I would think that about 90% of the devoted CD and digital music Lovers don't own any vinyl and simple state CD is better and 90% of devoted vinyl lovers own many CD's, so they have a better understanding of the difference between the Two..
Maybe we can make a proper scientific A/B study, Ask the LP owners which is more accurate..
Maybe we can make a proper scientific A/B study, Ask the LP owners which is more accurate..
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Yeah, MP3 VS LP is not the right way.. It seems which ever format is favoured there will be some sort of Slant..
If the internal electronis of any CD player are still close to it original calibration the sound will be pretty good.
Unfortunately even a damn expensive CD player will fail when it would approach the age of 10 to 15 years.
If the lens system or motor did not fail first, the inner capacitors will lost their good shape and the stereophonic sound will not be that stereophonic any more.
The turntable needs a high quality head and needle, and the direct drive ones could live for more than 25 years, most ones in 90s where build like to was an armored tank.
Even so vinyl records can not be used for that long, tape decks was a solution so to copy the music for every day use, so the expensive vinyl to stay protected as master copy.
Today very few own truly well performing speakers, or true high quality headphones.
Therefore the majority of people can not listen the differences.
Unfortunately even a damn expensive CD player will fail when it would approach the age of 10 to 15 years.
If the lens system or motor did not fail first, the inner capacitors will lost their good shape and the stereophonic sound will not be that stereophonic any more.
The turntable needs a high quality head and needle, and the direct drive ones could live for more than 25 years, most ones in 90s where build like to was an armored tank.
Even so vinyl records can not be used for that long, tape decks was a solution so to copy the music for every day use, so the expensive vinyl to stay protected as master copy.
Today very few own truly well performing speakers, or true high quality headphones.
Therefore the majority of people can not listen the differences.
Its a good point..
Diffraction losses from hard speaker baffles, waveguides, horns will mask the recored detail so CD or Lp, does it really matter..I'm surprised I don't see felt and rounded/beveled edges used on speaker design on this forum..
Compare a lesser TT setup to a good CD setup and CD might come out ahead depending on rest of the system..
I have been a mobile DJ since about 1977.
We started off with vinyl.
Where there wasn't a stage we had terrible trouble with needle bounce.
We would have to ask people to dance away from the record decks.
Then we moved on to CD's. This was better than vinyl in regards to bounce as disco CD players had large buffers. However we did get the occasional bad CD that skipped.
We are now on to laptops and MP3 players, MP3 for back up or playing playlists while we set up. There are no mechanical problems now. I use a sold state drive and that is great.
We started off with vinyl.
Where there wasn't a stage we had terrible trouble with needle bounce.
We would have to ask people to dance away from the record decks.
Then we moved on to CD's. This was better than vinyl in regards to bounce as disco CD players had large buffers. However we did get the occasional bad CD that skipped.
We are now on to laptops and MP3 players, MP3 for back up or playing playlists while we set up. There are no mechanical problems now. I use a sold state drive and that is great.
In my case in which I was using sound for radio broadcast, I was using marble plates below the turntables as isolation against accidental bumping over the workbench which was shared space with the mixing console.
That is true of modern vinyl and it will sound awful if it is mixed for playback on awful hand held players and mobile phones.
Older vinyl will sound better because it was mixed to be played on big old HIFI sets and there was nothing done to it to make it sound better on cheap little battery radios.
Older vinyl will sound better because it was mixed to be played on big old HIFI sets and there was nothing done to it to make it sound better on cheap little battery radios.
In the analogue days pretty much everything was carefully mixed/mastered to achieve the best compromise between playback on big stereos and cheap transistor radios.
That's why the dreaded Auratone 5c Super Sound Cube was the studio standard before Yamaha NS10s took their place.
It was a 5" paper-coned driver in a 7" cuboid box, no tweeter.
You should actually go at the start point which was live recordings by just microphones.
Mastering came later on, but all sound impressions are based according the age which an individual started listening music.
I started at the time that ABBA and Boney M become famous.
Suddenly all Daddy's become Cool back then .
Some of it is truly awful. A friend came by a while back with a copy of Adele's 21. That LP is a very good example of what not to do when mastering for vinyl. Probably sounds fine in an mp3 player with earbuds.
jeff
Adele 21 is one of the "last step" albums for assessing playback integrity ... because the sound elements within have been highly manipulated, the impression it normally conveys is of a ferociously intense, take no prisoners, auditory onslaught. Only a system tweaked and optimised to the highest level would allow the subjective balance to settle down to an acceptable level ...
The MP3 version is pretty awful, too. At least on speakers.
This is not actually true, many years back we contacted some experiments about getting high quality sound from MP3 for radio broadcast, less compression was just helping a bit the low frequencies at 100Hz and lower, but general quality was acceptable.
By my opinion MP3 true limits found to be at stereophonic sound, for example at Jean Michel Jarre music, that is complex and the artist does heavy use of stereophonic sound by actually playing with this technology so to create a new sound experience for the listener, the MP3 even by be recorded by the same CD disc, the MP3 was unable to give the same impression.
Equinox IV is a good test bed.
Equinoxe 4 - Jean Michel Jarre - YouTube
I certainly wish my vinyl LPs sounded better than CD. They don't, as much as I like them for other reasons.
Surface noise is a major problem. It seems much more difficult to get really good vinyl playback compared to digital.
I hear this a lot, and it is not a problem I am experiencing to any substantial degree. I wonder how much of this is cartridge and arm related? I do have relatively decent playback hardware; very good MC cartridges, good arms, Lundahl SUTs, and tube phono stages. Digital is Sony HAP-Z1ES and modified SCD-777ES, and I still slightly prefer vinyl in most cases.
I can only think of a few LP's that sound bad..
With 99% of my LP's there is resolution, accurate space thats unique to each recording, defined and pin point instrument placement in width and depth - all of this present even when there is strange and coloured signatures created by the recording chain..
With 99% of my LP's there is resolution, accurate space thats unique to each recording, defined and pin point instrument placement in width and depth - all of this present even when there is strange and coloured signatures created by the recording chain..
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