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Prefer vinyls?

#61
Debased said:
This board probably has the most comprehensive info on vinyl anywhere. If you have any questions, check the FAQ and search the archives:
http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/vinyl/bbs.html

You can get an inexpensive and effective LP cleaning kit here:
http://discdoc.com/

I'm a serious vinyl-junkie, and to my ears, analog (vinyl) preserves the natural humanity of the music far more convincingly than any computer-synthesized format (CD, SACD, DVD-A, etc.). Digital can indeed sound good, but it has a lifeless, mechanical quality that I usually find very fatiguing, particularly after extended listening.

In my experience, a properly setup and supported turntable, arm, cartridge, and phono preamp in the $1000 range will easily beat any digital player, no matter the cost, in terms of effortless musical flow, drama, scale, rhythmic drive, and emotional involvement. If you think vinyl sounds compressed, you've never heard a decent, well-setup turntable in a good system.

I have around 3000 LPs, and you'd be hard-pressed to find more than an occasional quiet tick or pop on any of them, even the thousand or so that I bought used. Good cleaning practices and stylus maintenance are a way of life in analog music reproduction, but the small hassles are well worth the amazing results.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the links. Thats a gorgeous turntable, what's the rest of the system likeif you don't mind my asking.
 
#62
Debased said:
This board probably has the most comprehensive info on vinyl anywhere. If you have any questions, check the FAQ and search the archives:
http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/vinyl/bbs.html

You can get an inexpensive and effective LP cleaning kit here:
http://discdoc.com/

I'm a serious vinyl-junkie, and to my ears, analog (vinyl) preserves the natural humanity of the music far more convincingly than any computer-synthesized format (CD, SACD, DVD-A, etc.). Digital can indeed sound good, but it has a lifeless, mechanical quality that I usually find very fatiguing, particularly after extended listening.

In my experience, a properly setup and supported turntable, arm, cartridge, and phono preamp in the $1000 range will easily beat any digital player, no matter the cost, in terms of effortless musical flow, drama, scale, rhythmic drive, and emotional involvement. If you think vinyl sounds compressed, you've never heard a decent, well-setup turntable in a good system.

I have around 3000 LPs, and you'd be hard-pressed to find more than an occasional quiet tick or pop on any of them, even the thousand or so that I bought used. Good cleaning practices and stylus maintenance are a way of life in analog music reproduction, but the small hassles are well worth the amazing results.
Click to expand...

Have you ever tried a copy of Mahler's Symphony No 8 - this always distorted at the peaks on vinyl - but sounds perfect on CD!

Another good "test record" is the version of Holst's Planets by Montreal Symphony (cond. Charles Dutoit) - so on CD the bass organ notes vibrate the floor - but on vinyl I found they just distorted...?
 
#63
Matt Till said:
What many are refusing to acknowledge: YOUR CD PLAYER IS PROBABLY BETTER THAN YOUR RECORD PLAYER!! IF you get a brand new state of the art record player, slap a brand new record on it, spin it, it will sound noticably better than CD.
Click to expand...

If you use a $1000 turntable, a $700 cartridge and a $500 phono preamp it should sound better than a $50 CD player :spit:

The fact is that cheap CD players sound way better than cheap turntable setups. I've owned plenty of both. This is a good thing for low-end systems, they sound much better than those of 30 years ago.

One audio dealer I shop at has a series of hand-picked systems he recommends at various price points....until he hits $15,000 total he doesn't even recommend a turntable!!!
 
#69
There are instances though where the things we don't always live about Vinyl actually help make a recording more listenable and to me grindcore/death comes to mind. Napalm Death in particular. Also the mix of Live at leeds sounds better on vinyl then on the CD, but, the album was re-mastered for the CD [along with more songs] so it's hard to say if it's the medium or some one with too much high end loss in their hear that mastered it.

