The vinyl illusion ?

[Macca]

No you are both wrong, there are not hundreds of analogue lathes around, there have not been since the 1970s. Possibly an idea to do some reading up on the subject rather than just believing what you want to believe. Never understood why people do that.

Also there is a difference between recording and mastering. You can have an excellent recording and ruin it with compression in mastering. 'Brickwalling' is something completely different and relates to the cut off frequency of CD.

[Marco]

No you are both wrong, there are not hundreds of analogue lathes around, there have not been since the 1970s. Possibly an idea to do some reading up on the subject rather than just believing what you want to believe. Never understood why people do that.

I didn't say that there were hundreds of them around [you're putting words into my mouth, as I didn't state a figure], simply that there are obviously more than you think, some of which, as Jez says, will be ones left over from 'back in the day', and used by studios and people who wish to produce the highest quality all-analogue recordings.

If you look around, you'll find quite a few specialist labels producing vinyl records in that way. Outside of the mainstream, it's certainly not that obscure.

Also there is a difference between recording and mastering. You can have an excellent recording and ruin it with compression in mastering. 'Brickwalling' is something completely different and relates to the cut off frequency of CD.

That's irrelevant to the point I'm making - a bad recording is a BAD recording, no matter the reason! And there are plenty of them around. Try buying your average 'chart CD', these days, for starters, or anything commercially produced for the masses, and see what it sounds like

Marco.

[JohnMcC]

I've been following this thread with great interest because it reflects my own experience so closely (this is mostly about classical music btw). For me there's a sort of hierarchy of listening. Most of the time a really great performance will transcend the medium. For instance, I have a recording from 1930 of Madeleine Grey singing the Songs of the Auvergne (and Ravel's "Chansons Hebraique", accompanied by Ravel himself) which I will take over any other recording of that work. It was transferred from old, scratchy 78s onto a World Record Club LP sometime in the 1960s without any real cleaning up; the backing Band on the Canteloube is a Parisian pick-up orchestra that sounds as if they've spent the afternoon on the piss; the singing is not always pitch-perfect and the tempi are faster than we're used to today. But the performance, the listening experience, is just perfect . . . for me.

That's the top - when the medium just doesn't impinge on the experience. Then there's listening to vinyl - for me it's more involving because it requires more commitment. I can pause any digital recording at any point, and the listening experience might be marred, but the music will pick up exactly where it stopped. If I have to interrupt a vinyl session it is much more annoying - to the extent that I ask for no domestic disturbance unless a real emergency occurs. Having invested the time and effort in finding, buying, cleaning and then playing (carefully handling everything) an old vinyl LP, I will listen to less than perfect performances with enjoyment.

Not quite so with digital. For me if it's digital it should sound great every time - quality of performance and all. My ears suffered with the first decade of CDs - all that shoutiness, all those careless transfers to silver disc. So I'm much pickier with CDs particularly than with vinyl. Vinyl's not a con, or a fad, or on its way out, because - in my opinion, and given copies of the same excellent performance on either vinyl, CD or high res download, the vinyl seems to give me simply a better experience.

[montesquieu]

2nd harmonic is a funny thing, indeed celebrated amplifier designer Douglas Self suggested the idea of an amplifier with a control to allow the user to vary the amount of 2nd harmonic applied to the signal. Although I don't think any such amp was ever built.

If you read some of the stuff written by Jason Lim, creator of NuForce and now boss of NuPrime (he kept the high-end stuff when he sold off NuForce), he openly admits to manipulating second harmonic in his power amps in a bid to make Class D sound more appealing ... and succeeds in my view.

I'm still very much a valve amp fan and wouldn't swap my big Radford for any solid state amp I've ever heard, but I can see the day when Class D will finally get there - the task is for electronics designers (working with acousticians and psychologists) to gain bit more understanding of what actually appeals to the ear in a valve amp, and modelling it.

