Light and sound, particle and wave, perception and reality. These are related, as we shall see. Newton said light is composed of particles. The double-slit experiment shows that light acts like a wave. Einstein proposed the existence of photons, light particles which simultaneously behave as waves, giving rise to the wave-particle duality. Aside from being a nifty thought experiment, does it matter if you can’t tell the difference?
That is the question Mobile Fidelity record buyers have been forced to ask themselves upon learning that the vinyl they were led to believe was analog from master tape to final product in fact has had a digital step in the middle of the process. Not until a YouTuber started comparing MoFi’s sales to the production limitations of pure analog manufacturing did the possibility occur to anyone (outside the company, that is). This has not been going on since the founding of Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs in 1977, of course—digital recording did not yet exist then—but it has been the case for years. Since 2011, to be exact. And until the story broke in July 2022, no one noticed.
The Accidental Experiment
Which is surprising because audiophiles pride themselves on their listening abilities. Audiophiles (I suspect) listen to music as an adjunct to enjoying their audio systems, rather than having audio systems as a necessity for listen to music. Many audiophiles now famously hate CDs and digital recording in general, so it is easy to forget that audiophiles once greeted the advent of digital as the descent of the New Jerusalem. No more pops and clicks? No more skips? And I don’t need to get up and turn the thing over in the middle of an album? Awesome!
Analog had never been able to reproduce the full dynamic range of sound from a roar to a whisper. Extremely loud passages of music were known to cause styluses to jump out of grooves. If you were a super-geek who, to avoid technical limitations such as this, preferred reel-to-reel (the ultimate in analog sound reproduction) to vinyl, you still might find extremely soft segments almost buried under analog tape’s ever-present background hiss. Digital had no such issues. It could produce sound as loud as your speakers could handle and your ears could tolerate, and as quiet as the nearly inaudible. And when there was no sound recorded, there was silence. No hiss, no rumble, no underlying noise floor. But at some point, audiophiles turned on digital, not because of the technology itself but due to its abuse. Bad mastering and remastering produced many tinny, annoying releases, and nonsense like the loudness war pounded the nails into digital’s coffin and moved audiophiles to a rediscovery of vinyl. Suddenly, seemingly passé outfits like Mobile Fidelity saw their sales rise.
I have some sympathy for Mobile Fidelity (though they really should have come clean about their digital intermediary practice from the moment they initiated it). They were caught between rising demand and limited production ability because they are a record company but not a recording company. Their product exists only because they license original master recordings from recording companies. Many of these masters are invaluable. Some are monuments of musical genius, a legacy of civilization. They are not to be abused, and their owners are justified in guarding them closely. A company like MoFi has a limited number of times they will be allowed to run a master. A remastering—one run of the master tape—will produce one lacquer master, a “positive” just like the final records to be produced. To produce those records, you need at least one “negative” intermediary (assuming this intermediary is physical, another disc). Normally, the initial negative is the “Father,” which can produce ten “Mothers,” which are positives. Each Mother can produce ten stampers (negatives), with each stamper producing around a thousand records (positives) before it wears out, for a maximum of 100,000 records for each “normal” remastering. But MoFi’s vaunted “One-Step” process eliminates the Father and Mother intermediaries, leaving a single (negative) “Convert” between lacquer master and final product. This should mean a run of no more than a thousand pressings per release, but astute observers noticed recent production runs much larger than this. And that’s when buyers started asking questions, leading MoFi to admit that—to work around this limitation—they were using DSD (Direct Stream Digital) technology as the intermediary.
Mobile Fidelity gambled that vinyl pressed from DSD would be virtually indistinguishable from what their customers had come to expect. The gamble paid off, and then some. A DSD-based “One-Step” album, released before the cat ran yowling from the bag, was judged by one reviewer to be the best record he’d ever heard. He had unwittingly pointed out that a digital remastering of an analog source had produced a better product. Ouch.
At this point I would like to indulge myself in an epic, full-body, shameless gloat. I am not an audiophile; I am a musicophile who values good sound. Nonetheless, I geek out over the arcana of audio and have cobbled together a system as good as a minimal budget has allowed, the crown jewel of which is a pair of Paradigm Mini Monitors and matching subwoofer purchased years ago. And I believe digital audio can be superior to analog. (There are nuances on which I won’t waste space here. Also, when I refer to “digital audio,” standard CD quality—at least—is assumed. High resolution formats like SACD, DVD Audio, or lossless streaming would be a step up; compressed streaming—which is to say, most streaming—or highly compressed MP3s would be a step down, if not downright ugly.) This means I long have been annoyed by those who not only despise digital but insist that analog is verifiably superior—and that they can hear the difference. They will post analog vs. digital diagrams that show an undulating, uninterrupted, and—yes, I’ll say it—sexy analog wave contrasted with a jagged, choppy, almost painful-looking digital stairstep graph, each step representing a sample. They’ll say they can hear this, that “something is missing,” that each step is an audible lacuna in what should be a continuous wave. They maintain that vinyl records sound warm and living while CDs sound cold and lifeless. Living vs. dead, zesty vs. zombie. Imagine my delight, my schadenfreude at learning how many vinyl snobs—who have been shelling out lots of money, sometimes hundreds of dollars, to obtain MoFi records they thought were pure analog—found they had been listening to, and enjoying, the very thing they were trying to avoid: digital (at least in part).
