I've been ruined...RUINED

[aerius]

So a few weeks ago I had the chance to get together with some folks and listen to some nice vinyl rigs. Crap, I'm now ruined, because I've now heard what vinyl can really do, and it's goddamn scary how good it is. What was most shocking to me was the soundstage and the amount of low level details. With vinyl, I could be practically anywhere in the room (other than right next to a speaker or something absurd like that) and the soundstaging would still be as good or better than sitting in the sweetspot with CDs. In the sweetspot, it's like there's no speakers in the room, even with non-audiophile records like a 30 year old Bob Marley LP. In terms of detail resolution it was like going from a Grado SR60 all the way to an RS-1, music is a lot more there and real, and you really do hear so much more.

Having never heard a really good vinyl setup before, I always figured it was a bunch of trade-offs and that the two camps were just being dogmatic weirdos like so many other things in audio. I thought CD had better frequency extension and dynamics while vinyl had better PRaT and soundstaging, and a slightly better midrange. Boy was I ever wrong. I don't know if vinyl will do 20Hz bass, but that Bob Marley LP didn't have anything lacking on the low end, and the grooviness was unreal. If I had a bong with me I would've lit it up and passed it around.

Other highlights of the night, Lowthers and the Quad ESL57. Neither is perfect, but both do things which are so special that I'm willing to forgive their shortfalls. I don't think I could live with either as my only set of speakers, but there are areas in which they'll kill every other speaker I've heard. Listening to the Cowboy Junkies' Trinity Sessions album on the Lowthers ruined me, I thought it was good on the Living Voice Avatars, Lowthers took it to another level. But play Metallica on Lowthers and well, let's just say it ain't gonna be pretty, they're pretty music dependant.

It was a fun night, very educational for me.

[PinkFloyd]

So a few weeks ago I had the chance to get together with some folks and listen to some nice vinyl rigs. Crap, I'm now ruined, because I've now heard what vinyl can really do, and it's goddamn scary how good it is.

Don't let the secret out aerius! Hell some people think ipod nano is "high end sounding" Shit man, they'd have heart failure if they ever heard real musical reproduction.... keep it quiet

[ojnihs]

God fucking damn it, now I'm curious about vinyl. Shit!

[aerius]

yeah, vinyl can be magic. still too much of a pain in the ass for me, though

The need to keep the damn things clean is a big reason I'm not getting a vinyl rig. However if I strike it rich and have one of those automated record cleaning machines then that'll change. Of course if I were really rich I'd get someone to clean my records for me in exchange for listening time on my system.

[JBLoudG20]

Yeah too much maintenance for me. My records wren't used that much, but damn I couldn't keep those things clean. Didn't help that I couldn't keep my hand off the record when it was playing. DJ tables do that to ya.

[ojnihs]

Didn't help that I couldn't keep my hand off the record when it was playing. DJ tables do that to ya.

LOL!

I'm going to stick with my computer as source for good I think.

[Guest sacd lover]

Don't let the secret out aerius! Hell some people think ipod nano is "high end sounding" Shit man, they'd have heart failure if they ever heard real musical reproduction.... keep it quiet

Analog has basically infinite resolution compared to digital .... even at 24/192 the resolution isnt close to analog. You hear the live venue or recording studio so much more .... and the resolution of musical detail is so much better. If analog wasnt such an expense, had more of the music I listen to available .... and was more setup friendly .... I would go analog. But alas, that is not the case. I know I dont miss cartridge alignment, cleaning records, tracking force adjustments etc.. etc... But digital sound just doesnt get you there like analog. Maybe someday digital will reach the point where it can compete with analog.

Digital is worlds better than in the 1990's. But when you hear a good analog rig you know that digital still has a long way to go.

[aerius]

Analog has basically infinite resolution compared to digital .... even at 24/192 the resolution isnt close to analog. You hear the live venue or recording studio so much more .... and the resolution of musical detail is so much better.

We actually had a chance to do some CD, DVD-A, SACD, and vinyl comparisons using the same album in the different formats. DVD-A and SACD are a fair bit better than CD, but still have a ways to go to match vinyl, I wasn't familiar with the music but I didn't need to be, the differences weren't subtle. I thought the new high-res digital formats would be effectively the same as vinyl, boy was I wrong, again. And this was with the Audio Aero Prestige SACD/CD player, definitely one of the better players out there, and worth more than the vinyl rigs.

