Why is my turntable making me happy?

My turntable has been making me happy too. Denon dl 103 cart on a denon dp1500 turntable. I bought a nice little sut recently and the rig sounds great powered by a Fisher 500b.

I buy lots of excellent vinyl on the cheap at tag sales, flea markets and Goodwill. I go to my local record store for harder to find lps.

 

Alex,

I looked at your profile page to check your digital chain.

It looks like, for digital, you are doing the "true to the source" route. You want to play back the sound as close as the original digital source as possible, am I correct?

As many already mentioned, vinyl play back introduces pleasing distortion. Also, using different combination of stylus, tone arm, and preamp, you can tweak the sound to your liking.

So, if you don't mind the pleasing distortion in vinyl, why should you mind introducing pleasing distortion to your digital source?

I am sure you have a Bestbuy near where you live. How about you get yourself a high end Pioneer receiver to add the pleasing distortion to your digital playback?

Before Pioneer, I used to go the pure digital route. For example, lossless play back from computer -> DAC -> preamp -> amp -> speakers. With this chain, I agree with your observation about CD sounds lifeless. Indeed, many CD sounds flat, hard, bright, and lifeless.

Now, my chain is Oppo HDMI out -> Pioneer SC 95 -> speakers. Using Pioneer’s suite of tools, like auto up convert, auto sound retriever, eq, tone control, etc, I was able to add enough pleasing distortion that most CD playback is very enjoyable! Billy Idol? No problem. AC/DC? No problem. No more hard, too bright, lifeless sound. Many YouTube videos sound incredible too. Rock concert sounds great! I get wall to wall life like sounds! Vinyl can't give you music video. Why miss out?

I have a friend that has room full of vinyl from years of collection. Guess what? His main rig now is a high end Yamaha receiver using digital source from Oppo and computer. He loves Yamaha digital processing (pleasing distortion) more than a pure audio chain.

In conclusion, you don't need to give up on CD. You just need to add pleasing distortion to your digital source like you do for vinyl . Good luck!

 

What have you done to the Bushmaster to improve it?

 

Funny it is as easy to scratch a CD - probably easier and a significant scratch means it won't play. Have had new ones that wouldn't play when they used to keep the CD separate behind the counter from the case. The now defunct Our Price did this.

 

I could sum up CD sound in a nutshell as rather 2D while analogue is full on 3D sound.

 

Replaced power supply with Ankaka battery. Enormous improvement.

 

Interesting. Never tried that.

Reminds me of the transistor vs tube guitar amps. Some people prefer to use quality tube guitar amp, as it has certain qualities that make guitar tone come alive. Others prefer to use solid state amps, and then emulate this 'coming alive' by adding various effects, pedals, whathaveyou downstream.

I'm more of a 'stick to the basics' guy, so I'd always go for the tube amp. Hence my preference for turntables over digital sources.

 

An enlightening thread.

I've had astonished friends and relatives over who've exclaimed that records played on my system sound "more like live music" than they've ever heard before.

But now I'll be sure to add "Yeah it does to me too! But it's actually analog's 'pleasing distortion' fooling your auditory system into sensing that. The joke's on us, eh?"

 

There is another aspect to it:

Digital reminds me hypertext, as opposed to regular text. If I'm reading a regular book, I usually do it sequentially. On occasion, I may skip a chapter or two, or start from the middle, etc., but that's not typically how I experience and enjoy books.

If I'm reading a hypertext document, I am liable to start clicking on links. Those links magically transport me to other parts of the digital document/book, or even to completely different digital books. That's exhilarating, as I'm now in control of the sequence and the dosage of the content I'm consuming.

But you see, with digital, I lose the organic connection with what the author had actually intended to portray. So in the end, this fast and furious digital diet, where I keep streaming and downloading and skipping all over the place, leaves me hungry and ultimately dissatisfied. That's the reason I prefer the analog, more sequential diet.

 

I got back into vinyl/TT fairly recently, and got a Tele a few weeks ago. So you're on a similar path! Best of luck!

 

Well he's not lurking anymore (right back at 'cha Little Brother .)

ELP 1st album :
And the answer is . . . 10!
7 US George Piros clicks/pops/surface noise
1 US CTH clicks/pops
2 UK Island Pink Rim
1 US "Victory" label CD
The 2nd UK Island is the keeper, a beauty (the 1st is a second-string spare,) along with the Victory CD.

And I haven't sold off any of the "defectives" so my 2 UKs and the CD have run me about $250 overall.

Good deal, eh?

 

Just today, I had my wife's uncle over helping me move something and he saw my turntable and asked me to play him some Neil Young on vinyl. I had him sit in the sweet spot and I pulled out After the Gold Rush and played side one. He shut his eyes and totally got lost in the music. Afterwards he asked me to play him the CD. From the first notes I saw his face scrunch up and he turned to me and said holy crap I forgot how good vinyl can sound, it just sounded so much more rich and I don't know, I can't explain it. I said I know man, that why I prefer vinyl.

Needless to say, we're gonna go turntable shopping for him soon lol.

 

That's the problem -- ignorance. It is clear from your description that your wife's uncle has never heard of the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem (Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem - Wikipedia ), so naturally he thought that CD sounds inferior. But the more people we manage to educate and expand their horizons, the less people will fall victim of that dark, medieval conspiracy that somehow analog sounds better.

