It’s been years and years that I hear people in milongas claiming that the sound of a vinyl DJ is so much better because it’s analogue and that old traditional ways are always better than modern barbarisms etc…
I wanted to react to this because this seems like a completely biased consideration. As we will see at the end, it is not the vinyl that should receive compliments here.
I do actual vinyl restoration … more casually than photography (and not for tango music so far)… and I feel like it’s taking even more time per quality result…
I see vinyl records in a really weird spot where, though some vinyl records "may" sound better than other releases, they also retain drawbacks from another age…
On one hand, I like it like I can like some "technical-artistic" subject, on the other hand, I hate it, because it's tedious and unjustified.
However, I’m not a sound engineer or a musician and this text contain information based on my current best understanding of the state of things… constructive corrections and precisions are always welcome.
(And like most of other texts here, this may get various forms of updates in the future.)
A CD can hold more data than a vinyl record. About this, you may watch video The Truth About Vinyl - Vinyl vs. Digital on YouTube channel Real Engineering .
So, a CD allows a wider dynamic range than vinyl. And no, analogue does not mean "continuous and infinite"… All media have physical limitations… I read estimations stating that a vinyl record can hold the equivalent of somethings between 250 to 400 megabytes while standard 4.7-inch CD capacities are 650 and 700 megabytes.
Niquist-Shannon sampling theorem states that to reproduce a frequency of x Hz , a sampling rate of 2x Hz is enough. Human hear typically hears up to 20-22kHz… And significant frequencies in music usually peak around 14-16kHz (this my observation, but precision may be checked *1) so the 44.1kHz sampling rate of CD should be more than enough to reproduce audible sound.
And yes, 96 kHz or 192 kHz just for listening is mostly snake oil*1 … and also, yes, I purchase it sometimes… (But, provided that your speakers can play them, I’m wondering if such high frequencies wouldn’t rather annoy cats and dogs who can hear up to 65-85 kHz depending on sources.)
Analogue does not "sound better" than digital since digital is perfectly able to reproduce analogue.*1 Most instruments peak at base frequencies around 4 kHz. The highest vocal note in "popular" music seem to remain Mariah Carey in Emotions , G7, around 3.13. There is some margin left. Though, instruments and voices can emit much higher audibles frequencies in additions to these, but, I don’t really know that topic and didn’t have time to dig into it. Another singer named Georgia Brown apparently has a Guinness World Record for a G10 note, I read this equates to a frequency of 10 kHz ... or 25.1 kHz??? So, in case it would be 25.1 kHz, then there may be people (and also instruments) who produce frequencies higher than what we can hear and record with standard gear. Hence, it would be possible that there may be some significant data in high resolution sound, but that most people cannot actually hear them or produce them. That would be somewhat less snake-oily than what I thought… But it is still very probably snake oil when the goal is making you purchase high resolution files of some random recording.
*1 Correction: There are indeed higher frequencies emitted along with base frequency, which form "timbre" or "tone color" or "tone quality". I had asked someone before, the problem is that often, people who know music don't know sound and people who know sound don't necessarily know music, so instead of telling they didn't know, someone told me bullshit instead, and the concept I was missing, with the meaning that relates to this context, was "timbre", but I won't go into details here or we're going even further from the main topic. I also checked an Emotions file and there are clear harmonics up 6.5 kHz, and less distinguishable harmonics up 14.3 kHz... I know of at least one singer who has clearer and higher harmonics on a lower base note... so I'm not sure who should win. And at the same time, I checked an "high resolution" file from Emotions and all the high frequencies above 20~21 kHz look a lot like roughly extrapolated noise (except for the drums?)... so at least for this song, it really looks like placebo.
It is perfectly fine to like vinyl for various reasons…
People enjoy seeing the records turning … and we can hardly come up with some new media that would look more vintage, or maybe even steampunk. The records have bigger covers, the DJs can scratch (obviously not in tango)…
Some say that they like to have an extra ritual between the music and them. That's OK in a sense that it is very subjective. My point of view would be that they're probably very lucky to have time and space for unnecessary extra rituals; I'm usually quite busy and adding steps to something increases the chance that I skip to something else that feels more efficient or relevant... I sometimes have those kind of magic moments when the music brings just what was needed in the atmosphere, thinking in example of that only time I ever listened to Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon in its entirety... I was just in the right mood and the right pace. It was random stream quality... And I must say if I had needed to put things into place, to pull of the record of it's cover, to make sure everything is clean and well set, I think it would have drawn me off of enjoying the music. But that point is very subjective.
