Opinion- Vinyl and CD

Viva la difference!!

I kinda feel like the Rabbi in "Fiddler on the Roof" in the debate scene: "You have a very good point...Yes, your point is excellent also...Yes, this also is true!" It's not that I'm waffling: Although I sometimes like to split hairs and could really get into this stuff from an audiophile perspective, at the end of the day I will also end up just plopping in a CD - whether better, worse or indifferent.

Say you're tired and frazzled from work and just want to relax. You grab your favorite mellow jazz record, pull it out of the jacket, slide it out of the sleave (Careful now - just by the edges!), balance it precariously on one hand while you open the dust cover because you forgot to open it first, place it over the spindle, take your brush out of its box, apply your favorite solution, dust for a couple rotations, inspect, dust again, lift the tone arm, give it a couple swipes of stylus cleaner, hunch over and inspect the needle with one squinting eyeball open, power the thing up and hit play. Now you squat down and watch from the side for a couple of rotations to see whether the disk has warped much (despite your best efforts) since the last time you played it.

This is actually all part of the fun of vinyl, as I've mentioned earlier. But when you finally sit down after all that you realize that somehow, you're just not in much of a mood to relax anymore. So you pause everything, grab the leash and let your dog take you for a walk for a while. You may or may not get back to the record later...

CDs and vinyl are both wonderful inventions, and each has a valid niche. Heck, they both reproduce MUSIC - how cool is that!!
 
One other thing, I have quite a few CD's that are 20+ years old and still sound, to me at least, the same as when I bought them. So I'm not sure if there is an age issue with CD's.
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Even if they do start failing, you can't hear any change in the sound until they get bad enough to screw up the numbers past the point where error correction can repair the data. Then things could go downhill fast. So you won't get any subtle warnings by way of "slightly more background noise", or " weaker highs". Digital is fun like that: absolutely no change in data, then BLAM when it goes bad just past a particular amount.

Same hear on the old CDs, no sign of trouble with mine either. I'm still going to make backups.


This reminds me of the Chevy vs. Ford debates, because we all know Ford is better
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I wish my ford Mustang hadn't died at 100,000 miles. It's up on blocks now, while I drive a Plymouth Voyager that's still cruising along (with a bit of extra smoke from it) at about 140,000. I can't stand the Chevy my wife drives, everything in it feels awkward & wrong, like it was built backwards just for the sake of doing it "different". Sort of like Apple computers.


Maybe they could make some CDs out of vinyl, just for the vinyl fanatics. :scratch2:
 
rylos said:
...everything in it feels awkward & wrong, like it was built backwards just for the sake of doing it "different". Sort of like Apple computers.
:scratch2:
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Actually, unlike Chevy, Apple was first! IBM and MacroSquish have always been awkward and wrong. We are just more used to them.
 
Having grown up with vinyl and reel-to-reel tape, I have quite firmly entrenched opinions on his subject. I have a collection of 700+ vinyl records. There are some that sound so good, with undistorted highs and powerful low frequencies, that you'd swear no recording medium could sound better!! Of the 700 records, though, there are only a handful that sound "fantastic." The Westminster Lab series of classical recordings, London Phase 4 recordings, Audio Fidelity label recordings are some that really are good. The Beatles White album on vinyl is very good, as are the early Neil Diamond vinyl records.

In the real world, however, when you attempt to play vinyl records at volume levels we are accustomed to today, the problems with vinyl become very evident. I don't care if you spent a year's pay on the turntable, there is rumble from the turntable (if your speakers reproduce 20 Hz or lower), hiss from the analog master tapes, ticks and pops from dust on the record surface, susceptability to skipping, acoustic feedback, etc, etc, etc.

In my collection of 600+ CD's, there are a few that do NOT sound "fantastic." Some of the early CD's that were merely remakes of vinly albums are pretty bad--the vinyl sounds better. There are many good ones, however, that knock the socks off any vinyl I've heard. Telarc is one label that nearly always got it right with sound quality.

