CD v.s LP - When comming from the same MASTER

In my experience LPs from a digital masters are usually notably better sounding than the CD. There are exceptions like Nora Jones first release where the LP sounds no better than the CD. I have a great sounding Phillips classical CD where I found the corresponding digital LP. What a dissapointment. The LP was considerably worse.

I think that there is more to the story than just differences in the medium. The path between the Master and the signal that feeds into your preamp is a long one with plenty of opportunity for distortion and grunge, regardless of the medium (LP, CD, SACD...).

From the original master recording (digital or otherwise) separate CD and LP masters are created. They include the obvious stuff like separating into tracks with fade in/out and inter track silence. At this step it is typical for bunch of equalization and compression to be done. The munging of the signal at this point is customized for the medium and how good or bad depends on the skill and ears of the mastering engineer. In addtion the quality of the equipment used for the mastering process may be different for different mediums.

There is a lot of nonsense about digital being a perfect medium without distortions. It is true that digital information can be replicated and transferred without degredation or distortion. However, distortions unavoidably introduced for both the capture (A to D) and the playback (D to A) conversions. Distortions introduced from a digital process are different than those in analog. But it is nonsense to assert that digital does not have distortions. The distortions from digital are more difficult to measure but I would assert that they are easier to hear and more harmful to musical content.

So getting back to the topic LP and CD are two different methods of recreating the signal from the original recording. Both create distortions. Those distortions are different and to my ears LP provides the playback that is the most true to the original.

LPs made from digital masters are no doubt compromised but I find that they still sound quite good and often benefit from analog on the playback side.

To 'hear' sound above 20KHz has nothing to do with believing.

Here is a very interesting link to this topic :

http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~boyk/spectra/spectra.htm

Styx

Well Pabelson, from real life listening sessions, LP has always produced superior soundstaging AND bass separation. While from a technical standpoint, what you say about suming the deep bass on an LP maybe true, but below roughly 80hz bass is non-directional, so having true stereo bass all the way down to 20hz is just academic, maybe good for the technician in the studio, but with less real life applicability than made out to be.

Take the Telarc digital recording of the Cleveland Symphonic Winds conducted by Frederick Fennell - Holst suite No.1 and 2. On the LP the bass drums hits are definitely on the far L back of the soundstage, and they do go deep, maybe not down to 20hz, but certainly below 40hz, enough to shake my floor and sofa. And the bass isn't the one note type of bass, but its quick, well-defined and full of impact.

Now I also have the Telarc CD version of this excellent recording, and let me assure you, the LP version sounds significantly better, its not funny.

Pabelson, actually the real impact of sampling at a higher frequency is not to extend the frequency response, but to make the implimentation of the anti-aliasing filter simpler, so that a filter with less passband ripple and less phase error can be used.

I agree with you that extra high frequencies above 20kHz do not make a difference.

I think this goes to the heart of your arguments ... in THEORY redbook CD is perfectly capable of producing perfect sound. Provided there is no jitter, the ADCs and DACs are perfectly linear, and most importantly, that you can implement a perfect brick wall anti-aliasing filter in the frequency domain, which creates the sin(x)/x function in the time domain to perfectly reproduce the analog waveform from the train of samples.

It is in the implementation that the CD playback falls short.

I agree with you that vinyl is a deeply flawed format, and I personally think that vinyl and CD replay are roughly on a par, with different deficiencies. I suspect that those who prefer vinyl are in some way more bothered by the distortions caused by the deficiencies in real-world digital recording and playback caused by timing jitter, non-linear DACs and ADCs and approximations to the brick-wall filter.

That vinyl should be considered "accurate" by the same people who argue endlessly about how different cartridges can sound at different tracking weights, how different tonearms sound with a different counterweights is equally ludicrous. But vinyl does have moments where it sounds more real than CDs, so I guess I kind of like the distortion introduced by the medium.

This is a great topic, and something to seriously think about for anyone who is interested in getting into vinyl. Nowdays it seems like the analog 1/2" master is becoming extinct, so therefore it seems logical to think with an LP copy of even a hi rez 24/192 source would only ever sound possibly as good as the SACD or DVD audio of that same source. This is a very thought provoking topic, unless you already have a nice colletion of vinyl or are interested only in picking up older stuff why would you bother with vinyl playback at all.