Steven Jobs liked Vinyl Records.Ipod ,not so much

There's something about the sound of an LP that is missing from a CD. Not better, just a depth that isn't on the CD. Part of the attraction is cleaning the LP and stylus and hearing the occasional pop or crackle between the notes. Having said that, my turntable and LP's are in the attic waiting to be enjoyed again someday.

 

Dang hard to stick a phonograph player in your front pocket and go for a walk, so I think I'll stick to mp3 players for now.

Fortunately...there are many from which to choose.

 

My turntable is also awaiting a new cartridge (the adhesive holding the tip disintegrated, dropping the diamond) and a new drive belt (the old one had to be scraped off the platter with a razor blade).

But DW's turntable was resurrected last year, so mine will remain dormant for a while.

 

Having just finished reading Steve Jobs biography, I'd have to say that I don't believe this to be true. Steve Jobs loved the iPod from the time it was released. Steve was a very minimalist type of person. From everything that I've read about him, vinyl records may have been a favorite early in his life but he was definitely and iPhone/iPod/iPad music listener.

In the book are several references to Steve playing music for guests or even the author. Never is a single mention of LP records but rather a lot of talk about how he would use his thumb to spin through his songs to find one and play it. His favorite was Dillon. His iDevices had complete Dillon collections including the bootlegs on them.

 

I listen to my LP records all the time when at home. When out and about I use the more convenient digital devices. Sound quality is not the same, but convenience makes up for it. Hopefully MP3 and CD formats will be replaced by something superior. Like FLAC. But there's nothing digital I have heard that can replicate the warmth of an analog record.

 

When my father-in-law passed away he left us his stereo system with huge speakers that included a turntable. My wife and I pulled all of our LP albums back out and listen to them all of the time.

I also like the LP sounds that the digital songs cannot duplicate, including the occassional pop and crackle. Their is something unique about knowing these were the original soundtracks and not duplications or remakes.

I also enjoy my Nav audio system, too.

 

This is a complex subject from the technical perspective, and a nearly religious one from the emotional perspective. This is an area where many people have beliefs that are unrelated to and unsubstantiated by science.

Setting aside the emotion and focusing on science, digital recording always has the capacity to out-perform analog. Given sufficient bandwidth, digital can exactly reproduce any desired waveform - exactly, not just nearly or close enough. This is something analog can never do. Good analog can be close, but there will always be some distortion.

Given this scientific fact, then why is there any debate? The debate exists because bandwidth is not unlimited and not all digital is created equal.

Let's talk about bandwidth first: Bandwidth is the amount of information that a signal can contain. Think of it as the space on a bookshelf: A bigger space leaves room for a bigger book which can have more words. More bandwidth, more information.

The downside of bandwidth is that it takes space, just like the book on the shelf. Higher bandwidth means bigger music files. Bigger files means fewer songs on a player or disk, or longer downloads. It's a trade-off.

When the Compact Disk (CD) was created, the designers made a reasonable trade-off between fidelity and play time. The bandwidth was high enough to allow recording to the limits of human hearing. The dynamic range was much larger than that on analog records, and was sufficient to cover the limits of ordinary human hearing. In other words, the CD was close to being perfect; not quite perfect, but close enough for very high fidelity far exceeding anything in the analog world.

So why do some listeners still prefer vinyl? Emotions aside, it mostly comes down to the recording and mastering process. All audio recordings are reproductions of some original performance. These original recordings are combined and processed, or "mastered", to create a master recording, from which all of the copies are made. Think of it like reproducing a photograph: If you make a bad copy of a good photograph you end up with a bad photo. If you make a good copy of a bad photo you end up with a bad photo. Only by making a good copy of a good photo do you end up with a good reproduction.

The same is true for audio recording. Many of the original masters were not that great. The superior quality of CDs allowed the flaws to be heard. Every bad note, dropped bow, and squeaking chair was now audible. Vinyl hides much of this. A perfect reproduction of a bad master is still bad. A lot of poor masters were converted to digital, with predictably bad results.

While this was happening, an even more bothersome trend was developing in the recording world. Radio station owners had discovered that louder stations got more listeners. When scanning the dial, louder stations sounded better. The simple solution was to crank up the modulation, making the station sound louder. However, increasing modulation took up more space in the airwaves (bandwidth), and that was strictly regulated by the FCC. Stations faced fines and licensing issues when they did this.

Compression became the answer. By reducing the loudest passages and increasing the quiet parts, audio engineers could compress or flatten an audio signal, and then this flattened signal could be played at a higher average level. The song now sounded much louder without running afoul the FCC. Compression wars ensued, with each station trying to out-loud its competitors. The effect on audio quality was dreadful, but what did they care? As long as it gained market share nothing else mattered. The loudness wars had begun.

The "benefits" of audio compression soon found their way into the mastering studio. CDs were perfect for this, since CDs have much more headroom than vinyl. Mastering engineers would heavily compress all the songs on an album, then record the master at very high levels. The result was a master that wasted most of the dynamic range of the CD, but it sounded loud. Loud albums sell.

To understand what this means, lets go back to our big book on the bookshelf. Our book might have 1,000 pages, but after compression only the last 10 pages have any text; the rest are wasted. It's a silly idea, but it works from a commercial standpoint.

Digital recordings are still made this way. Efforts have been made to undue the damage of the loudness wars, and while there have been some improvements, the war is still ongoing. If you want to experience the difference first hand, compare a Telarc classical CD with Amy Winehouse's Back to Black, or most any other popular disk. Play them both at the same volume setting. If you set the classical disk at a comfortable volume the popular disk will be deafening. The classical disk is using the entire dynamic range of the CD: the loud sections are loud, the quiet passages are quiet. Not so with most popular music, where everything is loud.

