Seriously considering walking away from vinyl

Most certainly. I just find that I don't care to spend my remaining time on this planet doing so. Others are perfectly free so spend their own time as they choose. I make no judgement's concerning what others do or may be doing.

I myself, do advocate experimentation. I am a self professed audiophile heretic. I follow almost none of the audiophile rules. I hook as many speakers and amps up at the same time as I feel like. I move speakers around the room to where I want them. I follow no placement rules what so ever. I mix speaker types, and amp types. Indeed, it is certainly possible to be "doing it wrong". I say that from personal experience.

I did comment that it did take some time for me to get my equipment figured out and for the most part, I have. There will always be small tweeks here and there, I suppose.

My personal preference is for live and immersive sound as opposed to typical home stereo. As such, I mix pro-audio gear with home audio gear, amps and speakers, including a commercial sub woofer. I care nothing at all about stereo imaging. Sound can come from where ever it wants to, as far as I am concerned. (One thing though, I do not use processors on the sound, just pure two channel stereo sources).

The reason that I do not walk away from vinyl, is that I have a start button on my "record player". I put the record on the platter, switch to the phono input, on the preamp, hit the start button and the record plays. When the record is over, the arm lifts off of the record, return to it's resting place and the turn table shuts itself off.

I have engaged in the therapy of manually cleaning every record in my modest collection and I can confidently say, that my need for therapeutic record cleaning sessions has been completely satisfied.

At this point, I just want to sit back, listen and waste my time doing absolutely nothing but listening.

 

Meh.

After growing up with vinyl since the 1950s, I unloaded my 1100 or so LPs in 2000.

Strictly for the expense of it all. Never looked back. Server sounds great.

Easy-peasy.

The moral: do what's right for you.

 

Yes and no. I do keep a room, but it is currently being used for storage. There is a Manager's quarters next to what was the lobby, but I am using that for storage also. The back bedroom is half full of speakers piled floor to ceiling.

I decided that I had no specific need for a lobby as such and turned the room into my personal office and living room. About three years ago, I decided that I would rather sleep on one of my couches, than in my room. I'm laying here right now, listening to the stereo. This is also my audio room and has the HT. Many speakers and amps everywhere (The newest being the Scott 222C). As you might imagine, we are on the informal side here.

You should come for a visit.

 

There it is. When I decided to get back into audio I thought long and hard about what I wanted. Read a ton here and other forums from seasoned audio veterans that have been listening longer than I've been alive. The one thing that resonated was "chasing the dragon". Whatever the hobby we all go through getting the unique, rare and usually expensive. Having experienced this in another hobby I decided to slay that dragon quick.

So I looked at my needs and that of my family. I wanted nothing complicated. More importantly my wife and kids can easily push one power switch and/or the aux switch and viola we have music.
My daughter received a Benjamin Elac Miracord turntable and a receiver that's it. Made life simple for her.
All of us are happy listening to music that's easy to use. It's not perfect, but enjoyable for everyone.
(Actually it sounds pretty damn good! )

 

35 years of collecting. I admire your commitment to your daughter. But there has to be another way to help pay for college. Second job. I dunno. That's a long time to dump a valuable collection. She better get A's.

 

CDs shouldn't really "sound" like anything. It's the masterings that you don't like

 

I don't care talk English, we had to conquer half the world for this privilege.

 

I would venture to run, not walk.

 

I've been looking at the U.S. student loan system and it appears to be worse than here in the UK, so I feel for the O.P. and his daughter. I noted with interest his comments about his records being mint and getting a copy frozen in aspic, this is how I viewed my project.

Recently I've been working with iZotope, to clean up my results and with judicious use it's given even greater justification to my labour. It certainly was a big project but I rediscovered albums I'd not played for a long time, so this was one positive. At the time I didn't need the money, for any particular reason, a traumatic injury meant I knew my earning potential was going to be severely effected and the cost and availability of vinyl was a primary reason.

Things turned out worse than I imagined they could, so it turned out to be a wise choice financially however regardless of that I still think it wasn't a bad decision. My needledrops sound fantastic and I've been freed from that endless search for the perfect copy. In fact I'm so pleased my only regret is that I sold my LP12 before I'd copied all the 10,000 Jamaican 45s my friend has. Given iZotope, they would have been listenable, rather than having to imagine what they'd be like without more clicks than music.

