A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire
Nyquist Theorem - learn it, love it, live it. I&#x27;m a musician and my mates and I have been going round and round on this issue for years. They <i>swear</i> analog is &quot;warm&quot; and &quot;captures the whole wave.&quot; It&#x27;s all BS. It&#x27;s <i>always</i> been BS.<p>What the vinyl lovers never stop to realize is the audio signal has to be modified to record on vinyl - you&#x27;re not listening to the music as recorded on the master tape, you&#x27;re listening to an altered copy of it. Why is that? Because of limitations of the playback mechanism - you can&#x27;t impart too much kinetic energy into the needle. So, the bass gets rolled off, pop filters and transient filters are employed, and high hats get dialed back. All to keep that stupid needle in its groove. Bottom line - the music is altered, the dynamics have been diminished, and it all sounds muddier, i.e. &quot;warm&quot;, as a result.<p>The problem is a couple of generations grew up listening to this and thinking it was what music sounded like. The musicians making the music always complained that it never sounded right, but had to accept the limitations of the playback medium. I grew up in a musical family. All my friends played music. We always knew, and thought everybody else knew, that the music on records didn&#x27;t sound right, it sounded muddy and compressed.<p>Then CD Audio came out in the 80&#x27;s and what a difference! The bass was punchy instead of muddy, the high-hats and riding cymbals rang, the dynamic range was breathtaking and the stereo separation was unreal! I was elated the first time I heard an audio CD.<p>Then the critics came. It sounds &quot;harsh&quot; or &quot;cold&quot;, it lost that &quot;warmth&quot;, computers can&#x27;t capture the actual analog waveform. That&#x27;s when I began to realize that these audiophiles and critics didn&#x27;t know what they were talking about. They obviously weren&#x27;t musicians.<p>Fast forward 30 years and the only people still debating this topic are the rock &amp; metal guys. The Jazz and Classical musicians quickly recognized the superiority of digital audio. But the masses don&#x27;t listen to Jazz and Classical music, they listen to rock and metal (and pop - but the pop world doesn&#x27;t seem to care one way or the other). I don&#x27;t even know what to say to the rock and metal guys anymore (full disclosure - I&#x27;m a guitarist primarily playing rock, metal, prog and folk - they&#x27;re pretty much all in the same camp on this issue). Rare is the guitarist that isn&#x27;t using a pedal board. Extremely rare is the guitarist using an all-analog pedal board. Many guitarists are using SS (solid-state) amps now. They&#x27;re recording into a DAW (<i>digital</i> audio workstation). Then they claim that somehow distributing the end result of vinyl is somehow pure? It&#x27;s nuts, it&#x27;s simply nuts. Add to that almost none of us are playing our amps clean and pristine, so what - you think it matters how accurately you capture our harmonic distortion?<p>Yet I see people lining up paying $40-$50 to get these albums thinking they&#x27;re getting something different. Which I guess they are, they&#x27;re getting an altered recording. This only reinforces what I&#x27;ve been saying for decades - vinyl is a scam and these people are laughing all the way to the bank.<p>I&#x27;m hoping now we can <i>finally</i> put this issue to rest and get everyone on board with digital audio. Now if we can talk to the recording engineers about these stupid &quot;loudness wars&quot;...