"That's why I am an
inventor," says Russell, now 83. "I can envision how it should
be." At Portland's Reed College,
Russell studied physics and built his first turntable. Unsatisfied with the
standard needles of the day, he used cactus needles, which he sharpened with
sandpaper, to play the first LP he purchased: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's
Scheherazade. Even so, with his sharp ears, he could hear the quality of his
LPs disintegrate after the 10th or 12th spin.
After he graduated in 1953, Russell
took a job in the research laboratories at Washington
state's Hanford Works, the nuclear reservation that produced the plutonium used
in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
Longtime classical music fans, Russell and his wife, Barbara, were subscribers
to the Seattle Opera, even though it meant a 400-mile drive round-trip for each
performance.
He worked on projects tangentially
related to nuclear reactors for several years, then convinced his superiors to
let him research ways in which optics — the use of light — could be used to
improve the recording and reproduction of music. Russell wasn't trying to make recorded
music more convenient or portable. He was trying to make it more accurate, a
clearer reflection of the performance. "I wanted the symphony to sound
like the symphony," he says.
On a Saturday morning in 1965, Barbara
took the kids to buy shoes. Home alone, free to think about his problem,
Russell figured out how to bring optics, digital technology and other
disciplines together to create the digital optical storage and playback
technology that would be used in what is now known as the compact disc.
The CD revolutionized the music
industry, but it was never cool. Even as CD sales eclipsed and nearly
exterminated vinyl, the format was plagued by accusations that its sound was
inferior, that it was merely a convenient alternative to the LP.
As consumers
flocked to the convenience and ubiquity of downloadable and streaming music,
they unsentimentally abandoned their CD collections. But as CD sales have
plummeted, vinyl's sales figures have been moving in the other direction. The
CD-versus-vinyl debate — and, by extension, the debate over digital versus
analog sound — has only grown.
By 2014, vinyl's resurgence as a
marketable product and fetish property appeared to be hastening the CD's
obsolescence. While CD album sales in the United States had dropped by 80
percent since their 2001 peak, LP sales hit 9.2 million, up 52 percent from
2013 and nearly 800 percent since 2004. Jack
White's Lazaretto moved 86,700 LPs, the
most units in a calendar year since Nielsen SoundScan started keeping track in
1991.
Even purely digital music is now
marketed using the trappings of vinyl. When U2 distributed 500 million digital
copies of its new album to iTunes users — a reach unimaginable when the band
released its debut in 1980 — the artwork depicted a vinyl record inside a sleeve
with the initials "LP" scribbled on the exterior. And when Neil
Young launched a Kickstarter campaign for PonoMusic, a digital music player and
online store, his company's stated mission was to "re-create the vinyl
experience in the digital realm." Baked into the vinyl resurgence is
the suggestion — fed by analog apostles such as Young and White — that an LP's
analog playback produces honest, authentic sound, while digital formats like
the CD compromise quality for the sake of portability and convenience. Young
articulated this sentiment earlier this month at the International Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where he told Rolling Stone's Nathan Brackett
that the vinyl resurgence is due to the fact that "[vinyl is] the only
place people can go where they can really hear." Fathers of the compact disc — and
many audio engineers who make a living reproducing what transpires in the
recording studio — bristle at this notion.
"As long as you can measure the
difference, the CD will be better than the vinyl, absolutely," says Kees
A. Schouhamer Immink, a former Philips engineer in the Netherlands, who was a member of the Sony/Philips
task force that created the compact disc standards. "But if you say the
whole experience — just like smoking cigars with friends — [is better], well,
do it. Enjoy smoking cigars with friends, and drink beer and brandy and enjoy
listening to an old-fashioned record player. But don't say the sound is
better. "You
may say it sounds better to you. That's OK. That's a subjective matter."
In 1968, a 23-year-old audio
engineer named Bob Ludwig at New York's A&R Recording was asked to
create a test pressing of The Band's debut, Music From Big Pink, so that the
producers could hear what it would sound like on LP. During the process, he
especially tried to preserve as much as possible of the deep low end of the
band's sound, which he believed was critical to its music. But when he heard the final LP that was released, he was stunned.
"All the low, extreme low bass that I knew was there, was chopped right
off." Years later, when Ludwig was hired to provide the final edit
(known as mastering) for a greatest-hits package for The Band, he got the
album's master tapes back from Capitol Records. On the box was a note from the
cutting engineer who'd made the original vinyl master, saying the album's
extreme low end had to be cut out.
