Vinyl CDR Copies vs. Original CDs?
Let me start by saying how wonderful it is to be able to burn music onto recordable CDs. 10 years ago,
if you would have told me that within a decade you would be able to buy a CD
recorder for your computer and make a perfect sounding copy of a CD in five
minutes or less, I would have thought you were nuts. But here we are making
high-speed, perfect CD recordings like it’s no big deal.
Well it is a big deal to me. What is even more amazing is how inexpensive the hardware and software have
become. You can get blank CDRs for under $1, sometimes even free after rebates.
And 48x speed burners are commonly available for well under $200. I’ve seen them
for as little as $50.
So what can you do with this wonderful technology? Well, you can make compilations of music sourced from
your CD collection and know that the sound will be identical to or better than
the original, assuming your equipment is working properly.
You can also make backup copies of your best recordings to take in the car, use in a whole-house CD
changer, or just for the sake of having another one should something happen to
the original. CDRs even offer the convenience of 80-minute recording time so
your music doesn’t have to be split up into many separate discs. But for me, the
most interesting use is making copies of my best vinyl LPs.
Going in, I expected that a CD copy made from an LP would be so inferior to the original that it would
just be for the novelty of being able to take a version of the record with me in
the car. Instead, what I have discovered is remarkable. The copies I have made
on to CDR from LP sound better in virtually every case than the store bought
original CDs of the same recordings. Huh? How can that possibly be? The store
bought CD is supposed to be sourced right from the original master tapes. Why
does my copy of Miles Davis "Kind of Blue" made from my imperfect LP, run
through a phono preamplifier, sound sooooooo much better than the official
store-bought CD?
I am still waiting for an answer...
Let’s think more about how absurd this is. My LP of "Kind of Blue," while a good pressing, is quite far
removed form the original master tape. Sure, it was done by Classic Records, a
company known for making very high quality vinyl pressings from the original
master tape. But they still had to play the master tape back and feed the signal
into an amplifier that drives a cutting lathe, which cut a master lacquer. Then
they rush the master lacquer to the facility where it is metalized before it
begins to lose its shape.
Next, the metalized master is used to make a secondary pressing called a "father." This father is
then used to make a number of "mothers." Each mother can be used to make a few
stampers and then the stampers press a certain number of records before they
deteriorate and become unusable. The closer a pressing is to coming from an
early mother and a good stamper that is still fresh, the better that pressing
will sound. So the question is, how good a pressing is my Miles Davis "Kind of
Blue"? I have absolutely no idea. But odds are, it wasn’t even close to being
one of the very first pressings made.
But that is just the beginning of the degradation of my recording chain when making a CD copy from an
LP. So what about my equipment? I use a decked-out Linn Sondek LP12 turntable
with a top-of-the-line Van den Hul cartridge, Lingo power supply and Ekos
tonearm. Pretty good, right? Well, sure if you compare it to most other
turntables, but not compared with the original master tape. Even the best
turntable in the world, playing the best pressing in the world, would introduce
its own colorations and artifacts when compared with the master tape.
I also use a fantastic RIAA equalizer and gain device, the Audio Research Reference Phono Preamp. It
may be the best in its class, but it still isn’t perfect. It will distort and
veil the original sound to some small extent.
From there, I send the signal through the best analog-to-digital converter I can get my hands on, a
Meridian. It’s way, way better than the ones that are built in to stand-alone CD
recorders, but it’s far from perfect.
And then, of course, there are all of the cables used to link this mastering chain together. Each
cable adds some distortion of its own to the sound. I try to use the absolute
best, but they, too, are less than perfect.
So, after all of that, how can copies made from LPs be so much better sounding than the store bought
CDs? Not just a little better, but shockingly better. They make the original CDs
sound like skeletons of the real thing. The original CDs sound thinner, the
space the musicians occupy is smaller, the tonal balance is harder, and they are
less detailed.
It makes no sense. What the heck is going on here? I have some guesses, but I really don’t know for
sure. Richard Vandersteen put forth one interesting explanation. He says that
when you make a CD copy of an LP, you use the higher noise floor of the vinyl as
a kind of dither which has the effect of putting the musical content up well
above the LSB or Least Significant Bit. You have to be
willing to tolerate the higher noise floor of a CDR copied from an LP to get
this "benefit". Store bought CDs are made to be much quieter, forcing some of
the subtle musical content down much closer to the LSB. It’s an interesting
concept, but I don’t know that it fully explains things, partly because there
are plenty of exceptions to the bad experiences I have had with original CDs.
CDs mastered by Mobile
Fidelity, the ones with the "Gain System" specifically, and by Analog
Productions, Reference Recordings and others, sound terrific; almost as good as
an LP. Even some of the regular recording labels put out CDs that sound
surprisingly good. But many CD recordings of older music made from analog tape
sound unnecessarily inferior to their imperfect LP counterparts. This is both
encouraging and discouraging at the same time. On the one hand, it shows us that
great sounding mass produced CDs can be made if care is taken to do things the
right way, but it also shows us that often times things are not done the right
way.
Enter high-resolution
digital. New formats like SACD and DVD-A are becoming available now and may give
us something much closer to master tape sound. Some of the DVD-A discs I have
been listening to have been really impressive. They sound much higher-res, like
a high-end turntable, but without the noise. I haven’t yet had the same kind of
experience with SACD even though many are raving about it. So far, the sound has
been more like a good, but still regular, CD to me.
But that may change now
that Linn is introducing the world’s first high-end SACD player to use a
non-Sony SACD engine. Up until now, every SACD player on the market, regardless
of price, has used Sony SACD decoding. Even the two-piece Accuphase for $20,000
is a Sony at heart. Linn struck a deal with Sony over a year ago to be able to
design their own SACD engine, license it, and sell it to other high end
companies. Linn’s Unidisc player is scheduled to be available around April of
2003. This may be just the thing to actually bring SACD sound up to the level of
everyone’s expectations.
The other moral to this
story is that a good turntable is still king when it comes to sound quality.
Yes, they are a pain to deal with, but for some, all of the rigmarole is well
worth it. If it’s not for you, don’t fret. You can pick up a combo SACD/DVD-A
player like the new Integra DPS 8.3 for a mere $1200 or the state-of-the-art
Linn Unidisc, which will also beat most of the best Red Book CD players around,
for something closer to $10,000.
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