SIDEBAR:

Micah Sheveloff and Rob Fraboni share their post-listening session impressions.

SHEVELOFF: I think the most dramatic revelations to emerge from this Listening Club session can be broken down into three areas. These conclusions come from my perspective both as a musician and from playing instruments for most of my life.

The first area is dynamics. You can say what you want about noise floor when using an LP record, but the dynamic changes on everything we heard, from Radiohead's In Rainbows to the Beach Boys' Holland, were much closer to real instrumentation than their digital counterparts. In reality, it may have less to do with the advantages of analog and more to do with the overuse of compression in mastering the CDs, but the difference was astonishing.

FRABONI: I agree that the dynamics are compromised on the digital CDs. This is probably due to the overuse of compression. But if the source material was analog and the vinyl represents a transfer directly from analog, the digital counterpart will have a slightly altered dynamic range that occurs when converting from analog to digital. The relationship between peak and RMS will change by as much as 4 dB.

SHEVELOFF: The second area is staging. I can't explain to you why the dimensionality of an LP highlights a sense of space better than the digital versions of the same recordings, but I do know that when mastering my own recordings, I've found that an overuse of compression had a detrimental effect on reverb and instrument decay. Maybe a portion of the explanation lies there. Whatever the cause or causes, the LPs staged dramatically better than CDs. It's not even close.

FRABONI: This again is due to analog-to-digital conversion and the spatial information that's lost or compromised in the conversion. The better the A-to-D converter, the less loss occurs, but there's always some loss of dimensional qualities. With vinyl, the better the pressing and the phono cartridge, the better the spatial reproduction. I have to say that I don't feel compression is really the culprit here.

SHEVELOFF: The third area is instrument tone. On acoustic reproduction of sax solos, human voice, drum hits, and cymbal decay, the LP versions of each sample recording sounded much more like the genuine article than an electronically reproduced facsimile. The electronic instruments suffer less in this regard, but the LPs seem to give the listener a more intimate sense for the ensemble and a realness for the players and their performances.

FRABONI: This would be related very closely to the above. Complex tonal characteristics are usually closely related to spatial characteristics. One should remember that the word "analog" is derived from analogous, and that's where digital differs significantly, in that there are actual gaps between the samples that are larger as the frequency increases. There are only 2¼ samples per cycle at 20 kHz, while at 100 Hz, there are 441 samples per cycle. The duration of the samples is constant throughout the audio spectrum.

SHEVELOFF: I think when you combine the subtleties of each of these attributes, it's easy to imagine why many experienced listeners prefer analog. It seems to be a medium much more closely related to the organic world of playing a musical instrument or singing in a performance hall. It's almost as if the spirit of the performer simply refuses be converted into digital data and join the Good Vibrations on a microchip!

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