Unable to comprehend this mentality whatsoever- what is your goal?

[Zygmo]

I like good vinyl over CDs. The roundness of the sound and lack of digital "bite."

I do not have anywhere near a high-end system. But with a good source and quiet power supplies in the phono and main pre-amp, you can get pretty quiet sound. Speaker and mic placement, room acoustics, and recording levels play as much a role in reproduction and recording as the source. AND a bad source (vinyl or CD) is going to sound not great, no matter how high-end your system is.

Anyhow, it's all for fun in the end. Here's a tune I uploaded to YouTube. 1970s Alnico era JBL L300s. Powered 136A subs. Anthem amps. MP4 format. AKG mics. Flat EQ.

Blue Bayou.
Off Linda Ronstadt's "Simple Dreams." Nautilus Recordings. NR26. 1/2-speed remaster SuperDiscs. 1981.
Run-out: NR 26 A1 IAM RD 1/2 KM - 6432 - A1

Sounds great. My favorite song by her. I have several SuperDiscs from that period, but I don't remember if I have that one or not. I keep a picture disc (the one where she is tying her roller skates) on my turntable when not in use. Very colorful, nice record. I don't play picture discs...they don't sound too good. I just collected them for years.
Bummer about her life now.

 

[Zygmo]

I haven't really messed with room acoustics and have some kinds of built-in issues anyway which would make it difficult to do much in the way of improvements... so that part of it isn't really a factor for me, though I have no doubt that if you have the luxury to move speakers around, use acoustical treatments, etc you can improve things a lot. A really well recorded, well mastered recording though is one constant, and one that arguably makes the biggest difference. A really nicely done recording even sounds very good to me on my desktop system, with my cheap little SMSL amp/DAC and little NHT SuperOne speakers.

Yeah, my vinyl playback gear isn't waht I'd call"very high end" either, but it's best far the best that I've had thus far. I'm often surprised by just quiet really clean vinyl copes of things I have can sound. My TT is belt drive, with very well designed isolation features and is clearly quieter than my of direct drive TT. Add that to the Denon cart that I have which has a elliptical stylus on it which apparently gets deeper into the groove of the record, they by avoiding a bit of the surface dirt which all makes vinyl, at least really pristine ones, sound very clean indeed. Still not as clean as CDs though. With my previous DACs I felt I could hear just a bit of what folks call "digital glare" with certain elements far into the treble region sounding just a bit blurred, but there's none of that issue at all with what I'm using now.

I dig Fleetwood Mac and Fink Floyd too, though I've been digging the earlier stuff by both of these bands. I never really cared too much for the Rumors era FM stuff, but I've been digging some of the pre-Stevie Nicks/ Lindsay Buckingham albums and though I like all of PF, before the Wall (I never got into that one), I've more recently been digging the pre-DSOTM stuff, which for most fans are probably the most skipable albums, but somehow really speaks to me.

I like pretty much everything by Fleetwood Mac, and Pink Floyd. Some Metallica, AC DC, Lady Gaga, The Piano Guys, Amy Winehouse (before she drugged out) etc. and actually quite a bit of new music. You just have to search awhile.

 

[2FarGone]

FWIW, I consider vinyl to be my best sounding source, variable of course within the medium. I rarely play records, though. Generally, the unmatched convenience of digital wins out.

It seems that the tonearm/cartridge combination has a profound effect on noise in my system, although I should probably include the loading in the phono stage. And cabling. Yes, there’s an occasional pop, but most of the time (with clean records, of course) there’s surprisingly little noise.

 

[Zygmo]

I like pretty much everything by Fleetwood Mac, and Pink Floyd. Some Metallica, AC DC, Lady Gaga, The Piano Guys, Amy Winehouse (before she drugged out) etc. and actually quite a bit of new music. You just have to search awhile.

