Metal Reviews

I have everything on CD.

I used to have a 30 gig ipod with all my music on it, with about 70% originating from a purchased CD's. It crapped out, and I have spent the last year or so buying all the CDs of albums that were just on my ipod.

I agree with all the physical medium arguments but the biggest advantage they have with me is that I can listen to them in my (any) car. I do a lot of driving, so that is always a big plus.

I have exactly 420 CDs right now

Totally wrong. Vinyl is compressed much more heavily than CD and has very restrictive limitations on the physical frequencies and bandwidth that can be used. All of this is in the name of tracking, which is a problem itself because of the noise and heavy distortion and smearing associated with it.

Vinyl also can not be played back without the RIAA EQ which flattens the frequency response. The music can't be pressed on Vinyl without the frequencies being seriously squashed, only to be reversed. It is something like taking a cassette and recording at half-speed and playing it back at double speed to squeeze a little bit more quality out of the format. They have learned what frequencies the vinyl is good at storing and Re-EQ the whole signal to make up for it.

Analogue is usually colored and distorted, but in a very pleasing way that a great many people prefer and digital, either in music or cicuits, is dead-on accurate but is not as pleasing to the ear.

Vinyl has a lot of complications that digital will never have. Last time I read the wiki page on records, it read like every tonal or sound problem can happen, like if the platter doesn't stamp both channels with the same force, if results in phasey and off-balance sound that will never sound right. They also have poor Frequency response in the low end. Their theoretical limits are almost never pushed, which is why people always claim they have a broader range than digital. They don't where it matters and where our ears place the most importance. Vinyl also has crosstalk problems. This is the number one reason vinyl has that bass heavy sound, because kick drums and bass guitars usually panned down the center get a volume boost that isn't heard in the mastering and mixing stages.

Thanks for the info, dudes, I shall ponder it further.

So much for that. I can't remember where I first heard that. Whatever, now I know.

I mean, make no mistake. Vinyl has it's problems, but if you get a really good pressing and have all the right equipment (like a 5,000 dollar turntable, tone arm, cartridge) it can sound golden. It doesn't take stair-like samples of sounds, but it draws an uninterrupted sound wave.

The above is a huge deal for some people, but I think if it is making a couple thousand samples per second and redrawing the gaps between samples, that is still extremely accurate.

I don't hate vinyl, just the reality vs. the mythology of the format are grossly unexamined.

I average probably a CD a week, and although I like having the physical copy and also I like supporting the bands (you can only have so many T-Shirts), digital is far more convenient, especially for album selection. I would actually like it if CDs were physically much smaller.

Most car stereos have AUX inputs nowadays too so I don't find driving a problem .. although flipping through an MP3 player when you are driving is more distracting than grabbing a CD from your glove box.

Really, the only thing I am losing is fidelity.

If we are gonna have a discussion about MP3 quality, they are lossy, but lossy up around 15K-20Khz.

To put it simply. The lower a frequency, the less information is stored and the more emphasis your hearing places on the frequency and the higher the frequency, the more space is needed to store that info but your ear has a much harder time telling sounds apart because of this. It is not that linear or simple, but it as close as can be described without getting into it too heavily. Your ears need much less high frequency information to determine pitch and tone and has a difficult time with pitch on low frequencies.

The "color" of a note never changes because of octave and is totally independent of pitch, which is why typically the best natural musicians play bass...because they can.

The upper harmonic above where you can hear ("air") is also critical. Using a low-pass filter on MP3 is terrible because of this. The next to highest order is probably the least important, that is where you get the sizzle from cymbals decay and not much more.