Of vinyl's inherent deficiencies,
reproducing bass is one of its most glaring. The other is that the last track
on each side of a record sounds worse than the first, due to the fact that the
player's stylus covers fewer inches of grooves per second as it gets closer to
the center.
"The vinyl disc is a steadily
collapsing medium," says Ludwig, who went on to become a Grammy-winning
mastering engineer, with credits on Patti Smith's Horses, Steely Dan's Gaucho
and White's Lazaretto, among many others. "The
closer it gets to the label, the more
the information is getting compromised, the high frequencies getting
lost."
Ludwig's colleague Bob Clearmountain is
one of the industry's most respected mixing engineers, responsible for setting
the levels of a band's performance before it's sent to the mastering engineer.
He has worked with everyone from The Rolling Stones and David Bowie to Ricky
Martin and Lenny Kravitz.
When Clearmountain mixed vinyl albums
for Columbia Records, he says the label required the test pressing of each LP
to play on an old, cheap turntable without skipping, or it would have to be
mixed again. Too much bass in one speaker could make the needle skip out of the
groove, as would too much sibilance — a harsh "s" — in a singer's
voice.
Clearmountain, who now works out of Mix
This! in Pacific Palisades, says that when he heard the vinyl test pressings of
the albums he'd worked on in the studio, he always felt the same way:
depressed. "I'd just listen and go: 'Jesus, after all that work,
that's all I get ?' It was sort of a percentage of what we did in the
studio," he says. "All that work and
trying to make everything sound so good, and the vinyl just wasn't as
good."
Not only did records provide only a
sliver of what he'd done in the studio but they also came with plenty of sounds
that hadn't been there in the first place: ticks and pops. "If you're
a musician like Bob and I," Ludwig says, "and you get to do
a mix and you listen to it and you love the way it sounds, and then it's
transferred to vinyl and suddenly it's got noise and ticks and pops, for me
that's an extremely unmusical event."
Unlike Russell, not all of the
engineers and scientists whose inventions and developments laid the groundwork
for the CD were motivated by the quest for clearer sound. Richard Wilkinson was
searching for a better picture.
At MCA Laboratories in Torrance, Wilkinson was charged with
developing ways to record television programs and put them on master discs with
a laser beam at a time when few commercially available lasers existed. It was
an experimental project with slim hope of success. "The director of the
lab told me there was no guarantee the job would last more than six
months," Wilkinson says.
But he and his colleagues succeeded. In
partnership with Immink and his colleagues at Philips, Wilkinson's team helped
create the standards for what we now know as the laserdisc. Under an agreement
between the two companies, Philips built the players and MCA manufactured the
discs at a factory in Carson.
"If you really want to have
problems between Dutch people and Americans, then you should do this kind of
thing," Immink says. "If a system didn't
work, who was to blame, the disc or the player? That was a huge problem."
The bigger problem was that the public
was not impressed. Philips' first commercially available laserdisc player — the
Magnavox 8000 — was introduced in 1978, but Immink estimates that after half a
billion dollars in development resources, only a few hundred players were sold.
But the excursion was not a total loss.
While Immink and his colleagues were developing the video disc, management
asked them to pursue a sound-only disc as well.
Immink grew up saving his money to buy
45s by American artists such as Elvis Presley. But when his team started testing the digital audio disc, they used
recordings of performances such as Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.
Classical music could demonstrate the format's superior dynamic range over the
LP better than popular music, which has a comparably smaller range — the
distance between soft passages of music and loud ones. "From a record
player, it's impossible to have such a dynamic range," Immink says.
"You have to suppress the dynamic range, otherwise the grooves will touch
or you [have reduced] playing time."
In 1979, Immink was brought into a
joint task force between Philips and Sony to develop standards for the compact
disc. In 1982, the new format went on the market. Two years later, the
first CD was manufactured in the United States. Fittingly, it was
Bruce Springsteen'sBorn in the U.S.A.,
an album that was mixed by Bob Clearmountain and mastered by Bob Ludwig.
Hearing Born in the U.S.A.
on CD didn't make either man a digital advocate.
