"But don't say that the sound is better"

tonyb

PolkMaster1 wrote: »

Note that you need to have the right gear in place for great vinyl playback.

Wouldn't the same apply to CD/SACD/ or digital hi-rez ?

Of course it would....but how many take the time to actually do that ? Seems to me, today SQ is more so sacrificed at the alter of easy and convenient....and cheap. Try doing that with any format, including vinyl and the results are always the same.

DarqueKnight

Nothing (yet) beats the sound quality of well-recorded single-sided 45 rpm vinyl.

muncybob

tonyb wrote: »

PolkMaster1 wrote: »

Note that you need to have the right gear in place for great vinyl playback.

Wouldn't the same apply to CD/SACD/ or digital hi-rez ?

Ed Zachary!

steveinaz

CD's can sound wonderful; capturing all the body and ambience of any analog source, and do it without background noise. The problem is, was it mastered properly.

steveinaz

Tony,
Have you ever had milk fresh from the cow? One might argue that milk doesn't get any purer or true; yet if you grew up a city boy like me, I want my "store" milk. LOL

This explains the love for tubes and vinyl. Are they as true to the source as SS and digital, no--but they sure do taste good to many people. We also need to remember that loudspeakers were developed around these earlier sources; not the "accuracy" and merciless reproduction of digital.

madmax

steveinaz wrote: »

Have you ever had milk fresh from the cow? One might argue that milk doesn't get any purer or true; yet if you grew up a city boy like me, I want my "store" milk.

I don't think that came out as you hoped it would. So rather than milk fresh from the cow (LPs) you would rather have old stored pasturized manipulated milk (CDs)?

heiney9

steveinaz wrote: »

This explains the love for tubes and vinyl. Are they as true to the source as SS and digital, no--.

You have that backwards there Steve. There are exceptions as there are superb digital playback pieces as well as superb SS pieces.

But analog is really the only "true" source if you really want to strip the argument down.

When you are sitting in Carnagie Hall making a recording, are those dashes and zero's coming from the stage?

When someone plays a guitar in a studio and it's recorded, is the sound from the guitar dashes and zero's? Nope.

Digital is and always will be an "approximation" of an analog wave form. Don't even get me started on all the horrid SS amps in circulation and all the inaccuracies and garbage added to the signal in order to fix non-linearity's in the unnecessary multiple gain stages and heavy negative feedback. There are of course some fine exceptions that we can all live with day to day, but in the end the basic idea that digital and SS are somehow the standard is very skewed.

This is of course breaking it down to the basics, there are other factors in play that dictate which path we prefer.

But your statement is fundamentally inaccurate.

H9

heiney9

I compromise and use a very simple SS amp that has two gain stages and minimal negative feedback, transistors matched in circuit, etc. It's very close to what tubes would sound like w/o the hassle of a power tube amp.

I use a tube based pre-amp and the finest tubes around. I use the latest digital to analog converter chip set but also incorporate a tube output.

So I'm compromising, but getting some of the best of both worlds. I don't do vinyl as I don't want to spend the time necessary keeping it going nor the rabbit hole I would go down.

H9

steveinaz

Brock, I site tubes as a way of driving home the point that listener preference often trumps "awesome numbers" on a spec sheet. Vinyl is far more compromised both in bass reproduction and loss if higher frequencies as you get closer to the spindle---add to that the background surface noise. However, I know first hand how magical both tubes and vinyl can sound as I had both in my younger days.

My point is preference, based on what you are most used to, can often have people selecting the "less literally accurate" route because they find the music more pleasing.

I'm not attempting to split hairs; saying thing "A" sounds better than thing "B" is SUBJECTIVITY at it's finest. What I'm saying is I understand why someone might prefer vinyl (or tubes) even if they know that "technically" they aren't necessarily superior.

madmax

I keep going back to a time when an audio engineer made several recordings with the various digital filters used by the recording industry, all were the same piece of musical work. They all sounded totally different. Not in frequency response or definition, but in the actual presentation of each sound. It became evident that each recording had a totally different character. The one thing you won't get when recording on several analog recorders is a different character. There may be a tonal shift, more or less hiss or clarity, but the character (or heart) of the piece will be retained.

Remember the old MoTown house sounds like the Supremes and others recorded in as compared to maybe some of the old country type sounds? Think of the different filtering techniques used in digital recordings as being one of many of these "house sounds". One day this will no longer be the case as technology improves.

heiney9

But they are technically superior at a fundamental level of reproduction because they closely imitate real hearing. I completely understand and agree with where you are coming from, I just take exception to the statement "digital and SS are more true to the source", that's not true and it has nothing to do with likes and dislikes of a certain format. Analog IS the natural source.

That was my only point I wanted to make, perhaps I am being to precise or analytical, but the statement you made was kind of a big absolute, intentional or not.

That is all

H9

nooshinjohn

Anyone that doubts that vinyl is superior to digital needs to only sit in the sweet spot and close their eyes...

PolkMaster1

steveinaz wrote: »

CD's can sound wonderful; capturing all the body and ambience of any analog source, and do it without background noise. The problem is, was it mastered properly.

I have yet to hear CDs capture the magic of analog vinyl. CDs do sound great. But once you hear vinyl on the right gear, there is no comparison.

