I'm sick of bands and game devs releasing music on vinyl but not on CDs.

Veho · Oct 18, 2024

And this is why bands release their stuff on analog media, because nobody wants to deal with this :rolleyes:

The Real Jdbye · Oct 18, 2024

RAHelllord said:
That is the bitrate, but you're confusing it with compression rate which is a different thing.
8bit audio can be lossless purely because no compression has been applied that discards information to make it smaller.
However that 8bit audio might not have the same resolution as one recorded with 24bit, but the difference is mostly only found in the dynamic range of that track.

If you take a 24bit track and downsample it to 8 bit you get a lossy version of the track, but if it was recorded in 8bit then that's simply how it was recorded. Nothing was lost on the digital side.
Also, technically even 24bit could be considered lossy if your criteria isn't digital data but how precise the analog audio has been captured. If you take the simple plucking a guitar string and record it until it rests again you have a tone that goes smoothly from playing to stopping, and yet during digital capture you chop it up into discreet pieces instead of storing a continuous gradient.
But with 24 but resolution is so high it's virtually indistinguishable from the infinite resolution real life offers.
And even 8bit can be an accurate representation of that small infinity, assuming what you have is good enough represented by 256 steps.

Everybody says "192 kbps bitrate" (or whatever), I'm not confusing anything.

And yeah of course even 24-bit is a technical limitation, I get that. Analog formats also have certain limitations as far as the dynamic range they can reproduce and certain frequencies having more dynamic range than others, just due to quirks of the format or the equipment used to record and play them back, but those limitations aren't as black and white, they can't be reduced down to just a hard limit represented by a number. Infinite resolution would require infinite storage space and technology that doesn't exist.

I still don't quite get how the difference between 8 and 24 bit and the difference between 128 and 320 kbps are different.

Acid_Snake · Oct 18, 2024

The answer is simple: CDs are easy to make a 1:1 copy of (easy piracy) and they aren't as "vintage looking" as Vinyl (hippy retro trends).

Other than that, anyone saying that Vinyl (or anything analog) is better than CD (or anything digital) is talking pure nonsense, physics and engineering would like to disagree with them. But what would I know, I'm just a simple computer scientist, not an "audiophile".

Ettino · Oct 18, 2024

Acid_Snake said:
anyone saying that Vinyl (or anything analog) is better than CD (or anything digital) is talking pure nonsense,

Vinyl is better than CD.

Veho · Oct 18, 2024

The Real Jdbye said:
I still don't quite get how the difference between 8 and 24 bit and the difference between 128 and 320 kbps are different.

8-bit / 24-bit refers to audio "depth".

Simplified: When recording a sound waveform, you take samples at regular intervals (~40 thousand times per second), and store the value. The more bits per sample, the more precise you can be. A raw, uncompressed recording then has a constant bitrate of 40,000*[depth in bits] bits/s. Give or take.

Compression then does a whole bunch of math to the raw data to approximate the same waveform with simple formulas that take less space to store. Then the bitrate means how much space is taken to "describe" one second of sound. Filtering out certain frequencies, smoothing the waveform etc. reduces the required space, but also loses that information.
Using the same compression method, all other things being equal, the higher the bitrate the higher the quality.

Sono · Oct 18, 2024

Everyone is talking about bits, while your smelly portable CD player probably has an 1bit PDM DAC in it. Just low-pass filter the output, and very minor distortions in the sub-bass aside, it sounds basically indistinguishable from a good quality DAC.

Similarly, you can get high-quality audio out of a GBA if you try hard enough. I know, because I tried.
GBA SP is very very noisy, but on Micro, it sounds amazing, if you filter out the sub-bass (<20Hz).
Although the noise floor is very high, so if you're using good headphones, you can hear some faint hissing. No tricks will make your GBA capable outputting more than 9bits of audio.

But yeah, more bits per sample, the more detail you can encode due to lower noise floor.
Although, 16bits already has an inaudibly low noise floor, so 24bit audio is really a circlejerk. Similarly for 44.1kHz/48kHz, any detail encoded in higher samplerate is just waste of space, as you can't even hear those higher frequencies it lets you encode in the audio data.

Edit: my point is, a well-mastered CD will get you a long way. It's lossless raw PCM audio. Any higher is very much pointless due to diminishing returns.

kijetesantakalu042 · Oct 18, 2024

Acid_Snake said:
The answer is simple: CDs are easy to make a 1:1 copy of (easy piracy) and they aren't as "vintage looking" as Vinyl (hippy retro trends).

Other than that, anyone saying that Vinyl (or anything analog) is better than CD (or anything digital) is talking pure nonsense, physics and engineering would like to disagree with them. But what would I know, I'm just a simple computer scientist, not an "audiophile".