Clearmountain and Ludwig say that
early analog-to-digital converters had an "industrial sound", which
made CDs sound brittle. But when Apogee Electronics — a company
co-founded by Clearmountain's wife, Betty Bennett — developed the first
high-quality converters in 1985, the sound came into focus. "It
wasn't until CDs actually started to sound good [that I went]: 'That's what it sounded
like. That's what I remember doing in the studio,'" Clearmountain says. "The great thing for me about digital,
about CDs, was that I could do things that I could never do for a vinyl
record."
Scott Metcalfe, director of recording
arts and sciences at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University, says
the move to CDs was especially beneficial for reproducing classical recordings.
"Really in every way measurable,
the digital formats are going to exceed analog in dynamic range, meaning the
distance between how loud and how soft," he
says. "In the classical world, [that means] getting really quiet music
that isn't obscured by the pops and clicks of vinyl or just the noise floor of
the friction of the stylus against the [LP] itself."
That said, every audio engineer L.A.
Weekly spoke to said it's also not hard to find LPs that sound better than CDs.
Mastering, production and manufacturing variables can drastically tilt the
scale either way. The seemingly endless possibilities of the CD also
resulted in unexpected consequences. "When the CD came, everybody
discovered that they could do everything with the CD — or they believed they
could do everything," says Andres Mayo, president of the Audio Engineering
Society. "So they started pushing and pushing and pushing the volume up
and up and up, and that created a totally different sound."
Even before the advent of the CD, there
had been a "loudness war" in the music industry — the desire to make
an album louder than its competitors, so it would catch the attention of
listeners and radio programmers. But when CDs made it possible to increase the
volume exponentially — no more skipping needles — nuance and dynamics often
suffered.
Because vinyl's restrictions do not
permit the same abuse of audio levels as the CD, Mayo says that listeners might
hear a wider dynamic range in an album mixed separately for vinyl over a
compact disc version optimized for loudness — even though vinyl, as a format,
has a narrower range than CD.
"It's not just the format,"
Mayo says. "It's what you do with it."
It is a fact that vinyl sounds
different from CDs. And many people prefer vinyl's sound. But it's not clean
reproduction of a recording that makes vinyl a preferred format; it's the
affect the vinyl adds to a recording that people find pleasing. "I think some people interpret
the lack of top end [on vinyl] and interpret an analog type of distortion as
warmth," says Jim Anderson, a Grammy-winning recording engineer and professor at New York University's Clive Davis Institute of
Recorded Music. "It's a misinterpretation of it.
But if they like it, they like it. That's fine."
It's also clear that the vinyl
experience is about more than just sound. Pete Lyman, co-owner and chief
mastering technician at Infrasonic Sound, an audio and vinyl mastering studio
in Echo Park, says he believes listeners are
gravitating toward vinyl for the physical experience of owning, holding and
flipping an LP.
"I don't think that sound is
really the appeal for people right now," Lyman says. "They like the
collectability factor. They like
the whole ritual and process of listening to it. They're more engaged with the
music that way."
Ben Blackwell, head of vinyl operations
at Jack White's Third Man Records in Nashville,
says that he thinks some people prefer vinyl because it tells the world
something about who they are. "It's like the kid walking around with a
copy of The Catcher in the Rye
in his back pocket," he says. "Does he really connect with it or does
he think it's making a statement?"
In the rush to get into the vinyl game,
Lyman — who not only masters recordings but also cuts the master lacquer disc
that is sent to the vinyl pressing plant — says a lot of corners are getting
cut. In the 1960s and '70s, when artists were recording specifically for vinyl,
they recorded and mixed to fit the confines of the medium, he explains. They kept sides below 20 minutes, and put loud songs on the
outside tracks and quiet ones toward the center to account for the natural
deterioration of sound that occurs when the needle gets closer to the middle of
the LP.
These days, Lyman says, vinyl is
often the last thing artists and labels think about. Clients who employ Infrasonic's
services only for lacquer cutting often hand over albums that are optimized for
digital downloads and CD but are too long for vinyl, with track sequencing that
fails to account for the medium's natural limitations. To get an album longer than 40
minutes to fit onto one LP, Lyman says, high frequencies and bass are the first
things that go. There's also extra distortion because he has to cut the master
lacquer at a lower volume to fit all that extra music onto the LP.
"As soon as you have to cut that
record at a quieter volume, you're going to hear more kicks and pops, you're
going to hear more surface noise," he says, "because you're going to have to turn your stereo
up to accommodate the lower level on the disc." As labels seek to
capitalize on a physical medium that is gaining momentum, some marketing efforts offering superior sound are downright
misleading. Most notable among these is "audiophile-quality 180-gram
vinyl," which consumers assume is superior because it is heavier. Lyman,
however, says the added weight offers no musical benefit at all.