I haven't really messed with room acoustics and have some kinds of built-in issues anyway which would make it difficult to do much in the way of improvements... so that part of it isn't really a factor for me, though I have no doubt that if you have the luxury to move speakers around, use acoustical treatments, etc you can improve things a lot. A really well recorded, well mastered recording though is one constant, and one that arguably makes the biggest difference. A really nicely done recording even sounds very good to me on my desktop system, with my cheap little SMSL amp/DAC and little NHT SuperOne speakers.

Yeah, my vinyl playback gear isn't what I'd call"very high end" either, but it's best far the best that I've had thus far. I'm often surprised by just quiet really clean vinyl copies of things I have can sound. My TT is belt drive, with very well designed isolation features and is clearly quieter than my old direct drive TT. And the Denon cart that I have has an elliptical stylus on it which apparently gets deeper into the groove of the record, thereby avoiding a lot of the surface dirt, which all makes vinyl, at least really pristine ones, sound very clean indeed. Still not as clean as CDs though. With my previous DACs I felt I could hear just a bit of what folks call "digital glare" with certain elements far into the treble region sounding just a bit blurred, but there's none of that issue at all with what I'm using now.

I dig Fleetwood Mac and Fink Floyd too, though I've been digging the earlier stuff by both of these bands. I never really cared too much for the Rumors era FM stuff, but I've been digging some of the pre-Stevie Nicks/ Lindsay Buckingham albums and though I like all of PF, before the Wall (I never got into that one), I've more recently been digging the pre-DSOTM stuff, which for most fans are probably the most skipable albums, but somehow really speaks to me.

Room acoustics!??? I would be laughed out of the neighborhood if I said I took room acoustics into account with MY system now!! My goal here was to just get something going! Stuck two 15in woofers in the ceiling, hung two small bookshelf speakers on the wall under them and a stack of components against the wall. Now I am (sortof) good to go.

 

[Adda]

For me, audio has always been centered around computers, I have always had my PC hooked up to my hifi.
I have owned a CD player before, a Sanyo DAD 8, but convinience of PC's is hard to beat and the DAD 8 was going out of alignment, fun part to use though, very fancy.
I started out with a SoundBlaster 16, a Sanyo rack system and GAMMA 50 speakers, all the way back in the 90's
The GAMMA's never left me, they only got modified in to a 2 way system rather then 3 way + more mods.
A SB16 isn't great, I can certainly say that moving away from internal sound cards to outboard dedicated DAC's is a great thing.
I have had a SoundBlaster 128, SB Live!, SB Audigy2 Value, nVidia SoundStorm APU (an onboard audio device that was ok for gaming), AudioTrak Prodigy 7.1 HiFi (now we are talking but sadly is has no lasting appeal), AudioTrak Prodigy Cube (a USB powered DAC was ok), an Echo AudioFire 2 (sweet interface, comes with it's own PSU, I wish it was supported on modern systems), and lastly a M2Tech HiFace Two (fresh sound nothing to complain about).
I do like hooking my W510 up as my main PC and use the AudioFire as my transport, it just sounds so dark I love it.
As for dedicated DAC's I have has a Little Dot DAC_I and an Atoll DAC 100, both used with an external transport hooked up via spdif.
I like having a proper soundcard hooked up between my DAC and PC, the M2Tech is not much of a soundcard though, but the Echo is sweet in that regard.
I do have an Aqvox low noise psu to power the HiFace Two, and I highly rcommend something like that for your USB powered audio devices.
It's not hard to guess that I have never owned a turn table, it has always been digital to me and I have never complained about that.

 

[Mr Boochie]

Sounds great. My favorite song by her. I have several SuperDiscs from that period, but I don't remember if I have that one or not. I keep a picture disc (the one where she is tying her roller skates) on my turntable when not in use. Very colorful, nice record. I don't play picture discs...they don't sound too good. I just collected them for years.
Bummer about her life now.

Thank you!

Yeah. It's a real drag that she can no longer sing.

Another one of my "Linda's favorites!"

