Would not mind getting your set up and the list of all the equipment you are using to turn those albums to good sounding cds.
Would not mind getting your set up and the list of all the equipment you are using to turn those albums to good sounding cds.
I’ve got my turntable setup in my garage, I’ll throw on some wax when I’m working on one of my MGB’s, some Led Zep, Doors or CCR. I’ve been collecting vinyl for a decade or so now, lots of bands still put it out. I’ll wait for new release dates and try and score the limited color first pressings. Cut my musical teeth on my dad’s LZ and Clapton records in the early 90’s, still prefer vinyl to CD’s.
Nope. I have 18 gigs of music on my iPhone. Vinyl can’t compete with that...
Most definately. I sell LP's online and business is pretty good. Check ebay for deals - also gemm.com, therecordranch.com and musicstack.com. Lots of deals to be had if you don't mind hunting a little. There's also a good forum at the recordcollectorsguild.com - lot's to learn there.
Welcome back to the land of vinyl.. Rock on!!
Vinyl Rules!
The only thing that comes close are SACD and hi-resolution downloads, but the selection is relatively small. Lots of vinyl out there.
I became aware of the superiority of vinyl about 10 years ago. Great equipment is expensive, but retains value pretty well. There are bargains out there in old LP’s, and soon you will learn which recordings and performances are great, along with which labels tend to be better than others. There are now also some audiophile 45rpm records (33-1/3 size) that sound even better than the standard 33-1/3 lp’s too.
There are new vinyl records being produced. Some are made from the old tapes, others are new. One of my favorites is the direct to disk, but there are not many of those. A Bing search should turn up many vinyl sources, and there are also stores in many cities now that carry both new and quality used LP’s.
I have enough LPs bought when I was younger—Classical and New Age—to build a house. Now it is CD’s and cassete tapes out the wazoo. My opinion now? Vinyl beats them all on a very good sound system. Always the sound is richer and deeper on vinyl.
I have actually been buying vinyl of my favorite albums from the past to frame and hang up in my office. Recently, I have been looking at turntables so I can actually listen to them like in the past as well.
A lot of artists now also have a special order vinyl editions of new music they have out. I think the interest in vinyl has always been there but it may be growing.
Thanks for starting this thread. I will be watching it as I am in the market for a turntable.
I’m old school but couldn’t afford Bang-Olaffsen. Do have a decent Pioneer TT, and a lot of old wax. We do CD’s and everyone but me has Ipods.
If it’s worth listening to it’s worth running a discwasher over before dropping the tonearm.
With regard to vinyl vs. CD - it all depends on how the music was produced. The CD, being 100% digital, allows you to encode anything - any sound that fits the dynamic range. The vinyl, being limited to the physical track, allows you to encode some sounds, but not the other. During production these limits were known and taken care of.
So if someone is intent on producing a super-wideband CD (with 41 kSa/s you can encode up to 20.5 kHz) he can do it. If someone wants to record the same 20+ kHz onto the vinyl, that might be not that easy.
The dynamic range of the CD is also larger. If you have 16-bit samples (which are the standard today) this yields 96 dB. This is a huge range. The dynamic range of vinyl is about 80 dB.
So all things considered, IMO you should take all the vinyl that you have and encode it (without lossy compression!) into the digital format. Then you can make backups, listen to the music wherever and whenever you want, and the original media will not be worn or scratched.
With regard to your friend's opinion, the transients are defined by the frequency response of the channel, and the frequency range of the CD is limited only by the filter after the DAC. You can build as good a filter as you want, just throw OAs at the problem. Expensive audio cards (FireWire or USB) already have those filters done right. The card in your PC most likely has abysmal performance, since they can't afford too many components.
With regard to "more complete harmonics" I don't know what it means. A harmonic is really an unwanted artifact produced by nonlinearity of something in the channel. Harmonics do not exist at the source, they are added by the machine that recorded the music and played it back. In reality both the instrument and the ear are highly nonlinear, and there are lots of harmonics produced naturally, but here we want to evaluate an ideal channel.
All in all, a modern digital recording and playback system is far better, technically, than the vinyl. The main difference is in what is recorded.
As for equipment I've got a Yamaha CR-640 receiver and a Pioneer PL-600 turntable. Both from about 1980. I bought them both about a year ago because I got on a vintage kick for some reason. The Yamaha I bought because I like its brushed aluminum and green incandescent lights:
The B&O tables are super sleek but apparently it's getting tough to find styluses for them. I think only one company still makes them, called Goldring.
My pop had a Fisher setup from 1960 with a tuning eye. Even the static between radio channels sounded sonorous.
Interesting thread. I was just last night considering going back to a turntable and vinyl . So this discussion is helpful.
I was proud of my stereo system in the late ‘70’s. It wasn’t top of the line, but sound was pretty decent. Album covers were fun to read too, better than the microscopic print of CD’s.
PFLater
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