OK, so many vinyl fans, but who's just DONE with it?

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by head_unit, Jun 8, 2018.

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  1. moops

    moops Senior Member

    Location:
    Geebung, Australia
    Nope ..... they've removed all the defects of vinyl playback. :)
     
  2. sublemon

    sublemon Forum Resident

    sure but it is not always the case, especially with more obscure and older stuff. Sometimes and original LP is the best available source. trust me, there are plenty of needledrops used on various commercial reissues.
     
  3. Time Is On My Side

    Time Is On My Side Forum Resident

    Location:
    Madison, WI
    I have only bought a few "new" vinyl records. Too expensive imo for what I am getting. I have all my parents' old collection from the 60s and 70s and a decent Audio Technica table to play them on from time to time. These days I am perfectly fine buying the iTunes version or a CD. It's hard to beat the convenience of iTunes and I think unless you've got a top notch system, 256k AAC is fine most times.
     
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  4. Phasecorrect

    Phasecorrect Forum Resident

    Location:
    WI
    Contrary to what many hi end audiophiles claim, one doesn't have to be spend $$$$$$ to get into vinyl or maintain it. Their is a fair amount of elitism and bragging rights with hi end boutique equipment, with often little emphasis on music. A modest vintage based system can provide excellent results if assembled correctly.
     
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  5. Bananas&blow

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

    Location:
    Pacific Beach, CA
    If one has a system revealing enough to reward a quality source. Then I can't fathom living without a vinyl setup and a CD setup (or hi rez if that's your thing). I'm interested in the best sounding recordings at reasonable prices. These come in both the vinyl format and CD, SACD format. Why choose one over the other? The best pressing/mastering is often only available in one format.

    If anyone chooses to be done with vinyl, great, that's more records in the bins for me to hunt through. But if you make that choice, you are definitely giving up the option for the best sound quality of many recordings. Same with giving up CD's such Audio Fidelity/DCC/Analogue productions SACD's. You may have a preference of one format over the other, but both can sound fantastic.

    Read a thread recently about a guy who paid $225 for a MOFI vinyl pressing of Pink Floyd's Meddle. I just bought the Pink Floyd Shine On box sans the singles disc, which included Steve Sax's mastering of 8 Floyd CD's which included a great CD of Meddle for $38. 5 bucks per cd. His might sound marginally better. But good lord, I made a way better decision.
     
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  6. Newton John

    Newton John Forum Resident

    Location:
    Cumbria, UK
    Oh dear!

    Your first sentence is a straw man argument.

    There may exist a few people like you describe in the second sentence but I do not recognise it as describing the vast majority of those who like music and good sound quality.

    The third sentence is non-sequitor - there are bargains to be had in second hand equipment if you're prepared to take a risk or have the relevant knowledge to manage without a dealer. So what. That's true at all price levels - in fact, it is often the most expensive gear that takes biggest hit in depreciation.

    The truth is that sound quality costs although the differences are sometimes quite subtle. It's up to each individual to decide what is cost effective for themselves. It doesn't become anyone to criticise others for the choices they make.
     
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  7. Buddy>Elvis

    Buddy>Elvis Senior Member

    Location:
    New Zealand
    I have a nice system but it's not up in the stratosphere price wise. I own a lot of records and clean and look after them. I rarely encounter snap, crackle or pop and find it unlikely that I'm just incredibly lucky having avoided it. My hearing has been tested and thankfully it's fine.

    IMO the whole surface noise thing is largely the audio bogeyman.
     
  8. Dave S

    Dave S Forum Resident

    I found a Japan for Europe black face CD in a charity shop for £1 (for a time, it was the forum's favorite mastering; maybe it still is). Also got a second copy on ebay with Japan inserts for a few quid. There are lots of great cheap CDs out there. There used to be lots of great cheap LPs as well.
     
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  9. NickC4555

    NickC4555 Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Leicester, UK
    With Tidal and Roon, the non-audio parts of the digital experience finally almost rival the joy of enjoying an album's artwork while listening to the music. But so far, from an audio perspective, vinyl is still my reference. Apart from a few really bad vinyl releases that have been successfully digitally remastered, I can switch between synced versions of the Tidal and vinyl albums and almost always prefer the vinyl. It's got very close, but as yet not equal. The gap is closing, but I suppose when it does I'll blow another £5K on a turntable upgrade!
     
