Why does vinyl excite me more than a cd.

Hi. I have heard several vinyl's and their remastered versions on cd and I can't figure out why vinyl sounds more appealing to me especially high transient greek music. I'm not saying I'm a vinyl freak, far from it.

The main difference I can hear with cd and vinyl is that with vinyl all intruments have the same amount of detail and can be heard clearly (you can pick out each intrument clearly) where as with the cd version one intrument is more dominate and veiling (if you like ) the other intruments.

Is this due to my cd player, speakers, audio engineers or some other cause. (maybe dynamic range expansion)

Also is the cd format veiling some transients?
And finally will it be worth getting these vinyl songs in HI-res cd fomats when they become available?

Based on all that has been said about this subject - here's a wild guess.  Could the material be more compressed on the CD, and could that compression explain at least part of the difference you notice?  Might it also be possible that the CD material has been slightly or muchly remixed from what appeared on vinyl?

Do you mean that when you listen to the original vinyl and compare to the re-issued cd that you prefer the vinyl? Or do you prefer vinyl in general?

I blame more the engineers doing the re-issue. Earlier in history, accurate recording and reproduction was more a virtue than it is these days. Now a cd has to impress with lots of bass and bright top with a lot of mud inbetween.

If you listen to re-issues of jazz recordings and then to a later recording of an ensemble of a same disposition, then the older one will have very clear lead instruments (and a nice changing balance when there are solos), while the new one will have a chamberwide double bass that sounds like a foghorn and loud cymbals while the sax/piano/trumpet is almost inaudible.

Well I can say generally re-issued cd's of my vinyl collection 70's 80's
haven't impressed me or haven't been converted properly.

I think it's all about dynamics. I think it has to be spot on.
Just to get one thing straight, does recording from vinyl to cd result in dynamic range expansion if left unprocessed?

Well I can say generally re-issued cd's of my vinyl collection 70's 80's
haven't impressed me or haven't been converted properly.

I think it's all about dynamics. I think it has to be spot on.
Just to get one thing straight, does recording from vinyl to cd result in dynamic range expansion if left unprocessed?

No it doesn't.

A big part of this problem is that a lot of CDs were re-issued from the original studio masters, and not from the tapes that were used to cut the discs that you love so much. In general, these tapes would have been created by somebody with a pair of top-grade monitors, in a good room, and with a pair of experienced ears. All the bass would have been placed in the centre of the stereo field, to prevent cutting errors, and the dynamics on the vinyl would have been limited to prevent damage to the cutter, and overmodulation. If the vari-groove system was used, there would have been a pre-read head on the tape machine to vary the pitch of the spiral, so that more of the vinyl surface area could be utilised. These mastering engineers knew exactly what they were doing, and they knew exactly how to get the best sonic results from a very flawed medium.

But CD's released from the studio masters invariably sound 'bright', and are often quite uncomfortable to listen to, and the 70s to 80's period probably resulted in the worst examples - largely on account of the development of multitrack recorders with extended responses, and studio staff who didn't really understand what the limitations of vinyl were - and this was depressingly common. There were a few mastering engineers around at the time who could rescue just about anything - and often had to. A typical example of this breed was (is!) George Peckham - affectionately known as 'Porky'. If you find any vinyl with his name scratched in the vinyl around the run-out groove, it will be good. If you find a record with 'A Porky Prime Cut' or 'Pecko Duck' scratched on it, it will be excellent. Quite a few engineers signed their names on their work if they were pleased with it - these pressings are worth looking out for.

With care, and a good original, you can often produce CD versions of your albums that are better than the thoughtlessly unprocessed versions that come from the studio master...

When I was 'at it', George was my cutting engineer of choice - he could, indeed, work some magic on quite mediochre material.  I always used to attend the cut (where at all possible) but rarely felt the need to say anything, other than 'Thanks, that's a lot better' .

Fascinating stuff.  I've never seen a cutting session and have merely heard the horrors of making sound conform to a squiggle in lacquer.

Would you say this is true of major-label classical stuff as well?  If so, I've been lucky.  Almost any "archival" reissues sound good, and the ones I have in both formats are all superior on CD - save one.  That was a recording at the famed Wanamaker Organ in Philadelphia where the album was cut from a 35mm mag master (or dub) and the CD was transferred from a 1/4" dub of that.  The CD sounds quite lacking by comparison.

But I think we've all provided evidence for a clear answer: it's engineering of some sort.

Would you say this is true of major-label classical stuff as well?  If so, I've been lucky.

I would say that it was rather less likely to be true of classical material - simply because rather less of it was recorded on multitrack machines, and most classical recordings got played back to at least the conductor before they got released. And we are not generally talking about the get-rich-quick set here, but people who tended to care rather more about quality in the first place. This all militates rather favourably in their favour, I think.

