Does vinyl only make sense if they're pressed from analog tapes?

I actually really like digital vinyl. As long as there is a a stylus vibrating to cause a faint electronic signal that is amplified into sound, it's analog.

I find a digital step in recording, restoration or mastering after makes for a better product. A bit more clean, dynamic, quiet and substantial. I get none of the glassy sound or digital glare that silvers or files can bring to the party. I buy new releases every month and often I'll get both the LP and the CD, to say there is no difference between the two just isn't my experience.

Also....90% of my collection is AAA. There are plenty of bad recordings that are AAA. That really isn't the most overwhelming factor when it comes to how a finished product sounds.

 

That's fine. I'm not saying a digital recording or digital master sounds bad -- I listen to tons of them all the time. I'm just saying, why then take that and cut it to vinyl and play it back with all the additive mechanical noise of vinyl and the riaa pre and de- equalization and all that vs. just keeping it in the digital realm and playing it back from a digital source? For me, I think it makes more sense to just keep it in the digital realm for storage and playback.

 

If I had a pound for every time I read a thread on this forum regarding a new release and someone noted that the vinyl version of the new release was a better sounding recording, I have would likely be able to afford a substantial upgrade to my system. In my experience with new releases the vinyl version will either sound at least as good as its digital counterpart and in many cases superior.So yes, digital vinyl very much has a place for me. One only has to listen to the CDs of Blue and Lonesome by the Stones or Is This the Life by Roger Waters to know what I am on about.

Luckily a lot of the music that I like is from the 60s and 70s and I have picked up good quality analogue originals for decent money. Recently the first four Leonard Cohen albums for less then the repress on Amazon. Tattoo You for peanuts. Originals of Love Over Gold and Making Movies for spare change. Lots of good stuff out there for very little money.

 

Theoretical vs. practical. Theoretically you can't reason why you would ever do such a thing. As you say, you are only adding mechanical anomalies to the playback and that can't help the task of being "Highly faithful" to the original recording. But...in no situation are you listening to a recording without some imprint from a mechanism. A computer chip that converts 0's and 1"s to an audible signal does something and different ones sound different. If not, every DAC would sound exactly the same. So now it comes down to the practical reality of preference. One can really like their sound of their cart and phonostage and want to hear music though those mechanisms vs. the 0 and 1 processor.

And since we are being theoretical, the preference may have more to do with biology. All sound is sourced from vibrations. The sound wave that is produced from a analog source is from a physical vibration that is amplified. Perhaps our auditory system and brain respond more favorably and with less effort to processing a natural sound vs. one that come from a computer. A bit like a florescent light may be brighter and better for reading but gives people headaches and is less relaxing than an incandescent light or or a candle. If the measure of quality for a light is "brightness" florescent beats a candle, if the measure of quality for sound reproduction is "silence" digital is the winner. In a practical sense, I'd rather listen to records by candle light. Also...you can get an analog playback chain pretty silent. Not every record ever time but it can be done.

 

Gosh. If I thought any of this were true I wouldn't listen to pure analog records either. Sounds horrible!

 

Not this **** again.

 

Also...I find it fascinating how many people are AAA purists. Clearly there is something there they are strongly responding to that I am not. I can hear the difference and can quickly tell when a new pressing AAA. Generally I thing, "hmm this sounds a bit dull and soft, must be AAA." I can get pretty weird about small differences in sound that are meaningless to 99.9% of the population but that's not one that bothers me. Many times they are the same people that think mono sounds better in every case and I'm not on that train either. Old can be better but it's not a given.

 

I think this is the time we get it settled once and for all.

 

There really aren't all that many AAA purists, it's just that they won't stop talking about it. Just look at the threads for recent Rush, Pink Floyd and Zeppelin reissues - hundreds of members bought them and enjoyed them even though it is common knowledge that they are digitally sourced.

 

If only.

 

It does sounds better, much better than the CD. I have both the 12" 45RPM of "Calling Elvis" (on basic 120g vinyl) and the compact disc of the album around the time of release...even with a conical stylus, the sound is WAY more open, three-dimensional, easy to pick out the instruments and details within them, PRAT etc.....

 

I mostly buy new music, and most of it is surely from digital sources, no doubt or confusion on my part about that. Still, I generally find the records to sound better if I even bother to compare, which I don't often. Even with all their shortcomings, and having grown up with vinyl, they are honestly just more fun to play. And often they come with a better set of goodies, like my new current favorite that has been spending a lot of time on the table for the last few days ...

