Vinyl - One Word - WOW!!

WOW

I stopped listening to vinyl because it didn't sound too good, I got tired of changing the steel needle and cranking the arm to wind the motor after every song LOL!

The OP, according to previous and current posts, is using a basic, 15 year old, Marantz CD player and  1980's Denon 50 Watt per channel Receiver into B & W speakers and prefers the vinyl playback of Project Debut Carbon Evo turntable. I'm not surprised!

JJbeason14, any discussion regarding vinyl playback is better served when we know the rest of the vinyl playback chain, ie cartridge and phono preamp.

Not trying to be critical,  but this forum is a wealth of user knowledge and experience with much to learn. 

And now a  few ramblings on my digital experiences.

I feel the  vinyl vs digital debate, it is less relevant as digital has matured. They both can sound fantastic when done right and rather much less so when done wrong,. This forum is full with members extolling the virtues of their recent purchases, " I just bought/heard the  blah blah blah, its' a gamechanger". It makes us audiophiles feel good after we see the visa bill!. 

My personal experiences  streaming music on Tidal with a Lumin U1 mini and Musician R2R DAC is that many older releases have been remastered for the better ....guess what?....not too Shabby sounding at all. 

 I can now populate my musical choices almost exclusively to releases that have both great music and  great sound .

At my age, life's too short to listen to badly recorded music no matter how good the  content. With digital streaming, there is more well recorded and brilliant music than one could listen to in 10 lifetimes.... all with  subscription that costs pennies a day. I like that! These are in some ways good times for music lovers.

"Old" vinyl, pressed before the digital era,  when that vinyl was made from the analog master tape sounded great. I have several friends with 1000s of records bought in the 60s, 70s, kept in pristine condition. Most sound wonderful.

Current vinyl is a horse of a different colour. Almost all current vinyl you can buy (except perhaps audiophile pressings) has been made either from original recorded to digital masters or from digital copies of the original analog masters. Once the music has gone through one or 2 format conversions before being vinyl, it will have lost some of that analog magic. 

So if a current purchase new LP sounds better on your turntable than your digital source, and they at some point were from the same digital master I can only come to one of 2 conclusions why:

#1 Your analog implementation (turntable, tonearm, cartridge, phono preamp) is  better than your digital.

#2 Your analog front end alters the sound in some way that makes it a more  pleasing for you. Nothing wrong with that. The purpose of this hobby is the pursuit of musical enjoyment.

I personally found very little difference on current pressings between my digital front end I described previously and my analog front end (VPI Prime, Benz Wood, Art Audio Phono preamp).

That's pretty much why I stopped buying vinyl.

So for those with huge old record collections, enjoy your treasures, but for those starting to build a record collection from scratch , well.... have fun I guess.

I no longer spend all that time physically going to stores to buy records although I do miss the thrill of finding a forgotten treasure in some dusty record bin in somewhere land.

@dogberry 

Love it!