Bye Bye CD?

[Endued]

There is a metric fuckton of misinformation in this thread. Some people still doing the whole "vinyl is clearly superior" thing too. Have a quick read of this:

Myths (Vinyl) - Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase

It's totally fine to prefer vinyl, but the 'warmth' the enthusiasts always mention is actually distortions.

 

[Thickguy007]

There is a metric fuckton of misinformation in this thread. Some people still doing the whole "vinyl is clearly superior" thing too. Have a quick read of this:

Myths (Vinyl) - Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase

It's totally fine to prefer vinyl, but the 'warmth' the enthusiasts always mention is actually distortions.

Same thing with recording to tape...it can be pushed and it gets a fuzzy sound going....people seem to have a thing for it. I like that element of analog/tape, being a guy who has recorded my own music for 15 years.

BUT...with digital, if you record without pushing the signal, it is better in many ways. I feel that what people are hearing is the CHOICE of modern producers to overly compress the signal to be LOUDER than everyone else. It is proven that in the last ten to twenty years the trend has been to get louder and louder mixes...which destroys the dynamic range that we the listener SHOULD be experiencing....
There is no loud, quiet...loud, soft...build anymore. It's all just varying degrees of loud. It does NOT have to be this way, has NOTHING to do with digital, other than the engineers ability to continuously tweak things. These guys are recording OFTEN times with analog gear, THEN the mastering process screws everything up...not the fact it's on CD.

 

[Mr. Snakey]

Same thing with recording to tape...it can be pushed and it gets a fuzzy sound going....people seem to have a thing for it. I like that element of analog/tape, being a guy who has recorded my own music for 15 years.

BUT...with digital, if you record without pushing the signal, it is better in many ways. I feel that what people are hearing is the CHOICE of modern producers to overly compress the signal to be LOUDER than everyone else. It is proven that in the last ten to twenty years the trend has been to get louder and louder mixes...which destroys the dynamic range that we the listener SHOULD be experiencing....
There is no loud, quiet...loud, soft...build anymore. It's all just varying degrees of loud. It does NOT have to be this way, has NOTHING to do with digital, other than the engineers ability to continuously tweak things. These guys are recording OFTEN times with analog gear, THEN the mastering process screws everything up...not the fact it's on CD.

You hit the nail on the head. Here is a demonstration on the Loudness and how it is destroying the dynamic range.This short video from You Tube says it all.
The Loudness War

 

[Calboner]

The fact that the closing sentence of the first-cited article describes MP3 as "superior" to CD (in no specified respect) suggests to me that the author is talking out his arse.

I think that this has a lot to do with what kind of music people listen to. I suspect that most of the music that gets distributed over the Internet is pop stuff that is pretty much a creation of electronic processing anyway, rather than any sort of attempt to capture the sound of an actual musical performance. With such stuff, it may be that the poverty of the digital recording doesn't make much difference. Music to me is classical music, in which the idea of preferring MP3 to uncompressed digital recording would be idiocy.

Analog recording may be superior to digital in some respects: I remember initially disliking the way that digital recordings made violins and female voices sound when CDs started coming out. But I guess I got used to it. In any case, I have never been much attached to the medium of vinyl records, which I always found troublesome. For years after I had started to collect CDs, I kept my collection of LPs (about 500 of them, I think), but found that as my collection of CDs grew, I listened to the LPs less and less, and eventually almost never. After some years of being burdened with them, I was glad to find a dealer who was willing to give me 20 cents a disc for the whole lot. I got rid of all of them except three recordings unavailable on CD that I never got around to recording for myself on to CD, as I did do with some of the others.