Gift of Screws Vinyl - Discontinued?

[estranged4life]

Originally Posted by FangsFirst

So they are less compressed?

(A short one at that) Yes

[Peestie]

Mine's in the post from the US Amazon site so it might be a while longer. I can't wait to hear how it sounds, though GOS isn't too compressed anyway. Some of the choruses are but it's a hell of a lot more dynamic than most albums being released on major labels these days.

[natesummers]

I'll have both of mine tomorrow. Will update then.

[estranged4life]

Originally Posted by Peestie

I can't wait to hear how it sounds, though GOS isn't too compressed anyway. Some of the choruses are but it's a hell of a lot more dynamic than most albums being released on major labels these days.

of too much compression by a major label artist (The GH is uncompressed, the CD is compressed)

[Peestie]

Wow, that's actually put me off getting the new Metallica album on CD! I can't believe how bad that sounds! All of the high end is just gone under that much compression. The RMS volume on that album must be shockingly high.

I've seen loads of stuff like that. There's actually an organization started by producers and engineers to combat this stupid overcompression called (I think) Turn Me Up. Thankfully GOS has escaped it in the most part but I still imagine the vinyl master will be an improvement.

[estranged4life]

Originally Posted by Peestie

Wow, that's actually put me off getting the new Metallica album on CD! I can't believe how bad that sounds! All of the high end is just gone under that much compression. The RMS volume on that album must be shockingly high.

Rick Rubin (Who some assume to be godlike in his, *cough**cough* production prowess...he did the exact same production value to the RHCP's latest release which also suffered "death by compression through 'Brickwalling'") , seems ME-tallica's management is playing 'spin-doctor' on the compression issue and blaming Ted Jensen, But oddly THE Overrated Rubin has yet to comment (Silence speaks volumes)

"In a posting at the Mettallicabb fan forum, Jensen wrote, “In this case the mixes were already brick walled before they arrived at my place. Suffice it to say I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here. Believe me I’m not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else”.

Jensen is the chief mastering engineer at Sterling Sound, where the album was mastered.

The criticism from within the circle has sent Metallica manager Cliff Burnstein into damage control. "There's something exciting about the sound of this record that people are responding to," he told the Wall Street Journal in response to Jensen’s comments.

Jensen said that the sound of the Guitar Hero version of the album is far superior to the CD."

-----------------------

The high end levels on the CD version of DM are gone, compressed into oblivion (I checked this on the spectral analysis myself, and it showed exactly what most have been saying is fact) whereas the Guitar Hero III version is superior (Which, from some reports, was sent via masters before Rubin's put his 'finishing touches' on the tracks)

Still a good album that could've been GREAT without the FUBAR'd compression/fidelity issues.

Here's a good read about the fidelity issue in current music:

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto..._high_fidelity

The link to Turn Me Up!

http://www.turnmeup.org/

and finally a link describing "Brickwall Limiting" in regards to RMS volume:

http://www.eqmag.com/article/brickwa...g/Feb-07/25512

[TrueFaith77]

wow i don't understand any of that stuff. . .

[FangsFirst]

Originally Posted by TrueFaith77

wow i don't understand any of that stuff. . .

Think of it this way.
You've got a big fridge and a low doorway.
The refrigerated portion will fit through the doorway, the freezer will not.
So, to get it through the doorway, you saw off the freezer.

Now you're left with no freezer, just refrigeration. that whole top, cold part is just gone, because it didn't fit.

OK, this is a weird metaphor, but hopefully a simple one if you have no interest in the technical aspect.
(you might have an open top freezer next to the refrigerator that goes into the doorway nicely without modification, so low volume sounds might sound fine--but the metallica record is almost ALL refrigerators with freezers cut off, because the volume is turned up loud, making all of the sounds "tall")

[iamnotafraid]

I think compression has to do with the dynamic range, not the frequency.

With the human hearing range being about 20-20,000 hz.
(most can't hear above 18,500 hz)

I believe the standard CD has a range from 5-20,000 hz.
(with a sharp cut-off at 20,000 hz).

I can't remember what the possible frequency range is for vinyl,
but it doesn't have a sharp or harsh cut off filter. So if the source
material has the information, and it is transferred to the vinyl you
will possibly hear a more natural sound. Some would say "warmer".

