The Washington Post reports today about MoFi Records, a company that creates analog reissues of famous albums on vinyl. But a few weeks ago a customer discovered that the mastering process they used was not, in fact, completely analog:
In a sometimes halting video posted to the YouTube channel of his Phoenix record shop, the ‘In’ Groove, [Mike] Esposito said that “pretty reliable sources” told him that MoFi (Mobile Fidelity), the Sebastopol, Calif., company that has prided itself on using original master tapes for its pricey reissues, had actually been using digital files in its production chain. In the world of audiophiles — where provenance is everything and the quest is to get as close to the sound of an album’s original recording as possible — digital is considered almost unholy. And using digital while claiming not to is the gravest sin a manufacturer can commit.
The story meanders through a couple thousand words, telling the story of analog reissues; the high-end audiophile community; how MoFi fessed up; and how they were caught:
Earlier this year, MoFi announced an upcoming reissue of Jackson’s 1982 smash “Thriller” as a One-Step. The news release said the original master tape would be used for the repressing, which would have a run of 40,000 copies. That’s a substantially bigger number than the usual for a One-Step, which is typically limited to between 3,500 and 7,500 copies.
Michael Ludwigs, a German record enthusiast with a YouTube channel, 45 RPM Audiophile, questioned how this could be possible. Because of the One-Step process, an original master tape would need to be run dozens of times to make that many records. Why would Sony Music Entertainment allow that? “That’s the kind of thing that deteriorates tape,” says Grundman.
“That’s the one where I think everyone started going, ‘Huh?’” says Ryan K. Smith, a mastering engineer at Sterling Sound in Nashville.
Perhaps you will notice that MoFi was initially cast under suspicion due to a technical question. Were they really playing the master tape over and over? That seemed unlikely.
What didn't cast them under suspicion—ever—was the sound of their records. Quite the contrary: everyone agrees that MoFi has some of the best sounding records in the business. It takes until literally the last paragraph of the story to address that elephant in the room:
Randy Braun, a music lover, Hoffman message board member and lawyer in New York, hopes that, in the end, the MoFi revelation will prove what he’s been saying for years, that the anti-digital crowd has been lying to itself: “These people who claim they have golden ears and can hear the difference between analog and digital, well, it turns out you couldn’t.”
Um, right. The whole thing is a ridiculous scam. Modern equipment can digitize an analog sound stream at such high resolution that almost no one can distinguish it from analog itself. Used judiciously, which MoFi did, it improves the sound without leaving so much as a trace of digital impurity.
You could hardly find a better test than this. MoFi had been doing this for years, and high-end audiophiles had been swooning over their reissues the entire time. Nobody had even an inkling that MoFi's records had been corrupted by digital processing
For years. Now can we all knock off this crap?
Next, do the mono recordings of the Beatles.
Those mixes are very different than the stereo versions.
The mono mixes of The Beatles & The Rolling Stones pre-1970 are much better than the stereo.
Lennon is on record as preferring mono btw
Only because he caught it from some Fraulein during the band's Hamburg residency.
Also, Pete Best did nothing wrong. So, fuck John & Paul & George.
Ditto for the Kinks.
Shades of natural vs artificial diamonds perhaps…
As long as you play it through a tube amp, you'll be fine.
Do we all look like Jack Gillis?
Everything old is new again. The younger generations bash boomers endlessly, then turn around and do their best to bring back that past. Digital recordings were a huge step forward back then. And it still is today.
My wife has perfect pitch/ear and an extensive musical education - she can tell the difference between vinyl and digital mainly by the lack of pops and crackles. It requires a REALLY good turntable and very clean records to avoid that. The other nice thing about a digital media server is that it can be made VERY small. Mine measures 6 1/2" x 6" x 2 1/4 inches, built-in CD/DVD ripper, supports all the common audio/video outputs, bluetooth, wifi, and USB enabled (what isn't these days?). I've already loaded close to 600 CDs worth of music into it and only barely eaten into the 2 TB SSD. Good web browser support for both regular computers and cell phone. A very compact front control panel that does make me think fondly of the tales of Lucas carburetors - tiny but nicely readable LED display, clickable knob for menu scrolling and selection, four buttons. Good thing it came with a comprehensive cheat-sheet.
Combined with a Visio sound-bar/dual tweeter/subwoofer setup (our local Costco was selling it at a big discount) it produces great sound across rock, R&B, and classic music that matches what I've heard from guys who have setups that cost them about as much as a good car. Ours cost us about as much as a medium good racing bike...
