Early digital recordings on vinyl vs. CD?

05-22-12: Johnnyb53
The early digital classical LPs have the advantage that they were probably mastered from the native mode of the digital recording, and definitely done through a pro-quality DAC. With CDs, regardless of the original sampling rate and word length, the mastering is downconverted to 16/44.1 and most of the market plays it back through an inexpensive DAC or built-in chipset. With LPs you're usually playing back a high quality analog made from a full-res master.

Johnny makes a good point. The Soundstream digital recorder which Telarc used in those days was 50 kHz/16 bits, as Phasecorrect mentioned earlier, but the difference between 50 kHz and 44.1 kHz sampling is more significant than it may seem from a numerical standpoint (even putting aside differences in implementation quality).

44.1 kHz sampling means that the anti-aliasing filter that precedes A/D conversion has to cut off all frequencies above 22.05 kHz, which only allows about a 10% margin relative to the highest frequency (20 kHz) that is intended to be captured accurately. 50 kHz sampling, on the other hand, allows an anti-aliasing cutoff frequency of 25 kHz, which increases that 10% figure to 25%. That represents a considerable relaxation of the sharpness of the filter rolloff that is necessary, which (everything else being equal) can be expected to significantly reduce the side-effects the filter may have at audible frequencies.

Also, I should add to the comments in my earlier post that (as Mapman alluded to) another major reason for the sonic quality of the early Telarc's was the fact that they applied far less dynamic range compression to their recordings than was typical of releases from the major labels, if indeed they applied any at all. Which means that you'll play them with the volume control set to a higher position than it would be set to for most other recordings. Which will make that bass drum even louder :-)

Regards,
-- Al

Just want to remind all about the once popular notion that digital Lps would destroy the bearings of turntables, as 'proven by certain folks back in the day..
After much bruhah over it, turned out no bearings were ever hurt by digitally based LPs.

To this day some folks are gun shy about digitally based Lps.
I am not one of them.

There are no black and white truths on this issue. Some digitally mastered LPs sound very good; some sound nearly as bad as early CDs. The earlier the digital mastering the greater the risk of bad sound. No surprise there. Mastering engineers found ways to work around the digital limitations.

A couple months ago my local college jazz radio station got rid of all their LPs since they hadn't been played for a number of years. I visted the station and walked away with a large box of jazz LPs mostly from the 1985 to 1988 time period. I suspect the station got them as freebies when record labels were trying to promote FM playing time. The records are almost all in pristine condition and nearly all of them were digitally mastered. SOME of them have excellent sound quality but most of the major label records have some pretty obvious digital colorations.

There was a box of free records to pick through at the last audio show I attended. One of the ones I picked was a mid 80's digital classical recording on Angel records. Ughh. The price was right! Not horrible really, but definitely below par.

So yeah, as usual, it is hard to make accurate generalizations and YMMV with digital vinyl as with most all else in audio.