Why Vinyl Sometimes Sounds Better

Last night I played an RCA Living Stereo "White Dog" pressing of Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto played by Yascha Heifetz that I had acquired at the local hifi club.  This is one of the most well known and beloved recordings of all time, and it's been rereleased in virtually every new format to roll down the line.  The "White Dog" pressing may well be the 2nd or 3rd pressing itself...IIRC the original RCA release had the "Shaded Dog" (and those may be the most sought after of all, provided they are the original series of Shaded Dog).

Heifetz' passion was clearly evident in the mind blowing vinyl reproduction, though marred by far more surface and pops than in my typical vinyl recording.  I subsequently played my 16/44.1 from a hybrid SACD.  It sounded much less passionate, and somewhat homogenized.

I never heard Heifetz in a live performance, but I have heard other top violin virtuosos playing the Tchaikovsky Concerto and the passion in the live performance is so intense you can't imagine any reproduction fully reproducing it.  So in this one way, the vinyl performance is more "authentic" and perhaps more "musical" than the digital.  Meanwhile I doubt the vinyl reproduction is any more technically accurate than the digital, even if you could go back in a time machine and compare it to the original master tapes on the day they were recorded.

I don't believe there is an inherent problem with digital sampled at 88 kHz or higher and with 24 bits resolution.  I don't think it needs to be much better than that, and anyway my living room system uses 24/96 internally for crossovers, eq, delay, and other features.  So if 24/96 were inadequate, I wouldn't be able to hear it on my living room system anyway, without giving up major features like the subs and supertweeters.

Consumer digital recordings are generally 16/44, which is slightly marginal IMO, but should be ok for  the distribution of well made recordings.

None of this, to my mind, explains why vinyl sometimes (often?) sounds better than CD's.  I had many theories myself why digital "must" sound worse, and heard more of such theories from others.  I believe they are all bunk.  PCM digital reproduction is fine, and essentially perfect when the sampling rate and bit depth is high enough.  I've read long and convincing debunking of many novice theories as to why analog should be better than digital, and they are all wrong.

That leaves us with:

1) Old master tapes may have deteriorated more than old vinyl.  When 50's recordings like the one I've been playing featuring Yasha Heifetz are "remastered" in the 90's, the tapes have had 40 years of deterioration, whereas the tapes were fairly fresh when the original vinyl was released.

2) Masterings may be different.  LP's may be somewhat filtered of low and high frequencies which may do more harm than good for reproduction.  Popular CD's are often overcompressed on CD because it's technically possible, whereas not as possible on vinyl.  Etc.  Small adjustments are often left to the mastering engineer, who might have done better on the vinyl.

3) Euphonic effects from the LP playback, such as small amounts of wow and flutter adding "thickness" as they do in electronic synthesizers.  And various EQ's and resonances, such as the 1kHz cutter head resonance.

4) Random effects from the LP playback.  Because of the superimposition of many different resonances and feedback mechanisms in LP playback, no two playings are exactly the same.  This goes beyond merely being "statically" different from the digital.  Each time vinyl is played, small differences may help it seem like a fresh recording.

5) Systematic bias.  It may well be that when people play vinyl, they tend to turn up the volume a bit higher, or leave it a bit lower.  Either one may, depending on circumstances, lead to better sound.

Many of the "White Hat" audiophiles I know don't (or never did) bother with vinyl playback anymore.  Other than 1 and 2 above, there "should" be no way that vinyl is superior, and many ways in which it is audibly inferior.  So they don't bother.  I'm find with that.  But I'm of the age where vinyl still seemed magic, and I want to understand the magic.  If in fact it's largely anthropological, I'm fine with understanding the human part of this as well.

In recent times, I typically record vinyl digitally (in 24/96) so I need play the actual records as little as possible (sometimes repeating after vinyl system upgrades), so much do I believe that 24/96 is adequate.  And despite my "random effects" theory (#4 above), I generally find the digital transcriptions capture the essential difference in the vinyl.

 

What Lingo Does

It's clear that what Lingo does is reduce the motor vibration even further.  And part of this seems, according to some tentative evidence, to come from that now familiar 8 Hz vibration.

It seems that the periodic wiggles in the reproduction during groove silence is in fact mostly 8 Hz.

Lingo seems to reduce these wiggles a bit, less than half of previous value.  But to do this analysis I had to compare recordings where the preamp level was different  and account for that, which was not easy at first glance.  A more detailed analysis of my pre and post lingo transcriptions of Blood On The Tracks may be instructive.

On a LP12 with Valhalla arm, avoiding the 8 Hz resonance is essential.  If the arm is not modified, that will be easy with most cartridges, as the very low mass means the resonance will likely be high, and likely causing a problem with too high resonance frequency (above 14 Hz vertical resonance or higher) with moving coil cartridges.

In fact, as I did, you need to add 3-4g additional effective mass for low compliance moving coil cartridge like Dynavector 17D3.  But any more than that gets the horizontal resonance down to the troublesome 8Hz.

I have not at all been able to figure why 8Hz is important, but a friend with Rega suggested it to me, and it might have to do with the vibrations from the motor or bearing and the motor seems like most likely culprit.

So anything reducing motor vibration is a good idea.  Valhalla does this a bit and Lingo does it better.