[estranged4life]

Originally Posted by iamnotafraid

I think compression has to do with the dynamic range, not the frequency.

With the human hearing range being about 20-20,000 hz.
(most can't hear above 18,500 hz)

I believe the standard CD has a range from 5-20,000 hz.
(with a sharp cut-off at 20,000 hz).

I can't remember what the possible frequency range is for vinyl,
but it doesn't have a sharp or harsh cut off filter. So if the source
material has the information, and it is transferred to the vinyl you
will possibly hear a more natural sound. Some would say "warmer".

a couple of links to defintions of compression (Data & Audio Level) :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_compression_(data)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_level_compression

According to wikipedia, the frequency range for vinyl that is 100-5000Hz for electric recordings and 168-2000Hz for acoustic recording.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_record

"The frequency response of vinyl records may be degraded by frequent playback if the cartridge is set to track too heavily, or the stylus is not compliant enough to trace the high frequency grooves accurately, or the cartridge/tonearm is not properly aligned. The best cartridges and styli have response up to 76 kHz. The RIAA has suggested the following acceptable losses: down to 20 kHz after one play, 18 kHz after three plays, 17 kHz after five, 16 kHz after eight, 14 kHz after fifteen, 13 kHz after twenty five, 10 kHz after thirty five, and 8 kHz after eighty plays. While this degradation is possible if the record is played on improperly set up equipment, many collectors of LPs report excellent sound quality on LPs played many more times when using care and high quality equipment. This rapid sound degradation is not usually typical on modern Hi-Fi equipment with a properly balanced tonearm and well balanced low-mass stylus. The RIAA standard represents only the minimum acceptable losses. Most properly setup Hi-Fi systems can provide much higher record life and sound quality."

"The theory that vinyl records can audibly represent lower frequencies that compact discs cannot (making the recording sound "warmer") is disputed by some and accepted by others—according to Red Book specifications, the compact disc has a frequency response of 20 Hz to 22.05 kHz. The average human auditory system is sensitive to frequencies from 20 Hz to a maximum of around 20,000 Hz. This means that any frequencies that a vinyl record can represent that a compact disc cannot would be inaudible and thus completely subliminal. The lower frequency limit of human hearing can vary per person, and interference caused by sound in the lower inaudible spectrum can still influence audible sound. It's possible that phonograph intermodulation effects from low frequency sources such as rumble and wow could adversely affect audible frequency ranges."


http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1543016

"The Frequency Domain

Frequency is pitch - the difference between a low, deep sound and a high piercing sound. As we hear sounds as a sum of frequencies, most of the important information is in this domain, and accurate reproduction is correspondingly important.

The sample rate of a CD is 44,100 samples per second. According to the Nyquist theorem this is sufficient to capture all the information in a signal that contains no frequencies above 22,050 Hz.1 This bandwidth is more than enough. The human ear is most sensitive at around 3,000 - 4,000 Hz. (The fundamental tones of a piano range roughly 25 Hz to 4,200 Hz) The upper frequency limit for human hearing is roughly 20,000 Hz, while for a middle aged male this figure may be nearer 15,000 Hz. At both extremes of the audible frequency range the perceived loudness relative to the signal power is less than that for moderate frequencies.


The reason for this extra sampling overhead is actually to make the CD player's job a little easier. When recreating an analogue signal from digital data it is necessary to filter artefacts generated above the Nyquist frequency (in this case 22,050 Hz). Analogue filters with sharp cut-off slopes are expensive, so a 2,050 Hz gap to ramp down is quite helpful. Still, a poorly designed filter might unduly attenuate the audible high end or have a "ringing" frequency response across the full range.


Sound behaves linearly, which means that frequencies above 20,000 Hz cannot somehow affect, alter or "shape" the lower, audible sounds. Nevertheless, audiophiles often believe that these high frequencies actually do make a difference. The best scientific support I have seen for this view is a paper2 which suggests that brain activity may be somehow affected by the presence of hypersonic sounds.


