"Vinyl's great, but it's not better than CDs"

I just got into it two years ago. And the only reason I did was to prove that CD's were better. Turns out I proved my self wrong...On the most part.

Yes, but there aren't an abundance of those redbook CD's out there that do.

(Although to be fair there are many botched vinyl pressings out there.)

 

Seems like the real argument here is between those who think there can only be one true answer, and those who don't really worry about it.

 

Stevehoffman himself said it best:

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threa...-vinyl-sacd-or-an-open-reel-tape-copy.133328/

I think most of the people posting here HAVEN'T spent the time comparing. Sort of like people who say "the gold disc is the best" when they haven't heard any other CD pressings.

 

To a certain extent.

You can not worry about which is whatever, but when you're presented with opinions borne of ignorance there's nothing wrong with attempting to correct another. Especially when they're trying to use said ignorance as a trump card.

I'm with you in the fact that I'm format agnostic (outstanding term, BTW), but folks on both sides of the war can come across as misinformed.

 

You haven't heard the AT440Mla, I assume? That thing is bright. But generally I don't mind that, I actually like bright as long as it isn't through the roof.

Not sure if I agree with the "why many of us like vinyl" reasoning -- some of us may have never heard vinyl until later in life or, in my case, my vinyl experience before I hit middle age was crappy record players with very questionable speakers / amps. I have my reasons for preferring the sound these days but I don't think it's because of the Emerson record player I had when I was eleven.

 

I had the one below Emerson at that age, The Monkees never sounded better

 

Mastering. Pure and simple.

 

My next upgrade will probably be an AT440MLA. And the rumble fixing kit for my bloody pain in the **** Pro-Ject Debut III!
I have many happy memories of me and my first turntable...

Passionate music lover since age three!

 

Riddle me this, many of my original CD booklets state that CD technology represents the best possible presentation of recorded music. Is this an accurate statement? Could it be that engineers just used that capability the wrong way? I've always preferred the clarity of the CD but miss the warmth of vinyl, am I asking too much if at some point I ask for both? If not, why aren't people whose opinions carry more sway asking for both now? Maybe the problem isn't with the information on the discs but still with the inability of CD players to present that information in a manner more pleasing? My wife bought me a Yamaha CD player years back that really made listening to CD music much more pleasant than my previous players, maybe it's just a case of bad matches?

 

in terms of sound i think vinyl and cd are about even. if put with a blindfold id probably choose wrong.

what i like about vinyl..is the artwork...the smell...the care of of a delicate record like a baby. having a beautiful turntable...forcing yourself not to skip any songs.
vinyl is more involving.

 

Very nicely stated.

I'm not sure if I could consistently identify one from the other either, but they have always sounded different to me. Though it could have easily been psychological...

 

If the music is right (the most important thing in this equation as far as I am concerned) both an LP and a CD are pretty involving. I play far more CDs than LPs at this point because I appreciate the convenience of the CD format. But, a CD will never outweigh the artwork aspects of the larger format vinyl, and I find that a vinyl outing sounds more musical than a CD transfer of the same recording. But the fact is that I now rarely buy vinyl (my most recent purchases were a used copy of Shannon's Let the Music Play, which was much more cost-effective than the high priced OOP CD version of the same title, and an RSD copy of Zombies' Odessey and Oracle). I have made my peace entirely with the CD format (though I can't seem to keep myself from buying the same music in various CD remasters, searching for that audiophile nirvana). I hope it is not thread crapping to say that people who prefer vinyl and those who prefer CD are both completely correct when it comes to personal preferences, and that's really all that counts in this debate.

 

The person to talk to is JJ Johnston.

 

This argument is a series of basic logical fallacies. You start with a tautological argument. Colorations are distortions. Then you infer circular reasoning. Distortions are bad because they are distortions. Then you dump a purely prejudicial unfounded assertion with this nonsense about trained listeners. Please provide some evidence in support of your assertion that rational trained listeners never experience a sense of enhanced realism via euphonic distortions. So far all you have offered are logical fallacies.

More logical fallacies. 1. Red herring. We were not talking about "fidelity" we were talking about the aural illusion of stereo imaging. 2 another tautological argument that amounts to stating more accuracy is more accurate. We are not talking about accuracy to an electrical signal. We are talking about the aural illusion of realism.

That is simply incorrect. I am one of many who have experienced greater sense of realism with vinyl playback. This argument is based on a simple misrepresentation of reality.

Now you are just making things up about me to attack my credibility just to win an argument. I normally do my comparisons under blind conditions. I have done hundreds of blind comparisons.

So unless you have something more to offer in a way of an argument other than a series of logical fallacies, prejudicial assertions with no support and inventions of your own imagination in an attempt to attack my credibility I don't think we have anything more to talk about.

