edit: to be clear, a CD will have far more resolution and technical capacity available than a vinyl ever will, I'm just saying that CDs have their own issues and aren't perfect.

>pretty much all CD players have garbage-tier DAC implementations.

A true audiophile I see, anything consumer-grade is "garbage" in order to justify the purchase of ridiculously overpriced equipment. The truth is that it's very cheap to design a decent quality DAC or ADC these days, mainly thanks to digital processing and the fact that those chips are made in huge quantities. Digital filters are high quality these days and the use of oversampling makes it a lot easier to design good analog filters.

Audiophiles are very hard to take seriously because the hobby is 95% snake oil and 5% reasonable engineering. I'm sorry if you're part of the 5% and I overreacted but it's one of these hot buttons for me. I've spent so much time arguing with people that, no, it made to mathematical sense to want 32bit samples or 160kHz audio...

Actually I'm rather fond of the $80 SDAC and it stands tall among other, more expensive stuff I have (I'm listening to it as type this in fact). It's miles ahead of any CD player DAC. Seriously, a CD transport into a cheap DAC will sound very noticeably better. Admittedly I've only sampled about a dozen or so supposedly good players and eventually lost interest so it's not a big sample pool.

I'm with you in that I also agree that it's dumb how most amplitude-signal DACs market "32bit/768khz" despite that sample rate being effectively useless and the noise floor in DS chips being at around ~20 bits worth of resolution and that's a best case scenario.

edit: honestly when it comes to amps and dacs, in my experience, there is no spec or measurement that correlates with how good it sounds so with those I pretty much gave up on anything other than my ears.

I bought some half decent speakers by my standards around a year ago (Creative T40s for what its worth).

As a test I tried some MP3 tracks at various bitrates sitting on my hard drive to see if I could guess the difference. Most of the time I thought the 192kbps sounded better than the 320kbps.

Not to sound condescending but those speakers you mention don't seem very decent at and probably don't warrant any conclusion towards the benefits of various compression settings or audiophile configurations in.

https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/134...

Additionally, this is purely talking about loudness dynamic range, not even including resolution or JND (just noticeable difference). I will demonstrate to you below how even 20 bits per sample is insufficient in some cases.

Imagine for a moment that you could argue that the human hearing threshold of quantization error is only 4 bits (only 16 discrete values!) at the sound level of a pin dropping (10db). Now, I think we can all agree that’s absurd; we need a lot more than just 16 discrete amplitude values to represent the sound of a pin drop indistinguishable from reality to a human ear. But for the moment, let’s be really really generous to your point and assume it’s enough!

Now, let’s suppose we want to extend the recording so sounds at 110db appear later on (say, an intense bass explosion in an action movie after a quiet scene early on). To do this without clipping, what range of discrete values do we need? 110db-10db = 100db = 100,000x greater amplitude than the pin drop. This means we need to be able to represent peak amplitude values of 1,600,000.

This exceeds the ability of 16 bits to losslessly represent the quiet 10db pin drop and 110db explosions within the same movie’s audio track! You would need at least 21 bits in this example. And I’ve been generous with my assumptions here, making the extreme assumption that even 4bits per sample is enough to record a 10db pin drop, which is clearly not enough.

If you think 110db is unrealistic for brief periods, it’s not, even for music: bass frequencies in particular can reach extreme amplitudes that might surprise you. I recently played an extremely well recorded orchestral piece at reference volume on my equipment and was so impressed by the dynamic range, I later measured the decibel levels (C-weighted). The quietest moments are around 65-70db, increases to 80-90db at times, and peaks several times momentarily to 105db when the bass drum hits (you feel it like a punch of an air wave)! It turns out this is exactly how real bass drums measure. Yet, the drum hit doesn’t sound unbearable loud (as treble would be at that decibel level), so much as tactile, because much of that energy is subsonic.

If you do much research into perceptual psychology studies, you’ll see just how surprisingly difficult it can be to completely pin down the limits of human perception on average, let alone including outliers among the human population. In that sense, it’s entirely reasonable that a durable high fidelity recording format that holds up to time should be over-engineered, so there’s at least no worry that some study will prove it’s missing something later.

That said, I don’t really agree with the parent post that most DACs are horrible, but I can’t comment on CD player DACs since I don’t use physical media. Most phone DACs are quite good. Most PC DACs are horrible not because of the DAC but because buzzing noises from system clocks and other sources always appear on my speakers (it’s very loud and noticeable), so I’m forced to use a cheap $20 external DAC, which quite frankly is nearly as good as anything else you’ll get at any price.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Aud...