A big part of this problem is that a lot of CDs were re-issued from the original studio masters, and not from the tapes that were used to cut the discs

Were the studio masters, in effect, re-mastered for vinyl pressing then?

A big part of this problem is that a lot of CDs were re-issued from the original studio masters, and not from the tapes that were used to cut the discs

Were the studio masters, in effect, re-mastered for vinyl pressing then?

Absolutely. Read the leader here...

Isn't there a loss in quality, going to second generation recording? Is this the probable reason why the CD makers go direct from the original masters?

What you said rather contradicts this quote from that link:

In the CD era it is unfortunate that many classic recordings from the age of vinyl have been transferred to CD using the production master optimized for vinyl, rather than going back to the original stereo mix.

You said that the CD makers use the original studio masters, and that this was the 'problem':

A big part of this problem is that a lot of CDs were re-issued from the original studio masters...

..have been transferred to CD using the production master optimized for vinyl

Which one is correct?

I was actually referring to the paragraph before...

The bit about which master was used for remastering is rather less reliable - simply because most of the vinyl tape masters weren't available - I believe that a lot weren't kept at all, because they weren't regarded as being as valuable as the studio masters. There are certainly some examples of where the vinyl masters were used, and they really do sound like the vinyl! Typical examples of these are the early Led Zeppelin CDs. Personally, I prefer the later remixes that were supervised by Jimmy Page from the multi-track tapes. In fact the first Atlantic album released on CD sounds dreadful in quality terms - just like the vinyl does.

You said that the CD makers use the original studio masters, and that this was the 'problem':

It certainly is - the simple truth of the matter is that without work, neither the studio or vinyl master is likely to be really suitable as it stands. But whilst in a lot of cases, the vinyl master sounds better than the studio master, this is by no means universal. The real point is that none of this stuff should have been released until it had been mastered in a suitable form for a relatively high quality medium like CD. The end result was that CD got a largely unjustified reputation for having an inherent 'sound' when actually, it has no such thing. The fact that on the one hand you can get a CD to sound remarkably like a vinyl disc if you know what you're doing, and on the other make it sound remarkably 'hard'  rather indicates that the problem is elsewhere, I think. And of course there's the not ignorable matter of a lot of early CD players themselves adding to the quality problems by sounding pretty dreadful whatever you put in them!

I suppose that realistically, there are just too many variables to make anything about this absolutely definite - except perhaps that sympathetic  re-mastering in general is a good thing when it comes to CD re-releases.

Nope, try again, LOL. You actually disagree with what the article says again, and this is still a contradiction of what you said previously. Either the problem was that CD makers used studio masters, or the problem was that they used vinyl tapes.

Which one is it?

[both]

Nope, try again, LOL. You actually disagree with what the article says again, and this is still a contradiction of what you said previously. Either the problem was that CD makers used studio masters, or the problem was that they used vinyl tapes.

Which one is it?

It's both - go and read what I said more carefully!
It's not an either-or situation. I did not claim that the article is entirely correct (it isn't, in my experience), I merely referred to it as a means of corroborating just a part of what I'm suggesting. The whole thing is a can of worms, and each particular example is different.

Let me spell it out: A lot of multitrack production in the 70s and 80s was not that great, and certainly unsuitable, as it stood, to be transferred to vinyl. So it got 'fixed' by mastering engineers. Unfortunately a lot of the studio master tapes weren't very suitable to be released anyway onto a relatively high-quality domestic format without work being done to them. And the quality varied a lot. Now, a lot of people preferred the CDs cut from the vinyl masters, and to be fair, they were more likely to have a degree of consistency about them. But they didn't represent what had actually been recorded, just the sort of sound that people were used to. LP sound is generally easier on the ear than an accurate rendition of the original, and this is in no small part why people prefer it.

If you go back and read my original post about this, you'll see that I refer to tapes for getting the best results from vinyl pressings, and studio master tapes generally sounding 'bright'. Nowhere did I say that vinyl masters were going to be ideal for CD release, because generally, they're not. And neither are the studio masters, because people won't like the sound of those either, as most of them stand. There are a lot of reasons for why this is - most of them to do with extremely variable mix acoustics, tired ears, record company pressure, pressure to get the stuff out of the door, you name it. Mastering engineers were a little oasis of calm, and by and large it was only because of them that there was any consistency of output at all. But it was optimised for vinyl, not CDs - they (CDs, that is) constitute a medium that will perform about as well as the master tapes of that generation in some areas, and significantly better than them in others - hence the need for a fix.

Please stop looking for black and white - it isn't there!