 

I don't think that digital playback is necessarily any "truer to the source". I don't know why I did this, but I once did a "shoot-out" of six or seven digital disk spinners I had in my house, all playing the same CD ("Handle With Care" from multiple promo copies of Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 I had at the time - don't ask), and run through analog outs on standard RCA wire to my Denon A/V amplifier. The players ranged in price from $100 to $7000. They all sounded different - close, but different. The only conclusion to me is that digital playback is "colored", as each player presented the music slightly differently.

For those that don't believe me, if I had time, I could do that test again today - I still have at least seven digital disk players and still have an A/V amp with multiple inputs (I only have three copies of that Traveling Wilburys CD left, so I'd need to do it in two or three groups).

 

Exactly! All those people talking about how CDs cannot produce frequencies above 20k...as if that meant anything! They have obviously never purchased a microphone that included a chart of the frequency response curve of that particular microphone. Here's one for the Shure SM58, which I'm pretty sure is the most popular microphone ever produced:


The frequency response drops like a stone at 10k, and is 15 dB down at 20k. If it is producing anything about 20k, it is completely lost in noise. Even the finest and most expensive microphones (which are not necessarily the same thing) don't have any response above 20k. There are some instrumentation microphones that go above 20k but the thing is nobody uses them for recording. The theoretical advantage of LPs to go up to 30k (which was used for Quad LPs...and those of us who are old enough to have owned Quad LPs remember what a debacle that was) is exactly that. A theory. There is nothing up there because the tools used by recording engineers didn't capture it in the first place! So please, please, please can we have a moratorium on the old saw about how "CDs are limited by the Nyquist theorem"? It is utterly meaningless.

I wish the people who didn't read the article would take a moment to watch the video the article linked to. The video was made by a record company to explain to producers about what they should expect when they have their record cut. That the bass will be summed to mono. That the very act of cutting a record is a painful series of compromises. These are people who want to make and sell records, and they know the medium is, at best, a collection of clever hacks.

Also, please compare apples to apples. Yes, a Steve Hoffman mastered LP made for the audiophile market is going to sound better than a CD crushed down to sound good on the stereo installed in the car owned by some record company weasel as he is stuck in bumper to bumper traffic...or on a pair of iPod earbuds. There are excellent sounding CDs like Kate Bush's Aerial which actually use dynamic range. Mostly because she and her engineer Del Palmer retain final approval of the mastering and actually check.

 

Actually, the person to talk to is the person who made the claim to begin with.

Please posts links to these double blind studies. Methodology, conclusions, etc...

 

Hah! 99% of the time, it's the artists who want their recordings smashed!

 

Exactly!

And when you're done with that, ROLO46, please provide some evidence that your neighbors have never seen unicorns prancing around in your backyard.

 

I think you're right.

 

Two words: Surface noise. Deal-breaker...always has been for me.

 

Perhaps you should do the same and compare apples to apples. You seem to suggest it is unfair to compare an LP mastered by Steve Hoffman to a normal common CD. And yet you suggest we all educate ourselves by watching a video that tells producers the bass will be summed to mono, the highs and lows will be rolled yadda yadda yadda. And yet we have a substantial number of LPs (including 100s mastered by Steve Hoffman) that have had no such "painful series of compromises " inflicted upon them.

You can't have it both ways. You can't cry foul when vinyl enthusiasts point out the many poorly mastered CDs out there and then insist that we look at second rate LPs as a meaningful measure of what the medium is all about.

If one wants to make a meaningful comparison between the two media to see what they are capable of at their best then they need to compare a state of the art recording mastered with the same mastering moves or no mastering moves to LP and CD. James Boyk made such a recording for that purpose. Pictures at an Exhibition on Performance Recordings.

If one wants to make meaningful comparisons of the real world differences between CD and LP one has to do it on a case by case basis. Anyone who actually does this on a regular basis should pretty quickly figure out that any audiophile who shuns either format is shooting themselves in the foot and/or are so afflicted by bias effects that they are possibly a lost cause doomed to unnecessarily suffer terrible sound with certain titles due to some philosophical hang up about audio.

 

Really? So if I told you about any other scientific studies you'd want to talk to ME about them and not the scientists who did the study?

If you actually want to know about the research JJ Johnston has done on euphonic colorations you can actually can ask JJ Johnston.

[email protected]<[email protected]

If you don't want to talk to the guy who did the research and knows better than anyone else about that research I would suspect you aren't really interested in it.

 

No, I just want links to all the double blind tests that you alluded to so that I can learn about methodology, sample sizes, conclusions, all that good stuff. Surely these were published?

And on THIS we agree 100%.

 

No unicorns in my back garden yet
Just badgers,foxes and Mr Mole.
Non of my trained listener friends (sound recordists) has any affinity to euphonic distortions
They consider vinyl records archaic
They loved their Nagras to a man,but thats a different kettle of fish.