Vinyl or wait for the new stuff??

My response has a historical turn to it, because I think the question is the product of its time.

Vinyl was brutally attacked and discredited with lies by the CD's promoters when they needed market share to survive. The CD was only just good enough at that point to replace the vinyl LP for many listeners who had poor-quality turntables. Ironically, the Linn Sondek had only just come onto the market and started to convince a small number that the problems of music reproduction should be addressed at the source. We were not source-oriented before this.

The Linn was expensive. Cheap CD players replaced background noise with distortion in the highs and loose rhythm but these failings were of an order we were not used to. This unfamiliarity was enough to allow many to believe the hype and dump the LP for CD. However the attention that was paid to the source had the result of opening ears to the CD's problems and consequently CD media and playback have improved. Again ironically, if the CD had not appeared the way it did, it might have failed on the market and something with higher sampling rates and longer words, something genuinely competitive with vinyl, might have appeared five years later and convinced many more listeners the LP was dead. Recycling was not then in vogue, so much vinyl which might have been useful for raincoats would have wound up in landfill.

Vinyl and the CD have thus helped each other. The CD was introduced when digital technology was only borderline, barely ready as a music medium. Vinyl has preserved some wonderful music and served as a reference, showing us the promoters were lying. Perfect sound forever, for Pete's sake !

Vinyl and the CD complement each other. One gives more natural music, the other gives us performances we can't get on vinyl. CD is also more convenient to use, and that's good. I think it only makes sense to get into high-end vinyl if you already have a lot of records and you know you want to hear them. However, if you are not satisfied with your CD system and you have bought it using your ears ; if you have looked into room treatment, cables, power supply and component synergy ; if you have heard vinyl do it so much better that you know that's what you want ; then you are condemned to spend a lot of money on a turntable setup and a record collection.

But no reproduction system is perfect and you could instead rest where you are and concentrate on finding software you want to listen to. When there's a critical mass of good software available in another format, you can make the move. In the meantime, if you need to spend more money on music, you could, if you don't already do it, support live music in two ways : go to concerts, and subsidize young musicians to study and purchase instruments.

Fun to read your reaction, Doug S. ; I have to say it was a bit of a chore reading through the spelling quirks but I understand it helps not to take all this too seriously.

No commercial CD player for 12 years after the Linn, you say ? I don't know. When I was selling in Canada in1974-5, we hadn't heard of the Linn yet. The Ariston RD-11 was the best we had ( and it was miles ahead of the rest and cost an astronomical $ 800 ).

Hi-fi was last on my hobby list in the early 80's but surely there was a commercial CD player by 1984 or earlier ?

My point is still pertinent in any case--the Linn being costly, relatively few people had heard it and could compare it to the new CD medium. It took time for Linn-type technology to influence the industry enough for people to try to duplicate the essential points for less money than the LP12. There just wasn't enough lead time for the LP playback revolution to establish itself firmly enough to counter the CD lie campaign.

That doesn't mean there's no point in finding out, by listening, if vinyl is what you really want. I wanted to point out that the CD's premature ascendancy in the market was what kept vinyl an interesting listening experience in comparison. Vinyl can undoubtedly be surpassed, and perhaps will be in the next technological cycle. Right now, it has something the other medium doesn't. The other medium knows this and is still trying to reach its full potential.

Jphilips, bravo for doing your comparison and telling us the results. As you know, you are not the only one to have done such a thing--UHF magazine comes to mind, and also a German researcher who additionally used tubes vs transistors as a parameter. And many of us have done it too.

These comparisons are all needed, because of the snap judgements we humans like to impose based on what we think is consensus. In other words, we don't trust our own ears, and the proof needs to be demonstrated. I am sure nobody who has heard such a shootout goes away unchanged, but you have to hear the difference, not just hear about it.

Bravo for doing such a public demo.

If I were newly dissatisfied with CD ( maybe after Jphilips' demo ), I would be looking into vinyl and SACD as alternative sources. I would like to say that my own experience with hi-res digital, both SACD and DVD-audio, has not convinced me to add yet another source.

What surprised me the most was the relatively small difference between first-class CD and hi-res. I conclude that vinyl can remain a priority for me, because it's better than both when all three are done right.

Two questions arise about high resolution digital audio, of course.

First, is hi-res digital being done right, that is, to or near the limit of its potential? Both vinyl and 16/44 digital needed twenty years to reach theirs.

Second, if it is not yet being done right, what should be corrected? Perhaps the recordings chosen for issue on SACD don't offer genuine high-res, or higher-res than what you can get on vinyl and CD. Perhaps the playback technology has trouble extracting part or all of the extra info.

I have been told that both are quite likely. And this, plus my small listening experience, plus my own nature which is excessively prudent, leads me to conclude that I should not bother yet with SACD.