Paul McGowan .....
“Dear Paul. After months of your blogs, I am finally confused. You say that the sound of a 44.1K 16 bit cd copy of a vinyl record is indistinguishable from the vinyl record. Yet, in my experience, the sound of a superbly recorded vinyl record has greater ambience, depth etc. than a “standard” cd. There have been many reasons stated, including brick wall filters etc. Am I just imagining those things? Is there any reason to keep our treasured old vinyl records?”
I received many such inquiries after my post A good magic trick and I wanted to set the record straight. It seems I did not do a good job of explaining what I meant which was never to suggest the remastered CD version of an original vinyl release is indistinguishable from the vinyl. That is something I would never suggest because for better or worse (mostly worse) the CD versions of classic vinyls are not the same and are completely distinguished from the original.
What I meant to have relayed is this. If you take one of your vinyl discs and play it on your turntable and listen to it on your system, it sounds the way it does. Probably great as is the case with the above poster. Now, play that same album again – the vinyl disc itself – only this time make a copy right off your disc using an A/D converter. The captured sound of YOUR turntable playing a vinyl disc should be close enough to what you hear live, if you have a good A/D Converter, that it is nearly indistinguishable from the live playback of the vinyl.
That is fundamentally different than what the remastering engineer did to make the standard CD version of a classic vinyl.
Just to set the record straight. Pun intended.