Vinyl sounds more like vinyl than CDs do, until a specific piece of vinyl is reduced to a shambles by time.

People who really like vinyl have a bad habit of equivocating between the above two statements, using "better" to mean either "greater fidelity" (which is wrong) or "sounds more like vinyl" (which is a tautology) without signalling which meaning they mean.

https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)

However, one note about CD quality — it may not be as perfect as you think! A peer-reviewed meta-analysis has shown that humans can hear the difference between CD quality (44khz/16bit) and “high-res audio” recordings (e.g. 192khz/24bit)! The perceptual difference is relatively small, but measurable (assuming high quality speakers and signal chain):

https://phys.org/news/2016-06-people-difference-high-resolut...

I doubt 44khz sampling rate is a problem, but fixed point 16 bits per sample does seem fairly constraining, given how our perception of linear audio loudness corresponds to exponential increases in signal strength.

Also, if anyone tries to test it yourself, beware that it is actually quite hard to do so properly:

1. Any listening tests in a web browser will just resample to CD quality automatically anyway, because they just play into your OS’s shared audio mixing system, which mixes all audio sources before they reach your DAC, which usually resamples them all to CD quality in this process.

2. The above point applies to ANY app that doesn’t take exclusive control over your PC’s audio output capability, and even then there are many pitfalls where you can almost accidentally trigger a default CD quality resampling stage somewhere in the pipeline.

3. Be careful to ensure the audio file you’re playing wasn’t just a regular CD quality file that was simply upsampled to 192/24 or whatever high res rate it claims to be. Sadly, this happens a lot. Your audio file MUST be recorded AND mastered (edited) in the studio at every stage using high res formats.

4. Make sure your audio signal path doesn’t have any components introducing dynamic range (loudness) compression (many default to this, these days), or any other resampling, equalization, etc. stages.

5. Your DAC may not even support anything higher than 44/16 data streams, so resampling may be inevitable!

6. Make sure you played the audio samples on extremely high quality speakers (often costing many thousands of dollars, making this whole point moot/irrelevant for most people anyway). The vast majority of consumer headphones and speakers can’t render a low vs high bitrate MP3 very differently, let alone the subtle differences we’re talking about here.

It's not just a matter of reproduction. Humans make the products different.

Look at the bottom of this page:

http://brianstagg.co.uk/p_t_a_clipressed/

If you were listening to music at that volume, it would generally be considered unsafe, and you would potentially have hearing loss beyond 37 minutes [1]

16 bits is plenty.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_bit_depth [1] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/noise/default.html

dB expresses the ratio of one value to another. So without knowing what the other value is, it's rather meaningless. But it is unfortunately an often-made mistake: how many times haven't you heard or read just dB as such? Anyway, this means you cannot simply compare dB dynamic range with dB used to express sound pressure level of which 'A-Weighted' is just one standard which gets used. Those are completely different things. Simply said, you can play 96dB dynamic range music at sound pressure levels which you won't even hear. Or at sound pressure levels which damage your ears nearly instantly.

And 96 to 119 is huge improvement.

First: Bits per sample just describe how many discrete amplitude values (2^bits) are possible at each sample of a recording. The waveform is quantized to these values.

To understand quantization in the context of dynamic range, imagine how many bits per sample are needed to recreate a very quiet sound without loss, and then check how many bits you need to extend that to reach very loud sounds in the same recording file.

For example: How much precision would you need to accurately record the sound of a pin dropping (10db)? 4 bits? 8 bits? 10 bits? 12 bits?

Let’s be really absurd and say we can use 4 bits — just 16 discrete values — to represent a pin dropping sound (10db) cleanly and indistinguishable from the real thing. This is so obviously impossible, given how terribly quantized the waveform would be, but let’s be generous and assume it works.

Now, for the same audio file to reach all the way up to 110db (not uncommon for bass drum hits in an orchestra for example) is an extra 100db of dynamic range, which is 100,000x the amplitude, which is a little over 16 bits in addition to the original 4. So, rounding down, we’d need 20 bits to represent 10db sounds (with quantization down to only 16 discrete amplitudes) and 110db sounds in the same recording.