Love Has No Pride.
Linda Ronstadt - "Don't Cry Now." Asylum Records. P-8399Y. Warner-Pioneer (Japan) pressing. 1973.
Run-out: P-8399Y1 6-Y (upside-down) (1) (2) ✲ 〄

Best inner liner, ever!

 

[Andyman]

Man, I loved Linda back in the day; still do. I have all those records and play them regularily. Blue Bayou was a staple on our turntable back in the late 70s.

 

[doctor fuse]

I do have to admit I have never heard vinyl on a very high end system. All my stuff is mostly mid level 1970s-90s. But I can't imagine any system removing the noise floor of vinyl records, or tape hiss without going through a digital cleanup, which sort of defeats the purpose of analogue media. One guy in here told me his records have NO noise. Period. Well....I don't think that is possible. Not without digital cleaning and transferring to a digital player. But that is just my opinion.
I also like playing records once in awhile. I understand the vinyl heads. The turntables can be neat, and the process is enjoyable. But as I mentioned in an earlier post to KarinS....I always end up picking out the noise (however faint), and giving up. I play mostly rock music...Metallica, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, etc...( LOL. Some people here would call THAT noise!), and often at high levels.

I adore vinyl, and my system plays very quiet, but the inherent noises bug me. I am envious of folks like you who can enjoy digital more than vinyl, I often wish I could, dunno why I don’t (it always sounds amazing). I just always note that I seem to lose interest in listening after a short while, <one hour. It’s mostly bias, I am sure, but sometimes I think there is something perceptible in digital that makes it fatiguing to listen to.
Granted, my digital is not anything expensive, but it seems like it should be adequate: Denon DVD player into a PS Audio DLIII DAC.

 

[Zygmo]

I adore vinyl, and my system plays very quiet, but the inherent noises bug me. I am envious of folks like you who can enjoy digital more than vinyl, I often wish I could, dunno why I don’t (it always sounds amazing). I just always note that I seem to lose interest in listening after a short while, <one hour. It’s mostly bias, I am sure, but sometimes I think there is something perceptible in digital that makes it fatiguing to listen to.
Granted, my digital is not anything expensive, but it seems like it should be adequate: Denon DVD player into a PS Audio DLIII DAC.

You mentioned you lose interest in about an hour. Try a little experiment. Play a CD of some of your favorite music for about 30 minutes. Then stop for a couple. Go feed the cat, get a drink. Then come back and start the CD where you left off. Then see if you feel like doing another short break and coming back.
Think about it. Non stop virtually anything can get tiring. (notice I said virtually!) You seldom have non stop music for much over 30 minutes, with vinyl and tape. All of us were conditioned to having breaks often with vinyl. Flipping the record or getting another one, dealing with the sleeves and cleaning each time or flipping/changing reels. If it is a new record, looking at and reading the covers.
I do have a great JVC KD-85 that I use once in awhile....half hour, or at most 45 minutes playing time.

I took to CDs like a fish to water, but as I have said I've always been extra sensitive to noise in music. I seldom sit still for more than an hour anyway...not good for us.

 

[Zygmo]

For me, audio has always been centered around computers, I have always had my PC hooked up to my hifi.
I have owned a CD player before, a Sanyo DAD 8, but convinience of PC's is hard to beat and the DAD 8 was going out of alignment, fun part to use though, very fancy.
I started out with a SoundBlaster 16, a Sanyo rack system and GAMMA 50 speakers, all the way back in the 90's
The GAMMA's never left me, they only got modified in to a 2 way system rather then 3 way + more mods.
A SB16 isn't great, I can certainly say that moving away from internal sound cards to outboard dedicated DAC's is a great thing.
I have had a SoundBlaster 128, SB Live!, SB Audigy2 Value, nVidia SoundStorm APU (an onboard audio device that was ok for gaming), AudioTrak Prodigy 7.1 HiFi (now we are talking but sadly is has no lasting appeal), AudioTrak Prodigy Cube (a USB powered DAC was ok), an Echo AudioFire 2 (sweet interface, comes with it's own PSU, I wish it was supported on modern systems), and lastly a M2Tech HiFace Two (fresh sound nothing to complain about).
I do like hooking my W510 up as my main PC and use the AudioFire as my transport, it just sounds so dark I love it.
As for dedicated DAC's I have has a Little Dot DAC_I and an Atoll DAC 100, both used with an external transport hooked up via spdif.
I like having a proper soundcard hooked up between my DAC and PC, the M2Tech is not much of a soundcard though, but the Echo is sweet in that regard.
I do have an Aqvox low noise psu to power the HiFace Two, and I highly rcommend something like that for your USB powered audio devices.
It's not hard to guess that I have never owned a turn table, it has always been digital to me and I have never complained about that.