Frequency domain issues with vinyl have an entirely different nature. First off, vinyl records are not recorded with a constant frequency response. To properly reproduce low frequencies would require larger grooves, so records are pressed with the low frequencies reduced. In addition, as a strategy to drown out noise, higher frequencies are boosted on the recording. A RIAA equalisation amplifier mostly corrects the frequency response on playback. Problems introduced by cheap turntables include "wow and flutter", which refers to frequency shifts caused by variation of playback speed and "rumble", low frequency noise from the motor.


Dynamic Range
The dynamic range is the resolution of the recording - the ratio of the loudest possible sound to the softest, expressed in the logarithmic decibel (dB) scale.

For CDs, each sample has a 16-bit range (65536 values). This might not seem to be a great deal but it actually translates to roughly 96 dB dynamic range. I would argue that this should be sufficient for any music, when we consider the range of human hearing.

By definition, decibel levels are always comparative - the difference between the loudness of two sounds. When you see an absolute figure quoted, ("A lawn mower measures 90 dB") this is in relation to a defined zero point - 0 dB is defined as the softest sound audible to a person with perfect hearing. This means that if you set the volume of your CD player such that you can hear all the sound it contains, the loudest point on the track will measure at least 96 dB on the absolute scale. Listening at a higher volume than this for too long will reduce the need for a large dynamic range.3


The biggest general misconception about analogue technologies is that they have infinite resolution, which is never true. (In this example, a PVC molecule is small, but not infinitesimal). In practice, the dynamic range of vinyl records is affected by the age and quality of the recording, and the density of the tracks. The best-case seems to be around 60 dB. The dynamic range will be adversely affected at low frequencies because of the equalisation issue detailed above."

-------------------------

I think alot of preference of format depends if your were familiar with vinyl back in its heyday - If you were raised in the post-vinyl (Compact disc/Download) era one may appear to chose the compact disc over vinyl (I preferred audio cassettes because I could manually adjust the playback head(s) on my cassette players to get a more "scooped" EQ than what Compact discs acquire...I'm not a fan of 'mid-range' in the modern day 'digital era' of recording) and vice-versa.

[iamnotafraid]

Originally Posted by estranged4life

According to wikipedia, the frequency range for vinyl that is 100-5000Hz for electric recordings and 168-2000Hz for acoustic recording.



Sound behaves linearly, which means that frequencies above 20,000 Hz cannot somehow affect, alter or "shape" the lower, audible sounds. Nevertheless, audiophiles often believe that these high frequencies actually do make a difference. The best scientific support I have seen for this view is a paper2 which suggests that brain activity may be somehow affected by the presence of hypersonic sounds.

Estranged you provided an interesting post, thanks for the work.
I do think widipedia is wrong about the frequency range for vinyl.
I believe it would have to be lower than what they specified, and
higher on the other end (could have been a typo?).

I do like the paragraph of yours I quoted about sound behaves linearly.
I'm not up on it like I used to be, but it reminds me of the days I read
from cover to cover "High Fidelity", "Stereo Review". And then graduated
to "Stereophile" and "Home Theatre". Sterophile has an excellent website,
if anyones interested.

Frequency response and dynamic range aside, the thing I miss most about
vinyl is the cover art. Sadly that is pretty much a lost art in the day of
digital (CD & downloads).

[iamnotafraid]

BTW, I received my Vinyl copy of Gift Of Screws today!!!

It wasn't packaged the best, but it did arrive in excellent condition.

Now I just have to check and see if the CD included with it is any different
in sound than the standard copy CD.

Oh, and the autographed 8 X 10 photo that came with the album was a
great bonus.



(please note that the autographed photo part might be a joke)

[estranged4life]

about the frequencies for vinyl, and the answers I read have various answers. The following are some answers I found:

"With vinyl, it was very difficult to vibrate a mechanical pickup at 20KHz, especially when the same motion was "on top of" other slower vibrations.

The solution was the famous old RIAA phono EQ which enabled one to restrict the signals by nearly 30dB BEFORE cutting the vinyl. And of course, a circuit with the reverse "EQ" was inserted at playback (phono input of preamp...)

So vinyl was barely making 20KHz..."
-------------------------------------
"The sampling rate for CDs is 44,100 cycles/second. This "conforms" to the fulfill the Nyquist criterion (> 40 kHz or 2x the analog frequency).