  10. missan

    missan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Stockholm
    Me and records are tight. But only old original records. Many of these can be found rather cheap; the ones I want, and in many cases in mint condition. Remastered records or contemporary ones are totally uninteresting to me. This side of the 80s isn´t interesting, then I buy original CDs.
     
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  11. ggergm

    ggergm another spring another baseball season

    Location:
    Minnesota
    @head_unit, you might as well ask me if I'm done with women.

    Same difficult relationship, but the payoff always exceeds any complications along the way.
     
  12. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    Honestly, it's perfectly possible to play a record without "snap, crackle and pop" from surface noise. And a system where audible mistracking is all but non existance. But there are always other mechancial noises present that aren't present in digital playback -- bearing noise, motor noise breakthrough, etc.. You can those noise very low in level but, but if that still bugs you, well, vinyl's not for you. Reel to reel has a lot of the same mechancial flaws as vinyl: speed instability; need for hardware maintenance and alignment; easily damaged storage medium that can stretch, oxides can flake, etc; need for exacting storage conditions. I dunno that it's any less problematic mechanically or storage-wise than vinyl.

    So, it's not for you. We won't start a thread about it.

    Personally, I'm done buying new vinyl, and I was done buying new vinyl some time in the mid-90s. CD and hi-res digital files are perfectly good options for playback these days; most new vinyl is cut from digital masters anyway so with vinyl you're just getting the digital master plus the mechanical playback problems; and I already have thousands of albums to store. But I haven't stopped listening to my old vinyl, or my CDs.

    FWIW, the thing that's present on a lot of records -- a cutting and pressing flaw -- that really takes me out of the music is groove echo.
     
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  13. mertoo

    mertoo Forum Resident

    Location:
    Turkey
    :edthumbs:
     
  14. jtw

    jtw Forum Resident

    Shoot. As impossible as it sounds, I've felt uncool at thrift stores and used record stores. The hipsters looking through the vinyl see me looking at the cds, and occasionally tell me how much I'm missing.
     
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  15. Gaslight

    Gaslight ⎧⚍⎫⚑

    Location:
    Northeast USA
    I call bull on this.

    Any self-respecting vinyl enthusiast would not purposely try to sway a CD buyer into the vinyl aisles. I want those aisles clear for my own selfish needs.
     
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  16. rfs

    rfs Forum Resident

    Location:
    Lansing, MI USA
    I bought Michigan Rocks new in a record store in the mid 70s and still have it. It still sounds great.
     
  17. Kevin j

    Kevin j The 5th 99

    Location:
    Seattle Area
    I swear, sometimes I wonder if I'm living in Groundhog day when I visit this forum.
     
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  18. Doug Walton

    Doug Walton Forum Resident

    Location:
    United States
    At this point, I continue to wrestle with my own questions and doubts about this subject. :)

    I have (by the standards here) a relatively modest turntable/cart set up that seems to be slightly overachieving for me (AT-LP5 and an AT-VM540ML, all dialed in very well after lots of fiddling). I listen via my Senn HD800s, or the PSB Imagine X2T speakers. I can enjoy a decent LP of something (say, the nice Monk/Rollins LP that I bought for maybe $8), and it sounds superb - there is something about it for sure. I can listen to the same album via TIDAL (HiFi, no Masters stuff here) USB'd into my Gungnir MB, and it sounds really great. Are they equal? No. There is "something" of a difference, and I'm currently trying to figure out if it's just the brighter sound of the cartridge, or the slightly warmer characteristic of the Gumby MB.

    Which is why I'm considering both a serious turntable/cart upgrade, and/or possibly upgrading to a Yggdrasil. I tend to enjoy that more technically clean, somewhat "clinical" sound that some components and headphones produce, both because I have a slight bit of high-frequency hearing loss, and because I just find it thrilling.

    This will undoubtedly get a little expensive for me. I think both LPs and digital are awesome.
     
