No comparison, CD always sounds so cold and gritty. Vinyl is so much warmer, smoother and has better imaging and much greater depth of sound. It’s like watching the world go by through a dirty window pane when listening to a CD. Put the same LP on the turntable and Voila! Everything takes on more vibrancy, fullness and texture.
Just like your vinyl which requires a external phono stage.....Digital streaming needs a streamer device and a DAC. You can go with one box solutions from NADAC or Bricasti that can stream and provide internal DA Conversion. And yes, you can create your own ‘playlist’ with each track. No need to run up a USB cable here....all you need is Ethernet cable from you router and analog RCA or XLR to your pre or integrated. One box typically don’t have internal storage so you would need a external NAS to store your ripped files.
Or you can buy Aurender N100C which comes with internal 2-4TB storage and an outboard DAC.
Plenty of choices for a great digital setup that can be just as satisfying as your vinyl setup as long as you’re willing to explore and keep an open mind.
@mikelavigne OTOH maybe you need to find yourself better digital playback if you are open minded enough to consider it?
You raise a good point, but digital has a long way to go before it can fully integrate into traditional systems with both a recording (archiving) and playback (streaming) function in one product that can stand alone or optionally interface to a PC. The variants of DSD have the performance potential, but have not reached a level of consumer-friendliness to go mainstream. That’s not to say that the mainstream even cares, but the products need to be more operator-friendly from an interface and functionality perspective.
@sleepwalker65, if you check out my system page....
......you can see that i have been open minded and have found myself ’better digital playback’, which I’ve compared with my vinyl and RTR tape and found it comes quite close and is not humbled by the analog.
of course, we all have our own viewpoints on what ’better digital playback’ might be and my view is just my own. maybe you have investigated what ’better digital playback’ which can come close to vinyl and could share that information with us?
my only point was to say that digital playback certainly exists that approaches the musical performance satisfaction of vinyl, but depending on the vinyl it might cost a pretty penny to acquire.
and I do have 7+ terabytes of dsd files, 1xdsd, 2xdsd, and 4xdsd, and assure you it’s very mainstream these days with most dacs. I listen to it often.
have a great day and we likely agree more than we disagree.
Your shortsightedness and ignorance is clearly evident when you say, ..... BTW.... until you do you would never know or understand how far digital streaming has come.
I may be impatient, but not shortsighted. I’ve been watching for something so obvious it’s painful that the industry hasn’t delivered on yet: an unencumbered way to take one’s existing (and possibly massive) media collection of all kinds (LPs, CDs, SACDs, tapes...) and archive it to 2xDSD or 4xDSD on a media server running on a PC or Mac or NAS elsewhere in the home. This is simply not possible without dragging in a PC and connecting up USB cables and an ADC in addition to the DAC / network streaming device required to listen to it. Internet radio and Roon are not enough. Give me the ease of use of a tape deck, albeit with the ability to title each track and group into albums. I don’t think that exists, or maybe I’m looking in all the wrong places.
I know you have not caught up to digital streaming so I will spare you the tech talk. Your shortsightedness and ignorance is clearly evident when you say,
“digital has a long way to go before it can fully integrate into traditional systems with both a recording (archiving) and playback (streaming) function in one product that can stand alone or optionally interface to a PC”.
BTW, you no longer need to rely on run of the mill consumer laptop or PC to enjoy state of the art digital streaming. You can look into Aurender, Innunos, Lumin, and Antipodes brands to start your journey into the world of digital streaming....until you do you would never know or understand how far digital streaming has come.
Sleepwalker 65 , you didnot mention what your digital setup was and cost ,and cables, as well as your record player setup. we want to know what you are comparing to see how you came to that conclusion .i owned a Audiostore ,and they both can sound excellent ,the latest digital has several inherent advantages. SN ratio, Dynamic range , 2x the musical information on the given disc,or recording, as well as much lower Bass response. that is the mechanical limitation of records, and every year digital continues to keep getting better and I donot miss having to clean , de static, the pops and clicks. Cartridge,needle upkeep. No I just pull out my tablet play a few CDs in any order I want and just enjoy them .
Not true at all , if you have a good recording and a Good quality digital playeror dac, with good cables , digital can better a record in several ways that are excellent. Vacuum tube dacs sound rich and detailed ,as well as top solidstste units.. A record is only capable of12 bits,digital more then double that. SN ratio not even close, dynamic range is at least 30 dB betterthen any record, as well as well as low Bass response. Any record player that is decent will cost over $5k with cables, with a good quality cartridge. Digital in a similarpriced comparison is every bit as good or better, please remember the new records are are well mastered. buy a mobile fidelity digital master , or MQA master digital recordings you have excellent quality music, and digital keeps getting better and better.