Digital is worlds better than in the 1990's. But when you hear a good analog rig you know that digital still has a long way to go.

Yeah, then again the same could be said of many things in audio. The Quad ESL57 is almost 50 years old now and very few modern speakers can match it in midrange detail & clarity, the midrange is incredibly clean. The Lowthers are like 70 years old and there's still something really direct and special in their midrange. Some things are just surprisingly ahead of their time and the LP is one of them.

[Yikes]

Vinyl can sound great, but?

My office is in the same building as Soundmirror mastering studio. Soundmirror is where all of the Living Stereo SACDs have been mastered. On several occasions we set up comparisons. During these comparisons we were able to switch between the Original Session Tapes and the outputs from the DSD A/D then DSD D/As (Meitner) and lastly the last CD version. It was an eye opening experience. It was all but impossible to tell the difference between the session tapes and the DSD outputs. The CD output basically sucked.

I know vinyl playback. I?ve owned several very good table systems and have extensive experience with several statement systems. I?ve actually heard some of the original Living Stereo LPs on these reference systems. The records sound great, but they sound different than the session tapes. The truth is that the DSD (SACDs) sounds much closer to the original session tapes than any of the exceptional vinyl rigs that I?ve heard.

I?m not saying that DSD sounds better, just that it is more accurate. I chalk it up to the fact that vinyl rigs are prone to euphonic colorations.

[tkam]

I'll never get in to Vinyl, no matter how good it sounds. It takes up a ton of space and requires much more maintenance time than I'd ever be willing to put into it.

[thrice]

Well, I just dove in with a new Rega P1..I know the very low end of vinyl, but I'm very happy with it. For $350 it's a pulg and play setup (cartridge already installed and super easy setup) it was worth it. I have just enough records for this small expense to brighten up a smaller corner of my music collection. Another $300 for a phono stage and I'll have a respectable vinyl rig (IMHO). I don't have enough to warrant a VPI or anything like that, but the bug bit and I'm scratching.

[TheSloth]

Analog has basically infinite resolution compared to digital .... even at 24/192 the resolution isnt close to analog.

If you will accept that sonically I agree with you completely, that statement isn't technically true. An analogy that is somewhat usable (but flawed - let's not nit pick!) is the idea the the resolution of a light microscope is (nearly) infinite, as it is an 'analogue' device. It isn't even close - its resolution is determined by the width of one wave of light in the visible spectrum.

The maximum resolution of a phono cartrige is defined (technically - again, I agree with you on the sonics but I'm arguing that the difference doesn't lie in what you said) by a combination of frequency response range (i.e. what would be the bit rate in digital and is very limited in even the best cartridges and best pressed LP's compared with 192khz digital sampling) and dynamic range (again, way smaller than 24bit dynamic range, between it's high noise floor (relatively) and point at which it loses tracking). Phono cartridges also have much smaller channel separation, and the recordings are often panned way over to the left and right because they are assuming crosstalk is somwhere around -40dB instead of -90dB on a bad day with a redbook CD. There's no point even geting into distortion figures, as they are worlds apart.

I'd still argue that the difference lies elsewhere, and has something to do with the production, encoding and decoding process. There is no reason why 24/192 shouldn't sound better than a LP, except for the fact that I'm not sure we have the technology to encode and decode without losing something that we can't quite measure effectively. Also, a lot more is done with CD's to mess around with the sound, using various methods of compression and other junk to make it sound better on shitty equipment - that wasn't done to the same degree with LP's. On top of that, I think the recording ethos has change, and there is less emphasis on absolute quality in digital, but rather something that works on a range of systems and will come out sounding pretty much the same on all of them.

The fact that, even now that red book has been surpassed, DAC's for playing back that 'limited' format get better every year leads me to believe that the differences will even out over time, and that will not require a change in format but rather a change in production, encoding and decoding technology. Remember that the very best LP's had 30-40 years or more of experience with the technology on the part of the recording engineer and production department.

As a final point, if LP's are great because they are analogue, then why aren't cassettes just as good? They are analogue, but of course their resolution is way lower than an LP, which is already technically way lower than high bit rate digital.

[Post]

i only have two complaints about my vinyl rig.

1) it sits on top of my melos, making tubrolling the melos a PITA.

2) my TT doesn't autoreturn the arm, meaning i have to catch the damn thing before it scrapes the label, so i never get to kick back and enjoy - "uh, is this the last tune on this side? how quick can i move to lift the needle before the inevitable?"