However the 20 kHz "brick wall filtering" does not mean 20 kHz
frequencies are faithfully reproduced. There's a lot more audio
information to sample at the higher frequencies. Advantage goes to a
clean vinyl record - e.g. some Technics cartridges can pick up >75 kHz
& can even drive the bats bats - not possible on a CD. Higher
frequency or >20 kHz "inaudible" harmonics have been shown to affect
the human sense of hearing. The ear might not pick it out in a DBT
(double blind test), but the brain wave scans show there clearly is an
effect. I never really trusted those DBTs anyway. ;-)

So "clean" vinyl can be advantageous or competitive for the last
several octaves. That's where the nickname "tin ears" for CD fans
comes from - e.g. the cymbals played which are among the highest
frequencies produced by the orchestra (or even rock band if you'd
care).

This vinyl advantage starts to give way even after the 1st play on any
turntable, no matter how well balanced & built. After all, vinyl is a
1 on Moh's scale of hardness & diamond is a 10. If the diamond stylus
never touched the vinyl surface, there wouldn't be any sound. But
depending on how well implemented the turntable, stylus weight &
tracking balance are implemented, this advantage will ?wear away? at
certain degrees.

But for lower frequencies, the advantages for the CD mentioned above
in this thread lean to the CD. Plus, on a CD the laser never touches
or affects the source disc. What to do? Listen to vinyl in good
condition on a good turntable, or a well recorded & mastered CD
(usually the later releases or masters), 24-bit 96 kHz digital
recordings or the for now occasional SACD or DVD-A. One idea might be
to make a 24/192 hi-rez digital recording (24/96 for multi-channel)
off a brand new LP or vinyl platter. One could do this with a RME or
Lynx sound card, good calibrated condenser microphone, a good
turntable/stylus... & a DVD RW drive or even burned right to a hard
drive.

If you notice the same is true of digital (in the sense of the word
digital, e.g. Class D) vs. analog amps - where digital amps are now
becoming very popular for home & car subwoofers. They are slowly
creeping into the home amplifier market, but seem to need a bit more
switching/sampling power for the higher frequencies to get on par with
higher-end Class A or AB amps. Interesting, when they first debuted
like CDs, they were called "the perfect sound". Some are pretty
good, even sound like a tube amp & all very efficient."
------------------------------------------
The following article doesnt specify frequency of vinyl, but it is a great read none-the-less:

"CDs and vinyl LPs both have their respective strengths, and their respective weaknesses, which makes comparison somewhat of an apples and oranges comparison.

To make matters worse, commercial recordings, both analog and digital, have not always been of the best quality possible for their respective formats. A good example is Aerosmith's first album. If you listen to the vinyl of this, you can hear the hiss of the original master tape.

You should not be able to hear this hiss. At the 28 inches per second transport speed of the high quality, professional recording equipment of the time, any hiss would only contain frequencies well above the range of human hearing. If your dog were an audiophile it might bother him, but human ears reach, at most, 20khz. Most ears top out at well under 18khz.

However, if you have an old tape that has been extensively reused, you can indeed get audible hiss at these speeds. Overuse of dubbing will also increase noise in an analog recording, because once the noise is there, there is no way to remove it without also removing signal.

A third posibility is that Aerosmith could have made a "demo" tape at 14 ips or even 7, which the record company could have "produced" the finished album from.

Their second album contained no such hiss. But someone who had only heard CDs before, listening to Aerosmith's first album through headpones or good speakers, might conclude that noise was a terrible problem in analog and digital is always better.

Noise is analog's biggest weakness. Its other great weakness is that when you make a copy, the copy degrades. With a digital recording, all you are copying is an incredibly large number from one computer to another. Each copy is identical to the copy it was copied from.

With analog, each copy of a recording is a completely new recording. It cannot have equal frequency response, nor can it have less noise, or a wider dynamic range.

The analog media most people are accustomed to are the vinyl LP, cassette, and there are actually a few eight tracks still around. Eight track should have been superior to cassette, as it has twice the transport speed of cassette.

