To me this point is the most important one, thanks Pano 🙂. Engineering is about (according to Henry Ford at least) doing for $1 what any fool can do for $2. Bang for the buck is way higher with digital. That's what makes it such fun as a DIY designer.
Get some more of the voice of experience.
Don't you guys have parties anymore? You know, where people get drunk, dance around, and fall on the turntable? Vinyl was and is a ******* nightmare. You'd buy a new album, get it home, play it once and it'd never sound the same again. All the dust in the room would make a beeline for it, if your stylus didn't do the job. Course you can listen in an operating theatre.
Can I borrow this album? NO! Don't even ask, I'll make you a cassette.
You can still get some albums, mint condition, but you can't play them. Like antique toys in the original packaging, never been played with. What kind of anal weirdo did those belong to? What kind of investor is going to buy them now? Certainly not a music lover.
But then it's not about the music is it? It's about the equipment, like so much of what people obsess about here.
w
Oh, as for being fooled by an LP, there was that Arthur Brown (the Crazy World of) album, that had a recording of an autochanger operating in the middle of one side, it just wasn't fair to do that to somebody as stoned as I was at the time.
Is 'the sound of vinyl' in your parlance referring to the slow parts (inner grooves) or the fast? I'm curious if it makes a difference to the sound.
Distortion and inconvenience. 😀
I'm not really joking though- analogously, people say that SETs "sound good." To me, they don't, they're like a waiter who takes it upon himself to change the chef's seasoning. Vinyl, much the same to me, though to a lesser degree. Maybe it's my inexperience. Maybe it's my biases. Maybe it's audible distortions, bandwidth limitations, compression, EQ.
The inconvenience factor shouldn't be discounted- the "ritual," the never-sounds-the-same-twice, the fiddling, the up and down every 15 minutes, the (let's face it) risk... all that adds up to an emotional involvement. It may well express itself as causing your cortex to WANT the sound to be good and thus make it so.
FWIW, for my recording projects, I'm not even considering analog. I've owned and used some pretty nice tape decks and there's not one that I'd use in preference to a good 24/96 or 24/192 interface. Or, for that matter, 16/44.1.
You make it sound dangerous.
You seem fixated on this notion.
You must get rid of them immediately, they're old technology.
They're gone because of economic reasons, not because they couldn't pull a train.
Or ride a bicycle (gasp).
jeff
Believe it or not, I've listened to fast parts on the outer grooves as well as the inner. 😀
Actually, as you may already know, that is usually set on the Lathe ahead of time. Direct to Disk recordings, OTOH, are live and therefore requires expert "gain-riding".
Best Regards,
TerryO
Last edited:
Except for a miniscule niche, where is all of the vinyl marketing?
SACD and DVD-audio made grand entrances with lots of fanfare and then disappeared with hardly a whimper. Now the preferred listening experience is MP3. No marketing there either? Thousands times more than for vinyl.
John
Last edited:
I think we might be talking at crossed purposes here. What prompted my question was the comparison between the speed of LP and CD - which led me to realise that CD is CLV and LP is CAV. So the inner grooves are played slower on LP but not on CD. The stylus 'sees' only the linear velocity as far as I'm aware. So does faster linear velocity sound better to you? I recall preferring the sound of my (12 inch) 45s in the days I listened to vinyl, which I took to be down to the faster speed.
People still drive '57 Chevys and watch Citizen Kane and Twilight Zone. In black and white, mind you. Hi-fi existed long before CDs. I still have a pair of monoblock tube amps. Yeah, my Class-D probably puts the specs to shame, but it does sound good nonetheless. And most important to me, it sounds different through the same set of speakers, and sometimes I prefer to listen to it over any of my solid-state gear. A wise person once told me, "There are two kinds of fools. One says old is good; the other says new is better." Above all listening should be enjoyable, and that has nothing to do with convenience or "state-of-the-art".
The short answer to that is that the best of the best are mastered using and cut from analog tape. There are quite a few mediocre lps that were obviously mastered from poor digital sources that sound as dull and compressed as their polycarbonate equivalents.
John
I knew what you were saying, I just thought I'd "needle" you a bit.
Yes, 45 rpm LP's can sound better, but there were a few, IIRC, that weren't all that great.
Best Regards,
TerryO
The premise I agree with 100% but enjoyment is at least in part about convenience, or, as SY has already pointed out, about inconvenience.
This reminds me of a dimwitted woman I know who was complaining about the American Film Institute's list of Top 100 films. "Some of them were even in black and white!" Imagine The Jerk not being on that list and La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (a silent film of all things) in the top ten!
John
Broadly speaking, yes. Turning the hand crank on a generator versus a mouse click? Sure. But the difference between handling LP vs CD I don't think is that great. Not in my life anyway.
This all isn't to say I don't appreciate the convenience. I have a couple hundred gigabytes running on shuffle play right now, thanks to technology. But I don't understand the purpose of making analog and digital an either/or proposition. That's a self-imposed limitation.
Thats so easy you wont believe me. You (and eveyone else who prefers LP) like the distortions the record making process introduces. How can you explain this any other way.(that uses logic).
To quote Neil Young: "digital sucks".
On a more serious note, if it was recorded in analog, I prefer analog. Digital ... keep it digital, it ain't rocket science.
Regarding "you only like it for its distortion": a well set up TT/arm/cartridge will produce distortion levels below what science tells us is discernible. And then, there is that thorny issue where people spot a digital recording mastered to LP three notes in ... and not in a positive way.
I'm a mostly an analog guy, but I'm currently in the process of switching over to a DSP based crossover (mostly for convenience). Does that mean I've given up on analog? No. It has to do with picking the right tool.
- Status
- Not open for further replies.