[WhiskeyX]

Let the arrows fly!

[Salamander]

I prefer wax cylinders myself but no one seems to be putting those out, anymore.

;D

[rikkir]

I agree. Vinyl does sound better with the right equipment, and now that we are old enough to take care of the albums.
I can live with CD technology, because I can equalize most of the imperfections out.
The one thing I won’t compromise on is music compression. A part of the actual recording is lost in compression. You don’t really notice it on a 1” phone speaker, or ear buds.
On Klipcsh Chorus II, or 4’ tall 100lb each Infinity Floor standing speakers, you notice.
If I ever had the money to buy the equipment I really want ($100,000 approx) It would be 100% analog for music, with a separate Digital system for home theater.

[fatnotlazy]

My brother has my parents’ old stereo and their old albums, plus a batch of old 45s. Unfortunately, everything sounds scratchy. Could be the albums are worn out or the stereo is old, or both.

[Robert DeLong]

In the time frame just before the CD takeover, vinyl records were thin which caused them to warp very easily. Now the old vinyl that was thick were better. Keeping them free of dust in the grooves was the key though.

[MagnoliaB]

I have ended up with LPs from different family member’s estates plus I have the LPs that I bought from the 60’s up til they started making CDs and I switched to them. I still have a turntable and speakers (which aren’t the best). I drug them out a while back and have been listening and sorting everything by genre. I’ll admit that I enjoy my record listening time, cracks, pops and all. Plus the record covers are fun. CD cases never had the character that LP record covers had plus the inserts that came with some. I will probably start selling them once I get through them all. Have sold a few already.

[proxy_user]

PCM digital is inherently flawed. The brickwall anti-aliasing filters introduce pre-ringing and other unnatural artifacts. The conversions back and forth are riddled with rounding errors.

However, if you listen to pure DSD digital, or even better, double DSD or DSD256, you will hear music that is comparable in quality to vinyl. However, very few engineers and companies are recording in pure DSD. Commercial SACDs may be recorded in DSD, but they are converted to 24/384 PCM for editing, and then converted back. I have listened to the raw, unedited DSD masters, and they have all the qualities you would find in a great analogue recording.

[RayChuang88]

Unfortunately, because LP's are a mechanical playback format, it has a all of the downsides of such a format. You have to deal with these issues:

1. An improperly adjusted tonearm can cause mistracking, which results in unpleasant distortion.
2. Off-center records can result in unpleasant "wow" sound.
3. LP's do warp, and that can also result in an unpleasant sound.
4. You have to deal with turntable rumble unless the turntable platter is really heavy.
5. Because there is physical contact, both the record and record needle will eventually wear out.
6. You're limited to around 22 to 25 minutes playback time per side of a disc.

Pity we never decided between the Super Audio CD and DVD Audio formats. If we had settled that back in the early 2000's, we could have a digital audio format using DVD-density discs that would have blown away LP's once and for all.

[MosesKnows]

human beings hear up to about 20,000 cycles

Nonsense! Find a person who can hear a 20,000-cycle tone and can afford the electronics necessary to reproduce it. Then find another. I would guess that finding two in the same week would be difficult.

Perfection is the enemy of good enough.

[Vaquero]

First off CDs are an old format and little used now a days. I currently buy music and download it from Amazon and iTunes. I don’t have the patience, time, or money to play with vinyl (I have hundreds of LPs gathering dust as I replaced my favorites with digital). And 1s and 0s sound a lot better than snap crackle or pops. And considering my 66 year old ears...subjected for decades to high speed centrifuges, firearms, and power tools....the difference with the various formats, in perfect condition, is a wash.

[P.O.E.]

It’s like trying to build a model of an ocean waves with legos.

[jaz.357]

IM old. My Music is old. My records are old. My stereo is old. All sound great to me.

What?

[usconservative]

Count me in the crowd that believes albums sound better.

A year or so ago, I was cleaning out my crawlspace when I came across several milk crates of my old albums. My sons asked what they were, having never seen a record before. After telling them what they were, they looked at me kind of funny and asked how we played albums in the car! ROFL!!!

So I took out my old Micro Seiki turntable and told them to pick an album for me to play. God bless 'em, they chose Pink Floyd's "The Wall." Before playing it, I ran it through my record washer then put it on the turntable.

First I played "Run Like Hell" from my CD collection. Then I played "Run Like Hell" on the album.

Both agreed the album sounded better. Why? The low bass rumble on the album that's not present on the CD.

Some things you just cannot re-create digitally.