This is the point I made at the outset: it doesn’t matter if you can’t tell the difference. Mobile Fidelity unintentionally provided us with a valuable experiment in this regard. Normally, it is entirely possible for someone possessed of decent hearing to tell the difference between a vinyl record and a CD. Even if the record is extremely clean, with no tell-tale pops or dusty crackle; and even if the playback system is particularly fine, keeping turntable rumble to a minimum; the fact is you still have physical sound reproduction, a stylus moving through the groove of a vinyl surface, so a record can have a detectable noise floor that a CD will not have (unless the CD is a transfer from a noticeably hissy analog tape). What MoFi created was a digital sandwich: a digital master derived from an analog source provided the content for an analog format—a digital patty nestled between two analog buns, if you will. In doing so they created an environment where audiophiles could be fooled. And either no one commented on hearing anything different or, in the one case where someone did comment, he said (in effect) that the difference was an improvement.
Mobile Fidelity also accidentally validated the Nyquist theorem, which is the basis for the sampling rate declared in the Red Book standard for audio CDs. Briefly, human hearing typically reaches from 20 Hz at the low end to 20 kHz at the high end. Babies can hear frequencies higher than 20 kHz but eventually lose this. This means that unless you are mastering recordings for babies or bats, you only need to make sure that the recordings register frequencies as high as 20 kHz. Analog frequency range varies, depending upon tape and recording equipment used (it’s at least 50 Hz to 15 kHz), but digital’s frequency range depends upon its sampling rate: digital recordings are collections of samples, each sample representing a chunk of data containing enough bits (bit depth) to define a moment of sound. A digital recorder, used in either recording live sound or copying sound from an analog source, captures so many “samples” per second; the higher the sampling rate, in theory, the higher the frequency captured. If the sampling rate is too low, the deficit becomes audible. What Harry Nyquist and Claude Shannon said (in the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, its official name) was that, for a digital recording to accurately represent the original analog sound wave, the sampling rate needs to be somewhat more than twice the value of the highest frequency to be captured. Therefore, a 20 kHz top end requires a sampling rate more than 40 kHz, that is, more than 40, 000 samples per second. Thus, the sampling rate for CD audio is 44.1 kHz, for good measure.
You’d think this would be the end of it, but many people have insisted that they can hear the difference between analog and digitally sampled sound. Aside from a decided minority with particularly keen hearing (those having the acuity to detect digital that is the equivalent of Robert M. Parker Jr.’s ability to taste wine), virtually no one should be able to tell the difference. This means that some people’s preference for the “warm, living” quality of vinyl stems not from its analog-ness but (ironically) from its imperfections, from the background noise inherent both in the record itself and the means of playback. MoFi may have proved this by providing a product that had all of vinyl’s virtues and fewer of its flaws, removing a layer of degradation at the mastering stage: an analog copy of a copy is always a step down in quality, while a digital copy is theoretically identical.
Now if you are a vinyl lover, keep listening to it. Listen to whatever sounds best to you. I have vinyl records—hundreds of them. I also have hundreds of CDs. Call me format-agnostic. I can see (and hear) the appeal of each and the flaws of each. Records can sound great, assuming the absence of scratches and dirt; so can CDs, assuming good engineering and quality production. I can see also that vinyl has sentiment on its side. The record cover provides a much grander canvas for art than a CD booklet (which, in its defense, can contain much more information than the back of an album). Holding a record is somehow more satisfying than handling a CD, and selecting, removing, and cleaning a record before placing it onto the turntable is a ritual for the vinyl lover. (On the other hand, CD listeners are quite happy to get right down to the business of listening without such an elaborate prelude.) Even opening a new album is better, using your thumbnail to pierce the shrink-wrap along the open side and sliding it from one end to the other, releasing the scent of the virgin vinyl within … as opposed to struggling with almost impenetrable CD shrink-wrap (why make yourself crazy? consider getting a tool for this).
But don’t mistake sentiment for superiority. Assuming textbook-perfect examples of each, the best CD will sound better than the best record. Records come with an encyclopedia of auditory woes. We’ve already encountered vinyl’s dynamic difficulties, the inability to reproduce the extremely soft and (especially) the extremely loud. But there’s also the fact that a record will sound best at the beginning of a side, then slowly degrade as the groove winds ever tighter around the center as the side nears its end. Good mastering can make the change almost imperceptible, but only if 33 1/3 RPM records have just 15 to 20 minutes per side; any longer than that and distortion becomes hard to mitigate. (Speaking of rotations per minute, higher speed means higher sound quality, so some audiophiles have abandoned 33 1/3 RPM records for 12-inch 45s, accepting the more frequent side changes that come with them.) And then you have wow, the pitch fluctuation that occurs when a record is not completely flat. Most records are flat enough, but then again you won’t encounter wow—or any of the other problems physically reproduced sound is heir to—on a CD.
Truth Is Not Always Appearance
One last thing: sound information can be stored digitally but must be converted to analog for us to hear it. Most CD players include a built-in DAC—Digital (to) Audio Converter—for this purpose, though some high-end systems split the player and the DAC into separate devices. No one “listens” to digital audio, except maybe HAL 9000, but when he sang “Daisy Bell” to Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey he was converting a digital file into analog sound waves. We find ourselves back where we started: just as light at once behaves as both wave and particle, digital sound is at once both wave and bit (to be accurate, millions of bits). Opposite things that seemingly cannot both be true, in fact, are. A scientific analog (pun intended) for this is the thaumatrope, an example of which is a card having a bird on one side and an empty cage on the other. This showed up in a scene from Sleepy Hollow:
“Separate pictures which become one in the spinning. It is truth, but truth is not always appearance.” How you respond to this may depend upon whether you’re aware of the illusion. If you are an analog devotee listening to a CD, you may be wishing you were spinning vinyl instead; but if you are one of Mobile Fidelity’s customers, you most likely were fooled by the slight-of-hand and perfectly happy with your purchases—until now. That’s the power of perception.