So similarly to industrial diamonds, one must find flaws to know it was produced naturally.
But could she tell the difference between a digital recording of a vinyl album, at uncompressed CD levels, with all the pops and clicks, and the vinyl album?
There are some vinyl v. digital recordings I can tell the difference between, without reference to pops and clicks, but I think that's because the albums are old and the sound loses sharpness over the years, the more the needle moves through the groove.
Back in the day I could easily tell the difference between good old vinyl and those new-fangled flat disky things. Since then two things happened: a) The digital formats got better, and b) my hearing got worse.
Since these two things are true for most all of us, I'll charitably ascribe the whole golden ears phenom as something that used to be true, and might still be for people whose latest CD was bought some time before the first episode of The X-Files aired.
Yep
Those Columbia Record Club CDs may not have been the highest quality.
Yeah, my brother was a vinyl head. Me, I could never tel any difference. Oh, except for one. But if I want Snap, Crackle & Pop, I can have Rice Krispies for breffix, and save a lot on audio gear...
I'm not a tech guy, but, isn't the "last mile" of what we hear analog, no matter what kind of technology was used along the way? The sound waves emanating from the speaker are analog, because the human sensory organs and brains can't deal with a bunch of ones and zeros.
Shhh, that's the quiet part.
Robots can hear digital, though.
So, when the machines rise in 2025...
When we digitized our old Christmas records, the needle got stuck in the groove during Good King Wenceslaus. We now play it every Christmas from the original MP3 file.
For a great take on audio quality and music appreciation, I recommend a 1994 NYTimes article: https://www.kaleberg.com/uploads/musicview.pdf
When our kids were little, I ripped all our DVDs, since the kids would always misfile the discs when they were done, if they got filed at all, and I got tired of the requisite brute force search required to find them again. Not to mention how scratched up the discs got.
Plex Media Server really was as godsend.
Schizo audiophile stuff was online before the internet like on compuserve it should have been a warning about what would happen
Even before Compuserve, magazines pitched at ‘golden ears’ were touting #8 AWG oxygen-free copper speaker cables and more, at high prices. Had to look it up - Monster cables date from 1979.
My favorite gimmick was an expensive green felt pen that was supposed to "seal" music inside a CD player if you used it to cover the outer ring of the CD. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bewaring-of-the-green/
So much of how we enjoy things is completely subjective. I don't doubt that most of these audiophiles do enjoy analog recordings more, but it's because of the associations they have with them, rather than actually being able to tell the difference in a blind study. So long as they think that it's analog, it produces a more pleasurable reaction in their brain.
Wine tasting is the same way. There is a tiny number of people who can really tell the difference between various different wines. The rest of us are just responding to subconscious biases. I really like malbecs. That's not fake enjoyment; I really do like malbecs. But I'm also aware that, if you handed me some other variety of red wine and told me it was a malbec, I'd enjoy it as it were one.
+1
Not to mention the entire ritual of playing an album. It's not a push a button and be done...no....take the album out of it's cover, put it on the turntable, air dust it as needed, place the needle down, the play the album.
When LPs were a thing, song arrangement really mattered. It was designed to be played through, and the combination of songs also told a story if done well.
There used to be a step where you slid the record out of the decorative cardboard cover in its papar sleeve. Have the purists dispensed with that protective sleeve? Also, removing the knot of accumulated dust off the needle before putting it down...
There used to be listening parties.
Do the kids these days get together to listen to an album?
The only listening party I could get down with would be Flaming Lips -- ZAIREEKA.
The only listening parties I had were all supplemented by the devil's lettuce.
Just realized this kind of socializing must be taken over by gaming now.
Alas, too much over the chat line.
You haven't really completed the ritual unless you use the cover to card your dope. It is a fact universally acknowledged that the double-album format is the preferred format for this activity ... but which one? There are two schools of thought on this: Some maintain that Physical Grafitti is the canonical standard while others, self-styled intellectuals one and all, express ratings in units of All the World's a Stage.
My Yessongs album was the go to.
Paul Giamatti is still not fucking drinking merlot.
Not sure about the relevance to this thread. But great actor. And great movie.
There is a reference to winesnobbery.
I wonder when the crossover of better quality audio codecs surpassing analog happened? For it's time mp3 was great but it's trash compared to newer codecs, not just in the amount of data being used but also in the saving a higher range of input from the original sources.
Nyquist would like a word.