But it wasn't. Play a cassette and an eight track side by side, and the cassette consistantly outperformed the eight track. Why? Because the record companies saw the eight track as for cars with their abysmal acoustics (much worse in the 70s than with modern cars), and the cassette for homes, with their superior acoustics and (at the time) superior speakers.

Home made eight tracks recorded from LPs often were superior to the factory produced cassettes. But with non-home made tapes, cassette ruled, despite what should have been its technical shortcomings.

Pink Floyd "fired" their first record label because the master to their third album sounded "muddy," presumably because the tape heads either had not been properly cleaned, were worn, or the studio's acoustics sucked. Certainly Dark Side of the Moon had none of these problems, and went on to be the best selling album of all time, still on the charts thirty years later!

Analog suffers greatly from lack of cash. With a digital recording, even the cheapest CD player sounds good if played through good speakers. Not so with analog. With analog, the more you pay for a piece of equipment, the better it will sound. A cheap Radio Shack turntable will have "rumble"- the rumbling of the platter's bearings. It won't sound clear, and likely will have the bass attenuated to minimize the rumble, and the treble attenuated because it will sound tinny without the bass. Likewise, a cheap cassette player may have a very severely limited frequency response and still have an annoyingly audible hiss.

In music, "dynamics" is the variation in sound volume. Probably the one piece of music with the most profound dynamics is the 1812 Overture, simply because it uses cannon as a musical instrument. Few stereos are powerful enough to reproduce the cannon accurately, and no recording medium yet devised has the dynamic range to do this piece justice. Not that it matters- if you fired a real cannon in your living room, you would not hear anything at all for quite some time. Certainly you would not hear another note of the performance, bacause of the ringing in your ears.

The fact is, even cassettes have a wide enough dynamic range that the entire range is seldom (if ever) used in a musical recording. CDs have a superior dynamic range than LPs, which have a better dynamic range than cassettes. Even so, many CDs that were remastered from analog media (like the aformentioned Beatles album) have even less dynamics than their original LP! A good example of this is Led Zepplin's Presence.

Why should this be? Presumably because you can always turn it up, or even buy a more powerful amplifier. Some studios use only half of the CDs dynamic range, or even less. I bought a CD of classical music that was so wimpy I decided to make a "corrected" copy, ripping to .wav and normalizing it.

It was so aliased I threw it away, and contented myself with the weak original. Until I could buy a better performance (and recording) of the piece (Swan Lake, IIRC).

Just beccause one technology is inherently superior to another in one way or another does not in fact ensure that an application of that technology is superior.

The CD's format has two distinct disadvantages to both cassette and LP, caused by the same shortcoming- its sample rate and to a lesser extent, using only two bytes of resolution per sample.

This was forced by the technology of the time when digital recording was first starting. In the late 1970s when digital recording was born, 44 k samples per second was the best the equipment of the time could do. It was deemed "good enough," since the labels "golden ears" (humans with hearing well above average) didn't hear any noise and the sound of aliasing was something they had never encountered. They knew what hiss sounded like. They knew what a "muddy" recording sounded like. They knew what harmonic distortion sounded like. They knew what clipping sounded like. But aliasing was new, and they didn't hear it- because they could not possibly listen for it, as they listened for the above mentioned distortions they knew.

At a CD's 44 ksps sample rate, the very highest frequency it can reproduce at all is 22 khz. This is well above human hearing- but here, the model fails. Because its 22 khz frequency response is not an undistorted response.

With a 28 ips analog reel to reel, you can record a dog whistle with no distortion, and transfer it to LP, also with no distortion. In fact, these two technologies had become so good, with a frequency response so high, that they introduced "quadrphonics," or four channel stereo, in the early 1970s. It was a complete flop, since a $300 stereo sounded much better than a $300 quadrophonics system. You needed four of everything for quadrophonics, as opposed to two with stereo.

So, with only two sides of a groove in a record, how did they get four channels?

In a stereo record, the up and down motions of the stylis (needle) translate into both channels of the stereo signal. This way an older, monophonic record player could still play a stereo record without losing half the signal.

The right channel comes from the side to side motions of the needle. To get the left channel, the right channel is mixed out of phase with the combined channels, cancelling itself out in that signal, which becomes the left channel.