"It increases shipping costs and
sales cost of the record. That's about it," he says. "It's the Super
Big Gulp of vinyl, but you're not getting more [sound quality], really, you're
just getting more vinyl."
With PonoMusic, Neil Young is leading
fans down the digital version of a similar "bigger is better" sonic
trail. It has long been believed that the human ear cannot hear frequencies above
22 kHz. This is why CDs sample sound at 44.1 kHz and 16 bits of information per
sample. According to a theorem called Nyquist-Shannon, in order to reach a
desired range, sound must be sampled at twice that range. Half of 44,
obviously, is 22. Pono — along with some other digital retailers such as
HDtracks.com — sells some tracks that sample music as high as 192 kHz, with 24
bits per sample. Pono also offers a PonoPlayer (retail price: $399), which the
company says is optimized to play those tracks.
Pedram Abrari, Pono's executive vice
president of technology and engineering, says the idea behind the player and
the store is to sell and play back tracks at the rate at which artists record
them. Since artists typically record at rates much higher than 44.1 kHz for
editing purposes — such as 96 and 192 kHz — the company believes that offering
recordings at their original rates drastically improves the sound. This,
however, is a matter of intense debate.
"There is no evidence that
humans can perceive frequencies above 22 kHz," says Dr. Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and author of the
best-selling book This Is Your Brain on Music. "There is nothing in the
auditory system or brain that processes sounds this high, as far as we
know." In double-blind tests conducted by Levitin and others — some
results of which were published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society
— listeners cannot tell the difference between high-resolution audio and
CD-quality audio.
But many audio professionals, including
Bob Ludwig and NYU's Jim Anderson, say they can hear an improvement over CD
quality, and they prefer the higher frequencies and sample rates. Anderson even teaches a
class at NYU in which he instructs students on how to listen for the
differences. "I think if people can't hear it, they probably didn't
know what they were listening for," Anderson
says. "Someone has to say to you: Listen for this, listen for this, listen
for this. And when you start to home in on those details, it starts to become
very clear."
Abrari says Pono doesn't like to get
into the science. And he says it's not just about what a person can hear but
what they feel. But even if humans can hear or
"feel" above 22 kHz, the experience of listening to high-resolution
digital tracks is very different from listening to vinyl. If anything, it's
closer to that of the CD. The ticks and pops are gone. There is no disc to
ritually flip. The tracks sound closer to what the artist laid down in the
studio, but that's only because the distortion and limitations present in the
vinyl pressing are no longer part of the experience.
It's not as cheap an obsession, either.
You can buy an armload of used LPs for the $21.79 it costs to buy a 192 kHz
version of Young's Harvest at the Pono store. As he's been pitching Pono,
Young has continued to promote the idea that analog formats and recording gear
offer the authentic sound, and digital is a compromise. "I don't
think [Pono] can sound better than vinyl," he said earlier this month at
the Consumer Electronics Show. "Because vinyl is a reflection and any
digital is a reconstitution; it's not the same thing."
Many audio engineers disagree. Scott
Metcalfe, for example, says that recording to analog tape isn't any purer than
recording music digitally. But the distortion and pitch variation that analog
tape adds to the recording are preferred by some artists and
audiences. "I think there are few people who would tell you that
recording classical music to analog tape has any benefit at all," Metcalfe
says. But for some artists, he says — particularly in rock — those layers of
distortion are preferable.
Ludwig says he mastered White's
Lazaretto on analog tape not because it's a better way to master but because
"it's what [White] wanted." "For many world-class
mixers," Ludwig says, "mixing to analog tape has no advantages if
what comes out of the console is exactly what you want." However, for a
less skilled mixing engineer, mixing to analog tape can "'glue' the music
together in the most wonderful way," he says.
Whether it's analog tape versus digital
recordings, or vinyl versus CDs, objective quality is not the conversation:
It's about which one the artist and listener prefer. "Every way you can measure it,
digital is going to be superior," Metcalfe says. "It really does come down to the
preference of the end user."
Or, as Kees Immink says: "Some people like marmalade and some people like mustard. If people like to listen to vinyl, do so, enjoy life. But don't say that the sound is better."