Is analog & vinyl anoying? Is it worht it.

'That is why for me yes, analog is annoying, over- populated and endorsed by terminal anal retentives and loonies but so worth it'

As precise an encapsulation of the issue at hand as I've ever read!

OTOH, you have to ultimately ask yourself if it's 'worth it'..... Either bite the bullet, and buy a tt, or go on the digital forum to continue searching for that ever elusive 'analog' sounding cdp!

I'm just saying.

Yes the alternative is live music! But sometimes the artist you love most is dead, drug F#@ked or retired. What can make things worse is they were never re-released on CD or if they did it sounds like S#!t! When this happens and you can get hold of some of their records you learn to appreciate a good properly set up analog rig as it is sometimes the only way to enjoy some music. A really good turntable set up with a decent recording always gets me more engaged in the performance of the music when I compare with the same release on CD and I have a very good CD playback system. If both are recorded well the record sounds more engaging and alive than CD that still sounds sterile to me. It never ceases to amaze me that a compressed carbon rock vibrating in a blob of vinyl EATS digital as far as my ears go. But I have heard reel to reel 2nd copies of master tapes and they blow records out of the water. The same goes for home recordings at 92kbs with my Broadcast sound card compared to compressed 16 bit CDs of the same live material. It is simply one more medium to enjoy the music. For me it is best described by the groupie stuck for very debauched reasons to the back seat of the tour bus on Frank Zappas Joe's Garage album. "Music is the Best" That is why for me yes, analog is annoying, over- populated and endorsed by terminal anal retentives and loonies but so worth it.

Totally!

depends on who's asking.
its one of those things that if you have to ask----then its not worth it.
i know allot of guys who played in bands that couldn't care less about all this,they are happy as all get out with ipod.
i even have an old pal who has played behind some pretty big names and is now a sound engineer he thinks my pursuit of HI FI is nonsense and too expensive.
he tells me how digital is wonderful and in what it lacks in the natural sound stage it makes up for with sub sonic lows and dog whistle highs.
who cares i for agreement.
i cant get enough records.

Viridian...Holt or Hirsh. What I remember is the astonishing differences between mics, all of which are well regarded models.

The fact that many of us make time to listen to vinyl, there must be some merit to it. I love my telarc discs, something about the bass I just don't get with vinyl. But of my three versions of Kind of blue, the classic records vinyl is best by a wide margin.. I've a/b'd for friends and everyone agrees, without exception, that the vinyl kills the sacd version. I use a Sony modded by Matt Anker (sacd mods). I am sure if I invested more in my digital rig I could get better sound. I am also sure that there will be a day when a digital format will be available that rivals or surpasses vinyl in every way. When that format is available at a reasonable price, count me in! By then I am sure I will be too old to be running to my tt every 15 minutes, adjusting cartridges etc!

Many of us vinyl spinners have been in the hi fi hobby for many years and had large album collections before the silver disc.Most have tried digital and many converted but many just run both formats and try to buy premium vinyl and use digital to warm up the system and play in the car.It looks in the near future that hi resolution downloading will be the next step in the digital chain and although I havent taken the plunge I have been researching a lynx sound card in a silent Pc.The fact that you can sample a track or two before buying and do it all from home with no waiting makes this perhaps a viable alternative.I see this as complementing my current system not replacing it.For me vinyl will never die, its way too much fun and the cds spend more time in the car anyway, a place where for sure they do a better job than an lp.

Viridian...Did you ever listen to that Test CD, I think it was put out by Stereophile, where Julian Hersh (SP?) reads an essay using various models of microphones? Anyone who has heard this recording can't possibly believe that A/D and D/A converters color sound more than mics.

Hxt1...If 80 percent of your LPs predate digital, you are the exceptional case which proves the rule.

And by the way, if you check my first post you will find that I merely pointed out that most of the music on LPs has been through the digital format.

eldatford your first statement is ridiculous. Eighty percent of my records were produced before digital even existed! Yes I have some thin sounding digitally remastered records, what of it? Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses, but I digress; if we read the op's thread he simply asks if it is worth the hassle. Well to all of the turntable owners on this site it is, to all of the people who sotched their tt , it ain't. To endlessly argue whether digital is superior to analog is completley ridiculous and futile... We may as well be arguing whether Pinot is 'better' than merlot!
Or say.... Converters are 'better' than transducers.
Let's bring it back to topic shall we? IMHO vinyl isn't a hassle at all, I see no need to justify my stance, YMMV. Good luck.

My point is that the audio signal is probably digital from just after the mic preamps to the LP cutting head..all through the mixing process. The vinyl final product might be thought of as "new wine in old bottles".

But Viridian brings up the point of transducers...mechanical-to-electrical,(Microphones) and electrical-to-mechanical,(speakers). Transducers color sound far more than any other factor. And the LP loop includes two more transducers than CDs (cutting head and cartridge). Unless you count A/D and D/A converters as transducers (a bit of a streach) CDs have only the microphone and speaker to color the sound.