I think it’s extremely obvious that even 20 bits in this example is far from sufficient. In fact, even 24 bits would be insufficient if 8 bits per sample are not good enough to record a pin dropping at 10db!

The absolute minimum threshold of human perception is about -8dB. 1 bit corresponds to about 6 dB of dynamic range, so the sound of a pin dropping at 10 dB can be represented perfectly within the limits of human hearing using only 3 bits.

Additionally, with proper dithering, the effective dynamic range of a 16-bit digital signal is around 120 dB. That's sufficient to reproduce everything from the -8 dB absolute quietest audible sound all the way up to your 110 dB bass drum.

See https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html#toc_1... for a more detailed analysis.

A pin drop contains a continuous and gradual decay of the ringing over time, which most certainly is audible (at least subjectively) in more gradations than just 8 levels before reaching 0.

But this isn’t just subjective: Studies have confirmed that humans can hear decibel differences of 1db quite reliably, and can even hear as little as 0.2db subconsciously (this can be objectively measured)!

So long as you can hear a pin drop ringing at 1db, and also at 10db, it’s therefore obviously true that 3 bits per sample (undithered) is insufficient to express this (keep in mind, these samples are linear amplitudes!)

So I’m not sure how you can possibly claim that 3bits is enough to replicate the continuous amplitude decay of a pin drop’s ringing sound. What am I missing?

That’s said, I will now go read your link. I agree dithering is one viable way to expand the dynamic range, but you also seem to be claiming this 3bit pin drop is true without dithering.

Since we can't hear any sound quieter than -8 dB SPL, then (I think) we can't hear a difference smaller than the 6 dB between -8 and -2 dB because that difference is quieter than the threshold of human perception. Similarly, the next perceptible change in amplitude would be to +1.5 dB (3x the threshold of perception), then 4 dB (4x), 6 dB (5x), 7.6 dB (6x), 8.9 dB (7x), and 10 dB (8x).

So, since 10 dB is 8 times the threshold of human perception, I think eight discrete values should be enough to represent everything we can hear up to that point.

Of course, I'm assuming we can only hear in discrete increments of the minimum threshold of perception, -- it makes sense to me that we would be unable to hear a difference in amplitude quieter than the threshold -- but this could very well be a mistaken assumption. (It's also worth pointing out that 10 dB is very, very quiet -- the article I linked says 20 dB is the standard noise floor for a soundproof room/recording studio.)

Another way of thinking about this is in terms of quantization error. Our 3-bit pin drop signal can be interpreted as the original analog signal plus a quantization error, and that error is clearly always quieter than the minimum threshold of perception.

Edit: This article [0] contains a table for the minimum detectable difference in sound level. It shows that, at a level of 5 dB SPL, the just-noticeable difference in amplitude is 2.5 dB at the frequency range of peak sensitivity -- which is pretty close to the numbers I found based on discrete multiples of the absolute threshold. So it looks like 3 bits is indeed sufficient for our pin drop (unless I'm mistaken somewhere).

[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/just-notice...

I think there's a lot of subtlety being missed between dynamic range and resolution. For example, I think your JND (just noticeable difference) assumption is incorrect; my understanding of the scientific consensus is that a 1db difference at any volume is consciously perceivable to "normal" human hearing (and 3db to virtually all humans), and a 0.2db difference has been shown to be subconsciously perceivable by most. This places the required bit depth (not counting dithering) of an audio recording spanning all human perception WELL beyond 96db, and probably somewhere in excess of 120-140db! This is consensus, BTW; hence most CD-apologists people defer to the dithering argument :)

Also, I did finish reading that article up to the point about bit depth, and unfortunately there's quite a bit of either bad and misleading data in there unfortunately. While the article does contain some very good true info, it's sadly riddled with enough bad/outdated claims that I can't really recommend it to anyone as a reputable/trustworthy source of truth. It strikes me very much as if the author is unaware of how imprecise our approximate understanding of psycho-accoustics actually is, when it makes extremely overconfident claims like "CD quality will be enough FOREVER".

For example, the point made about near infrared being invisible to all humans is obviously false: most humans can't, but a certain percentage of blue-eyed humans can see near infra-red (including remote control IR). I've known one such person personally, and have tested and confirmed this thoroughly. I agree that it's silly to try to make a TV that emits these frequencies (and cameras that capture them), but my point here is simply: there's a lot of bad info in that article, perhaps shamefully so for an article making such bold and confident assertions under the name of "science".