[HiWire]

I respect the vinylist's love of their unique analog sound, but there are too many technical and practical reasons against it, in my opinion.

[The Expanding Man]

For detail and musicality, vinyl is still the superior medium in my view (even superior to hi-rez digital). I have some experience with guitars and good tube amplifiers, and I find that only vinyl captures the true timbre of amplified guitars. From this, I conjecture that it must be the same for other instruments.

Vinyl set up is not that difficult. Once you have set up your turntable and cartridge alignment, I find it to be stable for 12 months.

Although CD was initially marketed as a superior medium, it isn't. In my view, this was all a bit of a con to get music lovers to re-buy their entire collections on CD, and at higher price than vinyl. I have no sympathy for the record companies' decline in sales in recent years as a result of music piracy that the digital medium has easily encouraged.

Having said all that, vinyl's biggest drawback is it's clumsiness and lack of portability.

In the end, vinyl is a lifestyle decision.

[ph0rk]

I have no sympathy for the record companies' decline in sales in recent years as a result of music piracy that the digital medium has easily encouraged.

It isn't the medium that caused the rampant piracy (though it did help). It was the draconian price scheme coupled with technology advances. I've seen plenty of encodes of vinyl.

[postjack]

In general, I also find vinyl playback superior.

post count +1

[mjb]

The need to keep the damn things clean is a big reason I'm not getting a vinyl rig. However if I strike it rich and have one of those automated record cleaning machines then that'll change. Of course if I were really rich I'd get someone to clean my records for me in exchange for listening time on my system.

or you could take Rega's position that you shouldn't clean your vinyl (unless it's really grimy) and just play and listen...

much of the click/pop artifacts vinyl is famous for come from poorly configured systems (tracking, weight, etc)...

vinyl makes the sound so much more organic...you can hear/feel the humanity in the sound.

vinyl is a hand written letter, digital is the typed equivalent...same words, same linguistic info being conveyed in both, but the type is missing so much more subtle information outside of the simplistic "what information is being conveyed by these words" question.

mjb

[grawk]

vinyl is for tweakers, technophobes, luddites, and the musical equivalent of civil war reenactors.

[Jon L]

While I would agree you'd have a better time listening to vinyl for most "popular" albums put out in the last few decades, let's not forget there are plenty of bad-sounding vinyl albums out there. It's not redbook's fault that the deaf-ass, incompetent studio engineers go crazy with ridiculous EQ and dynamic compression when making a CD.

When done right, I will take 24/96, 24/192 PCM all over vinyl any time, any day. Maybe even redbook on its good day.

[The Expanding Man]

oranges are spherical. from this, i conjecture that it must be the same for other fruit.

Yes, I knew there were faults in the logic, but my point was that I don't intimately know the timbre of any other instrument.

The one instrument I do know the timbre of, vinyl reproduces most accurately.

In fact, one of redbook's biggest drawbacks is that resolution decreases dramatically at high frequency. By design, redbook can produce no higher than 22 khz, and at that frequency, no more than a square wave.

Redbook misses out on high frequencies that, although inaudible, influence the harmonics of the audible range of an instrument.

I listen, and enjoy CDs for their convenience. Vinyl, though, is superior.

Call me Grandpa.

Keep listening to your MP3's through a soundcard.

It keeps the price of second hand vinyl low.

[Voltron]

vinyl is for tweakers, technophobes, luddites, and the musical equivalent of civil war reenactors.

I'm going to charge up Bunker Hill by listening to some beautiful vinyl right now. mjb inspired me with his mellifluous prose.

[Dusty Chalk]

vinyl is for tweakers, technophobes, luddites, and the musical equivalent of civil war reenactors.

Overgeneralize much? Vinyl is for people who prefer records.

[humanflyz]

Keep listening to your MP3's through a soundcard.

You are talking to the wrong crowd here...

[iceman94]

I'd love to try vinyl, but too too many critical albums for me are CD only, so it's a no-go. I'll stick to my music, kthxbai.

[offtopic rant]I sometimes see a similar mindset with overall system quality- people are like, wow, my system's so revealing that it only sounds good with excellent recordings. Well, what if some of your favorite music isn't well-mastered? Skip the "has-to-be-audiophile-recording" crap and aim to make everything sound at least somewhat enjoyable.[/offtopic rant]