Another "point" for analogue records, is that sometimes there is no choice, because some works have never been re-released… *2
Some people claim that vinyl is better because it has a warmer sound. First, this is not always true (I know some vinyl records that actually sound cold). Yet the sound heavily depends on the gear used for playback (the cartridge and stylus in the first place). Then, it is very similar to liking old yellowed photographs… It’s alright to like things warmer for whatever reason, but then remember that it is not an accurate reproduction of whatever it was. It is not what the artists have recorded (unless they thought that there would never be anything else than vinyl and they biased their works accordingly). And anyway, this is something that be achieved digitally.
I believe that there are people who actually like clicks and crackles… but… just… why???Any inaccuracy you want to hear can also be achieved from a digital source and/or on a digital channel.
Then, it's good the vinyl still exists, but it's overrated, and claiming that it's better due to beliefs and due to its distortion, it's a fallacy.
*2 About tangos that have not been re-released, this site could be interesting Tango Time Travel . I say "could" because I haven't tested except for a few samples. I think that they chose not do any digital restoration past strict digitisation, which can be understood for various reasons. (This is not sponsorship, just a potentially useful link.)
*3 A bit like those guys (sorry it’s in French only) : Justin(e) - Le bazar (Very good band, really not my favourite song though, but, there’s a video. And I found it quite fitting for people who like clicks and crackles!)
With vinyl… the consumer is a milk-cow… get a better stylus, get a better tonearm… oh wait, get better wires between the cartridge and the tonearm. And you will want several styli and cartridges for various kind of records… (Those would be like lenses in photography.) You should change that phono-amp… Have you thought of changing that cable? And the turntable mat? It changes the sound completely (or … maybe not). You get some repetitive hum? Well, it is possible that you should replace the whole power system of your house…
And it may take quite some time to assemble and tune perfectly…
And you will also better clean your records… without damaging them by the way.
If you purchase some fancy cheap turntable on the other hand, it is reported that it may even damage your records…
Of course, you can get used gear… but nowadays, used quality gear is not necessarily cheap…In conclusion, getting good sound out of a vinyl record can be very tedious and expensive (and somewhat random).
Vinyl’s guru Michael Fremer mentioned in some video that 15.000 USD is a standard budget for a turntable. (Hence, I look at mine and I feel poor…)
And it takes a lot of space…
On CD side, even if, as opposed to beliefs, every CD read is not necessarily the same compared bit to bit, you can read a CD on pretty much any CD player and hear the same sound (assuming that the rest of you playback chain is similar) … And, you may complexify things a little bit, but you can make a perfect CD rip easily and cheap, and if the rip is not perfect you may possibly "repair" it.
Digital files (in standard formats), they are much easier to deal with (copy, transfer etc).
(And it makes my writing shorter.)
(In music industry in general, so not necessarily tango…) For various reasons, many vinyl records are/were better produced than their digital counterparts.
This may have to do with a tendency that ruined music products since around 2000 and onwards known as the "Loudness War" and vinyl limitations preventing from abusing it.
Typically, if you get a recent CD of some music that you enjoyed, let’s say in the '90s, and that CD was manufactured recently… or digital sources like files or streaming … And instead of the masterpiece you remembered, it just sounds like all instruments, includeing voices, are crashing into each, the music has no space left to breathe, the is an addition of tiring high frequencies, and it's too loud, everything is loud… And you wonder why your ever enjoyed that noise in the past and how you could even listen to that whole album nowadays… That’s the Loudness War grinding your childhood/teen age memories to pieces for nearly 25 years now. Well, this depends on your age, maybe you are discovering some old works that you didn’t know, but not as they should sound…
And, typically, "remastered" ends up meaning "degraded to fit those new loudness standards".
