Vinyl & CD & MP3.... That to me is an unfair battle...Originally Posted by wazkelly
The absolute beauty of vinyl is in that it is entirely analogue. That minuscule little Diamond shaking back and forth as it tracks down the groove of your favourite 33rpm LP being mechanically coupled to a magnet surrounded by two just as tiny coils to generate a pair of electrical signals that are then amplified before going to another set of much bigger coils in much much bigger magnetic fields that ultimately generate those magical sounds we love.... Nothing is missed, All of it is there, including the dust and static that vinyl is known for...
CD is clean. 44100 times a second the incoming analogue audio is measured and allocated a value. A value that will never change for the rest of eternity. No matter how many people jump on that wooden dance floor if you put enough of those values into a big enough buffer the D to A conversion at the loud speaker will always be representative of the original recorded value. But some question the process, some 'Golden Ears' consider the process flawed, and possibly for good reason.... In my mind I see it this way. On a 440Hz note and with 44100 per second sample rate there will be close to 100 individual samples available to rebuild a single cycle of the original "sound" at the loud speaker, but on the 88th note of a piano at 4186.1Hz there will only be about 10 individual samples to rebuild all the complexities of that specific piano note. Ten samples is still quite a lot and will be fairly representative but it will not be 100% accurate. Thankfully though we don't have dust and static to contend with.
Then there is MP3.... the WIN ZIP of the music world. As CD is simply a series of numeric values, and if we jam those numbers into a computer and ZIP them then we can cram more and more music into less and less hard drive space. We can shrink the files more if we re-sample to a lower bit rate, which is the same as changing our original CD sample rate of 44100Hz to something less like 32000 or 24000 or 16000 or 9600Hz. We can even go to in between sample rates by using a bit of maths and predicting what a sample might be if it were taken somewhere between two 44100Hz samples and then using that newly mathematically created sample as a way of creating an entirely new sample rate... It's just numbers, and we have the calculator... But as we know everyone has a different ear for these things and to some people these fictitious sample rates are just wrong.... They sound bad. They might be okay for recording a telephone conversation or a Uni lecture on a 2GB SD card but in no way should they be used for quality music. Unfortunately many do, yet thankfully there are many more who don't.
Most radio stations these days do not have a vinyl or a CD collection... Nearly all have only MP3's. Most of those MP3's are at a reasonable bit rate. There will be a CD player somewhere in the studio used to add to the collection of MP3's, and usually one of the managers will have access to a vinyl to CD recorder, so if there is a 'Golden track' brought in they can find a way to add it to the master library all in the name of posterity ....
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