Continuing with CDs?

I've taken to using earplugs on long car trips and it really cuts down the post-driving fatigue... probably using earplugs at shows is beneficial also because you tend to have them on you and can use them at random other times when some random loud noise cranks up and you can't get away.

At 13.5khz the sound is indistinguishable from my tinnitus.

my partner uses earplugs at work to help focus, and brings em to blockbuster movies so as not to be completely overwhelmed sensorially. seems like a good system.

one sound I miss that I remember hearing a lot as a kid is the whine that CRT TVs and monitors would make when you turn them on. googling around it looks like that whine is around 15kHz. I wonder if I'd be able to hear that as an adult with tinnitus!

I measured the dB level at the last movie I went to the theaters for, Dune in iMax, using my iphone. the reading maxed out at around ~90 dB. quieter than a dino jr. show, I think! xp

ymmv! we don't go to a lot of dino jr shows....

440Hz mean nothing to you? the A above Middle C?

― koogs, Tuesday, February 22, 2022

No, Koogs, never heard of this.

I've played it, if that's what you mean - I have a piano, and a few guitars, and I can produce an A note on those.

It's a bit odd that this thread is full of people who have tested their own hearing capacity / and or can discuss it, in this extraordinarily scientific way, but then this is self-selecting -- the thread is now about such erudite things (I don't think it used to be).

Thanks online tone generator, I top out at 14kHz now. :( I suppose that's not unexpected after 51 years of some pretty lively listening experiences.

also a friend of mine who's an auditory physiologist says he thinks as we age, we all get some form of tinnitus which is predominantly at the upper limit of what we can hear (so the frequency creeps down with age), and is probably related to the acuity loss. I can certainly hear that myself.

It's a bit odd that this thread is full of people who have tested their own hearing capacity / and or can discuss it, in this extraordinarily scientific way, but then this is self-selecting -- the thread is now about such erudite things (I don't think it used to be).

― the pinefox, Tuesday, February 22, 2022 4:26 PM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this thread has recently turned into more of a general audiophile/stereo discussion thread, and even the audiophile snake oil thread started to make fun of audiophile shit is now halfway an audiophile/stereo discussion thread

basically i think people want a thread to talk about this stuff but no one wants to be the dork who starts an audiophile thread on ilm

hahaha, I'd guess a lot of us know more details than the average person about our upper frequency hearing loss because we've gone to the doctor about tinnitus

hands up if you've seen MBV and/or Dinosaur Jr more than once (or both at the same time in 1992)

Everyone on this thread was using the term 'khz' - though Koogs also used the term 'Hz'.

I don't know it, but I seemed to associate it with radio. So, I googled it.

A kilohertz (kHz) is a unit of frequency equal to one thousand cycles per second. Hertz measure cycles per second, and kilo means one thousand. Thus five-kilohertz is five thousand cycles per second. kHz is most commonly used in reference to radio frequencies and audio signal processing.

So, people here are talking about something (unsure what) happening at, say, 14,000 or 20,000 cycles (of something) per second.

Cycles?

Where does radio come into it? I don't know. Radio plays both high and low notes whichever channel you're tuned to.

Wikipedia only has an entry for "Hertz". Beginning:

The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI) and is defined as one cycle per second.[1][2] The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s−1, meaning that one hertz is the reciprocal of one second.[3] It is named after Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857–1894), the first person to provide conclusive proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves. Hertz are commonly expressed in multiples: kilohertz (103 Hz, kHz), megahertz (106 Hz, MHz), gigahertz (109 Hz, GHz), terahertz (1012 Hz, THz).

Some of the unit's most common uses are in the description of sine waves and musical tones, particularly those used in radio- and audio-related applications. It is also used to describe the clock speeds at which computers and other electronics are driven. The units are sometimes also used as a representation of the energy of a photon, via the Planck relation E=hν, where E is the photon's energy, ν is its frequency, and the proportionality constant h is Planck's constant.

if I play the top note of a piano ... I can hear it. So ... I don't need a hifi that plays notes on ... an imaginary piano ... that plays ... notes so high that only a dog can hear them?

True, but while the fundamental of the triple high C, the top note of a piano, is approx 4.2kHz, its harmonics, or overtones, are at multiples of this - so there are tones (of decreasing amplitude) at 8.4, 12.6, 16.8kHz, etc. This full envelope of overtones is what makes the character of the sound. So, if you do have age-related hearing loss in the mid-teens kHz (as most of us do), you're not missing out on any plucked, bowed, hammered or, er, blown(?) fundamentals, but you may have lost those upper harmonics.