Oddly, though, the CD is not a compressed format. All of the compression discussed so far was done in the studio. The files on CDs are uncompressed "wav" files. Because of this they are large. The advent of small digital music players with flash memory meant that smaller digital music files were needed. The answer to this was mp3, which really came from the motion picture industry, but that's another story (now you know why it starts with "mp").

In addition to normal compression techniques, the mp3 format also employs lossy compression. Lossy compression works by discarding unnoticed or only slightly noticed detail. If you can't hear the flute because of the crashing cymbals, then drop the flute for that part of the recording. It works surprisingly well, but detail is lost. How much is a function of the compression technique and how aggressively it is applied.

The take-away from this is that digital is inherently better,
but in practice it is not always better. Marketing compromises and plain old human greed have often worked to subvert the inherent advantages of digital. Hence the push by some for higher fidelity digital formats.

Tom

 

Having collected over a thousand LPs in my music life, I am currently transferring many of them to Ipod. What's nice when you do the transfer, it still sounds like a LP!
I am currently up to 13+ days of music on the main Ipod, gonna have to start looking for one with a bigger HD!

 

Or start compressing.

:eyebrows:

Tom

 

My only question was to Neil Young's source because anyone who has read the book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson which is the only biography to which Steve himself and all his family, friends and rivals contributed to, never mentions him listening to vinyl but there are certainly many mentions of him playing music from his various iDevices. Steve was a minimalist that couldn't stand any type of clutter, so I really can't picture him having a collection of records sitting around.

He bragged to everyone about his 1000 songs in his pocket when the iPod came out.

 

There are a million scientific explanations why digital is better.

And certainly many others which support the marketing of digital devices.

Blah blah.

Nothing sounds like vinyl.

Who cares what Steve Jobs liked or didn't like.

________

Also, there's a cool ritual about listening to music on vinyl. There's a beginning and an end, and the songs are ordered a certain way.

Some folks even say that we shouldn't listen to an album more than once in every 24 hours. Which makes it even more special, if it's old or rare.

Sitting down to listen to music—instead of having it come along with you while you do something else—is an activity that has been lost to most folks today.

Too bad for them, and Steve Jobs too if he wasn't into vinyl.

 

Thankfully I have learned how to decompress safely, and daily, oh you ment the audio... nevermind!

 

Oh wow.

 

Thanks for this explanation, Tom. This explains why I always thought CDs were MUCH better than vinyl. I listen to classical music.

Also, I'm a klutz, and my vinyl records ended up badly scratched after a while, no matter how careful I was.

 

I suppose we'll one day hear of VCR purists who lovingly maintain their collections of VHS tapes and restored VCR decks, and they'll swear they look better than DVD.

 

FLAC is the best digital format we have today. Unfortunately the files are large, and there aren't too many compatible playback devices on the market yet. Perhaps this will change in the future. Would be so cool if my Prius head unit could play the remastered Beatles USB stick in full FLAC format.

Most kids nowadays only care about portability, downloadability (and pirate-ability). Thus MP3 will be the dominant format for a while longer.

Sales of physical CDs are being overtaken by digital downloads. One of these days they may become collector's items just like LPs!

 

qbee got it dead on.

Of you want the math behind the actual theory, it is the Nyquist Theorem which states:

If a function x(t) contains no frequencies higher than B hertz, it is completely determined by giving its ordinates at a series of points spaced 1/(2B) seconds apart.

So basically human ears have an upper limit of what is possible to hear in the frequency range. If we call that absolute maximum frequency producable B, then as long as we take digital samples at least every 1/(2B) seconds, we can 100% accurately reproduce the signal.

It is generally accepted that 20KHz is the highest people can hear on average as adults. When younger it is higher, when older it is lower. Remember the 18KHz to 20KHz ring tones for your cell phone? Well there is a reason they were marketed towards high school kids and earlier. You (and all your peers) could hear your phone and messages but the teachers and staff could not hear a thing. Anyways, at 20KHz, you need a signal of at least 40KHz for sampling, so you need to save a data point every 25 microseconds.

Now the problem becomes what data do you save every 25 microseconds? You need the amplitude of the signal (how loud is it). If you saved 1 bit of data you would only have 2 volumes, on and off. If you saved 2 bits of data you would have 4 volumes, off, 25%, 50%, and 100% volume. Most recordings are 128bit so 3.4e38 volume levels. That is 34 followed by 37 more zeros. You can easily get 256bit which is not twice as many, but it is 1.2e77. So much much more. So 12 and then 76 zeros after it.

So analogue versus digital is easy hands down winner for digital if you know what you are doing. But similar to other things, the human sensory system sucks big time. So getting a perfect representation of something can be viewed as worse because it doesn't have a low quality feel that so many are used to.

 

It's too often left out of the discussion, but the distortions and noise of any recording are processed by the brain just as intensely as the "desired" sounds. Unfortunately in this area the audio metrics only cover how much of a certain distortion is occurring, not it's effects on the listener. For example, "harmonic distortion" is often a highly quoted spec, it really does not "interrupt" the pleasure of the listener nearly as bad as many other distortions. A amplifier slightly clipping is a real bummer for example. In the vinyl vs digital discussions, I always find that the nature of the distortions take a back seat to the specs of the technology. The problem is that listening is not a mathematical exercise, while measuring distortions is exclusively a mathematical process.

 

With mp3 recordings above 256kbps, and add the versatility that an iPod delivers you'd have to be foolish not to get with current technology.

Is sort of like holding onto a conventional tube tv when 1) tv only comes thru a digital signal now and HD channels need the 16:9 widescreen output

It's nice to hold onto memories but bring them into our current generation!