+1
What about YouTube? If I listen to a song or concert there am I getting the best sound. For example, right now I’m listening to something that sounds fantastic. It’s a professional recording of a live performance and on my awesome Bowers & Wilkins speakers it’s sounds great. YouTube video playing on my smart tv with the sound bypassing the TV. Is that analog or digital?
320kps AAC is their stated max quality at the moment but everything has to be right to get that level of quality which is still a "lossy" format. It's all digital till it hits your speakers.
Tbh as others have said it's what your ears can hear that counts so you might be able to get better quality out of youtube, it may or may not matter for your ears.
Thanks. There are no doubt crappy recordings on YouTube and I most buy cd for classical music then store on iTunes. I also stream the berlin philharmonic which is awesome sound. Sirius streams to my speakers very well also. I just can’t tell the difference unless it’s also a crappy recording.
If you want to try a quick and dirty test between quality settings with youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPjYsyDOA8I
If you're searching for something the more current it was uploaded the better quality it usually is. YT was built on crappy recordings because that was the original standard, so it's worth going for the 2yo recording vs the 12yo one if you have the option.
Your ears can hear sounds that aren't there. You can hear a violin play on an old fashioned 4KHz telephone line that completely chops off most of the high frequencies. How? It's the harmonics. Your ears are trained to recognize patterns of harmonics and construct the appropriate base frequencies. There's a whole science to this kind of signal processing combining mathematics, biology and acoustics. There's even something called kepstrum which is a harmonic oriented version of spectrum. What you hear is not always what is played.
I think digital sound has improved because the newer digital to analog converters and processors are so much better. Even crappy earbuds today are better than most earbuds from ten or twenty years ago.
And sometime you want the Speakers From Hell.
https://youtu.be/tew_fIhz3eY
If you have a high-end digital setup, do you really care one bit about analog masters? /P
TIDAL streaming gives you access to the digital master, which is better than waiting around for reissues of analog masters.
But for most of us, the bar is probably 192mbps streaming rates. And if you have good ears, your bar is 384mbps. The free version of TIDAL gives you access to 384mpbs streaming rate, which is the best there is out there for free. Short of that, your best source is your own CDs or the music you ripped off your CD collection in lossless FLAC.
Yeah, I made three rips of a CD of some Phillip Glass music from Powaqaatsi (sp?), one at 128Kb, one at 256 and one at 320, and also the original CD, and played them on a decent stereo (probably cost $1000 in 1987 or so).
I could pretty easily tell 128 from 256 -- the dynamic range was noticeably flatter at the lower bit rate. Once I got to 256Kb, I couldn't really tell one from the other.
Of course a vanilla CD isn't the best sound anyway.
I have to say, I've never wanted to go back to analog. Records wear out if you play them, MP3/M4A files don't.
I find that the speaker, or more frequently, the earbuds, make much more of a difference than anything else for most of my music, which is ripped at 320 Kbits.
I had to go through my CD collection twice. The first time, a long time ago, ripped MP3s at modest bitrates to save and listen. The second time, I ripped at lossless FLAC. Storage is cheap nowadays.
+1
Lots of services now give you access to CD and higher than CD digital versions. Amazon and Apple in particular. Spotify offers 320kbps, and is rolling out HiFi lossless streams slowly. But seriously, once you get above 256kbps AAC, it all sounds pretty good.
Now, back in the day, when I was in high school I had developed a pretty decent stereo by the time I graduated. I started buying Mobile Fidelity reissues of albums I really liked, so I had a lot of Steely Dan and Dark Side of the Moon, some Santana and some Miles Davis. Those big heavy platters sounded much, much better than the pre-warped shit you bought in the record store in those days.
Around 1985 I got my first CD player. Haven't bought any vinyl since. I've also ripped over 1800 albums in ALAC lossless. Works great, but I tend to stream more often than listen to my collection these days.
I feel much the same.
Getting rid of the old vinyl disks was a big step forward, in my opinion. Fragile, easily scratched, quickly worn and worn out, dependent upon careful placement of the needle for their integrity ... who needs it? Yet some are still obsessed. Crazy.
Early on, there were real differences between analog and digital. Note--any recording if different from a live performance.
Today, digital is fine--you just need really good electronics and speakers.
There was an article recently (Vox?) about why fireworks never show up as good on a monitor as they look in real life. Monitors mix red, green and blue primary colors to generate the visible spectrum, e.g. red and blue to make purple. In real life, purple is it's own wavelength band.
The cones in the human eye mainly pick up either blue, green or red and the brain interprets color However the red and blue combination will interact differently with the eye than the purple band.
However the red and blue combination will interact differently with the eye than the purple band.