  19. I so agree with you. I like LPs but i also like CDs. I will enjoy both formats until i spin of this planet.
     
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  20. malco49

    malco49 Forum Resident

    i listen to music several ways. streaming(mainly in car) but also at home.via youtube sometimes when on laptop. cd and vinyl.they all work for me. i have pretty decent set ups so the sound quality is good.
     
  21. drh

    drh Talking Machine

    Well said--all of it.

    So, what of the thread topic?

    I am not done with LPs. As Steve noted, too much of interest to me was on LP and has not appeared and never will appear on legitimately mastered CDs (as opposed to cottage industry LP dubs). Early Remington budget LPs, for instance, contain a wealth of interesting material, but as I understand things the master tapes were destroyed in a pipe burst accident, and so far every attempt to reissue selected material from that catalogue has been a miserable commercial failure. Or take the Schubert sonata cycle by Friedrich Wuhrer, the first "complete" one on records--beautiful performances, but no one who has fallen heir to the old Vox catalogue has evinced the least interest in offering them to a new generation of listeners. Or how about the Allegro recordings by Roman Totenberg, father of NPR correspondent Nina? Dunno, maybe they've appeared somewhere in CD reissue, but I've certainly never seen one.

    That said, I will freely confess that I don't especially love the LP. It simply embodies too many compromises and drawbacks relative to the 78.

    You laugh. You think I'm being snarky. But I'm serious here. Yes, an LP will play longer than nearly any 78 ever produced--hence the name "long playing record." And no, an LP probably will not break if dropped--hence the "unbreakable" label on most early LP sleeves. LPs, however, actually need more careful handling, because they are easily scratched and sensitive to fingerprints. They are hard to clean by comparison to 78s, which mostly can be washed off with dishwashing liquid and tap water in the kitchen sink. When purchased used, they are much more difficult to assess by sight; aside from those that have obviously been pressed into service as Frisbees, just looking at one, it's impossible to tell if the record harbors hidden skips or if it's been ruined by repeated play with a bad stylus or cheap cartridge (Crossley is by no means the first purveyor of bottom-end ceramic cartridges in flimsy plastic tonearms--anybody remember Lloyds? SounDesign? MCS? Those '80s appliance store "rack systems"?). Visual grading is certainly an inexact exercise with 78s, too, but on average it's likely to yield more reliable results. Naturally, 78s require some specialized equipment to sound their best, but then, so do LPs, and if you go far enough back, that equipment is much the same for both types. As to surface noise, in good condition 78s can be much quieter than most of us think, and, odd as it may seem, I, at least, find the occasional random pops and ticks of an old LP much more distracting than the relatively constant noise from an average 78 side, just as the audio engineer somebody mentioned earlier wasn't bothered by steady state tape hiss. And the big, bold, dynamic sound that leaps from the grooves of a well-recorded 78 in good condition, even one made by the pre-electric horn-and-diaphragm method, has body and power of which the LP can only dream.

    Last night, I put a cylinder on my Edison Triumph spring-driven phonograph only to discover the thing has developed yet another in a seemingly endless parade of problems: its speed is wobbling horribly. I'd be lying if I didn't come close--close--to throwing up my hands and saying, "I'm done with cylinders. I'm selling the lot and calling it quits." Close, but not quite. I'll get out my backup player, a lowly Edison Standard, and in due course yet again take the recalcitrant Triumph to my local service technician for another going over. I've never reached that point with LPs, and I doubt I will. But my heart is with the not-all-that-accurately-named "78s." Just please, please, don't start calling them "shellacs"!
     
    Last edited: Jun 10, 2018
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  22. Guitarded

    Guitarded Forum Resident

    Location:
    Montana
    No matter how bad your relationship with Vinyl is, it'll never take half your stuff.
     
  23. Claus

    Claus Senior Member

    Location:
    Germany
    I'm done one decade ago! Too many defective LPs, I still have about 500 LPs... I listen at my analog buddy sometimes.
     
  24. Slick Willie

    Slick Willie Decisively Indecisive

    Location:
    sweet VA.

    It's not the long player thing that makes most a fan...it's the hi fidelity part that does.
    That changed the recorded music game...IMO. The 78 just couldn't...or didn't do that.
     
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  25. sublemon

    sublemon Forum Resident

    no one believes that anyone on here has a wife/girlfriend/any female companionship anyway :nyah:
     
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