Regarding bit depth, the article doesn't really even try to dispute the fact that 96db is insufficient; it just says with dithering, we shouldn't have to worry about it. I'd love to agree, but the combination of the meta-analysis that shows it's not sufficient is all I need to prove that your linked article is simply wrong.

There many be a wide range of reasons why the meta-analysis found high res audio to sound slightly better, but none of that invalidates the validity of the results themselves.

For example, maybe most DACs aren't very good at replicating dithered subtleties (I'm just speculating examples here) -- supposing such a common problem exists, then we could debate whether it makes more sense to improve DACs with fancy improvements to dither reconstruction filtering -- OR -- we could just encode at least 140db of dynamic range in the sample bit depth in the first place! The latter seems a far simpler and less-overengineered solution to me.

Dithering is fine when it works, but let's be honest: fundamentally, dithering is a kind of compression algorithm that encodes a greater dynamic range within a signal with an artificially constrained dynamic range (but with the side-effect that not all DACs will handle it equally well). In the modern digital world, there's no need to rely on dithering any more in audio signals, in the same way that we don't see dithered 256-color images much any more. Why don't we leave compression up to the compression algorithms, rather than promoting ACDs/DACs that are glorified compression/decompression hardware? Modern lossless compression algorithms are vastly better anyway, if bitrate savings is the goal.

The Wikipedia article about JND seems to imply that the general 1 dB rule may not necessarily apply near the limits of perception. I haven't found a whole lot of more detailed information; however, the table I linked in the edit to my previous comment seems to indicate that the JND in dB gets much higher at very quiet volumes.

> For example, the point made about near infrared being invisible to all humans is obviously false: most humans can't, but a certain percentage of blue-eyed humans can see near infra-red (including remote control IR)

The article does mention that at some IR remotes can be visible:

> Can you see the Apple Remote's LED flash when you press a button? No? Not even the tiniest amount? Try a few other IR remotes; many use an IR wavelength a bit closer to the visible band, around 310-350THz. You won't be able to see them either. The rest emit right at the edge of visibility from 350-380 THz and may be just barely visible in complete blackness with dark-adjusted eyes. All would be blindingly, painfully bright if they were well inside the visible spectrum.

It has a footnote with more detailed information:

> The original version of this article stated that IR LEDs operate from 300-325THz (about 920-980nm), wavelengths that are invisible. Quite a few readers wrote to say that they could in fact just barely see the LEDs in some (or all) of their remotes. Several were kind enough to let me know which remotes these were, and I was able to test several on a spectrometer. Lo and behold, these remotes were using higher-frequency LEDs operating from 350-380THz (800-850nm), just overlapping the extreme edge of the visible range.

I don't have enough time or knowledge to really dive in to the scientific studies. That being said it's worth noting that a large number of studies that have found no perceptible difference between CD-quality and higher-resolution audio, and (as you mention) there are a lot of ways for minute hardware differences to skew the results either way.

> Dithering is a kind of compression algorithm that encodes a greater dynamic range within a signal with an artificially constrained dynamic range

Dithering does more than just expanding the dynamic range: it ensures that quantization error produces a predicable noise floor rather than input-dependent distortion. This video, by the author of the xiph.org article I linked before, has a good explanation and demonstration of dithering (use the chapter selection menu to skip to the "dither" section): https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

The dust/scratch factor of vinyl has a much bigger impact than 16 vs 24bit or much of the signal processing issues.

To me, it would seem that in order to compare the two, you would basically need to resample the 24/192 recording, with dither, and then resample it back to 24/192; and you would need to choose a high quality resampling filter. Anything other than that I wouldn't really consider a comparison.

Furthermore, given that the measured sensitivity is more likely on the frequency front than on the dynamic range front, did they establish a distinction between 44.1kHz and 48kHz?

https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/134...

In my experience CD’s are anything but durable.

There are some quasi-plausible arguments for vinyl, but arguing that durability is one of them is hilariously myopic.

Gracenote had 3 598 785 CDs in their database in 2005 [1], so I'll take that as a lower bound on the number of CDs ever made.

I don't know what the largest flash drive that will fit in a jeans pocket is, but the largest I was able to find is 2 TB, but SanDisk showed a 4 TB prototype at CES 2019, so I'll go with that.

Assuming lossless compression that averages reducing the size of a song by 75%, a 4 TB flash drive could hold 1 662 149.1 minutes of music.

