I have always been a big fan of music and my favorite media for playing music is still to this day vinyl.
When I was a kid tapes were cool for use in personal stereos and then CD came along and overtook the tape and vinyl sales as the king of music.
But the music industry bullshitted you into thinking cds are better than vinyl. CD was the chosen medium as it was backed by Sony who in turn had their own record company and could easily release albums. Much of the time without you knowing it was a Sony owned company, Columbia and CBS were pretty much Sony corp.
Phillips invented the CD and could not get it finished due to a lack of funds. Sony finished off the idea and marketed it as the new way to listen to music. Sony made a packet as every disk sold they make money. You have a platinum selling album on CD and so does Sony.
With marketing telling you it was better, and adverts showing you how much more reliable the CD was people spent hundreds of pounds on new equipment on a lie. Don't get me wrong it is a great sound and when recorded right albums sound amazing but it is not the best.
Geek Time
Remember it is called Compact Disc. Is this due to the disk being smaller than vinyl or the music being compressed more to fit onto a CD? You miss out on 20kHz by low pass filter at the very least when mastering an album to CD. It can be compressed that bad only 25% of the music is left as the finished article. When recording an album remember many tracks are used to record the instruments so when mixing down say 64 tracks to two audible tracks (Stereo) is very hard. But with some great production work and skilled mastering it can work very well. But then you have the one area that robs you of the music you should hear and that is the CD.
When playing a CD you are playing a digital track that is made up of ones or zeros (11110010010) or what the laser sees in spaces on a CD. You have most likely seen a CD play. Very fast isn't it? With it going that fast and at some point the player will miss read something for this it has correction circuits. When it misses something it ‘makes up’ the rest of the info. Bit like an educated guess in a way. So you have this as one area that can mess up the sound also the CD as you know is digital, you need a digital to analogue conversion. Again that much of the time is not precise as you have already lost up to 75% of the music mastering to CD and also ‘made up’ parts to the music so unless it is going through a very good quality conversion you will lose more.
So you have a new album on CD that has been compressed up to 75% and misses out 20kHz of audio and you use a player that can’t read all the info then output it as an analogue signal. This goes into an amplifier then speakers for your enjoyment.
CD to MP3
With the compression on a CD being as bad as it is from about 2000 onwards more people have switched from CD to MP3. Again thinking it is a better medium. Apple made the I Pod and sold millions to help launch the new download market and give the music industry a new way to sell music to fans.
But they have again used the worse medium to sell to the public. The digital music file has so many other choices from MP3 to WMA to FLAC and many more. Why take one of the worst?
Some of the better music sites do give a choice in the download and at times you can get FLAC (Lossless compression) but this is very rare.
Don't blame Sony
I can complain but it is not the fault of Philips or Sony as we go out and buy the product. They have even released technology that is better than CD. First up is CD ROM, invented six months after CD it works in a similar way with a laser reading info of a CD. But the information has to be read in its entirety to be understood. No making up missing information and the media can store far more audio information than an audio CD.
Super Audio CD is another option, higher bit rates and over multi channels. Only a few albums were recorded to take advantage of the medium. It was ten times better than CD and was even better than vinyl. But the public just never took to it and it failed. A real shame as it was a great format and one that would have changed the studio album forever.
DVD Audio was much like the Super CD but it had a chance to make the album experience better as it could use a TV to show other contents of an album. Again it failed as no music was really made for it.
12” is not perfect
Vinyl can be compressed if squashed onto a record that is why the maximum length is about 45 minutes. So it is pretty much never compressed which is why you get a double album. Also it is recorded onto the plastic in analogue like how we hear it. This helps preserve much of the music’s feeling and stops missing out up to 20kHz. Then the turntable will play the music and not make anything up as it can only play what is in the groove. The only thing against the turntable is the actual touching of the needle to the record, this does produce sound faults and friction. Again helped by the use of 45rpm. Faster and less friction helps deliver better sound.
The music industry is now backing vinyl again, mostly as they sell more of it now that in 1991. Also they can make more money for the vinyl than on a £6 download from Amazon.
I have always liked vinyl and not just the sound it had but you get so much more. You don’t just get a music record but a bit of art and history. The white album by the Beatles was a work of art as was PIL Metal Box. Both really would not have worked well if it was a CD. And never have worked on an MP3 release.