One point is very rarely talked about in reference to newly recorded vinyl discs. Nearly all of them have had the signal from the recording microphone converted to digital before the master disc was cut. How does a person who hates digital sound reconcile this in their mind when listening to one of these wonderful recordings?? This reminds me of the vacuum tube CD players that some people actually bought and claimed the vacuum tubes restored the analog sound to CD's.

Now that most of you have seen HDTV, do any of you vinyl fans prefer an analog TV picture to HDTV? The frequencies present in a TV signal, analog or digital, are thousands of times higher than any audio signal, yet you choose to believe that audio cannot be accurately handled digitally??

I enjoy all formats, vinyl, CD, DVD, Laserdisc, DVHS, and over the air HDTV. I play a vinyl record every few months, which always reminds me how technology has advanced. I hope you vinyl fans enjoy the format, but try to be a little open-minded and admit how hopelessly obsolete it really is.
 
Lake Wobegon weighs in...

I just saw Garrison Keillor's show last night at the Botanical Gardens here in Denver. They did a Grateful Dead cover from American Beauty, and he mentioned that he still had the recording at home - "on VINYL - LP!" And the crowd cheared! Yeah, I know, it's one nostalgia trip artist sucking up to his groupies (although he is an absolute genious at it), but it shows that there is some popular affinity to all this "hopeless obsolescence", for a number of reasons already mentioned. '67 vettes are hopelessy obsolete too. Especially when compared to a current BMW M-Roadster. But I bet they'll be around for quite a while.
 
Derek,

DVHS is great! It was the only HD recording method until the HD hard drive TIVO's arrived. I just wish there was a Direct TV HD receiver with Firewire so I could record satellite HD. Kind of a moot point now, with the HD Tivo's at less than $500. Can you burn DVD's from HD Tivo's?
 
DVHS is great! It was the only HD recording method until the HD hard drive TIVO's arrived. I just wish there was a Direct TV HD receiver with Firewire so I could record satellite HD. Kind of a moot point now, with the HD Tivo's at less than $500. Can you burn DVD's from HD Tivo's?
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That is the same reason I bought one. The HD picture is probably better on DVHS than it is on Directv due to the higher bandwidth. I also wish that HDTivo supported firewire. Supposedly, the cable companies are supposed to be required to carry firewire on HD boxes in July sometime (I am not holding my breath). Right now, I record HD to the Tivo or if it is an OTA channel, I can record it on my HDPC and stream it to my IO data Linkplayer in HD. A typical HD file is huge (18GB+), though.

I never tried to save to DVD because I do not want to lose the HD capability. I suppose it would be pretty easy to run the rca/svideo outs to my computer for recording to my hard drive (in standard def), but I still have not gotten around to it. I had my old SD Tivo configured to do that and it worked without any problems. I would guess the same process could be used for a DVD recorder that you have in your HT.

Sorry to interrupt the post...I will start a new thread if I decide to go off on a tangent again.

BTW I still like vinyl.. I actually just added a TT to my components early this year. I prefer Hybrid SACDs for the ease of converting to wav files, but I still like to sit down and spin a record once or twice a week. :smoke:
 
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Is there any Sinatra on SACD or DVD-A? I'm not sure I would pick it up, just curious.

That's your answer, though, guys. Once you get into SACD/DVD-A, digital can keep up with vinyl. For several years I would do this little test for people on my Acoustat electrostatics - I'd play Donny Hathaway live from CD, then from HDCD (noticably better) and then from my vinyl that has been played many, many times. The vinyl was significantly better than the HDCD. Now that we have SACD and DVD-A I've done this test with other recordings (no DH in that format, yet) and it's not so clear any more.

Well done 24bit 192K digital recordings are pretty damn good. Redbook is dead (well, it will die). The industry likes the new formats because they can copy protect. We are going to get better digital recordings, but we are going to have to pay for them - no more stealing.
 
