Big subject. If there's music you just can't live without and its only on CD then I guess you will just have to listen to CD. But if your enjoyment is in listening to really good music really well recorded and played back there's just no reason to subject yourself to substandard audio. ie, CD.
I'm old enough to have gone from records and tape (open reel) to CD, and to CD/records, and now all records. Just reached a point in life where doing just for the sake of doing no longer cuts it. Variety for its own sake is such a waste. What few hours I have to enjoy listening to music, by God, I'm gonna spend it listening to music.
The OP is absolutely right about the sound quality. That one is so done beat to death its silly. The last guy who even questioned it was 20 years ago. Played both, never asked again.
Pretty much all the complaints are made up out of whole cloth and easy enough to dismiss. Surface noise? With CD the signal is the noise. My wife pointed this one out to me, saying she was shocked by how much less noise there was with records. I thought for sure she was mistaken. Surface noise is a lot worse with records. Eventually realized she meant the music itself, the whole signal, was turned into noise by the CD. She's right of course.
Fiddly finicky setup? Get real. Of course you can do that. It sure is not necessary. Half the stuff they pretend matters, really doesn't, not so much. My vintage 1973 Technics SL1700 with Stanton 681EEE was set up by eye ball and Shure teeter-totter VTF gauge forty years ago. When I dug it out of a box and played a record my wife from the next room who did not know what was going on asked me what sounded so good. Well we had been CD only, this was her first time in years hearing vinyl. So get real.
The rituals of playing a record? I couldn't play a CD without cleaning it either, and demagnetizing, and coloring, and then after all of that sitting down and.... sorry, what were you expecting? No matter what you do its still just a CD.
So now I play records. Records only. Well, movies. And technically I do play CD. The XLO demagnetizing tracks are on CD. So I play that. CD is great for that. Mindless, repetitive, programmable, nothing you would ever want to listen to. The appropriate technology used appropriately.
I'm old enough to have gone from records and tape (open reel) to CD, and to CD/records, and now all records. Just reached a point in life where doing just for the sake of doing no longer cuts it. Variety for its own sake is such a waste. What few hours I have to enjoy listening to music, by God, I'm gonna spend it listening to music.
The OP is absolutely right about the sound quality. That one is so done beat to death its silly. The last guy who even questioned it was 20 years ago. Played both, never asked again.
Pretty much all the complaints are made up out of whole cloth and easy enough to dismiss. Surface noise? With CD the signal is the noise. My wife pointed this one out to me, saying she was shocked by how much less noise there was with records. I thought for sure she was mistaken. Surface noise is a lot worse with records. Eventually realized she meant the music itself, the whole signal, was turned into noise by the CD. She's right of course.
Fiddly finicky setup? Get real. Of course you can do that. It sure is not necessary. Half the stuff they pretend matters, really doesn't, not so much. My vintage 1973 Technics SL1700 with Stanton 681EEE was set up by eye ball and Shure teeter-totter VTF gauge forty years ago. When I dug it out of a box and played a record my wife from the next room who did not know what was going on asked me what sounded so good. Well we had been CD only, this was her first time in years hearing vinyl. So get real.
The rituals of playing a record? I couldn't play a CD without cleaning it either, and demagnetizing, and coloring, and then after all of that sitting down and.... sorry, what were you expecting? No matter what you do its still just a CD.
So now I play records. Records only. Well, movies. And technically I do play CD. The XLO demagnetizing tracks are on CD. So I play that. CD is great for that. Mindless, repetitive, programmable, nothing you would ever want to listen to. The appropriate technology used appropriately.