Thoughts on our first class - Ian

I love the "nothing sounds as good as vinyl" argument.

So let's say a track is written on digital synths, in a digital sequencer, emailed as a .wav to be mastered, mastered in protools (digitally), then emailed to a pressing plant as a .wav, somehow sounds better after being cut to a metal plate (quality loss), which is then impressed on hot vinyl (quality loss), then has a diamond needles drug across it (more quality loss)? Sorry, vinyl has suffered at least 5 degradations of quality (if no one else listened to it in the store before you bought it) by the time you play it once, which destroys the sound further with each play. A .wav is a .wav and will always be the same .wav that came out of the producers computer. Vinyl doesn't magically make stuff sound better.

An analog reproduction of a digital recording will not sound "warmer", vinyl is not magic. Open a digital photo in photoshop, zoom in 500% and tell me if it looks better. That is what happens when you convert a digital recording to analog. If you have a live band, recorded on tape and mastered in a thousand euro an hour studio with vintage tube compression, then it will sound better when played from an analog medium. At least the first time you play it, since analog mediums get destroyed more and more with each play. The first time you drag a needle across a record you kill anything in the -10hz range, if the artists even though to put in sounds the human ear can't pick up anyway, but my .wav will always have them.

The only thing you might get out of an analog medium is some reverb. In a large club the sound will reverb back through the needle. If it is that important, plug a mic in and set the level to 1 or so, there is your reverb.

The reason why it may "sound better" on vinyl is because it's been sent to a professional sound engineer to be further mastered before being sent to press (cd or vinyl). 90% of the mp3's and wavs and whatnot only have the producer's "mastering" on it (if you can even call it that). Of course a song that's been professionally mastered will sound better than one that hasn't.

Basically, I'm rendering that entire metaphor moot.