Vinyl is an actual GROOVE cut into the surface that is an accurate drawing of the soundwave from a performance.
The main groove in evidence here is the one between your buttocks, that you're talking out of.:wink:
Several japanese comapnies sued the DAT guys, and after a years long fight... won a suit in Japanese court that made it a LAW that no company could manufacture digtial miusic equipment with a higher sampling rate than CDs for at least 10 years.
My bold.
What law and which DAT '
guys'?
DAT was developed by Sony. To my knowledge there was
no such law - in which country(ies)? Please cite the case(s) and resultant legislation.
The DAT standard allows sampling of up to 48Khz/16bit although some manufacturers 'extended' this to 96Khz/24bit - consumer equipment tended to max out at 48Khz/16bit. Even the 'double' rate of 88Khz was only at the standard 16bit depth so offered no extended range.
To my knowledge very few manufacturers ever made 88Khz equipment; only Tascam and Pioneer that I know of. In real terms all DAT did was allow perfect copies of audio CDs - it never really had the potential to improve significantly on standard (red book) CD audio - so the audiophile argument is largely moot. But the equipment existed and was not illegal.
Its manufacture has
never been illegal anywhere that I'm aware of. There was a certainly a great deal of opposition to its introduction. This was especially the case in the US back in the late 1980s because the RIAA were so opposed to it, for the usual reason - greed.
But DAT equipment itself was never illegal per se, simply expensive and difficult to obtain. There was never
any legislation preventing its manufacture and/or use or sale, merely a latent threat of litigation by the RIAA for assumed copyright infringment resulting from its use.
The AHRA [re]affirmed that the use of digital audio recording devices (such as DAT) was not illegal. It did so in part by adding
a specific chapter relating to "Digital audio recording devices and media" to existing copyright law to expressly preclude such malicious threats by the RIAA.
That mandate did require that consumer devices contained SCMS in an attempt to impede the replication of high quality digital recordings between people and (for example) to CD although this requirement did not apply to professional equipment, nor to devices used expressly for non musical recordings, nor the non commerical copying of existing digital recordings.
To suggest the mere manufacture of such devices (that could sample above 44khz) was illegal is a complete nonsense. Such equipment could be purchased quite easily and legally in Europe and Japan from the mid 1980s. At that time it was common for Americans to cross into Canada to purchase DAT equipment, again entirely legally.
The illegality of such equipment was a common misconception held by many in the US - yourself included, evidently. If I recall, Dolly Parton (and others) went to Washington to lobby for legislation to outlaw DAT equipment
unless it contained anti copying chips.
The manufacturers of the equipment (such as Sony - Japanese
) were opposed to these chips precisely because they believed they would impair their audio performance. They even came to the US to argue this, successfuly as I recall.
DAT recordings were put on sale in the US although the catalogue was minimal. That hardly sits with assertion that even manufacturing the kit to play them was against a LAW, does it? For heavens sake, the '88 Ford Lincoln offered a DAT player!
Some key legislation you may wish to review are:
- Sony Corp. v. Universal Studios (set the ground rules in respect of copying of 'copyright' material).
- RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc (the use of the RIO MP3 player)
To answer the question... Vinyl sounds better because it contains vastly more information than any ordinary CD or MP3.
Rubbish, well sort of.
Vinyl can only hold (at most) as much information as the device that imparts is it capable of, only not really.
I only have a tenuous grasp on the theorem myself, (not really my field) but from what you are saying, your assertion appears based on a flawed interpretation of the Nyquest-Shannon sampling theorem - coupled with an unwillingness to acknowledge that the amount of data capable of being encoded into a vinyl groove is in fact also limited.
The better the vinyl, the better the master, the more perfect a picture it is. And the cool thing about vinyl is that the better the equipment you play it on, the more perfect the reproductions.
Masters are not made from vinyl but
lacquered aluminium.
Vinyl is capable of captureing Ultrawideband signals... far above AND below human hearing...and GOOD ultrawide band audio equipment can reproduce sound you can't even hear, but that has a harmonic and shaping effect on the sounds you CAN hear.
Vinyl doesn't 'capture'
anything, it's a passive medium.
You should do some research before coming here with this. The dynamic range of vinyl is perhaps 20-25 db
below that of an audio CD. As for the shaping stuff; what you are referring to is harmonic distortion, it's not beneficial in a technical sense because it's ...
distortion - but I agree, it can make the output sound nicer. Odd that, isn't it?
These may make you laugh, and learn, respectively:
Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD's Coffin
Dynamic Comparison of LPs vs CDs - Part 4 — Reviews and News from Audioholics
IEEE Spectrum: The Future of Music
That said, I entirely agree that Vinyl has some
perceived audio advantanges over CD in an auditory sense, although obviously it has a great many practical disadvantages. In reality however, those 'advantages' are imagined or at best, highly subjective. It doesn't sound 'better' so much as it sounds 'different'.
For some that's enough, I know for me it often is, I love the sound of vinyl but I don't delude myself into thinking it's better in any other way than subjectively. I suppose in a musical sense that's all that matters, but then one man's warmth is another's muddy base.
Forget SACD - it's a shame DVD Audio didn't catch on more - with a sample rate of up to 192khz it had great potential, but I wonder if the ship has sailed on physical media.