More on the Loudness War :
A vinyl record "may" also sound better because the engineers in charge of the mastering were more cautious… people say "more passionate", while those in charge of the CD/digital didn’t give a **** what they were doing… or maybe they were forced to follow aberrant loudness norms for "marketing" reasons…
And the issue when purchasing digital files directly is that their precise source is rarely documented. Sometimes the sources are even mixed… like, for a same album, it may happen that the master for the high-resolution files is worse than the master where the standard CD quality files come from.
On the streaming services side, it must be added to this that they usually tweak loudness a bit further in order to get loudness uniformity across the works they share on their platform… which may also add distortion.
Considering all of these, even if, in theory, digital has more potential it is very often ruined in the way it is mastered and delivered.
But actually, recent vinyl records, mostly those from after the so-called "vinyl revival" are also often poorly produced and package… I have seen things that would make one want to cry and to laugh.
(I don’t know when "vinyl revival" started… it’s like "crisis time", it’s one of those things that is always around and permanently starting … and it’s one of those topics for when journalists don’t know what else to tell.)
The problem is that, in the end, if you want quality, it’s all a case-by-case-test-and-compare thing, you may want to get several releases of the same records so that you have one that sounds more decent (usually the oldest)…
Between ruined-but-easy-access digital and somewhat better polished or snake-oiled vinyl being tedious and expensive to use in an optimal way… I think that music heritage preservation has taken a pretty much stupid path since the 2000s…
The ideal way would have been to produce quality CDs in the 2000s, and nowadays to provide quality music files. But maybe quality music easily accessible in standard ways has been seen by the industry has something that could ease piracy and/or limit re-purchase?
Earlier, I was always talking about music distribution in general and the perception it may give informed and uninformed people regarding vinyl records, CDs, digital files etc…
One good news here is that the few traditional tango CDs I have from the 2010+ are NOT affected by the Loudness War… perhaps because they do not target radio and such marketing. More contemporary tango orchestras CDs I have (El Cachivache, La Juan d’Arienzo…) are louder, but yet not too brick-walled. (I would be interested to know, if someone has more extensive information on this: is tango unaffected by Loudness War or is it that the CDs that I checked are exceptions?)
If confirmed, that would be one point for CD over vinyl in tango.
Though, most tangos from the around "golden age" and before likely just don’t have super high-quality recording sources that were made possible later… I think that some have gone through a proper restoration process (thinking of some Di Sarli or Pugliese compilations).
But many tango CDs actually (including files or streams on digital platforms) sound like they contain very raw vinyl rips (or shellac rips) that did not go through any restoration process… Or at least kept some major analogue flaws.
Also, one frequent issue with records digitisation is that playback speed is often inaccurate and varies from a digitisation to another.
Yet tango DJs often rely on mostly MP3 collections that have been more or less randomly gathered and don’t sound perfect at all and may include past analogue flaws from their sources and would deserve a proper re-digitisation.
On streaming platforms, again, quality varies…
Hence, the quality of digital sources in tango may be extremely random.
First, it should not be neglected that what you will hear does not depend on the DJ only but also on the venue’s sound system, on the acoustic of the room… and on the sound engineer for bigger events.
From a purely technical point of view, I think that a digital DJ who would know what they’re doing, who would polish their stuff, who would gather the best possibles sources should outperform a vinyl DJ… but both may have a lot of work to do…
The important thing is that the DJ know what they are doing and are well prepared with quality gear and good recording/sources. (If you give them coffee, I expect they will perform even better, but that may be a purely personal hypothesis.)
Now, beware of generalisations, but my impression is that since it is more demanding in time and money, I would expect that there are more DJs who polished what they can deliver on the vinyl side than on the digital side.
But this has nothing to do with the fact vinyl would be superior … on the contrary … but it depends.
TC, February 2023
Thoughts that have not found a place in the text:
It is certainly subject but I think that there are tangos that don’t work really well with analogue distortions and clicks and crackles. I’m thinking in example of Este Es El Rey and maybe some Pugliese? Things like Para Dos? … those sound much better on a crystal-clear sound system. Maybe, switch to clean digital for those tandas so everybody is safe, but please don’t play Este Es El Rey from vinyl … it’s pure suffering and torture in ears.
Well, actually, do whatever you want. I spend some time taking fresh air outside when I go to milongas… so I can always exit once more…