Why is my turntable making me happy?

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by alexbunardzic, Mar 14, 2017.

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  1. missan

    missan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Stockholm
    Records are sensitive, both to handling and playing. They will easily get scratched, different types of dirt will easily get stuck at the vinyl and will be hard to remove, different types of mistracking can cause audible problems. Noise floor is high below 500Hz. This in nothing new.

    How much we are bothered with all this varies, but the problems are there. Personally I listen through most of this normally; except when doing needle drops.
     
  2. Tim Irvine

    Tim Irvine Forum Resident

    Location:
    Austin, Texas
    I concur, even though I am a Les Paul guy. (Sometimes I wish the LP were a little firmer, more like a Fender. It is easy to get sloppy fast.)
     
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  3. Tim Irvine

    Tim Irvine Forum Resident

    Location:
    Austin, Texas
    Turning the record is also an excellent opportunity to top up drinks!
     
  4. alexbunardzic

    alexbunardzic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Vancouver, BC
    Good point. Good Teles tend to command much higher prices than good Strats. That's why I went for a Strat in the first place. Now that I'm hankering for a Tele, and was this close to get it, my voracious appetite for listening to music won over. I can still get a lot of mileage out of my Strat and Les Paul, but a good turntable is definitely a gift that keeps giving.
     
  5. alexbunardzic

    alexbunardzic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Vancouver, BC
    And also I'm noticing that it gives me some quiet time to reflect on what I just listened to and to prepare for what's coming on the side B.
     
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  6. alexbunardzic

    alexbunardzic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Vancouver, BC
    Yes, no question, LPs are way more fragile than CDs. I just wanted to point out that CDs are not as durable as the original marketing wanted us to believe.

    My biggest problem with LPs is not their fragility (now that we have good cleaning equipment at homes), it's the unpredictability of the pressings. I used to have numerous pressings of the same LPs (Sgt. Peppers being by far the biggest offender), because I discovered that each pressing of the same LP tends to sound somewhat different. Then you get into the hunt for the elusive 'perfect' pressing, and end up being a hoarder.
     
  7. alexbunardzic

    alexbunardzic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Vancouver, BC
    Totally agree. The biggest problem with used LPs is if they're coming from a household where people used to leave them lying on the floor, or on the wet and messy coffee table etc. That's where most of the irreparable scratches are coming from. I have some very old LPs that I know were being played to death on terrible, poorly set turntables, but thanks to the care their owners took to always return them to their inner sleeve, they play nicely today (after a thorough cleaning, of course). No scratches, no pops or clicks. So in a way LPs are quite durable, it's just that they need to be kept in the good sleeves all the time, and stored in an upright position.
     
  8. Raylinds

    Raylinds Resident Lake Surfer

    I'm glad you're enjoying it so much.

    I'm impressed- three pages and it has not yet devolved into a bitter digital vs. analog debate.
     
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  9. alexbunardzic

    alexbunardzic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Vancouver, BC
    Yes, I agree. For me, it's a very magical thing. I can never explain to myself how is it possibly that a tiny rock sitting on a tiny stick that is moving left-right/up-down as the record groove guides it, can produce such detailed, rich, lush sound. I can perfectly understand how can a CD do that (or any other digitized format, because I'm a software developer), but record grooves will forever elude me.
     
  10. timind

    timind phorum rezident

    Well, if you're going to get all philosophical on us...

    Does any of this make sense?
     
  11. Otlset

    Otlset I think I am I think

    Location:
    Temecula, CA
    The Father of the Hobby (trying out his new earbuds) speaks: "Magical? Naw, just sound vibrations etched into plastic grooves which are then retraced with a stylus to vibrate the sound back into the air again."

    [​IMG]
     
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  12. Steve G

    Steve G Senior Member

    Location:
    los angeles
    yeah it's a different sound and so it will sound different and will appeal to some folks more and others less. my responses are about the same as the OP's and I can trace it to a moment in time when I played the WORST quality LP on the WORST table and just got hooked back in immediately but I'm sure some others would have gone "ugh!!!!"

    For the record it was the late 90s and I got a $50 sony TT that ran fast from Circuit City and I played the Furtwangler multi-LP budget set of the whole Ring (I didn't play the whole set!) and I STILL got the feeling that I had been missing for so long. It could be anything. Who cares? Energy is a great way to describe it. And it's NOT the same as volume because that set has basically no volume at all. But something allowed me to hear the singers and orchestra in a real way that I had been missing for a decade or so.

    -s
     
  13. pdxway

    pdxway Forum Resident

    Location:
    Oregon, USA
    I am sure many already done this experiments, but a quick search did not turn up meaningful articles.

