Vinyl vs CD - what's your experience?

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Some of the staunchest supporters of vinyl i know have truly poor sound turntable setups. It is almost comical. To get LPs sounding poor is very, very easy. I should know, done it many times :)

If i have to make the choice today it would be hard. Digital has really covered some ground since those atrocious gen1 and 2 cd players of the 80s and 90s. Too bad most of the 70s rock never made a successful transition to digital, even today's supposedly "hi-res" transfers do not compared well to the original LP pressings and that is putting it mildly.

Back to today. Never really warmed up to the cdp sound. The separate transport-spdif-dac sounded even worse. Those same 44/16 files off a dedicated server into a good dac otoh can sound every bit as musical as a good tt, albeit in a different way.

Both analogue and digital require a lot of work to get the sound right. There are no easy or cheap shortcuts. Digital has the obvious advantage of sounding good for longer and offering a much wider variety of music.
 
Why do records sound better? by Dave McNair

Why do records sound better? - Dagogo


Interesting read, thanks for posting it.

I have been an analog all my life, never owned a CD player. I do now have a laptop with external Xmos sound card etc etc, and it sounds really good. BUT my TT sounds better, let me clarify that by saying the digital still has the depth and definition but the vinyl draws you into the music, my wife calls it the bigness of the vinyl.

The only thing I can put that down to (before reading the article) is the compression wars that raged in the late 80's early 90's. It was interesting his comment about adding some tape hiss........ I have a couple of late CD's(Human Nature comes to mind) ripped to the laptop and they do sound amazing, but no vinyl to compare to.
 
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I've always had both. But to sound really good, there is both some minimal amount of money you have to spend, and setup is paramount.
When I checked the list prices of my favorite two players, I found they were both $2,500 list. I've also improved the sound quality of both the CD players and phono stages. Plus everything else in the chain except the speakers. A little extra work is what takes a good product to being a great product. By improve, I mean measurable and audible improvements.

I don't have a turntable at my work bench, but there is a CD player and tuner.

-Chris
 
I find only CD causes me switch off earlier than usual. The original digital system BBC Nicam a delight. The BBC used listening tests to optimise how it works. They hid one defect in the inherent FM radio noise. Apparently the reality of real life FM is that it can not retrive the last 3dB of program dynamic range. Obvious defects to an experienced listener at the transmission stage can not be heard in the front end induced hiss. Apparently all types of digital arrangements were tried and this one was the better compromise. This defect is called pumping noise. Experts say it is quite obvious before transmission.

Someone told me that the reason CD wasn't quite as good as Nicam is that the money ran out. It had to go to market in prototype form. 14 bit with oversampling a work of genius and not unlike the BBC way of making best of what you have. The BBC were annoyed no one thought to ask them for their research before launching CD and did find technical defects they could have helped with.

Friends who were professionals in sound recording were very intrigued by Mini disc. As you would imagine they said despite knowing they shouldn't my Burger king analogy applied and preferred it to bad 16 bit. This was before gitter was discussed as to what might be a problem. Even then people were speculating that in converting formats something good was happening.The alternative was that humans don't like reality. I cope well with real music so doubt that.

Talking to Tim Dr Paravacini by email I asked him if he really said tape recording is like digital without the need of a playback DAC. Amazingly he did. He said the bias frequency asks the same questions. His suggestion was 200 kHz bias and 192 kHz sampling not so different. He gave me a better description than that which I will not try to recreate. I think no playback DAC being the important fact.

I knew Michael Gerzon. No one on the planet knew sound recording better than Michael. As best I could I argued my dislike of digital. Michael with his usual walking on water style let me see the future. He said anything that is wrong. in digital is understood and would eventually be put right. For anyone who doesn't know his work his parents were on lossless compression. I have to say to my ears CD is the part of digital that now is the past. I love digital in general but mostly don't care for CD. I also think that Mini disc ripped from CD sounds nicer.

