Pump up the volume
April 14, 2007 | 12:00am
Some members of the Philippine chapter of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) invited me for coffee two Thursdays ago through a friend, Andrew Sevilla, who also happens to be an AES member of good standing. Andrew owns and manages AMX Audioworks, maker of both professional and consumer-grade audio equipment. It was an afternoon of exciting and engaging dialogue on the future direction of hi-fi. Some even suggested that the future points to sound equipment with no movable parts, which is highly possible as shown by the flash or USB drive.
As they suggested, I checked out the AES website as soon as I got home. I found out that our Dec. 30 column "Get real" was digested and talked about in their website’s hi-fi thread (acoustics.com.ph/forum). "Get real" openly discussed the sonic differences between CD and vinyl, and I think some of the AES members rightfully viewed the column as biased in favor of vinyl.
Yes, we are partial to vinyl, and for a very good reason. The refusal of some audiophiles worldwide to totally embrace CD technology has probably mystified those who believe that vinyl is dead and music lovers must move on. The opposite happened and the analog renaissance has recruited a much younger generation of audiophiles who were not even born when the first stereo record was cut.
Mind you, many audiophiles’ adherence to vinyl is not whimsical. Audiophiles will always be in search of near-perfect music reproduction. If only the CD performed as well as it was advertised, there wouldn’t be a problem. It’s obvious why audiophiles suddenly resurrected vinyl from the musical grave: It really does reproduce music much better than a CD. Suddenly, analog audio gear is back in the marketplace. More artists are recording in both CD and vinyl formats, hoping to grab a slice of the growing analog market.
Forget the technical gobbledygook and test how these two formats work in real life. That was exactly what we did a few months ago. We auditioned several CD titles which have their counterparts in vinyl: Jacintha’s "Here’s to Ben" (Super Audio CD vs. vinyl), Patricia Barber’s "Nightclub" (SACD vs. 45 rpm vinyl), George Benson’s "Tenderly" (vinyl vs. CD), Harry James’s "King James Version" (CD vs. direct-to-disk vinyl), and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 (SACD vs. vinyl), among others. We used the same audio equipment at the same volume inside the same room to play them back. The difference, as my friend, audio engineer John Alegre, said, was "as wide as the distance between the earth and the moon" in favor of vinyl. This vinyl vs. CD evaluation is being repeated over and over whenever possible in different audiophiles’ music rooms. To most audiophiles, the result is the same, from the bottom low to the top end of the equipment’s frequency range rating.
The newer formats, which have more sampling rates and higher resolutions such as the SACD, Extended Resolution CD (XRCD) and DVD Audio should have already cured the so-called "red book" or the 44.1 KHz/16-bit limitation of a standard CD (see my Dec. 30 column), but the glaring disparity still exists.
George Graham, a respected audio engineer and record producer, in an article entitled "What Ever Happened to Dynamic Range on Compact Disc?," offers a valid explanation: "The fallacy that seems to have become pervasive among many people in the pop music recording field, especially among record companies, is that if a CD is pushing the absolute digital max, it will somehow be louder or better on the air and presumably win more airplay, and thus sell more copies to the public."
Graham laments that after the year 2000, recording companies increasingly resorted to compressing CDs heavily to pump their volume in order to be "radio friendly." They believe that if a CD is radio friendly, it will be played frequently, thus increasing CD sales. The same goes with radio: The larger its audience, the more ads they will have. One thing radio stations (which have a very narrow frequency range) do to draw listeners is to make their signal as loud as possible without exceeding the broadcasting limits set by the government, thereby using heavy compression to raise their average broadcast signal level. It’s the average level of a signal, not the peak level, that our ears perceive as loudness.
"Compressing a CD will contribute to on-air loudness almost unnoticeably. Radio people have the brains to turn up a CD that’s recorded at a normal level, and broadcast stations’ existing compressors will even everything out anyway. The only thing that is accomplished is messing up the dynamic range for those who pay their good money for CDs, ‘squashing’ the life out of any acoustic instruments in the mix, and increasing listener fatigue," Graham explains.
I believe it was in December 2001 that well-known people in the recording industry were selected as Grammy judges for the best-engineered CD. Out of the 200 CDs they listened to, they couldn’t find a single one worthy of the award. Since all the CDs they auditioned were heavily compressed, they ended up picking one that had been messed up the least. The winner that year was Norah Jones’ "Come Away With Me." Could it be that it won not because of great engineering but because it was the least engineered?