I think there are reasons of making copies of CDs. But with Vinyls they are more about novelty. You can still rip a vinyl to a flac

cearp · Oct 18, 2024

oobymach said:
My car has a cd player, but cd isn't lossless, it's just ok. CD is 16bit 48khz but lossless audio is 24bit-32bit and 96khz-768khz and is much more detailed than cd. I get mine from www.hdtracks.com

all lossless means is that the input is same as the output.

if you have a text file on your computer, and you put it on a usb drive, that's lossless
if you have a text file on your computer, and you zip it then put it on a usb drive, (when you unzip it) that's lossless
if you want to save some space on your usb drive, and so you edit the text file to shorten some unimportant words that you think no one will notice, that's lossy - not losseless

so if you copy the audio from the cd and keep all the audio data perfectly intact (compressed or uncompressed), that's lossless.

cd audio is perfectly hires enough for most and their speakers.
of course, it's nice in archival terms to have as high res / data dense digital form of the original audio sound waves that were recorded on the day.

Rolfie · Oct 18, 2024

i tbh don't see this exact situation a lot. but the bands i like do release limited editions with bonus tracks only on vinyl usually.
that ends up making smth like 4 discs... kinda wasteful

JeepX87 · Oct 20, 2024

Jayinem said:
I grew up with cassette tapes.

Same here, my parents collected a lot of cassette tapes in 1980s and early 1990s.

I was told that many deaf people prefer cassette tapes because it allow extremely loud music without force ejection, so not sure if it is true.

DaFixer · 2024-11-08T10:18:13+0000

Jayro said:
I too collect and rip my own CDs. Usually get them cheap off eBay or goodwill.

I'm doing the same, ripping for my jellyfin music service

Avalyn · 2024-11-08T11:01:08+0000

JeepX87 said:
Same here, my parents collected a lot of cassette tapes in 1980s and early 1990s.

I was told that many deaf people prefer cassette tapes because it allow extremely loud music without force ejection, so not sure if it is true.

Force ejection?
Digital would be best for deaf people, as it has higher frequency response in the lower levels of the spectrum, which is what you can feel - bass, kickdrums etc.

JeepX87 · 2024-11-08T15:58:23+0000

Avalyn said:
Force ejection?
Digital would be best for deaf people, as it has higher frequency response in the lower levels of the spectrum, which is what you can feel - bass, kickdrums etc.

or skip, not 100% sure.

Back in 80s and 90s that where deaf people rather to play music very loud with vibration and bass, so they found cassette to be very reliable than CD and vinyl LP. Before CD became exist on market like back in 70s, they preferred cassette over LP.

The cassette popularity faded out in early 2000s, so CD was cheap option and iPod was very new at that time. I didn't find portable CD player to be pleasant to make a enough bass, so I lost interest in music after all. Some deaf people have stereo with very loud speakers.

I guess that CD technology in 2000s was better than in 1980s, hmm.

coderNoob · 2024-11-08T16:33:00+0000

The goal is not to have all the formats available anymore and it's very easier to understand. People just don't buy it anymore. Very simple!
Vinyl still a thing not only because some "old" people still like it but because it also became a trend among young generation and new collectors. Nobody cares if you have a big collection of CDs but people still find it cool and nostalgic a big shelf full of vinyl.
It is also not about having the "best sound quality" in my opinion it is all about the nostalgia and overall better quality physical media and artwork...
I'm a collector myself of all formats but only for games (I don't know why considering that I cant just play having the disc but...), music / concerts. And I only buy CDs if the they have limited or collectors edition as good as vinyl has.

MFDC12 · 2024-11-08T16:46:24+0000

SylverReZ said:
The only people who listen to vinyl are on those cheap Crosley turntables with a stylus that will damage records if you play them multiple times. Something like an Audio-Technica AT-LP120 is much better at a reasonable price than cheap Chinese garbage. Vinyl also sounds better, too, if you've got the proper equipment and have maintained them well. Since I don't have my old vinyl turntable anymore, I still have CDs that are a lot simpler to use than anything.

Compact Discs are different to vinyl and 8-track.

I cringe every time I see someone walk out of a store with a crosley and the like, or if I go over to someone’s house and they have one. I’ll tell them (not the strangers, my friends) it’ll damage their records, but they couldn’t care. Most modern vinyl is all shit quality anyways because most things are pressed through GZ media, who are absolute dogshit when it comes to QC. I stopped buying records because of them. I’ll only buy something if I know it didn’t come from their plant and was mastered properly.

I'm sick of bands and game devs releasing music on vinyl but not on CDs.

The man who cried "Ni".

*is birb*

Developer

Well-Known Member

The man who cried "Ni".

cripple piss

questionably a racoon

瓜老外

Well-Known Member

Well-Known Member

Dare to be stupid

Ancient Enchanted Sorceress

Well-Known Member

Member

Well-Known Member

Similar threads

Popular threads in this forum

is birb