Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo The Death of High Fidelity

That sentiment is a common thread to people searching for the great dynamic range that has been lost in modern CDs. Earlier this year I dusted off my old Technics turntable, played some old vinyl and was amazed how good it sounded. It was enough for me to buy a new turntable/cartridge and dig out my old record collection. Classics and jazz never sounded this good on cds.

Yet there is hope. This quote in the article caught my eye.

"So is music doomed to keep sounding worse? Awareness of the problem is growing. The South by Southwest music festival recently featured a panel titled "Why Does Today's Music Sound Like Shit?" In August, a group of producers and engineers founded an organization called Turn Me Up!, which proposes to put stickers on CDs that meet high sonic standards."

Now that I have the audiobytes and work at home the large majority of the time, I've been getting into streamed and downloaded music. I've so far been very pleasantly surprised by the quality but perhaps this has more to do with the genres of music that I've been listening to. I've been finding that acoustic blues and light jazz is mastered very well.

I have other problems though. The biggest one is the noise coming from my HP's laptop fan. I complained about this some time ago and now HP has an "improved algorithm" that keeps the fan on all the time at low speed rather than cycling it off and on (high speed). Anyway, to make a long story even longer, the noise from this improved algorithm from three feet away is 80dB. I've been finding that I'm winding up with nasty headaches at the end of prolonged listening sessions and I attribute this to the high SPL required to fight my fan's parasitic noise.

If you are setting up a home office and plan to listen through a laptop or PC, compression may be the least of your worries.

Charles, there wasn't any implication that the LP had an advantage as a format, since the contrary is clearly the case as to dynamic range and all other significant factors. The theoretical maximum dynamic range of the CD format of about 98dB(6.02n + 1.76dB)is more than can be used in home music reproduction, and the highest practical would be about 70dB. However, if the choice is made for a given recording to make things almost uniformly loud for commercial purposes when transferred to CD, then a less capable format such as the LP can show a greater dynamic range on that same performance if the manufacturer chooses not to compress the dynamics as much.

Yeah, I'm just curious if that is ever the case, where the dynamics aren't as compressed on vinyl versions of new music. Being that new vinyl releases seem mostly to exist as collector's items, I imagine there's no real difference in the mastering, but then, I don't really know what they have to do to transfer to vinyl.

In any case, since I listen to very little music that was recorded in the days of LPs, picking up a turntable wouldn't do me any good unless by some fluke some of these newer releases were ending up with greater dynamic range than their CD counterparts.

Well no, I would never seriously consider spending money these days on an obsolescent format such as the LP. However, if an LP of a particular performance contained a greater dynamic range than the CD of the same performance, it wouldn't be a "fluke", but simply an intentional decision on the part of the producers.

Mo, that just doesn't seem right: 80dB is loud! I just now blocked the inlet on my Dell laptop so that the fan turned on high after a while. About a foot from the outlet(on the back of the computer)it measured 54dB. How did you get that 80dB measurement?

I agree that it is very loud. I set my SPL meter on dBC, slow and measured from 3 feet away. Another thing I can try is shutting my 100W incandescent light off to see if this is contributing anything.

Right. As an example of the trend, last week I picked up the latest MOFI 180g release of the original Santana LP. One of the first things I did was compare it to the CD version. If range and soundstage are the criteria it wasn't even a close comparison. On the LP, the instruments were more distinct and airy and the nuances of the percussion were more prominent. A well recorded LP will always have greater range since it isn't limited by the 44.1kHz/ 16-bit resolution of a cd even assuming the engineer has not compressed the recording.

Yeah but how many times can you listen to an LP before it's deteriorated to the point of a low quality MP3?

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