[Resettozero]

Mrs. R2z and I came across this movie on Netflix and we both have an appreciation for vinyl, as does Keira Knightley's character, seen clutching a couple of her favorite albums as the world comes to an end.

Cute movie; not for all FReepers.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

[4yearlurker]

I will say that I sell a lot of vinyl and there is a lot of music on vinyl and no other media. (Old jazz and such) I had Alice Cooper's Schools Out album radio station white label promo that people went crazy over. A guy from Japan emailed me and said "name your price."

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

A lot of the argument has to do with hearing. Younger people and those who have very fine tuned hearing, like violinists, can grasp the extended range of *analog* music, which is above and below what most people can hear, but is also “in between” what most people can hear.

This makes sense if you imagine digital music as being like a staircase, in which every step is a note, but there are no “half-steps” between notes. So there is no slightly sharp or slightly flat, and non-notes, like the squeak of fingers on strings, which are edited out. Digital means yes or no, not maybe.

As far as clicks and pops on analog, that is a mechanical problem. If someone was to create a record player that used an “analog laser” instead of a needle, this wouldn’t be a problem. Digital laser needles have been around since 1977, but that still has the digital problem.

A clear advantage of digital is that it captures a lot more data to start with. So very soft sounds become far more obvious.

[Sans-Culotte]

Most commenters in this thread seem to disagree with the conclusions of the article. I agree with the engineers that CD is better, or has the potential to sound better. I think a lot of the difference is what one wants to hear.

The engineers in the article mentioned dynamic range and compression of the dynamic. I listen mainly to classical music, and one thing I really like about CDs is the broader dynamic range. So, if a passage in a Beethoven symphony gets really quiet, the next passage when it gets really loud is more dramatic on the CD because the distance from quiet to loud is so great. On an LP, the engineers would have increased the sound of the quieter passage (which helps you hear it over the surface noise of even a pristine LP) and decreased the maximum volume so the stylus can track it.

I also listen to a lot of Sinatra, and for several years, I preferred to listen to his Capitol albums on LP or on CDs I had made from the LPs. This is not due to technology, but to other factors that made the LPs better. For one thing, when the albums were mastered to CD, the real original master tapes were not used. They sometimes used masters that were produced for later album re-issues. Also, in some cases, digital filtering was over-used to get rid of tape hiss. Tape hiss does not bother me on an album. Usually, the ambient sound in the room, such as A/C tends to diminish it. I guess some of today's engineers obsess over this because they know so many people listen on headphones or earbuds. Sadly, when they filter out the hiss, they remove important sounds from the music. Thus happens in some of my classical recordings as well, particularly the ones recorded in the late 50s or early 60s. Over-zealous engineers have ruined the sound of some of my favorite older recordings. Fortunately, Mobile Fidelity released SACDs of several of sinatra's Capitol albums that used the original master tapes, and they are mastered at a higher bitrate and dynamic range than CD.

I also agree that MP3s suck. IMO, they are only an approximation of music. I only listen to them when I am playing music on an iPod, such as when I'm on a plane, or if I'm listening to music on my computer through tinny little computer speakers. Through my real speakers they sound like crap. It's a shame that with the potential for such great sound and video that so many young people are content to list to music and watch movies on their phones.

[Vermont Lt]

I always thought vinyl sounded great. As long as you had the amp, speakers, a pristine—dust free— environment, and a great needle.

My headphones do just as well now.

[KarlInOhio]

Never pretend that vinyl has perfect sound reproduction. The bass on the master has to be reduced by a lot to keep the groove size reasonable to fit more music on the record (hey, isn't that compressing the music to fit more on the medium?) and the high frequencies have to be amplified to get them above the noise floor of the vinyl. Then this has to be undone in a pre-amp or the LP input of the integrated amp. Unless you had a real audiophile pre-amp, you probably only ever heard an approximation of the RIAA curve on your equipment.

I read one article (sorry long since lost the reference) early in the CD/LP battle where one test the reviewers did was with a CD run through an LP master RIAA filter and then undid it with a typical amp's inverse filter. The LP lovers loved it because it gave some boosts right in the ranges they were used to. But don't pretend that just tossing in ±20 dB changes in the recording result in perfect audio - it can't.

I grew up with cassettes (didn't have my own record player and didn't dare use the living room one when my parents were home), so the cassette to CD step was an easy one other than early portability.

[right way right]

Breaks my heart that I once decided to use all my vinyl for long range target practice.

What a freakin hillbilly I am.

[urtax$@work]

Has anyone ever experienced degradation of their music CDs from just aging ?
News going around 10yrs ago said that CDs would not last long.