If you heard such sound come from CD - what CD equipment did you have to reproduce such sound?

For me, I had a $3000 CD Player with analog outs going up against a great turntable with a great phono preamp. The sound was just unbelievable!!!!

I could never get a CD Players TOSLink out going into a good DAC to sound as good as the CD Players Analog Outs - the sound was close, but I always preferred the analog out of a CD Player.

Hence - even with a CD Player connected to a great external DAC - the sound of vinyl always trumped over CD.

madmax

With high res files out aren't CDs pretty much dead for audiophiles anyway?

F1nut

Not at all, why should I give up perfectly good CD's and SACD's for yet another format made for the absolute lazy!?!

PolkMaster1

madmax wrote: »

With high res files out aren't CDs pretty much dead for audiophiles anyway?

For my vinyl collection - I would rather buy an A/D Converter that upsamples the signal to 192/24 or 32. It would be much cheaper (and maybe better) to go that route than to buy my vinyl collection over again as hi-rez files.

That is just me.

F1nut

I have to wonder why the folks that tout the analog nature of vinyl as being superior aren't also touting VHS tape as being better than DVD or Blu-ray? No need to answer, it's obvious that the digital formats are the more accurate and superior format.

F1nut

nooshinjohn wrote: »

Anyone that doubts that vinyl is superior to digital needs to sit in the sweet spot and close their eyes...

Well John, comparing a what, $40+k vinyl rig to a $1k CD player isn't anything close to a fair comparison.

madmax

Not so obvious at all. Have you heard music recorded on VHS?? Problem is the equipment is no longer available because it was meant to be an audio/video format, not a high end audio only format.

madmax

PolkMaster1 wrote: »

For my vinyl collection - I would rather buy an A/D Converter that upsamples the signal to 192/24 or 32. It would be much cheaper (and maybe better) to go that route than to buy my vinyl collection over again as hi-rez files.

This is awesome if you want to record LPs as high resolution files up to 192/24 or DSD/DSDx2. http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/DA3000
I picked up one to play with, does a nice job!

mhardy6647

I like good quality program material in all formats.
Not so sure about eight-track tape cartridges, but otherwise, it is all good, to me.

Even this one -- depends totally on the station and the program.

DSC_0247 by Mark Hardy, on Flickr

madmax

Yeah, but does it do HD Radio??

F1nut

Not so obvious at all. Have you heard music recorded on VHS?? Problem is the equipment is no longer available because it was meant to be an audio/video format, not a high end audio only format.

Intentional or not, you missed the point. I was speaking to the video aspect and how folks who think vinyl is superior generally, prefer digital video.

gce

DarqueKnight wrote: »

Nothing (yet) beats the sound quality of well-recorded single-sided 45 rpm vinyl.

I totally agree. Maybe I don't have my Digital side setup the best it could be right now but I'm going to work on it and the reason I'm going to work on it is that my analog side sounds sooooo much better.

madmax

F1nut wrote: »

Not so obvious at all. Have you heard music recorded on VHS?? Problem is the equipment is no longer available because it was meant to be an audio/video format, not a high end audio only format.

Intentional or not, you missed the point. I was speaking to the video aspect and how folks who think vinyl is superior generally, prefer digital video.

Give me an analog video recorder which operates at the same resolution as BluRay and I bet it would look about the same without some of the artifacts.

F1nut

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.

Pretty serious deficiencies right there.

"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."

"....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."

Yep, exactly what I think.

"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."

People say that early CD's didn't sound good, which is basically true. Ever listen to early vinyl? Really, really bad sound and it took a lot longer than CD did to become what it is today.

"I think some people interpret the lack of top end [on vinyl] and interpret an analog type of distortion as warmth,"

Seems to be the case.

That said, every audio engineer L.A. Weekly spoke to said it's not hard to find LPs that sound better than CDs. Mastering, production and manufacturing variables can drastically tilt the scale either way.

Nor is it hard to find CD's that sound better than vinyl for the very same reasons.

madmax

Not much time to play with the quotes, but in summary:

Real sounding bass from an acoustic bass is not well produced by a CD, comparitvely, massive electric bass is reproduced very well. Ask any SPL contender at a car audio show.

They were hyped up in the studio, now reality sets in. They should probably call in someone from acoustic sounds to figure out what they were doing wrong.

If they had a decent vinyl setup noises such as pops and ticks if they existed would be off to the side somewhere and would not be noticed.

I've got non-pop style music from the 50s and 60s that sound very truthful. Of course they don't have the fatigue factor of a CDs whiz-bang dynamics.

The lack of top end on LPs comes from hearing loss caused by harsh sounds and loud bass listened to over and over again from CDs.

I guess at least the last one was accurate, mixing and production does make a difference.

bikezappa

I purchased the first Sony CD player for over $1000 after listening to a demo at Tweeter. The clean clear pop free background noise was so dramatic it was clearly superior. In addition the increased dynamic range was outstanding. Never looked back.

gudnoyez

Why not enjoy both Digital and analog? I have some digital recordings that sound superior to thier Vinyl counterparts, and vinyl that sounds better than digital. I enjoy both, and also like some digital downloading, but physical media is more enjoyable to me.

JPete

I have several hundred albums on vinyl. Every time I get the itch to listen to one, I just turn on an mp3.

Only kidding. I don't have any mp3s.