening to an 8-track mix tape ;)

Analog and/or Digital

Okay, this, to me (as a DJ) is pretty retarded. Why wouldn't they just include a CD with the vinyl? Why should I have to download anything? Seems like a waste of bandwidth to me. CDR's costs nothing to make.

Real DJ's want the original vinyl, but most still end up converting them to some sort of digital format if they do a lot of traveling (vinyl weighs a TON). It seems to me this is an attempt to get the consumer to their website.

I don't know anything.

I own Torq

How is this different from Serato Scratch Live [rane.com] or Torq [torq-dj.com]?

The double-headed approach makes sense for several reasons. DJs and audiophiles will always want the top end of quality, so they will buy physical media, but for convenience you can't beat a digital file.

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.

This is ALMOST old news.

As of the last few months, I almost never buy CDs anymore---- I'm lucky enough to have a great record store (Amoeba) that sells lots of new vinyl, and now I only buy records that include a download of the album. Recent LP+MP3 purchases include:

Ted Leo: Living with the Living [tedleo.com]
Low: Drums and Guns [subpop.com]
Coco Rosie: The Adventures of Ghosthorse & Stillborn [touchandgorecords.com] (sorry, Flash, but pretty)
Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? [polyvinylrecords.com]
Blonde Redhead: 23 [blonderedhead23.com]
M. Ward: Post-War [mergerecords.com]


I totally cannot tell you how much better it feels to spend my $12.99 on an LP than a cheap, disposable CD that becomes garbage after I import it.

And the best part is I'm selling Amoeba all my CDs to pay for it all!

Wish I could mod that up...

Making a legal, paid-for version of the file less useful than a copied or pirated one doesn't make sense.

It is a pity we can't mod that +5 insightful for the other guys in that industry...

Not a True Hybrid

Its not a true hybrid until they figure out a way to get MP3s to skip and warp if you leave them in a hot car.

They do have MP3 turntables you can use to 'scratch' recordings.

'digital' vinyl

When I first saw the heading I thought the mp3s were stored on the actual vinyl and wondered how they'd be retreived from them, nothing so fancy but it reminded me of the plastic flexi-disc I have stored away with my miniscule vinyl collection, the flexi-disc in question having a couple of Sinclair ZX81 programs on them whereby you use a turntable instead of a tape recorder to load the programs in.

Daft Punk's Discovery Did Something Similar

I have a vinyl copy of that album from 2000, it came with a 'Daft Club' membership card which let me download all sorts of exclusive audio content. In this case though it was DRM protected, unlike these mp3's

I wish I had the time to DJ out and about these days.

What's the point?

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?

This isnt new

Labels have been doing this for years...
http://www.discogs.com/release/324766 [discogs.com]

That one was released in 2004

But

By feeding the signals from my direct-drive [wikipedia.org] (it's only a 4-pole motor -- I'm saving up for a 16-pole one :) ) turntable into two of the inputs of my Alesis MultiMix 8 USB mixer [maplin.co.uk] using RCA-to-6.3 adaptors [maplin.co.uk], panning one full-on to the left and the other full-on right, cranking up the gain (you've already lost 6dB what with it being unbalanced and another 20db from it being the jack and not the cannon, but the too-low impedance of the latter will distort things worse) and then adjusting the tone controls (treble 9 o'clock, middle 12 o'clock, bass 3 o'clock) to correct for the pre-emphasis [wikipedia.org] used in recording, I can get a nice digital signal (it's a Burr-Brown A-to-D) from a vinyl record (which I already own, so it's just as much Fair Dealing as taping a CD to listen in the car and don't tell me there's a single person in this courtroom who has never done that, your honour) anyway!

Once the controls are adjusted and the record is set up to play with the needle on the edge, start Audacity, select dsp1 as source (this may be different depending how your system is set up), begin recording and start the turntable motor. Come back later, top recording, look at waveform on screen, pick out individual tracks, paste each one as a new recording, trim start and end, save in preferred format (WAV, OGG, or even MP3 -- isn't it great living in a country where there are no maths patents?). Turn over record, repeat process.

NB. Tip from bitter experience: make sure that the room is cat-proofed for the entire duration!

Makes perfect sense

An outdated digital codec for an outdated format! Just kidding about vinyl though. I love vinyl. Just provide AAC or even better, FLAC.

Or even better

Just get a usb turntable [amazon.com] and turn any record into a digital format.

Great idea

I've recently been spitting the rhetorical "they should" with friends recently along similar lines. My idea was that "they should" come out with stylized USB keys that conform to a specific size and let music lovers collect the cool USB keys that contain 24-bit/96kHz 2.0 or 5.1 FLAC versions of the album in complete DRM free glory at a $10-15 price point and that you could recover the files, should they ever become lost, once you register your key online. I think a vinyl movement would be great too. (except that vinyl recorded from a digital source which most studios use, seems kind of odd.) Basically, we are losing any tangible or visible association we used to make with an album via CD booklets, LP covers and inserts. I also don't like the notion of buying singles and not an album because that kills the album experience you get when you listen to an album that was conceptualized to be a complete work start to finish. Who am I kidding. Rock is dead. Justin Timberlake isn't going to make Dark Side of the Moon. Kerry Underwood isn't going to make the next OK Computer.

Re:Cancel your XM accounts!

Censorship and first amendment rights are not mutually exclusive. I mentioned nothing of first amendment rights.

A guest made some rude comments, some say it shouldn't have been said but it's his right (as a stinky drunk hobo) to make those comments. Supposedly the suspension is because O&A were told not to talk about the issue. XM wanted to "censor" them, hence the censorship issue.