Old and new converts to vinyl never had it so good as these past few weeks.
Last Saturday, audiophiles and music enthusiasts had a dizzying but fun-filled time hunting for records at the successful 3rd Vinyl ATBP Record Bazaar at Calatagan corner Filmore in Makati.
Aside from the bazaar, which I missed because of previous commitments, another event that fortified the return of the venerable round plastic into the mainstream was the launch a couple of weeks ago of Satchmi’s Motorino record player.
The way vinyl has resurged boggles my mind.
When I started writing about the vinyl renaissance in this corner eight years ago, I was merely sharing with fellow hobbyists my disappointment with the many flaws I found in digital music. Before I knew it, other newspapers had started putting out their own weekly columns on vinyl love to cash in on the phenomenon.
In the early 1980s, I was among those who hailed the introduction of compact discs. CDs were touted to be better than vinyl records, which in many ways they really were. The CDs took out the noise in recorded music, especially the hiss. The sound was dynamic, meaning that the high and low frequencies were generously given.
It didn’t take long, however, before digital music started to fall below my expectations. The first flaw I noticed was that the sound quality was sorely lacking in the mid-frequencies, which our ears are more sensitive to. The mid-frequency, which carries the voice range, is what gives warmth to music. Without it, a song will not sound as soulful as the artist wants us listeners to hear and feel.
Have you been to a philharmonic concert, an opera or even a pop concert lately? Without prejudice to any specific genre, the live sound you hear there, minus the benefit of amplification or any other sound-enhancing equipment for that matter, should be the reference point. This is what recorded audiophile music should sound like.
This is an issue that sound engineers have been hoping to address for years. They realized the mistake and tried to outdo one another at a dizzying pace by bringing back what shouldn’t have been deleted in the first place.
Our ears can only hear analog sound waves. That’s a law of physics, and not even digital music die-hards can change that fact.
To record music on a CD, the sound must be digitized first, or converted into numbers (strings of 1’s and 0’s), so that it can later be electronically stored, manipulated and distributed. The process is very much like taking a picture of the analog sound.
For a CD recording, engineers take 44,100 pictures of sound per second (sampling rate). The pictures are then converted into data with a 16 bits accuracy (each of 44,100 pictures must be transformed into one of the 65,536 [2^16] possible values).
A digital recording can’t get all the possible sound information. Think of a CD recording as a huge cabinet with many drawers. Some sound information will inevitably be lost since the pictures taken have to be limited to the maximum 44,100 per second. And to think that each of these pictures must fit in one of the 65,536 drawers of the cabinet.
In contrast, vinyl records are pure analog sound. The grooves engraved on it are an exact replica of the original sound wave. The analog sound signal is then amplified to produce music. In this process, there is no “picture†taken, no sound conversion and there is a limitless number of “pictures†and “likely values.†This is the reason vinyl recordings sound warmer and richer than any CD.
I tip my hat to Satchmi for realizing that times indeed are a-changin’. By coming up with an affordable record player, many more music lovers will be enticed to dust off their father’s or grandfather’s old records and bring analog music back to the pedestal it should never have left in the first place.
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For comments or questions, please e-mail me at audioglow@yahoo.com. You can also visit www.wiredstate.com for quick answers to your audio concerns.