There is life away from vinyl, in fact if I wasn't poor I probably wouldn't go back to vinyl. You may wonder why I've not sold all my vinyl, well after I'd sold the eagerly sought things did dry up and now my daughter's interested in them, so that's about all her inheritance will be from me. I've had a look at the stats and I obtained an average of £16 per album.

 

They sound like 1's and 0's

 

Very interesting thread in many ways for me. I have two daughters who are still paying for college; the youngest with our help. I can only imagine the process for getting student loans is more difficult and expensive than it was 10 years ago. Just a crappy system we have now.
As for the vinyl issue, I'm another who had listened/collected since the late 60's only to give it up 7 or 8 years ago. Even though I am extremely happy with my system and listening experience, I still look back at vinyl with a weird yearning. I don't miss it on sonic terms. It's more of an emotional or nostalgic thing I guess.
I find myself constantly looking at turntables on Craig's list and ebay. I think I'm going to buy a "for repair" table just for the fun of fixing it and spinning one of the remaining albums I didn't sell off.

 

Really, that's exactly it. There are plenty of us that set up a cart, and start listening to records. The only time I mess around with things is when I put a new cart on it (or double check things if I put a new stylus on it). Storage is the only thing that's a pain in the ass, but that's really more because my wife doesn't like the sprawl. There's plenty of tweaking that can be done, but it certainly doesn't have to be done.

 

She's a lucky girl. I adore my 50H.

 

I walked away from vinyl around 1990 and haven't looked back. Wait, I actually did look back. After joining this forum and hearing everyone rave about vinyl I did go back and revisit it. It just confirmed my decision of walking away. I tend to hear all of it's shortcomings when I listen and not the euphoria many here seem to find. It just isn't for me. But I can respect others who prefer it. Different strokes and all that.

I will say this though. Whenever I visit the hardware forum I'm always surprised (or maybe not) by how many people are having issues with their vinyl setup. I realize many people enjoy tweaking and laboring over their sound system, but I guess I'm not one of those people.

 

Me neither. But I still get immense pleasure from vinyl that no other medium seems to match.

 

"Cost Sharing" is one of the greatest gifts you can give to a child

 

Got to say I don't really take much notice of the turntable thread but I'm surprised by this. I had a LP12 for 15 years and all I had to do was put the vinyl on the deck and play, bad pressing though is a wholly different matter.

 

No they don't

 

Needledropping continues to be an absolute breeze/pleasure for me nowadays. Granted, my gear is different from what you're using. I don't have any plans to toss the vinyl; but, at 24/192 I can easily live with sonics when at work, on vacation, visiting relatives/friends, etc. I do save the files to hdd's; but, I'm not into carrying a hdd around or having to peruse menus; so, it's still burned discs for me.

...a smattering of the many I've done over the years. 24/192 on DVD-R (or DVD+R or dual layer DVDs), I still own every LP represented here...

 

Wisdom.

 

I still strongly prefer vinyl over digital, especially on mono recordings. But I have to say the recent digital masters of the Kinks (5 CD retrospective) and the recent Stones Mono box are finally starting to exhibit more analogue warmth and very low end frequency reproduction on mono source material which I have never heard before on that medium. That said I still think that a high quality original UK lp or 45 in mint condition still sounds sweeter than a good digital master but that costs $$$$$ to find all the ultimate vinyl pressings of your favorites. And for whatever reason some labels are still digitizing back catalog with ridiculous noise reduction and filtering (some of the recent Bowie catalog reissues for example). But the gap between digital and vinyl overall sound quality is definitely narrowing. To hear the improvement in vinyl nowadays, one needs to invest a lot more money in a very high quality cartridge, turntable and phono stage.

 

I think the OP will regret ditching his vinyl collection. Except for some dabbling a few years back, I have not used my vinyl in 25+ years. However, I will never sell my 50 or so "vinyls". They are nice to hang on the wall and are sentimental.

 

Converting vinyl, DVD-A & sacd's, cd's etc to digital is worth it because you get long term portable quality. Freeing yourself from the physical media part is fine - just invest in a few backup drives. I enjoy the process of doing it and accept that others get frustrated by it. Spending big bucks to do it isn't necessary.

OP: I use a Behringer 502 mixer purchased long ago off Craigslist for $20. It works just fine with no issues. I originally looked around for a sound card to control the input levels but couldn't find one.

 

C'mon dude, keep up - we solved this problem with Richard's suggestion that the OP simply send his daughter to Slovenia where she can go to college for free.