"...it is vinyl or sat radio..."
Why hasn't sat radio brought back the high end tuner. ?

Hxt1, no need to apologize for vinyl. i no longer listen to cd's, it is vinyl or sat radio. soon there will be better servers and better means of receiving, but to me cd's are a dead issue. i never liked ipods or mp3's either. high bit rate streaming video and music next future, but untill then it remains vinyl! the set up, treatment and handling of vinyl is part of the ride. oh and Eldartford is just jealous. so enjoy.

And yes Viridian, I agree with you as well, However let's not leave the master tapes out of the equation! :-)
Only thing my TT is missing is an analog to digital converter, so I can run it thru my DAC, and 'smooth out the sound' a bit!

Eldartford..... I am not digiphobic, I actually own a cd player AND a dvd player, and yes I am aware of digital mixing AND mastering. At the end of the day, I listen to vinyl more than I listen to cd's because I like it. I like listening to cd's to, I'm not afraid of them. My previous post was a simple observation, take it how you wish, if you read deeply enough into it to see 'digiphobia' then so be it.

I just spent the last three weeks tweaking my turntable-re-leveling, re-calibrating speed; bought new, upgraded tone arm cables (broke them in), got a stylus gauge to lock in the VTF, spent a few days with walley tools adjusting & optomizing VTA; bought new walker audio record brushes, got new (AI) fluid, stylus cleaner, put new isolation devices under the motor, basically an entire over haul.

All I can say is GEEEEEZ..... The time cleaning and destatisizing is like rubbing the genies bottle...
It is soo worth it.

They say that some things, like making sausage, you don't want to watch. Digiphobics, like Hxt1, probably should not watch LPs being recorded or mixed :-)

I think it is simple. The end goal in audio is to reproduce analog sound, an lp playback system is completely analog front to back, whereas digital systems take an analog source, converted to digital, and then reconvert it to analog. There's a whole lotta converting going on. I think one of vinyl's merits is the simplicity and purity of the interface itself... a needle on a record.

Is analog it worth it, YES YES YES YES & YES.
Yes I think it is!
You can read the liner notes without a magnifing glass while listening & enjoyihg the music. You can also see the art without squinting. Try that with a cd, I don't think so.

Yeah Chris, I've been buying up MoFi's recent reissues. Every one has been outstanding in both mastering and pressing. I think they're new releases are as good as it gets.

Dave

I played the Mobile Fidelity release of Bernard Herrmann's Fantasy Film World on 200 grams vinyl yesterday. Wow, that was the first time I heard a 200 grams vinyl release. Of course this was an audiophile release, so not only the quality of the vinyl was outstanding, but also the preparation of the stamper, the pressing procedure and the remastering job. 200 grams vinyl is quite heavy you know... It is also a sort of physical experience to hold this record in your hands and to put in on the turntable.

Chris

I started setting up my system about 3yrs ago with CD player. While hunting for CD player upgrade I stumble upon vinyl played thru a cheap NAD integrated amp with Linn Sondek. I was so taken by the vinyl sound, that I went on a massive buying spree purchasing 2000-3000 LPs, most of it original thru ebay and online purchases. All u got to do to understand the difference between vinyl and CD is to check out Civil War Vol 1, Mercury LPSD 2-901. The booklet that comes with this LP is a history book of American civil war !!! This something you can never get from CD. There is a saying , where there is love , nothing is too much trouble and there is always time. Off course occasionally I m lazy , then I will play my tuners. Easy, non stop free music- no trouble but merely played for the love of music. Happy listening

I feel that vinyl simply produces more realistic sound...a feeling of immediacy. It's a "je ne sais quoi" tht makes vinyl sound more musical...something that one cannot evaluate in an A-B test.

Let's see now if I go with the Stax headphones and tube amp I can have a killer system. No vinyl. No room treatment. No cables. Think of the money I can save. No complaints form the neighbors.

my new cd player. Accuphase DP57.

I found out what system (see my post above) the store I visited was . Here it is:

Technics SL1200 Turntable
Ortofon Pro S Cartridge w/ OM 30 Stylus
NAD 1155 Power Envelope
ADS L70 Speakers

No wonder. In the other thread, majority votes has said the Technics SL1200 is said to be good value TT.

Tvad,

I don't question your observation but it begs the question why shouldn't a brand new CD play properly from the get go?

Did you try other CDR's - like the clear silver ones that look more like regular CD's ( at least superficially)

Shadorne...Yes, interpolation is a fall-back method which is just an alternative to aborting. The R/S algorithm used for CDs will only fail for very severe damage. It is not intended that interpolation should occur for any significant length of time.

The "robustness" of the RS algorithm (how much bad/lost data it can recover) is chosen according to how noisy the data is expected to be. For a spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, and sending back pictures, corruption or total loss of data for more than a minute is fully correctable. The downsode is that a great deal of redundancy is in the data stream so it takes many minutes to transmit a picture that you might download to your computer in a few seconds.

Eldartford,

Actually I just answered my own question on the last post. So I thought I would share it.

