Anyone heard of these "HD vinyls" ?

Reminds me of my crate digging days. Collecting James Brown records made me realise all this. I gave up, too many what-ifs and gambles for my wallet...

 

This is shaping up to become a reality soon:

 

One thing that has been keeping me from bothering with vinyl is that digital masters put onto a vinyl disc don't sound better than their respective downloads and actually could be worse because vinyl material made at present isn't anything like it used to be.

Has this just been misinformed nonsense that I've taken as respectable advice from elsewhere?

 

I'm not getting a good feeling about this process. But I don't know. It has some advantages and could turn out great. It is interesting, that's for sure.

95% (or more) of my LPs are pre-digital technology. Now days, I will often choose a digital file over a digital file cut to vinyl unless the latter has more dynamics. The cutting mastering engineer (which will not exist with this process as far as I can tell from the video) and the sound of my cartridge could make an LP sound better than the mastered digital files but I usually don't get both to compare.

 

I'm not sure what to think of this. Part of me is super happy to see someone modernizing vinyl which I think has been sorely needed. I happen to enjoy digital cuts to vinyl, though I vastly prefer a pure analog process.

It's not so much the analog loss that worries me, that's been ramping up for a long time and the people who care still will, but it's that with more and more of the digital taking over, the deep trust in digital will actually make digital -> vinyl records worse. I think digital filtering is perhaps the worst thing one can do to audio and I'm sure it'll be a big part of this.

I'd love a HD analog version of this or to completely rethink our digital process, I think we sampled things wrong.

But I also will be the first in line to give this a shot, especially if I can compare it against an all analog recording.

 

If they are approaching it right, they'd use pulses to vaporize and not to melt.
One promising capability with using laser is that the material to be carved doesn't need to be soft vinyl (could be ceramic even), thus would last longer and be more reliable to scratches etc. Lets wait until someone comes up with an ion cannon next, haha.

 

There was mention in the article about mastering the medium directly, rather than the "music". I assume this means that they will be able to optimize the groove traces/shapes/angles/whatever in order for the needle/cartridge to reproduce the intended signal more accurately.

Anytime you have a physical medium, there will be some "loss" incurred at each physical step. This is sheer physics; there is no such thing as perfect or instantaneous movement in the physical world. However, one can compensate for this. RIIA filters already compensate for the medium's inability to represent all frequencies equally. I'm interpreting this "hd vinyl" technology as compensation for the limitations in how a needle tracks a groove. Start with the knowledge that a needle does NOT follow a groove perfectly nor produces a voltage that exactly matches it, because physics... but we can certainly figure out how nonlinear/inaccurate those errors are, because physics. So then alter those grooves (this would be the "physical mastering") to compensate for those errors in order to more closely produce the intended signal.

Or maybe I'm talking out of my posterior and I'm overly optimistic looking at this from an engineering standpoint.

 

To make my last point a little clearer: I always get nervous when people who don't remotely care about analog are messing with things in the analog space. We've already had digital ruin a lot of stuff, I hope we fight back.

 

I'm going to reserve judgement until I have a HD Vinyl on my turntable to listen to.

I'm glad people are thinking out of the box to advance this sector. The proof will be in the listening.

Since they are vaporizing material to create the stamper (so not the actual groove itself, but think of it as the walls of the groove), they will have a super high precision cut of the walls. With laser precision, this will be a really fascinating thing to hear. The final physical product has very high capability to be amazing, but the only botheration I have is the conversion of pure analog to digital process, and back to analog again.

So, mentally, I am thinking of it this way. There will be the few limited pure analog AAA releases which I will always cherish and buy.
For all those digital files being cut to analog, this might be a great way forward.

NOTE: Can a mod please fix the title to remove "HD Vinyls" and replace it with "HD Vinyl", no "s". Thanks!

 

This is really it for me too. I'll reserve judgement till I hear it, and it has all the potential to be amazing. it's just a little disconcerting that this is coming from someone who has no apparent appreciation for analog.

 

One thing that comes to mind: I have read* that modern vinyl often has dynamics limited less than the corresponding CD/Digital release because it is hard to cut vinyl that is limited beyond a point. It sounds like HD Vinyl might not have that limitation.


*(From multiple sources that I have forgotten.)