That's because the peak sensitivies of the L, M, and S cones are to the hex colors #C3FF00, #5EFF00, and #6A00FF. Now you can sorta handwave the M and S cones as not beig too far off from being the RGB green and blue detectors (#00FF00 and #0000FF), but the L cone is very much not a red (#FF0000) detector.
That's because the RGB color scheme mixes red, green and blue (#FF0000, #00FF00, and #0000FF ) while the L, M, and S cones are sensitive to the colors #C3FF00, #5EFF00, and #6A00FF. And while you can kinda sorta handwave the S and M cones as slightly off pure blue and green detectors, the L cone is in no way no how a pure-but-maybe-off red detector; it's at best a yellowy-green detector.
This isn't due to some biological defeciency, BTW; it's a result of the mathematical formalism. If that seems nonobvious, try to recast HSL color values as RGB color values sometime; turns out there's no simple one-to-one correspondence between the two schemes.
AAAAUUUUGH! The perils of leaving and coming back to a draft, and on an itty-bitty phone at that.
Consumers also cannot tell the difference between sales pitch and desire for prestige.
The sound of the needle in the groove adds a kind of container or frame for the music which is what a lot of what vinyl-heads are responding to.
Saw somewhere that disliking digital became a thing early on because the equipment it would be played on wasn't made to reproduce it accurately, or was simply cheap.
My theory is that many of the mixes from analog tape masters didn't correct for the RIAA curve and so sounded shrill. Recordings that were done well -- for digital originally -- like the first Dire Straits digital recordings sounded great. Sloppy mastering was to blame more than anything else.
Knew I was missing something.
Wasn't there a kerfuffle about New World and Old World wine in blind tastings that proved to of similar bullshittery?
Bottle Shock Doctrine.
I'm old enough to remember record jackets having more text about the recording technology used than about the music.
Reminds me of how craft brewers disdained aluminum cans for years, saying they negatively affected the taste of beer, as if the major brewers never checked about this. Now, they're all in, not least because they can crank out cool can graphics and it's cheaper to ship a six of cans than bottles...and cans have no effect on taste.
There is a difference in the mouth feel--though there are now twist off caps on cans now.
"Mouthfeel".
I have said some questionable things on here, but... --
So you pour the beer from the can into a proper beer glass, easily solved.
I'm a recording engineer and electric guitarist. I think the original prejudice against digital recordings came from the two or three year lag between the introduction of CDs and the awakening of mastering engineers to the fact that it was no longer necessary to use the RIAA equalization curve (or anything even close to it) in the production of a CD. They were boosting the high frequencies and cutting the lows to accommodate the shortcomings of the vinyl medium, and on digital playback the results sounded cold and harsh, and anybody could tell, golden ears or not. Not saying all of them made this mistake, or that they applied the full EQ curve to every recording they worked on, but it happened enough in the 70s and 80s to allow analog snobbery to gain a foothold. Needless to say, it's not happening anymore.
That said (KenSchulz), decades ago I tested a regular guitar cord against a Monster cable, and I think I could hear the difference. The Monster cable was better (broader frequency response), but I didn't buy it because it wasn't that much better and it cost way too much. But the experience led me to believe that there probably are a few people with golden ears who can tell the difference between a digital and an analog recording. But in an industry that gives itself artistic awards based on units sold, and most people listen on earbuds, audio fidelity doesn't matter.
And slightly off topic, a similar "debate" has raged forever between aficionados of analog (vacuum tube) guitar amplifiers and those who use digital modeling amps, which supposedly simulate the sound of tube amps. They don't.* There are just too many variables in the way the player attacks the strings and the way the input tubes respond to those stimuli, not to mention the "smooth" way the output tubes go into distortion when overdriven. These behaviors have not been realistically simulated by digital circuitry. The differences are pretty obvious, and similarly meaningless to 99% of listeners.
*It's been a few years since I last looked at modeling amps, and maybe they have gotten a lot better. I hope so, as I am having trouble lifting my 85-pound tube amp into the trunk of the car. Transistors would be so much lighter...
Bingo!
Thanks, Larry. I am a professional computer guy and a fairly accomplished amateur musician. I remember hearing that harshness (although at times it just seemed like brilliance) and wondering if they hadn't defined the sample rate (88kHz iirc) just a bit too low. Theory says you do faithful DtoA at frequencies at less than half the sample rate, and human hearing cuts off at about 44kHz. However, some things did seem a bit over harsh, so I wondered if a bit more headroom wouldn't smooth things out.