Unless the average CD is under 27.7 seconds long, that's not even enough to hold all the CDs known to Gracenote in 2005.

Anyone want to do the math if we allow lossy compression to squeeze more in (although I wouldn't consider it a backup of the CDs if lossy)?

[1] http://alchemi.co.uk/archives/mus/how_many_cds_ar.html

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=177.5+cm%5E3%2F%28%28%...

That'll fit in my pocket, so that's 240 million megabit, 160 million seconds, or 2.7 million minutes, about 1 million songs. OK not every song ever, but a good portion, and possibly every song that's been in the charts.

I did see one claim that there had been as many as 100 million songs ever recorded, which would mean the density won't be there fore another 15 years or so.

An average person can expect to live upto about 2.5 billion seconds, which requires (for stereo 44.1khz 16 bit), about 220TB - 2.7TB a year. Given the growth of storage, you could record everything you hear from now to forever, keeping it in your pocket.

E: Specifically I'm talking about the P & Q channels, but this can also include R through W which while technically unused, still contain data in some form.

Most audio CD extractors do not provide all of this channel data, as only the digital audio is extracted. When a CD is re-burned, the subchannel data is regenerated, but not a bit-for-bit copy of the original. Sounds the same (usually), but sometimes there is metadata, easter-eggs, and what-not that is omitted. Additionally, some copy protection relied on adding corrupted subchannel data which low end CD players would skip, but high end extractors would not. Having the original subchannel data can be key and necessary to determine whether a sector was infact incorrectly extracted or not.

more information here

If all we’ve got is opinions, let’s go with mine:

None of the CDs I’ve ever bought still works. I’m probably not as careful with my things as you are, so there’s that.

Unfortunately, due to manufacturing defects there are discs that will or have oxidized, so the durability of CDs (or other optical media) is not always as reliable as advertised. But as the sibling post to yours points out, CDs provide error correction and along with oversampling provides means of creating effectively bit perfect copies that can be as durable as the current state of the art (redundant, solid state, geographically diverse, etc.)

A major reason is that you can't really get away with the crappy loudness war style mastering on vinyl. Just because of that they sound way better than most digital masters.

There's also the well-known effect where the process of recording and playing a vinyl creates dynamic range (as measured by various tools) where there is none. Some vinyls that are known to be from the same master as the CD still get much better scores on http://dr.loudness-war.info/

A very nice technical discussion of this myth is here: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#Myt...

It's actually quite ironic, I think, that compression has become such a fad only now that we have digital media with their much lower noise floor. We have more dynamic range available, but we're using less of it.

The point is that if you want to make a vinyl sound "as loud as possible", you're best off not compressing it, since you can have higher peak volume in one groove if the adjacent groove is quiet. Whereas when mastering a CD, the way to make it "as loud as possible" is just to crush everything up to 0dB.

What makes compressed music sound "loud" is that there's some sound present to the ears at full volume, or nearly so, at all times. It's not that it simply has a higher peak level. Indeed, it's the listener who controls the peak level of the sound that reaches their ears, not the recording engineer — they can always turn the volume up or down as they please. The reason compressed music sounds "loud" is that it has a higher average volume than uncompressed music of the same peak level.

I don't think that can be right - sound is a waveform so even the loudest notes will oscillate around zero. "Loudness" would usually be defined as something like root-mean-square amplitude, but if we zoom in to talk about a single note (sine wave) then the peak amplitude and the RMS amplitude are in a direct relationship with each other. On the scale of a whole piece, yes there's a difference between average and peak, but on the scale of one groove to the next - a couple of seconds - I don't think there's any practical difference.

The complaint I've heard about "loudness wars" e.g. Californication is precisely that there are no soft passages - every bar is pushed up to full volume. I'm not aware of anyone talking about the effects of compression on a smaller scope than the couple-of-seconds scale.

Sure. When I refer to "peaks and valleys" I'm talking about the envelope of the waveform. I think that's standard usage in audio engineering.

I think you should download Audacity or equivalent and look at some waveforms of both uncompressed and compressed music. I think you'll see that there are loudness variations on a much shorter timescale than you expect, and that compression reduces these considerably.

But I like the rituals around it: taking the album out of the sleeve and looking at the artwork; placing the album on the table and setting it to spin; lowering the needle. I like how I have to purposefully listen to the music - you can't just set up a playlist and walk away, you have to pay attention to the songs and flip over the record once the side is finished, or put the second disc on.

