>as human beings we do have limited hearing, but it's been shown through various experiments over time that we take sound in through our bodies. we get high frequencies in through our skin, our body cavities take in lower frequencies. one of the things that happens with vinyl or with analogue tape, is that it allows frequencies through that our body can get, that otherwise get brickwalled or shut off by red book cds. any of the harmonic information that's above a certain frequency is gone or really distorted. when you to start to get beyond the sine waves but the square waves, the sawtooths are incredibly distorted, so what you're really hearing is incredibly cut off
>we don't always hear sound, but we feel it. cds stop us from feeling it, so the irritation people feel, the lack of the ability to sit down and really focus in on something or listen, has a lot to do with that.
Is this actually true or boomer voodoo? Can you actually 'feel' music better in some weird non-audible way through vinyl?
Conventional loudspeakers simply aren't capable of reproducing frequencies outside of the signal bandwidth of a CD recording. The overwhelming majority of microphones have a narrower bandwidth than a CD, as do the old multitrack tape recorders used in studios in the pre-digital era. Even if vinyl had a wider frequency range (which it definitely doesn't), it'd be entirely academic. Some digital audio formats can encode ultrasonic frequencies, but they tend to have worse real-world performance because all of that ultrasonic signal just causes intermodulation distortion with the audible signal. Increasing the frequency range above what CDs can handle would be like TVs having an extra colour that is invisible to the human eye - at best it's a waste of effort, at worst it has detrimental side-effects.
Vinyl records have inherently limited dynamic range (the difference between the quietest and loudest sounds). The signal is physically encoded as a wiggly groove and there's only so much wiggle you can put in that groove before the needle falls out. Vinyl playback systems inevitably create a moderate amount of harmonic distortion, a bit like adding a tiny bit of overdrive to an electric guitar. Vinyl makes things sound a bit softer and warmer, which a lot of people like. People approaching middle-age have lost a substantial amount of their high frequency hearing, so they don't notice that vinyl has much worse high-frequency response than digital.
I won't knock anyone who enjoys the theatre of putting a vinyl record on a turntable, I won't knock anyone who subjectively prefers the more coloured sound of vinyl, but arguing that it's better is just technically illiterate. Sound reproduction is really very straightforward from a technical and mathematical point of view; there are no great secrets, no hidden mysteries, just signals that turn into vibrations and vibrations that turn into signals. The technology we use has been around for decades and is incredibly well-understood.
Some people might be disappointed by that, but I like the lack of magic. Recording technology is sufficiently mature and sufficiently well-understood that it has become democratic. You can spend a hundred pounds on a pair of headphones that aren't noticeably worse than the best headphones that money can buy. Someone with a budget of a few hundred pounds can put together a bedroom recording studio that can produce a platinum-selling album. Any idiot can buy a Zoom handy recorder, watch a few YouTube tutorials and record a podcast that sounds basically fine. Audio is an exciting medium in the 21st century precisely because it's cheap and easy. An amateur computer game will always look amateur, an amateur film will never look like a Hollywood blockbuster, but you can make an album that sounds like something in the charts or record a podcast that sounds like Radio 4.
It's utter esoteric shite. People who believe in it probably also subscribe to water memory theory.
They're probably desperate to justify the ludicrously expensive purchase of a recent upmarket hi-fi turntable, which in all reality produces a sound that is less true to the original studio recording than a £250 CD player.
>>13417 It could be worse. The sort of people who believe this nonsense tend to also be into things like CD demagnetisers, wooden knobs, anti-leakage pens, directional cables, and acoustic pebbles.
Have any of you lads seen anything relating to 432 Hz vs 440 Hz tuning before?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1550830718302763 This seemed relatively interesting until I started making my way through the introduction section.
>...listening to 440 Hz music would seem to make people anxious, nervous, or aggressive, because it is not in harmony with the natural frequency of the planet earth.
If the earth can be described as having any "natural frequencies", none of them are neat integers. A second is pretty much totally arbitrary as a unit of time, so 432 cycles per second is no more "natural" than 440, 438.77134 or anything else. The standard tuning of 440Hz is a relatively recent innovation; historically there has been a huge range of standard tunings, with 440Hz being chosen because it was a reasonable compromise in the middle of the range. A lot of orchestras still choose not to tune to 440Hz, particularly in Germany. Most older recordings aren't tuned to exactly 440Hz because of inaccuracies in the speed of tape recorders, or because of a deliberate choice to speed up the tape to make the recording sound more exciting.
All western music is slightly out of tune with itself. We slightly fudge the tuning of notes so that we can move between keys seamlessly, but it means that none of the notes of the scale are the exact Pythagorean ratios that they're "supposed" to be. If you adjust the tuning so that everything is actually in tune, it sounds out of tune because it's so unfamiliar.
>>13422 I found an online radio station recently that plays all its music at 432Hz rather than 440Hz. I didn't notice any difference and I thought it was a bit shit. I quickly stopped listening to it.
