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Personality of vinyl

Paul's Posts — 02 April 2012

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Personality of vinyl

Hard to imagine that a piece of plastic has a personality but if you play vinyl records, each is an individual separate and distinct from all others.

Vinyl personalities depend on the pressing, the number of times its been played, the environment, the particulars of the stylus plying the grooves of the record and any number of unique circumstances of play and usage.

The individual personalities of vinyl add a unique dimension to this analog medium – but the personality traits are not usually beneficial to the sound quality as the individualism results from the copy degrading.  Unlike fine wine, vinyl does not get better with age.

It’s interesting to note that a vinyl collection is unique in all the world and a stored digital collection is not.

When I realized this my first reaction was a feeling of loss – I love the idea of possessing unique things – but then it occurred to me that while imperfection is unique it isn’t always desirable.

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About Author

Paul McGowan

Paul McGowan is the CEO and co-founder of PS Audio Inc. a Boulder Colorado design and manufacturing company of high-end audio products and services. McGowan has been designing and building high-end products for nearly 40 years. Hobbies include skiing, music, hiking, artisan bread baking, kick boxing and cooking. He lives in Boulder Colorado with his wife Terri and his 4 sons.

(11) Readers Comments

  1. zamazeev

    April 2, 2012 at 2:58 am

    No. Vinyl is just analog and real thing. Our brain understand this. And appreciate. Digital is pure artificial. Our brain understand it and do not appreciate it. No value. So simple.

    • Dmitrylo

      April 2, 2012 at 8:03 am

      Digital or analog – it doesn’t matter. Music matters.
      If your digital system sounds worse than analog it means your digital source isn’t good enough.
      I know what I say – I listened to vinyl from 1970 to 1990. It was the Golden Era of vinyl. Modern vinyl have nothing in common with it. New vynil is digital because it’s made from digital master files.

    • Staff

      April 2, 2012 at 6:53 pm

      Thought question: there are a number of vinyl albums today that were engineered, mixed and mastered digitally – then placed on the analog medium. People buying these vinyl pieces still think they sound better than the digital and I happen to agree.

      What say you then?

  2. sbrinck

    April 2, 2012 at 5:48 am

    I think it has a lot to do with our memories ,
    Some of my own fondest in audio are coming home with a new pressing. The packaging alone was always a treat how many things can you say that about these days . Paul mentioned like wine when you broke the seal you could tell right away if was a really fresh copy “Hah” the intoxicating smell off PVC’s the shine of the new pressing your ears would start to water just looking at it ! I could go on but I am already late for work. But i may just sit down this evening and uncork an old favorite .

    Digital Downloads even the name is depressing :-(

  3. LauraSkaer

    April 2, 2012 at 9:51 am

    Vinyl does indeed have personality and it is in the grooves–the wonderful music that flows from those grooves. Music that sounds more natural, more organic, more true to the source than any digital format out there. Are there imperfections? Of course, but there are imperfections with digital as well. Hard drives crash and get corrupted. If you have a good record cleaning machine like a Loricraft and use a record persative like LAST, use poly or rice paper sleeves lke MoFi, your records will last beyond your lifetime without any degradation in sound. Long live vinyl!

    • Staff

      April 2, 2012 at 6:53 pm

      Thanks Laura, you’re so spot on!

  4. Soundminded

    April 2, 2012 at 7:24 pm

    Vinyl phonograph records and record playing machinery have been a part of my life since I was born. Even as a toddler a phonograph was an important part of my existence. There is a certain visceral pleasure about watching the disc spinning, the tonearm undulating, and placing the tonearm on the record with your own hands and getting an instant response. I own around three thousand vinyl phonograph records, probably a few hundred 78s and lots of record playing machinery including those I wanted most when I was once upon a time an audiophile. These days if I listen to two or three phonograph records a year it’s a lot.

    Setting aside the obvious advantages of digital compact discs in terms of convenience, durability, portability, ease of storage, it would be nice to say that vinyl records and CDs each have their advantages. But the truth is, “t’ain’t so.” Redbook CD as a means for storing and retrieving electrical signals with the lowest possible distortion beats vinyl every way there is and not by a little but by orders of magnitude. You don’t have to be an engineer to prove it to yourself. Even with relatively inexpensive consumer grade equipment you can burn a CD from any vinyl phonograph record played on any record playing machine and make a duplicate that is invariably at worst almost indistinguishable from the original. In a laboratory I’m confident it would be entirely indistinguishable every time. You cannot do the same in reverse, not even close. What’s more, my experience bears out what the theory says, that the standards for Redbook CD are adequate for any and all musical recordings. I expect that further improvements to the standards would not produce audibly superior results.