It's similar in some sense to the reasons why people go to see live concerts. The sound quality isn't better, it's just different, and feels "more real", although for concerts it is also helped by the fact that you're actually there.

As I don't have thousands of dollars worth of stage speakers, amplifiers and audio equipment, there's a very noticable difference in sound quality between live shows and recorded music, depending on the venue.

You're also missing out a pretty big part of live shows, there's a difference between hearing a musician play a song live vs a recording. A recording is almost never one single take straight through and, depending on the artist, can be a fairly different rendition of the song.

An example, last concert I went to was cypress hill, they had a different DJ with them that mixed their tunes up pretty differently so the performance was.nothing like listening to one of their albums.

For some bands, I'd actually disagree with that. Both what they are playing is better, and their released material is compressed to hell and back[1], which seems to be less prevalent live (though far from gone).

No doubt they _could_ do that recorded (anything you can do live you can match in a studio), but they _aren't_ doing.

There's also the non-musical elements - there's a difference between just playing some music and putting on a show.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

So vinyl masters often (but not always) avoid the loudness war and have a wider dynamic range.

I suspect you mean the latter, though with modern audio tech, well-mic'd and mastered recordings can easily sound ... if not better, then more intense, than live performances.

Though there's nothing like seeing the music being performed live.

To me a philharmonic concert sounds... very different than recorded audio. I'm confident I can double-blindly 100% tell the difference. And so can everyone else. This is one experiment I'd be happy to participate in.

And the obvious difference: live 'rock' etc. is still coming through speakers.

> To demonstrate the veracity of Lyngdorf's "Is it real, or is it Memorex" claim, Birkelund invited the trio to begin performing. After playing for what felt like, at most, 30 seconds, the musicians began to fade out as the volume of a pre-recorded track of the same music was turned up. Although the much too short demo left many in the room a gasp at how remarkably close the live trio and tuned-to-the-room system sounded, Birkelund failed to mention that the Model D system was never silent.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/steinway-lyngdorfs-elega...

Normal turntables have a very simple analog signal path, with the needle moving electromagnets which emit the signal.

Best oxymoron I've seen in a while ("analog" literally means "simulating something else")

The casual and dictionary meaning of analogue today, in the context of vinyl and music technologies, is the opposite of digital (and technically that which "uses a continuous physical variable like voltage to represent data") not that which is simulating something else.

So "real analogue" just means "mechanism based on the actual use of a continuous physical variable like voltage to represent data" (as opposed to a digital version of such).

It doesn't work with coloured vinyl and it's worse than regular turntables when it comes to dust since it just reads it instead of potentially moving it away

There are some videos about it on YouTube and it looks like you have to meticulously clean your vinyl before playing it.

[1] http://www.gzvinyl.com/About-vinyl.aspx

Lasers are cheap, tracking for them is less so. To accurately read these grooves with sufficient resolution, you need 2 lasers (LPs are stereo), both looking at 45 degree inclination from different angles, and focused at the same point. That kind of accurate spatial + temporal sync ain’t trivial to accomplish. CDs/DVDs are much easier to implement. They don’t need similar resolution because digital, and they light their laser along the normal, only need to track 2 axes.

Even if you’ll manage to accurately focus both lasers, another problem is interference between left and right channel lasers.

Would aiming the lasers at slightly different spots and putting the channels back together in software work?

The technical problem is already solved, but the product costs $15k: https://diffuser.fm/laser-turntable/ As you see from the description, they did it with 5 lasers instead of 2.

A colleague was doing this in a decade ago, I wonder if he ever got it working.

[1] https://www.cse.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.htm...

As they say, "significantly lower than the wavelength of visible light".

In either case I feel like it's somewhat missing the point of vinyls in this day and age, people like vinyls because they're simple and low-tech like audio tapes, VHS and Polaroids. If you really care about audio quality and preservation you'll be much better off building a good capture setup and digitize your vinyl. It's easier to protect and backup digital audio samples than a fragile physical object.

That being said what I propose with 3D-printing is almost certainly what effectively happens with vinyls these days. I doubt music labels maintain a completely separate and parallel analog workflow in order to have "pure" vinyls at the end. Why bother when you can take the digital master and dump it onto the disk and nobody will be able to tell the difference?

