Posted on 09/08/2009 9:19:12 AM PDT by La Lydia
In the late '60s, with a little prodding from his sons, my father finally gave in and replaced his monaural Garrard turntable with a stereo one. Suddenly, Sgt. Pepper's band sounded so much bigger. And clearer. I could hear two distinct guitars playing, not just a generic guitar sound. Two decades later, in 1988, I finally broke down and bought a CD player and the first of many Beatles CDs -- now, that was a jump from what I'd been hearing on vinyl for years. There were so many more instruments I'd never noticed. And notes I'd never heard.
On Wednesday, things are about to change once again, as the sound of the Beatles' music takes another giant leap forward. Twenty-two years after the original release of the Fab Four's British catalogue on CD, the group's music will finally be reissued, the release bearing the fruits of a 4 1/2 -year project by engineers at EMI's Abbey Road Studios to remaster the entire catalogue...
So what's different from those CDs you already have? As any surviving Beatle will tell you -- and both are known to say it -- the Beatles were "a great little band" -- a rock band. What comes through on the new masters is the power and quality of the original recordings of that rock band -- the quality the Beatles themselves would have heard and intended when those recordings were created.
That means you can now hear John Lennon's raucous vocal in all its powerfully shredded glory...George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" reveals the presence of a Ringo Starr kick drum that was integral to rock's greatest rhythm section, alongside Paul McCartney's bass -- a beat that drives the song with a robust heartbeat not heard before....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I may not think it’s worth it after the fact, but I’m buying them.
I think music on vinyl sounds better than digital music. I’m not being nostalgic here. A good record played on a good stereo sounds...fuller? Don’t know the right word. Anyway...
Maybe you need to get some new speakers?
Because vinyl was an analog recording, and therefore got more of the harmonics for the music. CD deliberately “clips” frequencies above ~20,000Hz or below ~50Hz, on the assumption that most people can’t hear them anyway, and it therefore saves on the size of each track.
Can we see some wave file comparisons or spectrum analyzer data to show the better separation or whatever is behind the hype?
Beatles’ records in Mono are worth more.
To use the popular descriptor - vinyl has a bigger and fuller “Sound Stage”. It doesn’t clip the highs and lows that digital can.
That said the new CD’s are remasterd so you may get more info from the new CD’s as opposed to the old vinyl. That and vinyl degrades every time you play it.
You have any objective evidence you can hear above 20k Hz?
“I think music on vinyl sounds better than digital music. I’m not being nostalgic here. A good record played on a good stereo sounds...fuller? Don’t know the right word. Anyway...”
Totally agree, but it’s difficult getting the needle to stay on the record in the car. ;)
I am definitely buying them.
In some cases, I believe.
Jokes aside, Ringo was a good drummer..
My wife and I have a collection of about a thousand vinyl records, some very rare and unreleased on CD, and some that we just never bought on CD for whatever reason— mainly $$$.
I unearthed her turntable a month ago and bought a new cartridge for it, invested about $50 in a record cleaning kit and a can of Gruv-Glide and started ripping the albums to Mp3.
Personally, I cannot detect an obvious improvement in quality over the CD versions, but they DO sound different. They sound like they did when I sat in my room and played them over and over again until the early hours of the morning. For that reason, and a few others, they have value. A CD is a CD— they all sound the same. These are OUR records.
It’s not just the cutoff in frequency, it also has to do with the digital sampling rate. The higher the frequency of the waveform, the less accurate the sample will be. With the CD sample rate, you start to lose some of the quality of the reproduction of the analog signal long before 20Khz
Which is an absolutely valid assumption.
Interesting.
So even if most people do not noticeably “hear” the higher and lower frequncies that were recorded, those parts of the music are getting sent out on vinyl but not on CDs. I wonder if double-blinded audience studies would reveal diffferent impressions of the full band vs. clipped band versions of the same songs? Theoretically and if all else where equal, the broader band version might leave a slightly different impression on listeners than the clipped version??
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