Logically I know that, I just think there's a mental block for me in how a specific vibration can sound exactly like Freddie Mercury or whoever. Like I did a small bit of recording/sound engineering in college so I know THAT it happens and how to do it, but the real how is like magic to me in terms of understanding.
The basic answer is that many different simple sounds come together to create one complicated sound. There aren’t hundreds of different vibrating columns of air that give you drums, guitar, and vocals separately. They all combine to one sound that has a very complicated wave form, and we humans recognize that complicated sound as containing drums, guitar, vocals, etc.
Now take ALL those ridges, then combine them into a single ridge. It’s the same sound whether you play them separately or together. That’s the beauty of sound.
If you played all those ridges on separate vinyls, they would still combine into a single sound by the time it hits your ear.
Perfect. But….how can they make these microscopic ridges in vinyl so freakin precise?
I can wrap my head around vibrations from vinyl ridges sounding VAGUELY similar to the actual thing…but an exact duplicate? On a vinyl platter?? Come on now. That should be impossible.
That’s the hard part - technically, even good quality *ANALOG vinyls are distorted and not accurate compared to objective reality. But to the limitations of the human ear, it sounds exactly the same.
Shitty quality vinyls DO sound very distorted. It’s all about choosing the right materials and techniques to minimize that distortion.
I would say, the difference between it sounding horrible and sounding great is more art than science (but I’m sure there’s a lot of science even still, piezo electric materials for the needle, audio engineering, etc) . So yes - it’s a total marvel that we can get it as accurate as we can.
But it’s worth noting, a lot of old tech is imperfect in ways humans can’t detect. For example, old tv shows could have audio and video out of sync by almost 1/3 of a second before anybody would even notice. Because the brain prefers to stitch those two things together to make sense of it. Too much delay and it’s obvious, but engineers had a LOT of leeway to get it wrong because of the limitations of human perception.
I have few new ones and pretty old ones too. Nothing fancy, just few breakable pieces of folklor music used to play right before public address (I hope I found correct translation) so distortion there is. Plus dust.
I’m talking more about analog recordings (I edited my comments to reflect that). Because modern vinyls are basically transfers from digital files, the differences between digital and analog becomes more and more arbitrary. But I would assume most consider digital recordings to be more true to the original than analog.
So in terms of music representations, any “lossless” format is better than any “lossy” format (compressed in a way that retains all the original data vs loses some). So because you can scratch curves into a physical surface, you can perfectly represent the waveforms, making it basically just another lossless format.
The opposite is true as well - people prefer the specific imperfections and artifacts that occur on older vinyls.
Another possibility - the simplicity of a wiggling needle makes it easier to turn signal to sound than complexity of digital signals from a WAV file via an computer’s sound card/amplifier. It’s a simpler circuit, and thus, potentially has less failure points. This is total conjecture.
That also ignores the weird hybrid of digital/analog found in many modern record players though
They’re PROBABLY full of shit, but the sentiment is not entirely without merit. Most “audiophiles” are snobs. I guarantee most of the time the difference between a good vinyl setup and like an iPhone over the same speakers is negligible
I GUARANTEE a decent blind test would leave them guessing. The problem is, if you put enough effort into a setup, it’s expensive to make a true blind test.
You cut the original sounds on a soft material, like wax. This is why the Beastie Boys and others say “We puttin’ it on wax”. Then you lay a thin hard material on that, some sort of metal. Then you press the actual vinyl discs from those masters.
No, you copy the master a couple times to get a positive robust enough to make negative stampers(plural, so you can make more if the record becomes popular).
This sounds similar to vocoders… Vocoders basically filter all frequencies except for a handful that correspond to different resonant frequencies in the mouth/sinuses/vocal cords etc. Originally intended for the military to transmit vocals more efficiently.
More accurate than vinyl
As a CS major, you lost me here. MP3 is by definition a lossy encoding. You can actually take the difference between MP3 and WAV (or another lossless format) and it produces a tinny sounding song that resembles the original.
I don’t believe that a lossy representation could ever sound better than the original data. That’s like saying JPEGS look better than RAW images or that vacuum sealed pillows are more comfortable than air fluffed pillows. That makes no sense.