In sound, the Hz refers to how many vibrations the air makes in a second. Musical notes range from about 100Hz to 4kHz. Deeper sounds down to 20Hz aren't really experienced as tones so much as presences. Above 5kHz is experienced more as noise or transients, sounds like rustling, scraping, etc.
In radio, Hz refers to how many cycles the radio wave makes in a second (the "frequency" you tune a radio to), which is kHz for AM radio, MHz (megaHertz, millions per second) for FM radio, and GHz (gigaHertz, billions per second) for things like wi-fi etc. You can't hear these because it's not air vibrating, it's photons.

Hertz is a measure of frequency, pitch is how we mentally perceive the frequency of sound waves. So the higher the frequency of a sound wave, the higher we will perceive its pitch being. Sound is waves of pressure propagating through a medium (like air). Humans can hear sounds between about 20Hz to 20,000Hz, but the upper end of this range diminishes with age and/or exposure to loud noise. Teenagers can hear sounds with frequencies up in the 17.5kHz-20.0kHz range, but by the time you're in your forties or fifties (even without attending hundreds of live shows) your upper range diminishes, being able to only perceive sounds around an upper limit of 14.0-16.0kHz. That's on average... some people can still hear high frequency sounds in middle age (like my office mate, who is in his late 40s and easily heard the 17.5kHz tone I was generating).

Radio waves also have frequencies, so are also measured in Hertz, but they are electromagnetic waves.

this thread has recently turned into more of a general audiophile/stereo discussion thread, and even the audiophile snake oil thread started to make fun of audiophile shit is now halfway an audiophile/stereo discussion thread

basically i think people want a thread to talk about this stuff but no one wants to be the dork who starts an audiophile thread on ilm

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, February 22, 2022 5:41 PM (one hour ago)

sort of feels like if we're having to justify using a dead medium like CDs sooner or later the discussion will turns towards audiophilic qualities of why said dead format is superior to streaming

you can borrow my copy of 20kHz Jazz Funk Greats on CD if you want, I think it's defective

> Wikipedia only has an entry for "Hertz".

Wikipedia is often its own worst enemy for things like this, gets far too deep too quickly. there needs to be a kid's version, almost.

thought the 440Hz thing was the kind of general knowledge that happens on (bbc2) quiz shows and that musicians would know it from, say, guitar tuners, but i guess not.

when i went to see the bloke about my tinnitus he singled out Brixton Academy by name where, yes, i'd seen the Rollercoaster tour, albeit decades earlier.

I'm grateful to the people who have provided information about the concept of 'khz' and 'sound waves'. Though these technical matters are entirely unfamiliar to me, I actually think that those posters (Assert and Jaime Pressly) explained them about as clearly as they could have.

Koogs: I think there *is* a simple version of Wikipedia? But you'd know better.

How about this?
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

I have watched UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE for almost 30 years and I don't remember your 440Hz statement coming up.

I don't have a guitar tuner - except, technically, I think, on a computer (in Garageband I suppose?). I've never owned a free-standing gadget to do that. I usually tune a guitar from a piano. (You may well say: but is the piano in tune?)

a useless piece of trivia, but in the USA the dial tones on landline phones are at something approximating 440 hz. so if you needed a guitar tuner it would do in a pinch.

The CD Revival properly reaches the Guardian!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/23/music-streaming-cds-spotify

"proof of a revival for CDs may come merely in the shape of comment pieces wondering if CDs are due a revival"

This article is a pretty good summary of the state of affairs and the various ideas and directions often mentioned above (before discussion here mainly became about "khz").

I'd also missed this report:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/feb/04/they-just-worked-reports-of-cds-demise-inspires-wave-of-support

A comment in that last report fairly typical of the inanity of much of this public debate:

But, he added, it was unlikely to match the vinyl revival of recent years. “There is not the same romance, the magic of dropping a needle on to vinyl. The plastic cases cracked easily. I remember listening to Nirvana’s Nevermind on the school bus and every time that the bus went over a bump, your CD would skip.”

Yes ... it was better to take a record player on the school bus. Much more romance.