But the EQ curve explanation seems pretty solid.
Bear in mind, I knew some guys who would take a green sharpie and draw it around the inside circle of a CD and swore up and down it made it sound better. It sounds like a practical joke, right? I don't think they meant it that way.
You're welcome, Doctor.
But I guess I shouldn't blame it all on mastering engineers. In some cases they were being asked to produce master tapes that could be made into CDs and vinyl records, which is not really possible. And I'm sure any experienced mastering person would know how godawful a CD would sound if encoded with the RIAA phonograph EQ. So there was probably a period of experimentation, trial and error for the earliest CDs, plus no one was sure exactly what the new medium could reproduce, and all past experience (with vinyl) indicated there were likely shortcomings that had to be dealt with somehow.
I will say that once the technology had advanced to the point where you could produce a complete project totally in the digital domain from songwriting to pressing discs, the world became a better place. Ironically, all recording software these days includes multiple ways to make your project sound like it was created using old fashioned analog equipment. Take that, snotty audiophiles.
Folks have been using Fractals, Kemper, and Line 6 Helix systems instead of amps/pedals, and Fender's digital versions of the DRRI, Twin, and Super Reverb have been getting very positive reviews. Amp in box, like from Universal Audio seems to be part of trend for DSP solutions that emulate just 1 classic amp extremely well, instead of modeling 10, 30, or hundreds of amps and effects. As an unaccomplished guitar player, I have wanted a classic low powered tube amp, like a Princeton Reverb, but realize that even 12 watts will be too loud for home use.
There's a lot of stuff like this where it basically amounts to snobbery, and people can't actually tell the difference when put through a truly blind test. Same thing happens with wine tasting, and "organic vs conventional" fruit and produce tests.
Sheesh. Next time you'll tell me gold audio cables don't do anything.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000J36XR2/ref=cm_sw_r_fa_dp_W3hdvb1ZJAGD2
These cables listed for $8000. The reviews are gold.
I can remember when I could hear well
I have lost a LOT of high frequency hearing capability unfortunately.
But I do remember back "in the day" an electronics teacher telling us that anyone who put a "system" (read expensive and powerful audio) in a car is nuts. Metal can, riding on a metal suspension resting on rubber times rolling over rough asphalt just simply gives off too much back ground noise to enjoy ANY type of music while in a vehicle. Of course he was right, but we didn't believe it back then. And when music is playing over a loudspeaker at an army base in "Nam well you just lose all interest in this whole analog, stereo, digital debate.
Now that I can't hear too well it makes little difference to me. I think I hear my memorized versions of music more so than whats actually coming out of a speaker these days
What creates differences in sound:
1. Room acoustics.
Most overlooked/ignored factor. Move one musical system from one room to another and the difference in sound is immediately "Tuning" isn't terribly expensive, but hard for non-professionals to do.
2. Speakers.
The transducers you have will determine the sound you hear. Fundamental and simple. And there is no such thing as a "neutral" sounding speaker.
3. DAC's - digital to analog converters.
How they process the signal affects what you hear. Like speakers, it's a design choice and more expensive never translates into better automatically.
Again, O/T, but important:
https://mobile.twitter.com/MeansNefarious/status/1556240426629271559?cxt=HHwWjsC45Yab8JgrAAAA
( ( ( Jon Ossoff ) ) ) & ( ( ( Raphael Gamaliel* Warnock ) ) ) pity fool.
*A H/t to Atticus's disqus brother by another mother Hugh Everett III for teaching me Rev. Warnock's unamerican middle name.
From having been in the thick of it, I remember the main part of the vinyl over CD preference starting off in the late 1990s/early 2000s (probably a bit too early for Fox News to be responsible).
During that period labels were putting out older releases on CD and subjecting them to intense compression (they wanted it to have the same apparent volume level as the new music CDs) and getting rid of that hiss that became apparent on older recordings by slathering it in NoNoise process. It ended up sounding so much worse than the same music on original release vinyl, so everyone started thinking vinyl was automatically better. By the mid-2000s labels started eliminating those problems on CDs but their reputation had been damaged, perhaps permanently.
There's only one way to truly get to original sound - get hold of records made before electronic recording came in around 1925, and play them on a good quality Victrola or other vintage gramophone from that period.
When you do that, you are hearing the actual vibrations produced by the singer's voice, never mediated by electricity. I have an excellent 1925 Victrola I inherited and can play acoustic recordings by the likes of Caruso, Chaliapin, and Bessie Smith. They sound fantastic.