CDs, I Am Disappointed

[kiffie]

I've always known that records have a much higher sound quality than CDs. (That's why I started buying records in the first place.) I just didn't really key into how much better they are until a few nights ago.

It was... two? Three in the morning? The point is, it was quiet. No cars, no helicopters. I wanted to listen to some music as I went to sleep. I didn't want to take my big, bulky headphones to bed with me, so I fired up my record player and fished out my Les Miserables album (yes, random, yon stack-o-records are back in my room now -- admittedly, though, I only moved them this past week). It took me a few minutes to fumble with the record in the dark, of course, and heaven knows I'm hard on records and CDs, alike. It's no wonder that Castle on a Cloud skips like hell. Anyway, I wasn't paying much attention to anything until that song had ended and... ah... Wow. You know how muted a speaker sounds when you put your hand over it, then there's the sudden clarity when you move your hand? It was like that.

I think the biggest place it's noticeable is in the deeper of the male voices. Enjolras and Javert seem to have suffered the most from digitization. Listening to the songs on my MP3 player makes them seem hollow by comparison. I wonder why tech folks decided to drop out that specific range to save space?

Now I kinda wish that my album was in better shape -- it's the record equivalent of a CalTrans fuckup. Hmph.

BTW, does anyone know how to jury-rig a new Crosley recordplayer to run at 78rpm? I've got a V-disk that I require to live. REQUIRE.

Comments

[random-redshirt.livejournal.com]

That's not just the CD vs. record issue, it's also the CD vs. mp3 issue. Digital is perfectly capable of preserving those details, although it takes quite a bit of space (I don't know what the storage comparison is for CD vs. record). I forget all the details from my audio class, but something about the way mp3s are encoded and compressed (along with bit rate) means that you lose the really low frequencies and the really high frequencies first. It kind of makes sense to me, because those frequencies aren't usually essential in a song; you can still understand the lyrics and hear most of the instruments without them, and quite a few listeners won't notice that they're gone (assuming they can hear them in the first place). However, that does mean that lower-frequency instruments and voices can lose some of their oomph, and losing higher frequencies can mean losing upper harmonics and changing the tone quality of what you hear. I would suspect that is why the mp3s seem "hollow." Of course, it's also possible that the CD mixing was just poorly done.

tl;dr Lossy compression, not just for JPEG.

Knowledge +5!

[kiffie.livejournal.com]

*noms JPEGs* Mmm, fuzzy. :D

Considering that the MP3s on my player are direct rips from your CDs, I wonder how much digital encoding (to CD, or otherwise) has improved in twenty years? *pokes at the strange, old, thick CDs* Maybe the poor, old things transferred poorly to MP3? Maybe they didn't like my wee little Sansa, and are plotting against it with all of their non-sentient, file-encoded might? ( o_o)

You never know!

As for mixing, I think we have exactly the same mix on both the record and the CDs. I'm almost certain they were printed only two or three years apart, if that. Yours is... what? '89? Mine is '87, I think. And the companies were far too cheap to remix it for those teeny, tiny laserdisks. X3

Still, I'd be curious to get ahold of a newer printing of the same recording and compare quality between your set and that one. Y'know. For science. And totally not because I'd like to sit and listen through the whole thing multiple times. *shifty eyes*