I'll leave it to you to enlighten your uncle's views on the merits of digital music reproduction...

 

Far be it from me to correct my elders! (*duck*run*hide*)

 

Not sure "stick to the basics" really meant. Anyway, nothing is stopping you from using a tube amp with digital source.

You can do this:
Digital source -> dac-> high end receiver to add the pleasing distortion->receiver's preout->tube amp -> speakers

In fact, I would bet that if you could capture the output from you vinyl setup and play it back with your digital chain, you will also get that “energy” that made you so happy in your first post.

 

And it's very nice to be able to pull up an editor like Audacity and get rid of the @#$%^#^^ pops!

 

Lol. How about I just help him pick out a nice new table? I may recommend the Orbit table. I've heard really good things about it. In the mean time if he's serious I'll let him borrow my spare Technics direct drive table

 

Pretty sure that was drenched in sarcasm

 

That's why the lol is there

 

To quote Homer Simpson... "D'ohhhhh!"

 

I totally respect the fact that many people prefer the sound of analogue,but that does not mean it is warranted to have dig at the digital format in order to justify your preference.

I wrote this in another thread a few weeks ago and it sums up my feelings on this Digital v Analogue debate.

''It always make me slightly angry when people say that CD can make recordings sound 'hard' or 'flat'.It does not.A CD player will invariably play what is on the recording very accurately.Unfortunately many recordings are flawed and do sound hard and compressed.This is not the fault of the hardware playing it back accurately.A well recorded and mastered CD will sound superb and with no harshness or hardness.A sweet recording will sound sweet .A hard recording will sound hard.That is what a transparent source will do.
The reason some prefer the sound of LP's is because the analogue process can 'color' what is actually on the recording in a pleasant way.The slight HF roll-off.A bit of lower-mid bloom.Some inner grove distortion.A bit of nostalgic crackle.The motion of the vinyl gently rotating.Add to this the fact that in some modern recordings the mastering on vinyl is not quite as loud or compressed as the CD version.Or that older vinyl (produced well before poor mastering become an epidemic) can sound like a lovely antidote to the harshness of many modern recordings.
BUT to say vinyl sounds more natural/less harsh/more organic just because its doesn't play back what is actually on the recording as transparently and accurately as a CD player does, is unfair on the CD format in my opinion.''

 

Comparing analog sound reproduction to digital is a layered, complex and really deep endeavour. Although there is a huge variety in the quality of the source material -- well done LPs, poorly done LPs, well done CDs, poorly done CDs, well done hi rez files, poorly done hi rez files -- I still insist that there is room for generalization. Meaning, regardless of the actual level of care taken to produce the source, one can always assign certain qualities to analog playback that cannot be detected in the digital playback. And vice versa, of course.

Let's first consider how is sound being recorded: in terms of physics, sound is a measurable vibration of air molecules. When recording it, we rely on the fact that vibrating air molecules apply pressure on the membrane in the microphone. The kinetic energy of the vibrating microphone membrane gets converted to electrical impulses. These electrical impulses travel across the wire and instigate commensurable changes in the magnetic tape.

We see from the above description that the actual sound has already been processed by electrical components. When we use the signal stored on the magnetic tape to cut the LP, we are already twice removed from the original source.

So what we call 'analog' sound reproduction is actually a degraded, derived, twice removed signal. As such, it cannot but erode the pristine quality of the original performance.

Now when we move to the digital processing, we are processing the already pre-processed, degraded signal. Now we are trice removed from the original source.

Some people claim that this third step, the third derivation (i.e. the digitization of the analog signal) can safely be ignored in terms of producing any additional sound degradation. Really, no kidding? I beg to differ. I don't think any processing step can be safely ignored. Each and every act of tampering with the signal degrades it. I'm sure many people will disagree, but I'd need a convincing example which proves that tampering with the signal is 100% transparent.

So using an analogy (how apt for us analog lovers), I could say that analog sound reproduction is like cooking a meal: we take perfectly fresh ingredients, and then mess with them, combine them in all kinds of crazy ways, add some seasoning, add oil and lard and butter, crank up the heat, etc. In the end we get something we hopefully find enjoyable.

But digital sound reproduction (following this analogy) would be like taking such cooked meal, freezing it, then chopping it up, reheating it, refrying it, shoving it into microwave oven. How can the end result be identical? There is no way!

As for taking a dig at the digital format, I think most of us tend to do it because we feel cheated by the music industry. CDs and digital wouldn't be a big deal if we haven't been force fed the phoney propaganda how LPs are dead and CDs are 'perfect sound forever'. That's the thing we resent (and we all know that music industry execs did it out of greed, because CDs are more profitable for them than LPs).

But having LPs, CDs, DVDs, blu-rays, hi rez files, cassettes, 8 tracks etc. as various formats side-by-side is actually awesome. Freedom always boils down to freedom of choice.

 

Aren't most studio now record directly to digital master instead of tape master?

 

Yes, so?

 

It means your steps as described 2 posts above are now different.

Now both vinyl and CD are twice removed from original signal, no more trice removed, don't you agree?