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Thread: BWGK on Vinyl
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Old 03-04-2009, 05:25 AM   #38
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Re: BWGK on Vinyl

Quote:
Originally Posted by thestand View Post
SACD is Super Audio CD. It is much more data on the disc, producing the same sound, providing for a much more high-definition sound. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD

Vinyl, when done right, sounds better than CD for a few reasons. One of them is an intangible, but is generally accepted: it's a warmer sound. Less harsh and digitalized. Vinyl can produce lower frequency waves, though these waves often fall into the range of sound normal ears cannot hear, so it is not a direct sound enhancement, but the effects can be felt in other ways. This won't be the case with the new album, as I'm sure they recorded into a digital board, but for albums that are recorded to an analog source, vinyl reproduces the sound as the artist intended for it to be heard. With CDs, the sound has to be digitized. But with vinyl, when taken from a master tape, it is taken directly from that, built into a master, and pressed onto vinyl. Then you get it, put it on your turntable, put the stylus to it, and it goes directly from the stylus to the preamp to the amp to your speakers, never being digitized, never being altered from how the band played it in the studio.

But like I said, that only goes for older albums (and newer albums where the band records to tape, which isn't done as often anymore).
If I may expand on your explanation...which is very good...

Digital sound is sampled at a certain rate, most often 44.1KHz, which means that if you take an analog sound wave over the period of one second, to convert to digital, it needs to be "sliced" into 44,100 pieces. Now that sounds like a ton of slices for one second, and it is, but imagine that one of those slices catches the very back end of one of Carter's high hat hits. The sound muddles or isn't as crisp as the original analog sound wave. That is an example of why analog sound will always reign supreme to digital in terms of fidelity. With sampling, there is *always* a loss.
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