I also am centered on the computer, with music. I furnished the music for a restaurant for a few years. The owner had an extensive collection of records that he wanted converted to digital so it could play non-stop for the hours his business was open. So I ran every record through Diamond Cut Productions (similar to Audacity) to clean up the noise as well as possible. (I could have just downloaded them from the net, but I would still have had to listen to each one in real time. Never know what somebody could slip into a song! They could have slipped in "Why Don't we Get Drunk And Screw". THAT would have gone over great with his crowd of mostly retirees!)
I did enjoy taking some of my favorite vinyl songs to see how well I could get the noise off. With practice they could sound nearly perfect. However, I have no idea what actual quality comes off a computer. I have never done an A/B comparison between a vinyl record on a tt and the same cleaned song off the computer. I have no idea how well a computer CD/DVD compares to a home player either. (probably not very well!) LOL

 

[Volvo242GT]

A guy I know has a nice system and he thinks it sounds wonderful however he still messes with it. If you are happy with what you have, why introduce a change and spend more money, more time if there is no goal in mind. I mean - just be content! Can't we just be satisfied? I am not even sure he knows what he is chasing.

On the other hand if I come to your house and your highs, or mid-range, or bass is just superb then I could very well have a new target to try to achieve. I wonder how many don't really have a "specific" audio sound or element of the sound they are chasing vs just randomly making changes hoping for some improvement but nothing specific?

Sometimes, people like experimenting with things. When I was a kid, I'd move furniture around in my bedroom weekly. Just wanted to see what worked best for me. I eventually grew out of that phase. Audio-wise, I'm pretty satisfied with my personal system. Do need to get the cassette deck fixed, and need to do some more work on the CD player, since the power switch is still rather iffy about whether or not it wants to remain in the on position. Turntable does need some work, but that's to be expected for a 57 year old piece of gear.

 

[Lux Man]

Sometimes, people like experimenting with things. When I was a kid, I'd move furniture around in my bedroom weekly. Just wanted to see what worked best for me. I eventually grew out of that phase. Audio-wise, I'm pretty satisfied with my personal system. Do need to get the cassette deck fixed, and need to do some more work on the CD player, since the power switch is still rather iffy about whether or not it wants to remain in the on position. Turntable does need some work, but that's to be expected for a 57 year old piece of gear.

That’s pretty funny. I was into experimenting too as a little kid but moving furniture around, wasn’t one of them! My experimenting was more like I’m not sure what’s in all these cans in my dad‘s workshop, but let me mix some of them together and see what I get!

I suppose one question I might ask myself is “what’s the weakest link in my system that impacts the sound the most?” Or what part of the sound would I like to change and change it how? I would be all in favor of improving the sound of my system by a decently noticeable amount, but I seriously don’t know what that would be in my case.

And I’m not saying I don’t think my system can be improved but the reality is, I don’t want to spend the 15 or $20,000 to achieve that. In my case, I think I’d have to replace my Jbl 4435s with something else. I am going to augment them with a 18 inch 2245. While the 4435 have a wonderful bass my belief is that I will be able to enjoy the wonderful bass more and be able to turn the volume down once the 2245 is implemented.

