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I was accused of being an analogue zealot, or equivalent, yesterday as I was extolling the sheer excellence of high quality vinyl. I get why one might think that streaming spotify into your phone and listening through (absolutely crap) Beats headphones, is the last word in audiophilia, if you have never heard better. There is nothing like listening to a well mastered nicely pressed record through an all analogue system. Well…… maybe a live performance.

In any case, I am both the most analogue and the most digital person I know. I was a very early adopter of CD (and have thousands of them), DVDA, SACD, Blu-Ray audio, surround sound and ran the gamut in the video sphere also from video 2000, to VHS to CD-I, to CD-V, to DVD to HD-DVD to Blu-Ray to UHD-Blu Ray. I ripped my entire CD collection to MP3 in 1999 – having to burn the files onto CD-R because there wasn’t a large enough external hard drive available then. I bought the first CD Walkman that supported MP3, then various MP3 flash players, the first windows iPod (and lots of its descendants), I rockboxed a Cowan-iAudio X3 to play flac bootlegs in 2007. I have a large collection of HiRes flac and DSD files that I can play through portable players and a high quality digital system at home. I bought Sonos in 2008. I use Roon. I love digital. I still prefer records.

Why do I make this point? After the horrific revelations about the UMC archive in 2008, I realize that we have really taken analogue recordings for granted for too long. I believe that recordings are best heard in the medium that they were first recorded – either analogue or digital. Yes I buy many new recordings on vinyl, but I don’t believe for one second that the record is better than the 24 bit digital master. But here is the rub: I bought the new Bruce Springsteen album today (by the way it is really good). I presume that this was recorded in a modern studio using a digital console and mixed in Pro-Tools, from which the digital master was constructed in 24/96 or 24/192 resolution. You can buy the album from HD Tracks or Qobuz at 24/96 and it will sound exactly like the studio master. The album can be obtained on downgraded 16 bit – as a CD or MP3 for €15 or you can pay up to €30 for the 3 sided vinyl album (limited edition on blue vinyl). There is no conceivable way that the record can outperform the digital version. One buys the record for the experience, to impress yourself and your friends by your collection, because you like to own music (and CD no longer feels like a quality product) and as a souvenir.

Analogue recordings are like paintings – in the master there are multiple layers of physical data that builds the soundstage. The best version of the recording is the original master tape. Every copy, irrespective of the quality, must be inferior. Mastering engineers, such as Kevin Gray, Steve Hoffman, Bernie Grundman etc. take the master tape and, using a lathe, cut a vinyl acetate that mirrors the master tape. Then there is a couple of generations of sound loss to construct the stamper (I know the mofi one step gets rid of this and improves the sound). Irrespective, a high quality vinyl pressing reconstructs the analogue master and brings with it the texture, colour and soundstage. The master tapes can be copied into a series of digital files, either in PCM or DSD format – but this is like making a photocopy of the original. Something always gets lost. The best transfers and the best mastering engineers may produce a digital copy very close to the master – and these often sound great, but not always. However, it makes NO SENSE whatsoever to take that digital album and use it to cut an acetate – for pressing into vinyl. This is analogous to photocopying a photocopy. It is so inferior to an all analogue (AAA) copy that it is scary.

Bizarrely, people, including and in particular me, will walk into a record shop and pick up a newly pressed digitally sourced 180g version of an album, while ignoring the vintage AAA version sitting in the second hand bin. Why would one do this? First – people like new stuff and new records look and feel good. Secondly, they may actually be better: I have piles of 1980s records that aren’t much thicker than flexidiscs – and sound hollow due to mass pressing. Also, for the best records in the best condition, second hand copies are unbelievably expensive. It is highly likely that the new copy of Dark Side of the Moon that your recently bought (and it is, in any given year, one of the top 5 selling vinyl titles), sounds better than your original version: pressed on flat virgin vinyl from a high quality source. Indeed, for most rock records from the 70s and 80s, the chance of picking up a really good sounding used product is quite low: Tom Port’s Better Records makes a business of buying lots of albums, identifying “hot stampers” and then charging $100s/$1000s for them. In my opinion, modern vinyl is of a much more consistent quality than the product I grew up listening to.

Finally, vinyl has now become very expensive. Vinyl box sets are typically twice the price of the equivalent version on CD; the CD box set drops in price over time, vinyl does not. But here is the crux: are they the same product? I recently bought the Traffic studio albums box set. I already had a couple of the records on vinyl (new pressings), and they are all easily availably from second had outlets as AAA (but first pressings are very expensive). The only Traffic album available for download on high res is “John Barleycorn Must Die” – which makes me think that the box set is sourced from 16 bit wav files. Considering that UMC is charging €25 per album in the box, the least they could do was source the records from the original analogue masters; if they still exist. Suckers? Probably.

~ by Pat Neligan on June 14, 2019.

Posted in Box Sets, Digital Music, Uncategorized, Vinyl