My apologies to those who were expecting to learn more about speakers and room acoustics this week. That’ll be our next topic.
For comments and suggestions, please e-mail me at vphl@hotmail.com.
As they suggested, I checked out the AES website as soon as I got home. I found out that our Dec. 30 column "Get real" was digested and talked about in their website’s hi-fi thread (acoustics.com.ph/forum). "Get real" openly discussed the sonic differences between CD and vinyl, and I think some of the AES members rightfully viewed the column as biased in favor of vinyl.
Yes, we are partial to vinyl, and for a very good reason. The refusal of some audiophiles worldwide to totally embrace CD technology has probably mystified those who believe that vinyl is dead and music lovers must move on. The opposite happened and the analog renaissance has recruited a much younger generation of audiophiles who were not even born when the first stereo record was cut.
Mind you, many audiophiles’ adherence to vinyl is not whimsical. Audiophiles will always be in search of near-perfect music reproduction. If only the CD performed as well as it was advertised, there wouldn’t be a problem. It’s obvious why audiophiles suddenly resurrected vinyl from the musical grave: It really does reproduce music much better than a CD. Suddenly, analog audio gear is back in the marketplace. More artists are recording in both CD and vinyl formats, hoping to grab a slice of the growing analog market.
Forget the technical gobbledygook and test how these two formats work in real life. That was exactly what we did a few months ago. We auditioned several CD titles which have their counterparts in vinyl: Jacintha’s "Here’s to Ben" (Super Audio CD vs. vinyl), Patricia Barber’s "Nightclub" (SACD vs. 45 rpm vinyl), George Benson’s "Tenderly" (vinyl vs. CD), Harry James’s "King James Version" (CD vs. direct-to-disk vinyl), and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 (SACD vs. vinyl), among others. We used the same audio equipment at the same volume inside the same room to play them back. The difference, as my friend, audio engineer John Alegre, said, was "as wide as the distance between the earth and the moon" in favor of vinyl. This vinyl vs. CD evaluation is being repeated over and over whenever possible in different audiophiles’ music rooms. To most audiophiles, the result is the same, from the bottom low to the top end of the equipment’s frequency range rating.
The newer formats, which have more sampling rates and higher resolutions such as the SACD, Extended Resolution CD (XRCD) and DVD Audio should have already cured the so-called "red book" or the 44.1 KHz/16-bit limitation of a standard CD (see my Dec. 30 column), but the glaring disparity still exists.
George Graham, a respected audio engineer and record producer, in an article entitled "What Ever Happened to Dynamic Range on Compact Disc?," offers a valid explanation: "The fallacy that seems to have become pervasive among many people in the pop music recording field, especially among record companies, is that if a CD is pushing the absolute digital max, it will somehow be louder or better on the air and presumably win more airplay, and thus sell more copies to the public."
Graham laments that after the year 2000, recording companies increasingly resorted to compressing CDs heavily to pump their volume in order to be "radio friendly." They believe that if a CD is radio friendly, it will be played frequently, thus increasing CD sales. The same goes with radio: The larger its audience, the more ads they will have. One thing radio stations (which have a very narrow frequency range) do to draw listeners is to make their signal as loud as possible without exceeding the broadcasting limits set by the government, thereby using heavy compression to raise their average broadcast signal level. It’s the average level of a signal, not the peak level, that our ears perceive as loudness.
"Compressing a CD will contribute to on-air loudness almost unnoticeably. Radio people have the brains to turn up a CD that’s recorded at a normal level, and broadcast stations’ existing compressors will even everything out anyway. The only thing that is accomplished is messing up the dynamic range for those who pay their good money for CDs, ‘squashing’ the life out of any acoustic instruments in the mix, and increasing listener fatigue," Graham explains.
I believe it was in December 2001 that well-known people in the recording industry were selected as Grammy judges for the best-engineered CD. Out of the 200 CDs they listened to, they couldn’t find a single one worthy of the award. Since all the CDs they auditioned were heavily compressed, they ended up picking one that had been messed up the least. The winner that year was Norah Jones’ "Come Away With Me." Could it be that it won not because of great engineering but because it was the least engineered?
For comments and suggestions, please e-mail me at vphl@hotmail.com.
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