I find on MOST [not all] CDs I either have to cut highs and or boost bass, where OLD LPs, reels and cassettes I don’t. Is it the CD, no, because I can mix a CD where that doesn’t happen. Actually I noticed the same problem with vinyl from the 80s particular hardrock stuff. A lot of albums from that era are really bright and thin sounding to me. One more reason to hate the 80s I guess.
 
#71
Some good points here - so with pop/rock albums - it is not about CD vs vinyl - but rather how these recordings have been mastered - older ones will have been mastered with the imperfections of vinyl in mind - so don't sound "right" on CD unless they have been remastered specially for digital.

Secondly - these albums are not a re-creation of a concert sound - they are always a sort of false picture...

That's why I think Classical albums are a better way to judge the medium, as the idea is that you hear the same sound as you would if you were sitting in a concert hall with the orchestra in front of you!

I always felt with vinyl that the orchestra were in front of me alright - but behind a big heavy curtain that muffled the sound - but then when I heard the same thing on CD - it was like the curtain had been lifted and I could hear the orchestra exactly as I did in the concert hall! :)
 
#72
Matt Till said:
Vinyl.

People who complain about Vinyl quality have a bad player/needle/record. That popping and crackle means you need to take better care of your stuff. A nice clean vinyl on a great player is the best sound there is.

My main preference: ALBUM ART! Vinyl's heyday is when people really gave a **** about album art. I've got some Gentle Giant stuff that folds out into a giant poster essentially. I've got a copy of Jethro Tull's thick as a brick that is a newspaper! The whole thing is a huge newspaper... haven't read the articles yet. But if an album has great art, the only way to appreciate it is BIG!
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+1000 ON THE ART!!!!

And I love listening to vinyl but it is a MAJOR PAIN IN THE @SS to keep turning the LP over.

You cannot beat CDs length of play.
 
#73
i agree for certain things cd's are great-ex. tuck & patti a duo or electronic instruments synthesizers etc. it's just that anything recorded on vinyl or cd is just that-recorded-it isn't live. what they strive to recreate is the illusion of live. for many of us it is vinyl, for others they are happy w/cd's. i have a very nice cd setup w/a cal audio unit & also a nice double turntable setup-1 is a j.a. mitchell transcriptor table w/a wynn strain-guage transducer cartridge & the other an old pioneer direct drive table w/a signet 7ke cartridge (the latter about $400+ setup v. my cd player which was about 5x the price in the 80's). even the pioneer table produces more an illusion of live w/regular quality vinyl that makes me beam from ear to ear when i listen to it v. the still joyful but only for noncritical listening of my cd setup. the cd's, even several audiophile quality labels like chesky or 3 blind mice are far better than tapes for sure but for me certainly not on a par w/my transcriptor table. i.o.w. cd's are like tapes great for not having to go thru the cleaning aspects etc but don't quite match that feeling of realism of music-not because of their ability for the cd to reproduce a sound accurately but for the sense of truly feeling you are sitting before a stage with depth from the images. :cool:
 
#79
Hey, some people actually get proper earbuds (Etymotic research for example)... and honestly, most people's stereos are not better (more linear) than the iPod earbuds anyway. When I see the junk people use to listen to music, I think more often than not, their best sound is in their car, or with an iPod.

Also, however much I love good sound (and you will have a idea of what I mean by checking this website out : Invalid Link Removed ), as a musician, I have come to realise that it doesn't matter to me as much as it use to. CD or LP... or SACD, DVD-A etc...

I listen for the music mostly... and no matter how good the system, it never manages to fool me. The day the combined works of an incredibly well recorded album and unbelievable sound-system fool me to believe it was played in front of me, it'll still be missing half of what happens at a concert.

I know this thread is on LP vs CD, but I feel like this whole debate is not really relevant. To me the experience of recorded music is so far from reality that I'd rather sacrifice sound over convenience : keep more money to see shows, and not be intolerant of portable music, even MP3 (though it really is disastrous for sound) or AAC (much better), because they allow me to spend much more time listening (during my commutes for example, versus only at home, in my listening room etc.)
 

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