Is there any Sinatra on SACD or DVD-A?
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Sinatra at the Sands is out on DVDA.
The industry likes the new formats because they can copy protect. We are going to get better digital recordings, but we are going to have to pay for them - no more stealing.
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They can copy protect CD and they have done so in the past. I don't believe that people will choose to buy formats in large numbers that cannot be dropped to a computer. With home media players and portable players becoming more and more popular, it will be a necessity to have music available on computers and/or servers. They may add copy once or other protection (like Itunes), but I doubt they will ever convince people to buy albums that they cannot burn to a computer at least once. I rarely buy non-hybrid SACDs or DVDA for this reason.
 
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Vinyl Covers.

I read almost all the posts in this thread and you guys have said it all.
I am stil a big fan of Vinyl, i've got hundreds of LP's and i think there's a big difference listen vinyl with Tube Amplifier than Solid State.

Another beautiful thing about Vinyl :
The LP's covers. :thmbsp:
Some of them were pure art.There were many artists who almost start their career with Vinyl Covers.

Back To Vinyl. :yes:
clint.
 
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I guess I'm new school because I like digital better. The hiss, pops and rattles I get from vinyl bug the crap out of me and are unavoidable. Vinyl also seems flat and has less range in my opinion. They also seem to vary a lot in quality, volume and EQ. I also love the flexibility (programming), convenience (100 CD changer) and reliability. I love music and am a musician. I think I have a good year and have mixed many a song / album in my time. I started with a 8 track reel to reel system back in the day and now do it all digital. I would never go back. With the derogation, head alignment issues, tape quality issues, temperature related issues, linier layout (can’t jump from one spot to another) and all the other stuff, no thanks. I was an early adopter of the CD and never looked back. That’s just me. I also like what some might call over produced recordings like Larry Carlton. Sweet to my ears. To be fair though I have never had a super high end TT, tube audio amps and $10000+ speakers so at that point maybe things are different. One area I am old school is I love tubes. Tube guitar amps, as temperamental as they can be, have not been surpassed yet by the digital modeling stuff. The digital stuff is getting very close and I’m assuming will overtake in the next few years but right now some glowing tubes are very hard to beat.
 
The pops and clicks can be annoying and can also be avoided with a record wet vac system. It can also get one to focus on the music more and thereby greatly increasing the subjective dynamic range of the music.

I think it behooves one to hear a good turntable properly set-up on a good system with a good phono preamp stage. I'm not going to say it's better than cd because that point is moot -- if you love music IMO you need BOTH formats because there is so much stuff on vinyl that is not available on cd and vice-versa.

A lot of people say that a cheap turntable is better than the best cd players and I find that totally untrue. It requires a significant investment IMO to get what Vnyl can truly offer. I would suggest that the entry level would be an Audio NOTE TT1 with arm 1 and cart 1 at about $2k would be the entyr level good turntable along with the Linn LP12. Perhpas a Roksan Radius 5. But the Rega and the nad set-ups while plausable still seem to lack in my view that dynamic ability and sparkle.

Though perhaps if one can modify or get a wonderful cartridge you could do well -- but I'm speaking of stock gear only.
 
"I think it behooves one to hear a good turntable properly set-up on a good system with a good phono preamp stage. I'm not going to say it's better than cd because that point is moot -- if you love music IMO you need BOTH formats because there is so much stuff on vinyl that is not available on cd and vice-versa.

A lot of people say that a cheap turntable is better than the best cd players and I find that totally untrue. It requires a significant investment IMO to get what Vnyl can truly offer. I would suggest that the entry level would be an Audio NOTE TT1 with arm 1 and cart 1 at about $2k would be the entyr level good turntable along with the Linn LP12."

I agree for the most part.A decent CD player will when playing back a well recorded CD best any low quality analogue set. That said,one does not need to spend $2000 to acquire a really good vinyl playback setup.There are numerous good quality new turntable/arm/cartridge combinations that will provide high quality playback for less than half of that.In addition there are any number of quality used setups that can be had.I paid C$250 for an Ariston RD80sl ( the part by part equivalent of the original Linn LP12) equipped with a Grace 707 arm.

BTW the newest incarnation of the LP12 retails in Canada for about C$6000 ( without arm ).Naturally the newest version is a much upgraded unit with separate power supply and 30 years worth of upgrades.
 
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