In the 90s I used to regularly take a bus journey that took about 10 hours, I’d take my plain jane Discman and a wallet of 20 CDs, a set of 4 AAs would get me there. Some of the purest pleasure I’ve had listening to music, at times.

Similar experience here! Only very occasional bumps. Plus dedicated wired-in vehicular players are a thing innit. Not sure I've heard mine skip a beat in a decade.

It's almost like a certain strain of vinyl enthusiast *wants* to be mocked.

The plastic cases cracked easily.

Whereas vinyl records are celebrated for their imperviousness to physical damage.

I have LPs from the 1940s that sound good, still play, obviously people have 78s from the 20s. CDs are superficially more durable, but damage on a CD basically goes from 0 to 100 pretty quickly, one of the CDs I just checked out from the library doesn't have that much scratching but it's enough to render it unplayable halfway through, it gets stuck on a song and won't progress. You can sometimes skip ahead to the next song, sometimes not

we won't know until there are 80 year old CDs

For digital formats, there's already tons of obsolete formats, (realplayer etc) who knows what the future is for MP3s.

Analog tape is by far the most reliable format, people are still able to remix/remaster/etc from analog tape, or pull from newly discovered tape (cfe the new Coltrane Love Supreme Live thing)

so yes vinyl is somewhat fragile but in its way very durable. I certainly have 70s rock records that were put through the wringer by stoners and there is more surface noise than you'd like but they are still listenable.

and there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot

That Wiki article doesn't provide any information on how common bit rot is, though. I've got hundreds of CDs, some dating back to the late '80s, and I can think of only one that became unplayable. Actually, its companion disc (from a Jane Siberry compilation) also stopped working. Must have been a bad day at the factory.

I don't know how common it is, I'm sure manufacturing errors. my first cd was fear of a black planet and that's still working i think

that's not my main point thought, see the post above. also, let's give these late 80s CDS another 50 years.

but I shouldn't have posted the disc rot thing if that's going to be the focus, it's a side point.

and I'm not saying CDs are bad, I like CDs. and they are durable in a way compared to vinyl, in that scratches are benign...until they aren't

it's not a simple this is more durable than that

"Surface noise," warp, sibilance, pops, "warmth" (that just means artifacts the artist didn't intend)--I never understood the "romance' of vinyl. The "ritual" of placing the needle, flipping the record--all these things just distracted from the music as the artist recorded it. And all the kids who would talk up how it sounded better than CDs, while using their parents 8-track-LP-radio-combo unit from 1977 with a cartridge to match.

Even on the relatively cheap gear I could afford as a kid, CDs just sounded... like whatever music was put on them. Lo-fi punk sounded lo-fi, high-end classical recordings sounded pretty high-end and polished, and everything in between.

I doubt whether I could tell a 320kbps mp3 from a "better-than-CD" FLAC in an A/B test on my $300 headphones, so I guess I don't have golden ears. But from 1992 until storage space and ripping speeds made at least 320kbps mp3s of large libraries feasible, CDs just *worked* for me. I didn't end up with the level of nostalgia (Stockholm syndrome?) people seem to feel for LPs (or cassettes, yech). But I think that's because CDs encouraged me to focus on the music itself, rather than the artifact or the "rituals". Which in turn encouraged me to listen voraciously and widely, to new-to-me music from any time and any place in recorded musiical history. So I guess I love and am thankful for the ways in which CDs are "boring".

The only nostalgic memory I have for vinyl, actually, is being 7 years old or so, and rolling up a sheet of notebook paper into a funnel and taping a sewing needle to the small end, and being amazed that some sound would eminate from that dead-simple mechanism (as we were presumably destroying the Moody Blues or whatever record we were torturing from my Dad's collection).

ha yeah i cringe at the memory of being the same age & doing that, except using playing cards.

i got to be on the flipside of that recently when I played some 78s on a victrola for my 10y/o nephew (yeah thats right, i'm nonstop fun as an uncle), and he was completely fascinated and amazed that music was coming out of the place where the needle touched the record, couldnt stop trying to figure it out

I grew up w/vinyl (and tapes, and later CDs), but never felt the “romance” of vinyl; I’ve wondered if a lot of that is people from slightly later generations, for whom it has a sort of mystique…

Soundslike is completely otm. Having to worry about the quality of your LP pressing? Screw that!

The young folks I know into vinyl like the physicality of it and enjoy having a "thing" that represents what they like. But typically they listen to their records on Spotify.

