[Mike Rivers[_2_]]

On 2/9/2017 9:28 AM, wrote:
Mike Rivers wrote: "
You could certainly do an experiment today if you had the facilities,
and a CD and phonograph disk playback would certainly sound different,
but which one sounds best would be subjective. "

They would sound different if the chain to
either the lacquer or the CD contained
superfluous processing, such as an EQ,
compressor, etc. RIAA curve on the
vinyl side does not count as superfluous.

The use of EQ, compression, etc. are "conscious" processing. You don't
have to use them. If you wanted to conduct the experiment, you could
feed the same signal to the inputs of the CD recorder and the disk
cutting amplifier. But because both of those hardware devices have a
signal path that isn't identical, the signal would be changed in
different ways before reaching the final medium that you're testing.

The CD recorder has a D/A converter that may have some non-linearity.
The disk cutting system has all sorts of stuff to get in the way. Some
you can turn off, like a limiter, if you leave enough headroom so one
groove won't cut into the next one. You can used fixed pitch and
eliminate what's involved in the variable pitch converter - like, for
example, the input signal drives the variable pitch smarts and the
signal that goes to the cutter head actually (these days) goes through a
digital delay to delay it by one revolution of the disk.

So you can't just compare the CD with the lacquer without considering
what's between the source and the delivered media and its effect on the
sound. And we're talking about the raw, first generation recording here.
If you add in anomalies caused by the vinyl pressing and CD molding
processes, that's something else.

You can compare the sound resulting from each one of the recording
_processes_ and decide which one you think is best. If you're a warm,
fuzzy, analog kind of a guy you might like the lacquer better than the
CD. And if you're a "I don't care that it sounds so clean and sterile, I
just want to hear everything" kind of a guy, you'd likely prefer the CD.

My point is, processing applied, during
the mix and/or mastering stages, makes
more of an audible difference than differences
between playback formats.

Well, sheeeeyuttttt! Mix and process a recording so it will sound like
people expect a CD to sound and mix and process it again so that it will
sound like people expect a phonograph record to sound and of course
they'll be different. But it's not because of the medium, it's because
of the people getting paid to make the best product they can ("best" is
of course subjective) for the medium that they're working with.





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