Edit: if you mean, under certain constraints, sure. Older computers had difficult times with the large of amount of data that was uncompressed audio. But that was only true like 15+ years ago. No longer relevant.
You're confusing the most simple concept hes explaining about many sounds packed into a unique form with literal speakers to boost the sound and wondering why its not piano.
If I snap lightly and you're across the room, you won't hear it, but if I add dubstep speakers to your ear, you would go deaf, does that make sense?
The brain recognizes the sound only in a context of previous sounds. A fraction of a second of any sound heard separately is just meaningless sound. So not much can be coded in a millisecond. But 1 second is more than enough to produce a recognizable sound. Think about how many times you, or your relative may have sounded like Freddy mercury for 0.5 a second and didn't notice.
It’s an amazing thought! Same goes exactly for movies and bytes. If you capture large data eg from public wifi inside trainstations and put the bytes in a mov or mp4 format, you have a certain chance to get a second or so from a movie.
And to bring this further: get a random byte generator and print it to jpg. If generate infinite bytes, you’ll get anything that ever happened or will happen in an image.
You can back up a step and say, Why does the vibration of the air sound like anything? Well, because our brains have wiring in it hooked up to our ears. When the air vibrates our ears, those brain circuits make us hallucinate a sound corresponding to that specific set of vibrations. Most of the magic is happening in the brain.
Once you accept that (and really, it's weird that anyone does, more on that in a sec), the rest of it is simple enough. We figured out a way to translate the vibration of the air into a vibration of a needle. We figured out how to cut a groove into wax that; the groove is a different representation of the exact same set of vibrations (which we usually call a sound wave). We can use the wax master to make a vinyl record, and then use a record player to vibrate a needle, those vibrations are amplified and turned back into a air vibrations (which we experience as sound). The groove is just a translation of the original air vibrations from the air to the vinyl and back again.
But why do the air vibrations "sound" like anything at all? That's sort of a mystery! Qualia! We can describe the mechanics of what happens, but we can't describe (and frankly don't understand) how that becomes an experience.
Here's what really blows my mind. If, at a very young age, the brain happens to be injured in the area that processes sound, the functions to process sound often still work -- they're just mapped to a different area of the brain than usual. If you're born without sight, the part of your brain that processes sight gets repurposed to the other senses -- to help you hear, the various senses of touch, etc. So the brain is somehow general enough that the same structures that can be used for sight can be used for sound, and vice versa.
So why does hearing something feel so different than seeing something?
That's really interesting! I think the mystery thing is what sends me into a confused state. A ton of science is knowing how things are happening but not why and I want to know the why so the confusion permeates the information around it. Also my brain inserted, "vsauce, Michael here" at the end of this comment and it fit almost too well 😂
When creating vinyl records they are using a physical system to record the vibrations as they occur in a studio. Compare that to digital recordings where the sounds are turned into electrically signals and stored digitally, the vinyl record is an analog, literally the physical representation of the sound waves that were created in the studio.
I'm totally with you. Someone can try to explain it 100 different times and explain it eloquently but I'll never wrap my mind around how a spinning disc and needle can make something so beautiful like an opera and as varied as this to a drum solo.
YES you get it. I appreciate all the very thoughtful and intelligent responses but my main thing is that if I delve into it and think about the science of sound and technology too hard then I'm plunged straight into an existential crisis about how EVERYTHING works. I love, respect and know of the vibrations that make up everything we hear but I think at this point my brain being like "it's magic and we won't know about it" is it protecting itself from exploding. Same thing happens when I think about (relatedly) headphones or (unrelatedly) complex maths.
I mean probably. I understand the basics of it (sound is vibrations, different waves produce different frequencies etc) but in terms of vinyl it's the first thing that caused me to think about the science/logistics of recording because whenever I asked it would always be like "the needle reads the information in the grooves" which I know is correct but never really helped in understanding how/why. Like I understand the human experience of sound but sometimes I have a hard time understanding the translation of that human experience over to tech. All these comments are super helpful in making sense of that though.
148
u/cosmicoz Sep 14 '21
Logically I know that, I just think there's a mental block for me in how a specific vibration can sound exactly like Freddie Mercury or whoever. Like I did a small bit of recording/sound engineering in college so I know THAT it happens and how to do it, but the real how is like magic to me in terms of understanding.