I have a couple of contemporaries who are into vinyl. One has always been so and, while it's his preferred format, he happily buys CDs as well. The other friend sold almost all his CDs and switched to vinyl. I think he secretly wanted to do so because his interest in new music has dwindled and it gave him something to keep collecting. But he'll say it's also due to the ritual, warmth, yadda yadda.

"Surface noise," warp, sibilance, pops, "warmth" (that just means artifacts the artist didn't intend)--I never understood the "romance' of vinyl.

That John Peel quote in defense of vinyl over CDs -- "Listen, mate, life has surface noise!" -- always bugged me. Yes, life has surface noise...so why add more?

Despite being mostly a vinyl guy I'll admit that the people who praise the "physical ritual" of vinyl vs CDs have always confused me because, unless someone invents some kind of thought-activated music player, every format has some amount of proscribed physical activities that lead up to you hearing the music - taking the CD out of the case, opening the tray, hitting play, etc. They can like the particular physical ritual of vinyl listening, but its not like that one format has a monopoly on physicality.

I feel like people are responding to arguments not being made in this thread

I don't know any collector who likes surface noise, I've never heard anyone irl or on discogs do anything but complain about it

I will say that if you handle your records like a normal human being, have a decent needle and use a brush from time to time, you'll experience very little to no surface noise. it's often only noticeable between songs

as for warmth I think there are quirks to how vinyl rolls off certain frequencies that sounds very appealing and non fatiguing, I read someone say "the sound of vinyl is a series of happy accidents"

but CDs can sound great too, especially modern reissues done with care. streaming can sound great too with a good DAC. reel to reel tape sounds great. Spotify on earbuds doesn't sound great, but it's million more times better sounding than a Walkman and frankly with a decent pair of Bluetooth speakers comparable or better to an average home setup from the 70s or 80s

but I maintain a great vinyl pressing through a good setup is an amazing thing

UMS OTM. I'm format agnostic: whatever format makes most sense for a particular release (though I try to avoid cassettes as much as possible). Vinyl problems way overstated by the naysayers. Ritual applies to CDs over streaming as well.

the only thing that nags me is I wish I could turn however many thousands of CDs I have from the 90s and 00 into vinyl so I could sell them for shitloads of money

I think it's neat to enjoy music in the format in which it was most widely consumed at the time. highway 61 revisited sounds good on CD but sounds great on vinyl! says someone who was born in the 80s. that's sort of been my philosophy - buy music from 80s and before on vinyl if you can find it, 90s onward on CD. I grew up with Substance on CD but the BLT 12" sounds absolutely fantastic on my system!

i have memories of buying 80s music on CD that quite frankly sounded like shit (for some reason the early metallic albums stand out in my head - particularly kill 'em all). I'd bet the same release on vinyl was killer! I know this is because nobody knew how to master, and I'm sure scik mouthy will show up to talk about loudness wars and how a really flat CD is actually great because just turn up the volume, etc. etc. - still, no thanks!

for me the "ritual" is *about* focusing on the music - i'm consciously putting stuff on, i'm consciously keeping a loose queue of shit i wanna listen to soon. i'm more aware that i'm listening to something and i really enjoy that.

to be clear, it's streaming and before that MP3s that (for me) really failed at this. it's like vinyl >> CDs >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> the other options. i also overwhelmingly listen to older stuff, so "as the artist intended" has to include things like "this song is meant to close out side A with a full stop afterwards."

with longer sets, this can break down but also be helpful. all the side changes CAN be a pain, so double and triple LP releases have to really be all-killer no-filler or i will ultimately let them go from my collection. i've recently purged some 90s/00s hip-hop releases which are great albums but (between the wide bassy grooves and a preponderance of skits) have like 3 songs per side. that's a little too much ritual for me, and single CDs would legit make a lot more sense here. OTOH with, like, a 3-disc box set of some 60s singles artist, the side changes do keep me paying attention, and encourage me to listen in more manageable batches. one huge disc or playlist and i might never actually get to the last third!

this is just all about personal styles of listening and how we relate to stuff; i'm not trying to convert anybody, but to make it clear that vinyl enthusiasm does include things beyond material fetishism, nostalgia, and anecdotal accounts of subjective aural phenomena.

OTM x2

xp That's a really good rule of thumb. Ofc a lot of 12" singles from after 1990 sound great but one could say that's how those particular mixes were supposed to be consumed.