Cross-Interleaved Reed Solomon Coding

It states

INTERPOLATION: If a major error occurs and a sample cannot be perfectly reconstructed by the error control circuitry, it is possible to "guess" the content of the sample; that is, obtain an approximation by interpolating it off the neighbouring audio samples. While this concealment will not "fix" the error, it will make it inaudible, offering a graceful degradation of audio quality as clicks and pops are avoided.

A corroded CD with errors from additional random pits over the surface would be a candidate for "interpolation" - as the data will be consistently affected rather than in "error bursts". (Corrosion being a very different situation from a scratch, dirt or thumb print on the surface)

I suspect my rotten CD was being interpolated in regions where data was bad for more than 2.4 mm.

--------------------------------

Now back to the Shine-Ola comments. Armed with the above informaton from Wikipedia it seems that Shine-Ola could cause an audible improvement if the CD surface was dirty enough to cause interpolation but not cause skipping. This situation would mean that the CD would sound OK to the listener (no skipping) but would still benefit from being cleaned because there was excessive interpolation going on (excessive interpolation would definitely be audible, at least I can hear on a CD with CD Rot)

However, cleaning is cleaning and there is no reason to suspect that Shine-Ola offers the only effective way to clean a CD.

BTW: I don't handle my CD's much, as I only ever feed them into the machine once and they stay there. So I may not need to clean my CD's - but others might benefit from keeping them clean.

Shineola was a brand of shoe polish. I don't know if they make it any more. It was brown, and had the consistency of you know what.

Do people who have skipping CDs clean them a lot, or does cleaning CDs a lot cause them to skip?

Eldartford,

04-18-07: Eldartford
I really question the need to clean CDs.

I agree with you. However my personal experience with CD rot did leave my faith in the robustness of CD's slightly shaken. (CD rot is pitting damage occuring on the silver CD layer of a badly manufactured disc which corrodes from the inside over ten years (below the lacquer surface)

What struck me as very odd was that the affected CD still played without skipping but with audible distorting scratchy noise (no skips)...so much for error correction! I must emphasize that this was one CD out of thousands - so this is by no means indicative of CD's in general. However, I was expecting a bad CD to NOT play at all!!!

TVAD eihter you are lot younger than I thought or you hsve no sense of humor.

I started to to get some Shine-Ola. I could not distinguish it from some other subtance.

I really question the need to clean CDs. Except for a few with obvious major defects I have never had one skip. People who clean their CDs as if they were LPs seem to have a lot of problems. Draw your own conclusion. The error correcting encoding of CD data "cleans" the data stream.

Gonna take delivery on new cd player. Don't need preamp. What's a good cleaning method for cd's?

Viridian...I agree that it is astonishing that a mechanical media like a vinyl LP can sound so good. With some dynamic equalization (instead of the fixed RIAA curve) it can be as quiet as a CD, and with reduced distortion. (This was the DBX LP system, which I once had).

I believe that the CD4 system used a carrier with frequency modulation above 20 KHz. Because it was FM an undistorted waveform was not necessary. It was intended that the rear channels have full bandwidth capability (20 to 20K) so the cartridge had to work up to 40 KHz. In fact, although CD4 was a flop, phono cartridge design was greatly improved as a result of CD4.

I think that the carrier signal was at 44K Hz, but certainly above 40K. That of course forced cartridges to track at much higher than previously.
The response, however, wasn't necessarily flat to 44K and many carttridges achieved the higher frquency response by designing them to 'ring' at the carrier signal frequency.

salut, Bob p.

Viridian...Some recent tests that I ran on my humble phono system (Shure v15mr) suggests that, to my surprise, some signal up to 35 KHz does actually exist on some records, (at a very low level) so I won't contest your suggestion that 45KHz is possible. The low end is, IMHO, the important difference relative to CD. For a CD there is no roll off the bass to limit groove modulation amplitude, or mix to mono to prevent stylus hopping, or feedback. And, my ears still work quite well down to 20 Hz, but are deaf (to sine waves anyway) over about 14KHz.

Regarding dynamic range, on my system the noise floor of a "silent" groove is about 80 dB down from the peak of a loudly recorded LP, and a similar test of a CD yields about 100dB. I admit that I didn't read your reference (web names that go on for two lines are a challange) but the ones that I have seen usually talk about listening to signal that is many dB BELOW the noise floor. Frankly I don't enjoy listening unless the quiet passages of music are well above the noise floor. A signal that lies well below a noise floor can be detected by computer processing and perhaps by ear, but I would not include that in a practical measurement of dynamic range.

I agree that most music lovers probably dont have these kinds of systems, this is a hobby and the equipment research and sound production go hand in hand, it appears most all men are nerds just we all have different passions.
There are the Model Train nerds, Civil War buffs, Coin and Stamp nerds, Photography, aquarium, fishing, hunting,
even Harley riders are nerds about their bikes.....the list goes on and on because we are all better off if we have a passion and some vehicle for a reasonable dose of
Obsessive Compulsive behavior.