Steven Jobs liked Vinyl Records.Ipod ,not so much

When was that? I don't recall seeing any lossy audio until about 1990.

 

I cannot speak for others, but for me listening to vinyl is not about nostalgia. There are many old recordings that simply do not exist in any digital format. This is particularly true for classical, jazz and folk music. I have a large collection of rare recordings that have not been, and probably never will be, remastered or re-released digitally.

Plus, the fact that more and more younger people are buying vinyl of contemporary music further disproves the "nostalgia" assumption. For them, vinyl is a relatively novel experience!

 

Lost in this debate over formats is the music itself. Once upon a time there was no such thing as recorded music. You either had to hear it live or not at all. Recording technologies turned music into a commodity and, for better or worse, the music "industry" was born.

At the end of the day, however, music is a service. It is meant to be performed, consumed and experienced live. Any other delivery method - digital or otherwise, is only an approximation and oftentimes a poor substitute for the real thing.

The sad part is that many "musicians" today consider selling musical artifacts (MP3s, CDs, what have you) as their primary goal rather than playing music to live audiences.

Below is an illuminating article on the history of vinyls with some interesting technical details:

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2012/02/local/the-brief-histories-modern-journey-of-a-vinyl-record

"The modern vinyl record began its life at a 1920 funeral, with King George V and the procession walking down Whitehall, while two producers, waiting for their arrival, sat in a truck parked outside Westminster Abbey in London. They were there to cut a record of the burial ceremony of the Unknown Warrior. English and Indian princes joined admirals, lords, and the mourning masses to remember those who had died in the First World War. The Unknown Warrior acted as the symbolic recipient of their sorrow. Inside the wood-paneled truck, a small heating stove kept the producers warm against a late autumn chill. Beside the stove, a recording device rested atop a narrow oven. Heated wax being easier to cut, the oven warmed the producers’ blank recording discs while they, the producers, waited for their cue..."

 

I have a Teac Reel to Reel with some great tapes in a box stores around here somewhere. Those were some great sounding recordings.

 

Sound studios can and do have recording at this accuracy and higher.

What they push out onto a CD, is another matter.

FYI there are no single ADCs that are 128bit. However, you can have multiple ADC sampling the same time at difference reference voltages and essentially create one larger ADC out of that. Similarly you can cascade them in phase and use slower more accurate ADCs and as one samples others are convertering and so on. There are lots of pretty awesome ADC tricks that can be had. This technology came mostly from oscilloscopes and other high end lab instrumentation.

 

Tube amps aaaahhhh.

 

Analog-to-digital converter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The only 128bit systems that I'm aware of currently are some DDR memory busses on video cards. 64bit computer systems seem well fast enough for 3D processing and certainly have a high enough depth for plenty of audio tracks (especially since adding multiple pipelines/cores is the main trend for computers).

 

I don't believe it. 128 bits is 772 dB of dynamic range, before accounting for the nonideal ADC and analog front end artifacts. That is beyond absurd overkill.

For comparison, the RF path loss to the Voyagers, long past the outer planets, is only about 220 dB. Room temperature thermal noise, from electrons rattling around in ordinary matter, is about -174 dBm/sqrt(Hz). The full fusion power of the Sun is about +296 dBm. Even the audio band portion of the cosmic background radiation would turn most of those claimed bits into noise.

In an earlier life, I designed much of the ADC section of a couple pieces of that high end lab instrumentation. Two stage pipelined architecture with flash ADCs and multiple paralleled DACS, full scale dither, 10 and 20 MSamples/second. So I have some familiarity with this.

I still think you are confusing the 128 kbit/second data stream of some compressed audio formats for the actual bit level of the recording.

----
PS. Here is another reference point showing why 128 bit recording accuracy is bunk --

The quietest sound a human can hear is about 0 dB SPL (20 uPa). The loudest tone that can be transmitted in air at sea level pressure without distortion (clipping because wave trough pressure cannot be lower than a pure vacuum) is about 194 dB SPL (101 kPa). This dynamic range of 194 dB can be represented with just 32 bits. See Examples of Sound Pressure.

If one limits the maximum signal to the threshold of pain, 22 or 23 bits is sufficient.

 

http://ultimateclassicrock.com/vinyl-edition-of-bruce-springsteens-wrecking-ball-announced/

Fear not, ye lovers of the black wax – Bruce Springsteen’s new album ‘Wrecking Ball’ will indeed be released on vinyl, with the day and date coinciding with the March 6 release date for all other formats.

Pressed as a two LP set, the Springsteen fan site Backstreets reports that the vinyl edition of ‘Wrecking Ball’ will feature the primary 11 tracks set to appear on the regular edition of the album. A CD copy will also be included with the vinyl pressing for the convenient purpose of on-the-go listening.

 

If you compare a digital signature to an analog signature (your name)

The digital is incomprehensible... just like digital music.

 

Are today's recording equipment mostly or all digital?

I remember back in the early days of CDs, most releases were AAD or ADD. But now I think they are all DDD (unless it's a re-release of an old analog master).

 

Awesome graphics! The rise and fall of CDs over thirty years...

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/081611thirty

 

From the RIAA!!! As for your question about recording....I don't think any productions are analogue by this point. Even way back when, I remember seeing a DAT setup at a local classical performance when I was in high school. I'm friends with some amateur musicians. All you need these days is some software and a modest 64bit computer setup...and you can record in HD PCM (24bit/192khz). As I said in a previous post...a lot of those classical CDs that said ADD (etc)...they're now recorded in DSD. So it's now a high definition master being encoded for 16bit CD/FLAC/mp3...and also mixing for surround SACD or blu-ray 24bit audio.

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization[/ame]

 

A bit of levity...

Todd Rundgren - An elpee's worth of tunes - YouTube