CD vs LP

[Bonsai]

Bonsai,

I enjoyed reading your reviews...our taste in music and recordings is quite similar - nice work!

Thanks Kevin!

 

[a.wayne]

Going thru the reviews right now Bonsai ...

 

[suntechnik]

When I transfer an LP to CD all the "magic" is still there. If a CD sounds bad you can only blame the people that made it. The format was and still is, very good.

Red Book is a good format for POP no doubt but inherently very different beast in compare to analogous LP. Low pass FIR basically means decimation that results interpolation has to be perform during CD playback. There are some very capable devices like Wadia decoding computers. However SACD is less price prohibitive approach.

imho most consumer CD-players sound unnatural and no good for classical music recordings reproduction at all in contra to LPs.

 

[Conrad Hoffman]

imho most consumer CD-players sound unnatural and no good for classical music recordings reproduction at all in contra to LPs.

Hey, looked around for any "consumer" CD players recently? There was a time when every major brand had whole tier of the things. Today you can play a CD in any DVD player, and there are probably a few carousel players left around, but try to find a high quality low cost single play unit aimed at the music lover. Certainly there are high end players (far out of my price range), but little other choice.

 

[midfi]

Perhaps musicians and sound engineers assume the material will go thru media sources in mp3 format, and therefore simply produce recordings ready for the compression?
I know bands can send in mp3 files to vinyl pressing shops and get back vinyl records to sell as merchandise (the usual way bands pay for their existance is thru merch sales during shows these days since no one buys CDs anymore).
What good is a vinyl record if the format it is made of is mp3? Can they use expanders and get back the dynamics?
How can we know that when we buy a record it is not already compressed for digital social networks? There should be some listing somewhere of how each and every album was made.

SemperFi, your post set the light bulb off (though rather dimly lit ) in my head! I don't know if the CD manufacturers still do it as I haven't bought a CD in I couldn't tell you when but they used to mark on the back of the case somewhere with AAD, ADD or DDD for the recording type. Cant take next to nothing to do the same thing with new vinyl, right?!? I guess for vinyl it would have to be AAA, ADA, and DDA being the final product is an analog device.

Oh and Toujours Pret to you from an Armored Cavalry guy...

 

[Bonsai]

Hey, looked around for any "consumer" CD players recently? There was a time when every major brand had whole tier of the things. Today you can play a CD in any DVD player, and there are probably a few carousel players left around, but try to find a high quality low cost single play unit aimed at the music lover. Certainly there are high end players (far out of my price range), but little other choice.

Time then to buy a few top loading mechanisms and build your own

;-)

 

[midfi]

Hey, looked around for any "consumer" CD players recently? There was a time when every major brand had whole tier of the things. Today you can play a CD in any DVD player, and there are probably a few carousel players left around, but try to find a high quality low cost single play unit aimed at the music lover. Certainly there are high end players (far out of my price range), but little other choice.

this is what I'm currently using...
CEC CD3300R CD Player Small price yet big on talent! Review By Todd Warnke

go it going thru one of these with a tube and power cord swap...
Hidef-Audio.com – Lite – DAC-68

 

[camusmuse]

... on the topic of cd playback..... I will sometimes use my laptop player(dvd), if I'm too lazy to get up to put a disc in my bluray player. But I have to admit, the bluray seems to have a great sound. Granted im using straight digital out for the BR to a Pasound avc-1800, have digital out on laptop, but have yet to compare. Have also yet to compare the DACs onboard the BR compared to the AVC.

Has anyone tried any similar comparisons? I also have a SACD changer, which really doesnt sound much better than the bluray through toslink out. I used to run my game room system through a Conrad Johnson DA3....sounded good, but not great...not for the money(recently sold it). I think that computer processing power has come along way in the past few years...and might be the future of "high-end" CD. But thats my opinion..I also enjoy FLAC .....at least its far superior to MP3.

More on topic.....I recently attended an acoustic concert and had a chance to talk to to the artist after the show as he had vinyl for sale. He seemed somewhat knowledgeable, and said that most everything is recorded Digital first regardless, and then converted to analog. I dunno...have yet to listen to the vinyl as my Thorens needs a major tune up and I dont want to mess up a brand new record. But yeah I also used to look for the AAA process...now I seem to be more concerned with what I am listening to, rather than how it was recorded. Too bad every great song, couldnt get the great recording it deserved..... anyway sorry for the ramble....but this topic got my gears a turning.

 

[ThorstenL]

Hi,

Has anyone tried any similar comparisons?

Yes. Frequently. When AMR came out with the CD-77 in 2006 it included a USB input (but no SPDIF connections at all - we have since relented on the point of not offering SPDIF, though it was a good one).

If the driving PC was correctly set-up (a task rather involved back then) there was no appreciable difference between the internal drive or the external PC Source. Of course, with bad setup (which was pretty common in 2K6) the PC sounded bad...

Nowadays a PC Transport that outputs Bitperfect, optimised Audio is as simple as getting any nice PC capable of running Windows 7, putting the simplest possible Win 7 installation onto it, adding J-River Media Centre and setting this correctly for your USB DAC (easy - normally use WASAPI Exclusive Event Style and maximise all buffering) and adding the pay version of Fidelizer. I normally recommend to use wired networking, as many wireless drivers network drivers are badly written and cause excessive latency.

I must note that using a machine dedicated to Audio (or AV) is pretty much mandatory, for reasons as of yet not fully understood, running the usual PC we now have, with internet chat software, dozends of "agent" programmes for Google updating, Adobe Acrobat fast start, Microsoft Office Fats start and G*d knows what else seem to have a NI on sound quality. This goes as much for Mac's as it does for PC.

I must also note that using the build in playback software (WMP on PC and iTunes on Mac) are not suited to high quality playback. Workaround solutions for either exist.

Ciao T

 

[midfi]

i prefer the sound of my meager vinyl setup (DUAL 1219, Jolida JD9) to my CEC cd player and DAC-68. The digital sounds good with certain cd's but the vinyl sounds great and the costs of my TT & phono pre are less than the CEC alone (but that's a different story).

 

[camusmuse]

Thanks both for the info....more stuff for me to play with.

.....and yeah some cds just seem to sound better, I have A/B tested a few recordings with "new" vinyl...and it just didnt have the dynamics that the cd did, perhaps the studio's digital to analog processor or the person running it was to blame. Maybe it was because most of it was recorded(and manipulated) in digital....I dont know.

Regardless I will hopefully always have all mediums setup and can pick and choose soon enough....gotta move a 350lb Sony XBR CRT first before I "redo" my current system....lol...