    Then why do vinyl phonograph records often sound better in some ways than CDs? That’s a very complicated question with many factors involved. These in part relate to the extraordinary skill of the recording engineers who produced vinyl records making the most of what their limited and often inadequate media was capable of. One reason is the use of dynamic compression. By automatically increasing gain at the end of every musical phrase, all things being equal there is more audible reverberation, the gain being increased each time. Another is some degree of standardization of monitoring equipment during the era they were made. Various studios used different equipment but at least at large studios they were usually equalized by a skilled technician once a week using a calibrated microphone. This tended to minimize the differences in spectral balance of recordings although different labels did have different characteristic “signatures.” Many in the US used Altec A7, RCA used its own LC1A, British labels probably mostly used Tannoy Dual Concentric Monitors. Some record labels or sub labels had deliberate FR distortions to sound better on some equipment. RCA Dynagroove used bass boost comparable to the Fletcher Munsen compensation. London Phase 4 used a treble boost to sound good on mass market stereo consoles with poor treble. Columbia 360 Sound cut bass below 50 hz and had a boosted treble (possibly the result of using those A7s one salesman from Altec was so excited about having told me he just sold them 56 pairs.) Command records deliberately produced “ping-pong” stereo, Enoch Light arranging both music and musicians to get this effect. This was especially noticeable in console stereos where speakers weren’t separated very far. In short recording engineers of that era were expert knob twirlers and used the full array of what was available to them to the hilt to get the best results. By contrast I think that by the time cd manufacturers began recycling their old recordings in the 1980s the master tapes had deteriorated and they wanted to get as much product out on the market as cheaply and quickly as possible. Early A/D and D/A converters may have also left something to be desired. Additionally the current generation of recording engineers whom I suspect come largely from the ranks of audiophiles often take a “purist” view with little knob twirling and using their favorite speakers “out of the box” as monitors. I find that spectral balance of CDs is all over the place. With high end sound systems no longer providing means to compensate for that it’s small wonder they often sound so awful. Many large studios probably switched to using expensive B&W 801s, and later 802s as their monitors of choice while others use small nearfield monitors probably mostly built around the heavily passively equalized BBC LS3/5a design (Rogers, Harbeth, etc).

    For those “purists” whose fantasy imagines some sort of impossible “direct to disc” translation from microphone to vinyl, here’s something to think about, something you don’t want to see that you can add to watching sausages and legislation being made. Even with direct to disc you will get at least 2 extreme (40db) RIAA equalizations, one on recording, one on playback. If the recording was captured on a master multitrack tape recorder and mixed down you will get at least 4 more comparable NAB equalizations in the signal path. If Dolby A Professional noise reduction was used, it’s your worst nightmare come true. It breaks the signal into four bands, applies equalization to each of them differently and to a degree depending on the instantaneous loudness of each one, compresses them on recording and then does the reverse on playback before re-integrating them. Calibration had better be dead on perfect or there’s big trouble with it. This adds 8 more equalizations so even without the mastering engineer’s knob twiddling (what do you think all of those adjustments on those mixing consoles do anyway) you have 14 equalizations. Here’s another. Except for the earliest stereophonic recordings, nearly all vinyl records from the early 1960s onward were processed using only solid state equipment, that’s right not a tube in the circuit but dozens of transistors in the signal path. If you don’t like the term download, how does the term re-grind strike you? Yep, to keep costs down, recording companies would grind up old vinyl records, melt them down and recycle them. Then around 1970 they started making them thinner to cut costs and as a result they warped more easily, especially in the stacks in store displays. And then there was the fact that over time the stampers wore out so some pressings of the same record may not have been as good as others if quality control wasn’t uppermost in their minds.
    About the only recording/playback media I can think of that doesn’t require equalization, noise reduction or dynamic compression just to make it function are all digital.

  5. oliver T. Finch

    April 2, 2012 at 8:06 pm

    While analogue more often than not results in getting lost in the performance digital never does that. Obviously something is missing.. Forcing oneself to think that something is better simply because it is close to ideal on paper is an exercise in futility at least in this case. Regards.

  6. LauraSkaer

    April 3, 2012 at 10:24 am

    My experiences are completely different from Soundminded. In virtually every case, I hear a difference between the vinyl and a redbook CD of the same recording, and so can almost everyone who has listened to both in my listening room, and the vinyl sounds better almost every time. Last year at RMAF, I played a cut from the new Decemberists album, both from the vinyl and the redbook CD, in different rooms and the difference was not subtle. The vinyl was more open, airy, natural and warm. The CD was obviously compressed and less musical compared to the vinyl. Everyone in the room heard the differences.

  7. Soundminded

    April 3, 2012 at 1:07 pm

    Directly comparing “Water Music of the Impressionists” played by Carol Rosenberger performed on a Bosendorfer Imperial Concert Grand Delos DMS 3006 played with a Shure V15Type V MR in an Empire 698 and Delos DE 3190 played on a Toshiba SD-K741 DVD player they were indistinguishable to my ears. The vinyl was in pristine condition having been played only once or twice before.

    I am not surprised however that many vinyl records sound different from CD releases of the same recording and I’ve posted previously some of the reasons why I think that is and why many like the vinyl version better. I don’t think it is inherent in the CD standard, only the way in which it is used.

    One thing I appreciate about CDs is that when you are listening to music that is not loud, say music of French Impressionists you are not bothered by pops and clicks that detract unacceptably to me.

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