USA Today: Music lovers pursue technologies to return to high fidelity Options

[jamesbaud]

http://m.usatoday.com/article/tech/52963362

I thought this was interesting.

[andy o]

Because the article is by default displayed as a short page, actually the first of nine, and the link to display it all at once is buried away down the page, here is said link for convenience:
http://m.usatoday.com/article/tech/5296336...ViewMode=single

That's still the mobile link, the normal link is in post #4.

BTW, HA favorite Michael Fremer makes an appearance in the comments, indignant at a critic, as always.

[2Bdecided]

HA favorite Michael Fremer makes an appearance in the comments

Ooo, thanks for that - straight through to his facebook page.

I like the photos of his record collection. I can sympathise with the lack of space! He also has interesting screen caps showing the result of the loudness wars on vinyl mastering.

...but how can he believe things like this...

I know many well known recording engineers---and they agree that vinyl sounds more like what they put to tape than does the CD version. if it's a high resolution digital recording, the vinyl is more likely than not to sound more like the file than is a truncated CD version. I wish I could post here an MP3 of properly played back vinyl...even in that awful format you can hear what I'm talking about.

(from the comments section of http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/20...62/1?csp=34news )

If you add in the indisputable facts that mp3 is either worse than, or equivalent to, CD - and that mp3, decoded, can be losslessly written to CD - then what you have there is that vinyl sounds better than CD, and to prove it, Michael will send you a messed up recording of some vinyl (i.e. an mp3) which you can copy perfectly onto CD to hear how much better it is than CD!!!??!?!

Or simply...
master > vinyl > mp3 > CD
is better than
master > CD


I think the guy is trying to explain what he thinks he hears - i.e. that most of the time, vinyl sounds better than CD. But he can't find a rational explanation, so falls back on irrational non-logic, pseudo science, and things-we-don't-know / can't-measure / our-ears-are-too-clever.

Cheers,
David.