This is not unrelated to the vinyl-CD discussion. I have a pretty nice digital setup that I enjoy. For whatever reason (possibly because I have four times as many records as CDs) I listen to vinyl probably four times as much, and many evenings don't even switch the digital rig on. In fact to counter this tendency, sometimes I deliberately only play CD - leaving the lid firmly on the turntable - just to make sure I have a bit of diversity in my listening, going for new recordings rather than my old favorites.

Digital can be great but I think vinyl is almost always more enjoyable, not necessarily always for reasons of sound, but in its tactile qualities which encourage better engagement with the programme material. Also a 20-25 minute 'side' is a just the right length for the human attention span to focus without a break - it can be hard in a domestic environment to keep unbroken listening concentration for a whole CD of 60 or even 80 minutes (it's far easier at a concert where there are other cues to keep the energy up for continuous engagement). These factors far from being unimportant are core to the listening experience.

[Macca]

I didn't say that there were hundreds of them around [you're putting words into my mouth, as I didn't state a figure], simply that there are obviously more than you think, some of which, as Jez says, will be ones left over from 'back in the day', and used by studios and people who wish to produce the highest quality all-analogue recordings.

If you look around, you'll find quite few specialist labels producing vinyl records in that way. Outside of the mainstream, it's certainly not that obscure.



That's irrelevant to the point I'm making - a bad recording is a BAD recording, no matter the reason! And there are plenty of them around. Try buying your average 'chart CD', these days, for starters, or anything commercially produced for the masses, and see what it sounds like

Marco.

Fair enough you did not say 'hundreds', don't know where I got that from.

But you are still confusing mastering with recording. Those chart cds are very well recorded. They then have the dynamic range flattened in mastering, making them sound awful on a decent system. I've challenged people before when this subject has come up to actually name a poor recording so we all know what they are talking about. No-one ever does.

I'll grant you that good or bad recording is relative, compared to say some Opus 3 or Sheffield Labs recording you might argue that a mainstream rock release sounds poor. But that is comparative. I want to know what these recordings are that are so bad they are unplayable, because I don't believe they exist. (BTW bootlegs or something your mate's band recorded in the garage on a Sanyo ghetto blaster don't count).

[Marco]

No worries. Ok then, simply substitute 'poor recordings' with 'shit sounding CDs', as it's only the FINAL RESULT [what you hear] that matters, and there are plenty of the latter around, which are shown up for what they are by any decent system!

I also don't believe that some of these recordings were that great to start with, even before they arrived at the mastering stage, certainly in comparison with how things were once done, and the sheer attention to detail and care taken by dedicated and experienced sound engineers, back in the day when only the best was considered as good enough.

That's one of the reasons, equipment aside, why some older recordings (think here from the 50s and 60s) often sound as good as they do.

Marco.

[Stratmangler]

I thought when I wrote that that someone was bound to come back with some obscure place where they still use an analogue cutting lathe. It isn't in any way related to the point I was making

That wasn't the reason I dug out and dropped the video.
I was fascinated that record cutting had incorporated computer control over cutting depth and pitch.
The two head tape machines were fairly rare, and there's no free lunch with them -they need someone extremely capable to keep the machine calibrated and up to snuff. To make sure those playback heads are exactly azimuth aligned is a headache in itself.

Now go to the more common scenario, where there's only one playback head.
You send the initial playback to the cutting computer, and you need to use a delay line to feed the signal to the cutter head.
You're not going to use an analogue delay, because of the degenerative issues they have.
An analogue delay is also incapable of producing a delay signal at a precisely timed interval
Chuck in a digital delay line, and you have the input replicated in the delay, only at the required delay interval. Because the A to D, and D to A are covered in the one box, you're feeding analogue signal in, and getting analogue signal out, which is what you need to drive the cutter head.

Move on to what's the common situation today, and the cutting computer works directly with 24/96000 files and a midi synced control system - no further delay required, and the cutter head being fed from a mixing console's ADC.