 

[KarinS]

I do have to admit I have never heard vinyl on a very high end system. All my stuff is mostly mid level 1970s-90s. But I can't imagine any system removing the noise floor of vinyl records, or tape hiss without going through a digital cleanup, which sort of defeats the purpose of analogue media. One guy in here told me his records have NO noise. Period. Well....I don't think that is possible. Not without digital cleaning and transferring to a digital player. But that is just my opinion.
I also like playing records once in awhile. I understand the vinyl heads. The turntables can be neat, and the process is enjoyable. But as I mentioned in an earlier post to KarinS....I always end up picking out the noise (however faint), and giving up. I play mostly rock music...Metallica, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, etc...( LOL. Some people here would call THAT noise!), and often at high levels.

I'm with you on the rock (Metallica, Stones, etc., etc.), Zygmo, but I have a bigger thing going with blues and good soul. Remember, the blues had a baby and named it rock and roll! Ain't that the truth?

As for vinyl vs. CD's, I was raised on vinyl, from my parents' 78 rpms to my 45's and 33's. I was born in 1956, so I enjoyed vinyl for over 25 years before the quality went down so badly that I switched to CD's. My tipping point came in 1985 (just a few years after CD's hit the market), when I had to return a Baz Scaggs album 9 (nine!) times due to defects, none of which were in the same location on the record. I have never looked back. I like the sound of CD's. The music's also easier to rip and put together my own compilations, and hey, you can't play vinyl in a car.

The other thing I've read on this forum is that the quality of vinyl has gone down even more since the mid-'80s. Hardly inspirational.

 

[KarinS]

I like pretty much everything by Fleetwood Mac, and Pink Floyd. Some Metallica, AC DC, Lady Gaga, The Piano Guys, Amy Winehouse (before she drugged out) etc. and actually quite a bit of new music. You just have to search awhile.

I found a great way to search for new music. I'll take a song I like, put it in a search engine, and listen to all the covers that come up. For example, I once searched Sonny and Cher's 'Bang Bang', and came up with versions by Nancy Sinatra, 2Cellos, and an Icelandic group called Kaleo, among others. Check this out:

KALEO - BANG BANG

I found Samantha Fish this way, through 'I Put a Spell on You'.

 

[Gigantic]

I'm with you on the rock (Metallica, Stones, etc., etc.), Zygmo, but I have a bigger thing going with blues and good soul. Remember, the blues had a baby and named it rock and roll! Ain't that the truth?

As for vinyl vs. CD's, I was raised on vinyl, from my parents' 78 rpms to my 45's and 33's. I was born in 1956, so I enjoyed vinyl for over 25 years before the quality went down so badly that I switched to CD's. My tipping point came in 1985 (just a few years after CD's hit the market), when I had to return a Baz Scaggs album 9 (nine!) times due to defects, none of which were in the same location on the record. I have never looked back. I like the sound of CD's. The music's also easier to rip and put together my own compilations, and hey, you can't play vinyl in a car.

The other thing I've read on this forum is that the quality of vinyl has gone down even more since the mid-'80s. Hardly inspirational.

I have generally not found that to be the case, although there have been a couple exceptions where I've returned warped vinyls. I mostly buy new music and the majority of the 250 vinyls I've purchased over the past 3 years have been 180g platters, something that was a rarity when I worked in record stores in the mid to late 80's and early 90's.

 

[OBMG74]

This is why it might be good to have several interests. To keep you from diving too deep into any one rabbit hole.

Agree.
It is good to have several rabbit holes!

 

[Mr Boochie]

Agree.
It is good to have several rabbit holes!

That disperses the energy!

 

[Gigantic]

Agree.
It is good to have several rabbit holes!

Guitars, Motorcycles, Bicycles, Audio and Cooking. So. Much. Gear.

 

[Mr Boochie]

Guitars, Motorcycles, Bicycles, Audio and Cooking. So. Much. Gear.

Don't forget photography!

 

[OBMG74]

That disperses the energy!

And dispenses the $$$$