I listened to some BBC 24 bit recordings recently via LS5/8 . Surreal and wonderful. As my friend said eight hours a day says that most home hi fi soon would give you migraine. The 5/8 were mildly bland to start with. That soon dissapears. They were ones my friend recorded. I forget the medium. What
 
Bob Ludwig On Digital Audio from BAS Volume 18, Number 4 October 1989

Bob Ludwig On Digital Audio BAS Speaker

Regarding the resolution of the CD and the LP: I can make a digital recording of an LP that would sound identical to the original to almost everyone in a controlled A /B/X test, but I don't think even the high-end writers would suggest that one could make an LP of a CD that would be indistinguishable from the CD! This comparison reveals what I would call resolution, and to me the CD far surpasses the LP in this regard.

The question of musicality, however, is a more complicated one. I believe the LP to be the more musical of the two formats. Now, what does this mean? And is the vinyl disc inherently a musical medium, or do we think it so because our ears have grown accustomed to it, so that anything different is de facto less musical?

I engineer many CD reissues of old recordings, and often the CD sounds to me far superior to the original LP. There are times, however, that the LP sounds not only better than the CD but also better than the original master tape! Sometimes the echo seems to last longer on the disc than the master; sometimes there is more spaciousness on the LP; sometimes the record sounds brighter or more "open" in the top end. Since I cut a lot of these LPs in the first place, I know there was nothing "artificial" done to them.

What is going on here? My CD master tape sounds identical to the original output of the analog recorder, but the LP sounds better than either of them!
Also, in many cases a good original pressing will simply be more enjoyable to listen to on a good system than a CD. This is because all too often the CD is poorly made — done by inferior engineers on inferior equipment, without the artist or original producer having a single thing to do with the process. The artist and producer probably baby-sat the original recording through many hours of careful mastering and care in manufacture, but it is now seemingly no longer cost-effective for the record company to hire them to do it again. I have mastered the LPs on hundreds of gold and platinum recordings, but have been hired to do only a small fraction of their CD reissues because of the cost. Frankly, I can't listen to the new, butchered versions of some originally very fine records.
 
I think people make many assumptions about CD verses vinyl. Almost like writing about driving a car when you only have been a passenger.

I think I am repeating myself here. Many engineers found digital recording harder than analogue not least when you hit trouble with analogue it can sound better! If an engineer understands this he or she will get work. The public vote with their credit cards. Buy yourself a Sony TC377 and practice being a sound engineer. Its just like the best ever driving experience. Personally, I would have transferred or recorded all CDs on analogue. Then I could make many digital copies until one sounds right. Some TVs have a very narrow range where they look good. Digital can be like that. Having time to get it right is the secret. Also the copy one makes when in a hurry might not be the best.

A strong impression I get is the arguement isn't digital analogue. It's is CD a good example of 16 bit . Very occasionally I hear good CD. It's rare and it's not the discs so much as the machine. Right at the start of CD I thought the Denon DCD300 sounded very good. I waited a long time to hear better and it was a cheaper machine. The more expensive Denon players seemed less real sounding! Meridian 14 bit machines were stunning. Years later even more so. By oversampling they met the CD standard. The DCD300 was very rythmic and found bass nothing else could. The top was digital but nice. With some Bose 901 it was remarkably good. A tricky speaker. I had to modify the amplifier to let it shine. I changed the input to cope. The DCD300 used a single 16 bit dac with time delay correction. Maybe this cost cutting was good? My father in law was before the banking crisis a multi millionaire. His Bose speakers. I bought him the DCR 300 to get him started. My mother in law said he cried as it was the most expensive gift anyone ever bought him. Isn't life strange! His Hitachi turntable definitely wasn't as good. I think that's the only time in my life I have admitted that. Mind you I tuned the amplifier to work as initially it was clipping at the input.

I often buy cheap new world wine. Often it is very pleasing. CD has the problem of saying one is enough.When wine not wanting another is about being wise. When CD it's often boredom and feeling a bit fatigued.
 
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