We have the technology to 3d print records, though the audio-fidelity maybe isn't there (~2 years ago) for music more subtle sounds (jazz or classical). It also did not seem possible on an (affordable) FDM 3d printer and I didn't have access to an SLA 3d printer.

Keep in mind prints would take hours to do, on top of the usual delicateness of 3d printing.

Part of the joy of having a record is the rest of it, the album cover, the notes, etc. I wasn't trying to copy an existing record, so for me there was considerable effort required for those parts as well which made it harder to justify the extra effort 3d printing a record would have required.

Which brings me to my last point. There are numerous services that will accept a digital audio file and mail a physical record, in the $200-500 range (length/size dependent). Depending on your budget (esp compared to gaining access to an SLA printer and your time), that may be more effective.

A fragile physical object has more charm.

Turntables that trash records are usually shitty turntables that, if they're even adjustable at all, aren't adjusted properly.

I can't find back the paper in question but I've found this which is in the same spirit: https://www.cse.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.htm...

Now, if instead of a relatively simple one scanning laser beam you would make an image of the record with a moving scanner head, exactly like paper scanners and then used what's today is commonly called "AI" ... that could work.

But honestly, this seems like insane overkill. Vinyl has a ridiculously limited dynamic range, and digital recording at 24/48 is practically transparent even with low-end prosumer equipment. At the high end you have to work quite hard to spend more than $4k on a spectacularly clean and neutral studio-grade ADC/DAC. (You can spend more on madly expensive super-fi, but it's not going to sound any cleaner than a good Burl, Lynx, or Metric box.)

So if you spend $4000 on the turntable/arm/pickup another $4000 on studio grade converters, you can capture recordings that will be absolutely indistinguishable from the vinyl source. And your precious plastic disks can stay in their wrappers.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/m...

Now as far as speakers are concerned, yes, you’ll need to spend at least a few thousand for a stereo pair capable of doing justice to this level of precision and dynamic range.

I belived in their swansong and bought into it up until recently, then I tried "terrible" hardware and dear God it sounds so much better.

There’s no reasoning somebody out of something they weren’t reasoned into the first place, so usually this isn’t an argument worth having.

A modern laser interferometer could easily get well past the resolution that is limited by the vinyl structure itself.

I don't think the correspondence would be linear. There's probably something like cos(2 pi d / W) in there somewhere, where d is the distance to the grove and W is the wavelength of the laser. So you'd need some sort of equalization circuit on the output, but audiophiles are OK with that--they are used to RIAA equilization on vinyl already.

I assume that the variations in groove distance are much larger than the wavelength of the laser, which would mean that there are several plausible grove distances that give the same intensity output of the interferometer. I'm not quite sure how to handle that. I have a feeling an integrator would be involved, but details elude me at the moment.

Distortion here means both extreme distortion (e.g. clipping) which is what people often think of when they hear the word "distortion", or the more technical definition of any alteration of the input signal. The pre-amps, compressors, and so on will all add their own distortion to the signal. However this is desired distortion. Tape offers some of this, although I'm not familiar with what its exact characteristics are.

Clipping (when the input signal amplitude exceeds the limits of the storage medium or output device) is a type of distortion that can sound great or absolutely awful.

Digital clipping sound awful. The max amplitude is all 1's in the digital storage medium. When a signal exceeds this, for the duration of it exceeding every sample will have that same value of all 1's. The waveform will basically have the top lopped off. There will be sharp "corners" where it starts to clip, and where it stops clipping. Those corners create "pops". It makes that part of the recording unusable.

Analog clipping can be a very sought after sound though. The max amplitude on tape is when all of the poles of the magnetic material are aligned. This isn't perfect though and it's not instant, so you get a slower compression of the signal and some variation. The waveform will look like its top has been squeezed downward. This can sound amazing.

The quality on youtube is pretty bad (spotify or elsewhere is better), but this song has a great example. You can hear his voice distort in many places, but it sounds wonderful (particularly starting around 2:20 - 2:40 and 3:10). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAGS8UL9b6A

If you want supreme sound quality you don’t play from a vinyl. A CD (or even FLAC file) will always “sound” better, even from first play. I, at least, don’t really care about the minor degrading my mid-range turn table does to my records. Almost all of the new records I buy come with a download code, so if, for some reason, my record becomes degraded beyond listening—however many listenings that would take—I always have the option of listening to the higher quality FLAC file.

Again :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_emulation_software

If you have a higher budget, check out Pro-Ject or Rega Planar