 

I'd say many of those voices are from flippers and collectors that want to believe in greater value for their collections and inventory.

 

There needs to be more awareness of the horrors of Bearing Rumble.

Has anyone yet pointed out that vinyl is just a fad?

 

I find that another variant of the AAA-only crowd are people who left vinyl years ago and Never Looked Back who try to use the digitally-sourced vinyl phenomenon as a criticism of people who enjoy vinyl. "Ha ha you think you're getting pure analog goodness but it's just a CD pressed to vinyl" and etc.

 

My Fleetwood Mac Tusk LP mentions some digital processing (1979).

 

Gee, that's only alleged in every fifth post of every vinyl-related thread ever. Ten years now people have been telling me it's a "fad."

 

General Public...likely a fad. To those on this forum...it never left.

 

Yeah, but even at the quietest we can get our analog, the additive mechanical noise is much more substantial in level and degree than anything added by DAC, as is the difference between one record player rig and another vs. one DAC and another. Mechanical noise added by playback isn't a factor in CD, not to say that there's no differences between digital playback devices, but the addition of gross levels of mechanical noise from the playback machinery itself is not present.

And in terms of all this vibration business, with either source, we're only experiencing the pressure wave from the speaker. Are brains are only responding to the sound pressure wave either way. It all started as a sound pressure wave, was converted to something else -- including a ones and zeros representation if its a digital recording and/or master -- and has to be converted back to a sound pressure wave for us to hear it.

I think the more conversions from one type of energy to another in the chain, the more likely we are to have gross deviations from the original sound. With vinyl cut from digital you have pressure wave to voltage to ones and zeros back to voltage with the treble boosted and the bass cut radically to a mechanical movement that's etched on a disk to a mechanical movement to a voltage that's amplified and has corrective EQ applied. That's a lot of levels of conversion. You cut out a significant number of conversion steps, and all that pre and de-eq if, once the signal is in the digital realm, you just keep it there until the final conversion to an audio output AC signal.

 

When the fairly large and complex vinyl section disappears from my local B&N I'll agree that the "fad" is over. As it is, I was also told ten years ago that it was a fad and everyone would get fed up with it soon and return to CDs.

 

None of it is false. The mechanical noise might not bother you, and you might have a relatively quiey playback system. But its existence is not false. And I bet most people, when they put a stylus in a groove, have an awareness that a record is playing before any audio signal arrives. That's all mechanical noise added by the playback chain -- as a result of vinyl surface irregularities and motor vibration breakthrough as much as anything else, and probably audio frequency sidebands of subsonic arm-cart resonance. We know the best vinyl playback rigs minimize this, but it's there. Maybe it's more problematic for people who listen to music will long ppp passages that for people listening to other kinds of material.

 

Strangely, I preferred the digital-vinyl pressing of “The Wall” released 2 years before the current analogue master tape version. But I also bought “WYWH” in both versions and to my ears the recent analogue version beats the digital-vinyl version?
All very complex this subjectivity thing......lol

 

So many people have been telling me how noisy my record playback is, and I've just never seen any of ya'll in my listening room before. Sure, it's a mechanical process, mechanical process have >0 amounts of noise. But as a practical matter, no, there are not mechanical noise problems to be had in my setup. To state otherwise is just being pedantic.

 

I thought I cared if it was analog or digital, I tried to only buy AAA releases. But then in the end it got to expensive for me to only buy 1st AAA pressings. So I started to buy reiusses, and ofcourse most of them are digital sourced. But I learned that a digital sourced vinyl record can sound just as good (sometimes even better) as a AAA vinyl record.

The first time I really noticed that was when I bought all the Rush reissuses that got released in 2015. All are from digital source, but they sound damn good! I have even compared my 1978 original pressing and my 2015 reissuse of their record Hemispheres, and the reissue sounds better to my ears!

So now I no longer care if its a AAA or a digital sourced vinyl. Now I instead do my research and try to find the best sounding pressing (or if its a favorite band/artist, I just try to get every pressing of the record, so I can compare, but I only do that with 2-3 bands/artists in my collection).

 

Cheaper, yep. Better...nope. Not always. I actually feel bad for everyone making these types of comments because you clearly have no idea what you are missing.