I'm also fascinated by the vinyl comeback of the last decade or so. I'm also old enough to have a reasonably large vinyl collection (1000+) and an old Linn (LP12 ittok asaka) Naim setup to play them on, they sound excellent.
I have to say, vinyl can sound wonderful when well mastered and recorded, better than CD in my opinion, however I haven't bought vinyl for a long time. I generally now buy music as file downloads Qobuz etc.
Having worked in and also built a few high end recording and mastering studios, I thought it may be worth sharing some observations and comments and possibly dispelling a few myths.
As virtually all music is recorded digital I really can't see the point of converting it to analogue and putting it on vinyl from a sound quality perspective. Both formats have their own distortions and characteristics both of which have completely different. Copying from digital to analogue and vice versa just adds the two forms of distortion and worsens sound quality. However if it sells then fair enough.
All audio starts off analogue, as sound waves. Analogue recording tried to preserve this as closely as possible, analogue recording and playback systems cannot be perfect, but have no theoretical limit to their accuracy, only pratical limits. Digital systems have practical limits in the A to D and D to A converters and a theoretical and absolute limit set by the bit rate and bit depth of the recording. I was always frustrated at the rapid rise in CD quality recording, it imposed an absolute limits on the recordings, they would always have a bandwidth of 20khz and the low level distortions of a 16 bit resolution (bear in mind the human ear can discern a signal 20db lower than the noise floor) desoite the use of dither.
Working in in the music recording industry as a studio tech engineer theduring 1980s and 90s I thought it may be worth sharing a few observations and facts on the subject.
Firstly, a few techie facts about vinyl and analogue in general; Vinyl, and the best analogue tape machines have a bandwidth of below 20Hz to over 40khz, they can't manage 40khz at anything like full level, more like -20db for vinyl 10db for 30ips tape, but they can do it. CD cannot go above 20khz due to the sampling frequency used. In the case of vinyl, this bandwidth was used to handle the old CD4 quadraphonic system of the 70s where the rear channels were modulated into the frequency band above 20khz. Neumann etc. developed specially shaped cutting styli and amps to cope with the additional bandwidth. Ragarding analogue tape, this was mainly to keep phase shift and group delay at bay, i remember lining up an Ampex ATR124 multitrack recorder and measuring the frequency response, it was 3db down at 40khz at -10db and would record a pretty passable square wave, something no digital system could do at the time, or probably even now.
With regards sound quality, we tried all the digital recorders at the time, including the Sony PCM3324/48 multitrack, but went back to analogue tape for both classical and rock, pop, jazz as it sounded so much better. we just marked the final digital transfer as DDD and no one ever complained. What digital does however allow is multiple generation copies with hardly any degradation in quality, something analogue can never manage. That, plus the public hype is why it was so widely used professionally.
I worked in studios wth vinyl cutting rooms, I've compared the original master with what comes back from the signal from the pickup stylus whilst cutting a record, when well mastered the differences are very small, a slight muddying of the bottom end. That being said, cutting vinyl is a mix of art and science and is easy to mess up, it requires good ears, a technical understanding of the process and lots of experience.
A couple of final observations; firstly, loud CDs and compression, this is often down to ignorant record companies insisting the CD over compresssed dynamically, to be LOUD! A few years back a friend of mine who runs a mastering studio shared his frustration that a record company had complained that 'that CD you cut isn't as loud as the new cd by The Verve, make it louder'. The CD was an acoustic folk band which was very well recorded, he argued for a while, mentioning that the Verve CD was very compressed hence sounding louder and that this wasn't approriate for an acoustic recording. They insisted until finally he got them to come to the mastering studio and listen. He played them both The Verve and the acoustic album back to back. The Verve album was definitely louder until he compressed the folk album. He then played the folk album, switching between the compressed and uncompressed version, the preferred the compressed version as it was louder. He then repeated this, turning the volume up for the uncompresssed version so it matched the compressed one, they then far preferred the uncompressed version commenting that it sounded much better and more dynamic. He showed then what he'd done, explaining that if it sounds too quiet, turn the volume up! It was mastered uncompressed.
Finally, remastering of old recordings. When an album or CD is mastered, the original master mix recordings (from the studio) are level matched and for non-classical albums, eq'd so the tracks match in tone and character, there may also be other processing carried out too so it can be cut to vinyl. This is copied to a new tape called a production master, as it's been copied this introduces a generation loss but is still excellent quality. Then multiple copies of the production master would be made for international distribution,a third generation copy. This is then stored for future use. When re-releases are made it's not unusual for the distribution master to be pulled out of the vault and used again, this is then copied for re-distribution (fourth generation copy). Care will be taken making the mix master and the original production master but not necessarily when making distribution masters, I've heard some truly horrible sounding copies of what were great albums and where possible, I have gone back to the vaults myself to search out the original production master. It was not too unusual to find the original tapes had been lost or damaged beyond use and the re-release then copied from a vinyl pressing! I'm told by those still in the industry that thing are now much worse and the provenance of 'master tapes' impossible to determine.
An example, my vinyl version of Miles Davis' 'Kind of Blue' sounds wonderful. I was playing it in a studio I was working in from my Linn T/T, Naim pre-amp combo whilst checking out the mixing desk. A well know recording engineer wandered in and commented "that sounds superb! what CD player are you pIaying it from?" as he'd not heard it sound so good. His jaw dropped when I pointed to the spinning vinyl on the LP12 turntable. we compared the CD to the vinyl and there was no dispute over which was better. It wasn't until the Hi Res Studio Master series was released that I managed to find another copy of the album that sounded anywhere near as good as the vinyl. I guess all the previous re-releases were from dodgy old multi-generation production copies where no care was taken.
I apologise for the overly long waffle, hopefully someone will find it interesting and useful. Well mastered vinyl in a good system can easily match CD for quality. But as always, the music and the way it's recorded is by far the most important thing!
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