    What if you record the output of vinyl via turntable preamp to your computer and then listen to the recorded file via your digital chain? Would the digital chain now sounds like vinyl?
     
  14. alexbunardzic

    alexbunardzic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Vancouver, BC
    I've never tried this, but I have a number of so-called 'needle drop' FLAC files in my library that I've obtained from blogs etc. They always for some reason sound inferior to the LP playback. Maybe it's because the 'needle drop' recordings are not being done professionally, I don't know. But the end results always seem not satisfactory.
     
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  15. missan

    missan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Stockholm
    Yes.
     
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  16. pdxway

    pdxway Forum Resident

    Location:
    Oregon, USA
    If you have the capabilities to do such capture with your own setup and play back the digital with your own setup, I am very interested in knowing your observation.
     
  17. alexbunardzic

    alexbunardzic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Vancouver, BC
    Me too. Unfortunately my rig is all analog, so I don't have a USB output.
     
  18. alexbunardzic

    alexbunardzic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Vancouver, BC
    Well, depends on what is meant by 'sound like vinyl'. If you mean surface noise, occasional pops and click, then yes. Otherwise, I'm not so sure.

    For example, I have a 24-bit/96 kHz needle drop of Santana's Third album, and it sounds anemic and wimpy compared to the old beater of an LP I play on my turntable. So I would say, no, not necessarily, not even close to the LP.

    (however, it may be a faithful reproduction of how that LP sounded on the turntable of the dude who did the needle drop; I have no way of knowing. Or, maybe my digital chain is not resolving enough to ensure faithful reproduction?)
     
  19. pdxway

    pdxway Forum Resident

    Location:
    Oregon, USA
    May I know if the same needle drop file sounds the same on all playback devices you have on hand? For example, all computers, all external DAC, all disk players, all receivers, etc, that you have, via headset and speakers? That might give a clue about the quality of the dude's reproduction system and also the weakness of your digital chain.
     
  20. missan

    missan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Stockholm

    There is no problems making needle drops sound better than vinyl, or worse for that matter.
     
  21. sublemon

    sublemon Forum Resident

    i like vinyl too. my player is currently making me happy. I took a bit of time to re-dial in the alignment lately and it was worth it.
     
  22. Bananas&blow

    Bananas&blow It's just that demon life has got me in its sway

    Location:
    Pacific Beach, CA
    I encourage you to come back to this quote in a few years and see if you still think this is true. I'm mostly into vinyl these days and I'm under no illusion that they are even remotely as durable as a CD, particularly on the used market. Couldn't tell you the last CD I had to return due to scratching. I've returned 10 records in the last few months alone due to how poorly they sound.

    I appreciate your enthusiasm for the hobby and hope you enjoy yourself.
     
  23. gslasor

    gslasor Forum Resident

    Location:
    Canada
    This is exactly why I gauge up my strings on my Gibson-scale guitars :) (10s on 25.5", 11s on 24.75")

    ... and back to the thread!
     
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  24. Gretsch6136

    Gretsch6136 Forum Resident

    The stylus works on the same principle as a microphone - Electromagnetism. If you surround a magnet with a coil of wire and then move the magnet or the wire, a voltage is induced in the wire. The nature of the voltage varies in line with variances in the movement. With a stylus at one end of the cantilever, and a magnet at the other end (or a coil in an MC cartridge), the groove modulations move the stylus, which moves the cantilever, which moved the magnet (or coil) which creates a corresponding voltage from affecting the magnetic flux, which is output to the tonearm wires.

    A speaker works the opposite way. A voltage is applied to the coil which surrounds a magnet, and is attached to the speaker cone. The voltage interacts with the magnetic flux and causes the coil to physically move, and therefore moves the speaker cone.

    Its all quite simple, but incredible really, when you think of the fidelity that can be achieved from an electromagnetic device!
     
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  25. Gretsch6136

    Gretsch6136 Forum Resident

    The stylus works on the same principle as a microphone - Electromagnetism. If you surround a magnet with a coil of wire and then move the magnet or the wire, a voltage is induced in the wire. The nature of the voltage varies in line with variances in the movement. With a stylus at one end of the cantilever, and a magnet at the other end (or a coil in an MC cartridge), the groove modulations move the stylus, which moves the cantilever, which moved the magnet (or coil) which creates a corresponding voltage from affecting the magnetic flux, which is output to the tonearm wires.

    A speaker works the opposite way. A voltage is applied to the coil which surrounds a magnet, and is attached to the speaker cone. The voltage interacts with the magnetic flux and causes the coil to physically move, and therefore moves the speaker cone.

    Its all quite simple, but incredible really, when you think of the fidelity that can be achieved from an electromagnetic device!
     
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