Comment by dale_glass
3 hours ago
How does it buffer audio?
One thing I didn't realize for a long time is that it turns out that a lot of these machines have a digital stage. To cut a disk you need to pack the grooves as close as possible. But the spiral isn't fixed, it's adjusted dynamically. Quiet sections can be packed close together. That means that before cutting, the machine needs to know how much physical space it needs for the audio it's about to put on the disk. And that requires a buffer, and that's very often digital. So it turns out there's precious little vinyl out there without a digital step being involved out there.
Not that it matters anyway, since vinyl is a pretty terrible technology, but still, it's kind of funny.
Most music today is digitally recorded, digitally mixed, and digitally mastered. It's at the end they distribute it on vinyl and sell it for a fortune. They're literally fleecing people. Now I will tell you digital is far superior to analog BUT - the way music is recorded and mixed today takes all the soul out of music. Rigidly fixing to "the grid" makes it so music can't breathe. Drums are programmed. So much precision is required that session musicians are playing most of the things you hear, not the actual artists.
In short, today's music is just another corporate product and vinyl distribution is just a means to extract more profit from that product.
There's digital and there's digital. If you look at some of the technology used for A/D and D/A conversion, it's possible to do it lossless way. I learnt this after I started recording my bass and this is a very deep rabbit hole.
If they are using well refined conversion paths with enough bit depth, that buffer stage will be completely invisible even at the waveform level.
As a person who likes, buys and listens vinyl, I don't care how it's processed to that stage as long as it sounds fine. Note that I don't buy vinyl because of the "sound quality per se", but for the experience of listening it. I like to make time to listen my favorite albums properly, and vinyl is a part of that for some albums. I'm equally fine with audio from a CD or a well encoded lossy codec. I can distinguish between lossy and lossless encoding of the same album, but I don't always have time to appreciate that.
So, some references (This guy has enough knowledge to write his own DSP plugins):
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuecg-5Gvn8
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-MGXDXR4x0
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fmCy686IC8
To implement groove packing digitally, you don't need to put that process in the signal chain, do you? You can digitize the master, analyze it, and determine the required spacing at various points on the record. You then feed that information back to the machine to control the cutting processes, as the analog signal is transferred directly to the record. No digital buffer in the signal path.
It’s great technology for long-term archiving.
“Look ahead” to determine optimal groove spacing doesn’t have to be done digitally, even though digital makes this much simpler.
I’d guess that musicians and producers using an all-analogue recording / mixing / mastering process where they have zero digital stages to the master tape are very few and far between nowadays. Kevin Shields for one, but he likely has other options for his analogue master disk cutting, and only needs to attend disc cutting once or twice a decade/century.
A transparent digital stage for the master isn’t going to make a huge amount of difference really, and the limited bandwidth of vinyl compared to digital means that the vinyl master has to be squashed and limited regardless.
> I’s great technology for long-term archiving.
Dam right. It’s a medium that a reasonably intelligent individual from any time in future/past history could intuitively understand. Let’s not forget that NASA chose a record to store the digital images it sent with Voyager on precisely that assumption.
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-reco...
Also it can be "read" non intrusively with a laser-pickup, like a CD, without wearing the medium down.
2 replies →
yes, they mostly use a digital delay, although some mastering houses still have a reel-to-reel equipped with an extra 'preview' head that gives the required lookahead for the lathe without any A/D conversion in the audio path.
Vinyl is a terrible technology?? Have you never put on an old record and considered the miracle of it?
70 years ago Miles Davis vibrates some air with his horn, which is translated into electricity by a microphone, which is translated through magnetic tape and eventually back into electricity and then back into vibrations on a disk. 70 years later I can take that disk and turn its vibrations back into electricity that moves the air on my living room. No encoding, no decoding, just air and electricity that my ancestors will be able to replay until the end of time.
That's as close to magic as anything humanity has ever come up with in my opinion.
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