arny krueger

Not even the technical experts are interested in the *exact* dB ranges.
However the fact that one is at least 30 dB more than the other, and one is
bad enough to muddy up the sound of low-level passages does interest us.

Right, a LP performs poorly compared to just about everything, and a CD
performs about as well as the finest amplifiers.

That's an unfair comparison that no competent techhie would make. Music with
high distortion isn't music well-reproduced. This almost looks like a straw
man argument. And you can't define recording levels arbitrarily high. At
some point not that far beyond where vinyl normally operates, its output
gets to be so distorted that it simply stops increasing.

That's what I was trying to point out to Mr. Wheeler. The way we have
historically characterized the dynamic range of vinyl including giving it
the benefit of a number of doubts or if you will, Mulligans. With all those
Mulligans in place, its noise floor is at or above the quietest passages of
many real-world wide-dynamic range recordings. In contrast the CD format's
noise floor as measured with zero Mulligans, is still about 20 dB below the
music in the quietest passage. Furthermore, the noise floor of a CD shaped
during mastering so that perceptually, the noise floor is more like 40 dB
below the music in the quietest passage.

In fact the state of the art of vinyl hasn't changed in decades. DMM is
maybe 2-3 decades old. It never received general acceptance. It was a
solution looking for a problem, in many people's eyes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_metal_mastering

"The original inventor of the DMM method (Neumann) has completely stopped
making cutting lathes and neither do they have any spare parts left for existing systems."


We see people who want to give the obsolete vinyl format any number of
allowances or as I call them, Mulligans.

There's the tic and pop Mulligan. There's the inner-groove distortion
Mulligan. There's the low frequency noise Mulligan. There is the high
distortion Mulligan. There's the high background noise Mulligan. There's the
warp-induced jitter Mulligan.

There's the "I have thousands invested in LP playback gear and media, but a
$50 test record will break my bank" Mulligan. There's the "I don't want to
find a library with JAES back issues and do my homework" Mulligan.

There is something kind of warm and comforting about recording and listening
to music via a medium like the CD that needs no Mulligans! ;-)