With quadrophonics, the rear two channels were modulated with a 44khz tone and mixed with the other two signals, then demodulated at the turntable. This illustration is important to highlight the incredible frequency response of the 28 ips reel to reel and the vinyl record. These incredible frequency responses are completely undistorted. Were the supersonic carrier and the signal it carried distorted, when demodulated it would have sounded terrible. In fact, had you enough cash to afford a good quadrophonic setup, you would not have heard any difference in quality between the front channels and the rear channels.

By contrast, at high frequencies, CDs do very badly indeed. The best cassettes were capable of reaching 18khz without distortion, and even modest, affordable cassette players reached 16khz. If you had both the vinyl and the cassette (many people bought two copies of a piece, an LP for home and a cassette or 8-track for the car) you could hear the difference in the responses of cassette and vinyl. They were very striking, and it didn't take an audiophile to hear them.

By contrast, a CD doesn't even hit 15khz without horrible distortion. A little third grade math using graph paper explains why. A 15khz tone recorded on a CD has only three samples per cycle!

A sine wave curves up, then descends past the zero point, then curves back up to the zero point where it starts a new wave. A square wave goes straight up vertically, shoots horizontally, then straight down to its negative, where it repeats in reverse. A sawtooth wave goes up at a 45 degree angle, then back down at a 45 degree angle to the negative crest, then back up to the zero point.

A guitar player's "fuzz box" converts the complex sine waves coming out of his instrument into a sawtooth wave, or a square wave. Most fuzz boxes have a switch to select sawtooth or square.

At only three samples per crest, there is no difference whatever between a sine wave, a sawtooth wave, or a square wave. And a sine wave that sounds identical to a sawtoth wave is horribly distorted.

And here is where our action adventure nerd protagonist was right. A CD that was produced from an analog master will have the worst of both worlds, both analog media's more limited dynamic range and its noise, coupled by the CD's abysmal frequency response.

When CDs first came out, LPs had been mastered from digital tape for a few years. These CDs must be superior to their LP bretheren, since these LPs will have all the noise of analog, with none of LP's superior frequency response.

But remastered CDs made from an analog master is a completely different thing. Like the early digitally mastered LPs, they are the worst of both worlds.

But six hundred bucks difference??? Well, maybe if you are a chemist for the FBI, or your name is Larry Elison. Personally, the two dollar LPs I find in the used record shops are good enough for me.

As to the aformentioned Presence CD, it lacks presence. The original LP was recorded at the cutting edge, pushing the limits of the recording technology of the time - and analog recording was at its zenith. When it was remastered for CD, the highest frequency harmonics had to be attenuated to remove the aliasing. This made the bass sound too dynamic, so it was attenuated as well. And, puzzlingly, even the dynamics were reduced; I haven't a clue why. "

[natesummers]

Judge for yourselves:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3N6FL2NW

[estranged4life]

Originally Posted by natesummers

Judge for yourselves:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3N6FL2NW

I'll check it out to see how it compares to the CD version of GOS - I need to humor myself after reading the following paragraph that Lars Ulrich just made:

“Listen, there’s nothing up with the audio quality," he said. "It’s 2008, and that’s how we make records."

Speaking to Blender, Ulrich added: "(Producer) Rick Rubin’s whole thing is to try and get it to sound lively, to get it sound loud, to get it to sound exciting, to get it to jump out of the speakers. Of course, I’ve heard that there are a few people complaining. But I’ve been listening to it the last couple of days in my car, and it sounds ****in’ smokin'."

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Update: The LP vinyl has an obvious "Warmer" sound to my ears compared to the compact disc version...So there is definitely some compression on the regular compact disc compared to the LP vinyl version.

for example, I compared the size of the vinyl versions "Great Day" (32.7MB) to the compact disc versions data size (32.4MB) so the loss of data due to compression was only a 0.3 degradation, but I am at a loss for words to explain how that 0.3 explains HOW much warmer/rounder/fuller the vinyl version in comparison sonically. But the spectral graph's I used (ie foobar2000) show the obvious that the vinyl is the superior in dynamic range.

Trust me folks, It you have a choice between the vinyl version and the compact disc...Chose the vinyl !!!