Vinyl Rippers: How has 30 years of CD listening affected how we hear our vinyl?

The point of test tones is that whatever imperfections you hear listening to the tones are also present in the music. Wow, flutter, modulation noise etc. Part of the "amazement" for me is that the characteristics of "real music" so effectively mask the imperfections most of the time.

I sometimes wonder if we're wired to accept imperfection as being "natural". Voices and "manual" musical instruments often exhibit micro variations in pitch and timbre, just as a "hand made" object can often be distinguished from a machine made object by small variations in dimensions etc. This can lead a largely "machine made" performance (synthesized and sequenced electronic instruments, autotuned vocals etc) to sound somewhat lifeless and unnatural. A performance reproduced via CD has little or no added variation, whereas one reproduced via LP has some added variation. In small amounts, this may lead to a side-by-side comparison favouring the LP as sounding more "natural". Just a theory...

 

Hi Don, it's certainly a reasonable theory. I've wondered about such things myself, but I can't say I have any answers that are entirely satisfying to me. I do enjoy listening to LPs though, and part of me also wonders if maybe I shouldn't give it much more thought than that.

 

Ive often thought that part of why some enjoy vinyl so much, is that they actually enjoy the "imperfections", although many seem unaware they are even hearing any, and are able to gloss over certain imperfections OR not pay attention to them. Others are less able to ignore small distortions and so on and to them its a negative.

What many are not able to understand, is that while some are able to enjoy vinyl highly and find it nearly perfect, others hear more into the sound, and the same imperfections that add "Flavor" to the sound, can be a "detriment" to others.

Play the same record on the same system for 10 different audiophiles, and a few will hear perfection, a few will hear wow and flutter, and a few will hear distortion and innner groove issues, and all will claim the others are wrong.

Its not a lack of hearing "ability", but certain things bother some more than others.