Always? My David Manley VTL CD's sound very good to my ears. Very well recorded. No fatigue. Not one-dimensional. I use "Toolbox" as one of my reference music sources.
to each his own.... I grew up with vinyl, because that's all that was available and I was glad to see the development of compact disc. The notion that CD is "cold and gritty" does have some merit because early CD's were poorly mastered in the rush by record companies to build out their CD catalogs. However the recent re-mastered versions done in the last 25 years, mostly by careful re-equalization, has been most excellent. I still listen to my vinyl collection from time-to-time but I don't enjoy all the distracting pops and clicks and constant incessant background rumble. I do enjoy the smooth clean sound of the same music on my CD...and without having to get up and flip the record over half way through the audition. Don't forget that many albums even from the early 80s were digitally recorded and mixed to begin with. If you really gotta have your pops and clicks and extreme high frequency roll off there's software that can add the aforesaid noise and rumble to a CD rip....
My $1,200 turntable sounds better than my $1,400 CD player. The CD player has tubes in it but the turntable don't. I wonder what it all means. Fact: a vinyl record is a reproduction of a real time musical performance. Fact: a compact disc is not a real time reproduction no matter how you slice it.
The main problem with CD playback is that scattered laser light inside the transport makes its way to the photodetector where it’s detected as noise. The photodetector isn’t too swift. The Green Pen partially corrected this problem by absorbing the RED portion of the scattered light. But the RED portion is only a fraction of the total scattered light since, you know, the laser nominal wavelength is infrared - invisible, 780 nm. The good news is now you hear what CDs were always *supposed* to sound like. More to follow....
Since I build a DAC and phono stage the phono beats the CD playback so far by far. My DAC sounds better than most vinyl rigs in direct comparison so that should tell you something about the phono stage. Happy Listening..
A $5,000 vinyl rig will sound better than a $500 CD player. Try a $5,000 CD player and report back.
Wow, now that’s a good example of fact-based thinking 🤔 NOT! As in “he said he paid 50% more than I did for exactly the same thing”, so one is a fool and one is a wiseman. Price has little correlation on sound quality after a threshold of VALUE rpt VALUE is attained. By the way, anyone who calls a high end audio system a “rig” is pretty out of touch.
Man that has got to be some bad digital you have that it was so easily beaten by vinyl. I am a big vinyl fan but personally feel you need to spend a good 3-5 times more for a vinyl system to have it beat digital.
Also, digital needs to be more operator friendly to compete with vinyl? Vinyl, while it can sound great is about as unfriendly a setup as I have very seen.
@mikelavigne OTOH maybe you need to find yourself better digital playback if you are open minded enough to consider it?
You raise a good point, but digital has a long way to go before it can fully integrate into traditional systems with both a recording (archiving) and playback (streaming) function in one product that can stand alone or optionally interface to a PC. The variants of DSD have the performance potential, but have not reached a level of consumer-friendliness to go mainstream. That’s not to say that the mainstream even cares, but the products need to be more operator-friendly from an interface and functionality perspective.
There are bad records and bad CD's, and there are examples of both that are quite good. I have always believed that vinyl is superior just because of the way it's made......it's a real time recording of a musical performance whereas CD is is little "chops" of the performance. If you had digital ears, digital recordings would sound superior but our ears are analog. Having said that, I do have discs that sound good and records that sound bad but it's not the format that makes it so, it's the recording engineer.
Agreed with the comments so far: words like "always" aren’t helpful and I can’t take anyone’s claim seriously with descriptions like "always looking through a dirty window pane."
Though I do think the OP was jesting somewhat as a flame on the other thread.
Both digital and LP can be awesome. I’m crazy about vinyl these days, but my digital source - just ripped CDs and Tidal streamed to a regular old Benchmark DAC - continues to sound fantastic - pristine, clear, beautiful. Admittedly things do get some help in sounding rounded and organic going through my Conrad Johnson tube gear. But in any case I’ve had many great listening experiences with digital in plenty of systems, not just mine.
And besides, there’s no good argument against digital’s better potential accuracy. A good digital needle-drop copy can accurately capture the sound of vinyl more than the reverse.
not all CD playback is created equal, and not all vinyl is created equal.
use of words like 'always' and inferring universal domination by vinyl is not helpful. but I agree with some of the spirit of what you are saying.
at the top of the food chain for both formats vinyl is better, but CD (or 16/44 files) can sound awesome.....even compared to great vinyl. and surpassing the very best digital will cost you dearly in dollars.
OTOH maybe you need to find yourself better digital playback if you are open minded enough to consider it?
Apples to Oranges.Put on a recording that has been mastered correctly and everything is fine.Get off the Vs thread and save this hobby. Audio lovers/Audiophiles got absolutely crushed by the mp3 folks!!!
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