[Marco]

I've been following this thread with great interest because it reflects my own experience so closely (this is mostly about classical music btw). For me there's a sort of hierarchy of listening. Most of the time a really great performance will transcend the medium. For instance, I have a recording from 1930 of Madeleine Grey singing the Songs of the Auvergne (and Ravel's "Chansons Hebraique", accompanied by Ravel himself) which I will take over any other recording of that work. It was transferred from old, scratchy 78s onto a World Record Club LP sometime in the 1960s without any real cleaning up; the backing Band on the Canteloube is a Parisian pick-up orchestra that sounds as if they've spent the afternoon on the piss; the singing is not always pitch-perfect and the tempi are faster than we're used to today. But the performance, the listening experience, is just perfect . . . for me. That's the top - when the medium just doesn't impinge on the experience. Then there's listening to vinyl - for me it's more involving because it requires more commitment. I can pause any digital recording at any point, and the listening experience might be marred, but the music will pick up exactly where it stopped. If I have to interrupt a vinyl session it is much more annoying - to the extent that I ask for no domestic disturbance unless a real emergency occurs. Having invested the time and effort in finding, buying, cleaning and then playing (carefully handling everything) an old vinyl LP, I will listen to less than perfect performances with enjoyment. Not quite so with digital. For me if it's digital it should sound great every time - quality of performance and all. My ears suffered with the first decade of CDs - all that shoutiness, all those careless transfers to silver disc. So I'm much pickier with CDs particularly than with vinyl. Vinyl's not a con, or a fad, or on its way out, because - in my opinion, and given copies of the same excellent performance on either vinyl, CD or high res download, the vinyl seems to give me simply a better experience.

Could we have that again, please John, this time with paragraphs? It makes it *so* much easier to read, otherwise the tendency will simply be for folks to by-pass what you've written

Marco.

[Arkless Electronics]

The last time I read any article on the subject was a few years ago (other than that Neumann in Nairobi) but the situation was that many of the old lathes and pressing equipment had been scrapped and that there was a frantic effort being made to track down remaining lathes and presses, refurbish them, and put them back to use to accommodate the renewed popularity of vinyl. Much of it was being found in odd places and there was a lot in Eastern Europe, including several facilities still able to cut and press vinyl records. Much of this kit was well past sell by date and results could be variable... Rumble from worn bearings in the lathe was even reported!

A cutter head is like a giant MC cartridge in reverse and is driven by an analogue signal from a power amplifier. I can well imagine that digital add ons for controlling the position of the cutter head etc will have been added. The continued growth of vinyl may well by now mean that new lathes and presses are being built, but I fail to see how anything but driving the coils of the cutter head from a power amplifier would make any sense. I can see that it is certainly possible that said power amps could be driven by a "digital pre-amp" and DAC from the digital master recording, and that the RIAA EQ could be applied digitally in this "digital pre-amp", but the signal from the DAC would still be analogue to the power amps, which then drive the cutting head.

If "everything I thought I knew about disc cutting" has been supplanted by some new digital technique I've never heard of in the last few years then I will stand corrected...

[anthonyTD]

The last time I read any article on the subject was a few years ago (other than that Neumann in Nairobi) but the situation was that many of the old lathes and pressing equipment had been scrapped and that there was a frantic effort being made to track down remaining lathes and presses, refurbish them, and put them back to use to accommodate the renewed popularity of vinyl. Much of it was being found in odd places and there was a lot in Eastern Europe, including several facilities still able to cut and press vinyl records. Much of this kit was well past sell by date and results could be variable... Rumble from worn bearings in the lathe was even reported!

A cutter head is like a giant MC cartridge in reverse and is driven by an analogue signal from a power amplifier. I can well imagine that digital add ons for controlling the position of the cutter head etc will have been added. The continued growth of vinyl may well by now mean that new lathes and presses are being built, but I fail to see how anything but driving the coils of the cutter head from a power amplifier would make any sense. I can see that it is certainly possible that said power amps could be driven by a "digital pre-amp" and DAC from the digital master recording, and that the RIAA EQ could be applied digitally in this "digital pre-amp", but the signal from the DAC would still be analogue to the power amps, which then drive the cutting head.

If "everything I thought I knew about disc cutting" has been supplanted by some new digital technique I've never heard of in the last few years then I will stand corrected...