Vinyl making a comeback ?

Squonk

Squonk wrote:
Depends on what pressing you get. We have listened to a South African copy of Love over Gold, and to my ear the LP sounds a lot warmer and more distinction of the instruments. But the System we played it through was over 100k

We experimented with a couple of old LP's, South African and Imported and some of the SA discs were better quality but generally not as good as the imported ones.

Also listened to Christopher Cross's first Album with Sailing etc, LP definately sounded better. Well to my rather prog rock fried ears ?

But I must stress that the audio setup was High End stuff

Psean

Squonk wrote:
Psean wrote:
X-rated Bob wrote:

I do think there is a sonic difference - but it's not necessarily about quality. There's physical constraints when you master to vinyl. A while back I posted about the Them Crooked Vultures album and how all the compression made it a most unpleasant listening experience. I bet they didn't add all that loudness to the vinyl - simply because they couldn't. That was a record that I wanted to like, think I could have liked but it was so damn tiring to listen to on CD. Maybe if I'd got the vinyl my experience would have been different.
+1
Same with some White Stripes stuff. Many others too I'm sure.
Then there are others that I've A/B'ed good vinyl pressings against well mastered digital stuff (WYWH 2011 remaster) and my ears tell no difference. I'm sure better trained ears would notice though.

I do think that the experience of listening to music has changed with the transition from vinyl to CD. My mates and I used to carefully remove the disc from the sleeve (we knew how), put it on the turntable. 22 minutes or so later you'd have to flip it. That would be a useful pause for a cup of tea, some comments about the guitar playing or the sax solo... There was more of a ritual to it. We listened harder, I think. Maybe because you knew you had to maintain the concentration for a relatively short period of time. And the records, the good ones, were sequenced to flow pleasingly over two sides - so maybe you got more loud and soft, more fast and slow, more contrast.
Yup.
Also, having the artwork and liner notes so much bigger is a huge bonus to me.

Depends on what pressing you get. We have listened to a South African copy of Love over Gold, and to my ear the LP sounds a lot warmer and more distinction of the instruments. But the System we played it through was over 100k

Yeah, I've unfortunately never had much opportunity to listen through such high end kit.

And +1 on the different pressings. Jeez, there are some flimsy discs out there.

Gearhead

Psean wrote: I'm sure better trained ears would notice though.

Having done quite a bit of double blind A/B with high end stuff and (unfortunately for my wallet) having been given ears that can consistently pick up the difference between the one audiophile cable and the other, I can testify that one can pick up vinyl tone from a mile away, blindfolded, with cheese in one ear, gum in the other and two blankets over the speakers. Not necessarily bad, just noisy and much better than MP3 at whatever bitrate.
Maybe the people who buy vinyl these days just want to improve over their cellphone download into R120 earplugs. Good idea.

Psean

Must have cheese in my ears then. Either that or the systems I've listened on don't show up the differences. Although they're not audiophile quality, they're not crap. Planning on some more A/B'ing again to see if the cheese has dislodged in the last year or so,

Jayhell

I like the idea of some bands like Queens of the stone age that if yo buy the vinyl you get a free download voucher. then you got the awesome vinyl and the mp3s on your phone/computer/whatnot.

I personally haven't owned a vinyl in my life, I am from the CD generation that said goodbye to tapes and welcomed mp3s. I would like to own some, just all my favorite albums and I'll probably mount them on my wall.

Psean

Jayhell wrote: I like the idea of some bands like Queens of the stone age that if yo buy the vinyl you get a free download voucher. then you got the awesome vinyl and the mp3s on your phone/computer/whatnot.

Yup. Most new vinyl pressings that I've bought came with a download code. Can't listen to a vinyl record in the car, and most cars don't have tape decks anymore so it makes a lot of sense.

singemonkey

And don't underestimate the awesomeness of the record sleeve. No other music format quite has the same sense of being a package - a little box of treasure. You wander around reading the album notes and grokking the cover as you listen. Covers could be elaborate because of the large format. Now everything has to be visible at 500x500 on your phone or ipod, so details are lost.

Vinyl isn't just about audio quality. It's also about the experience.

Note: The word hipster has become meaningless when it refers to people buying Van Halen albums... ?

Psean

singemonkey wrote: And don't underestimate the awesomeness of the record sleeve. No other music format quite has the same sense of being a package - a little box of treasure. You wander around reading the album notes and grokking the cover as you listen. Covers could be elaborate because of the large format. Now everything has to be visible at 500x500 on your phone or ipod, so details are lost.

Vinyl isn't just about audio quality. It's also about the experience.

+1
It's a big reason I like vinyl.

Bob-Dubery

singemonkey wrote: And don't underestimate the awesomeness of the record sleeve. No other music format quite has the same sense of being a package - a little box of treasure. You wander around reading the album notes and grokking the cover as you listen. Covers could be elaborate because of the large format. Now everything has to be visible at 500x500 on your phone or ipod, so details are lost.

Vinyl isn't just about audio quality. It's also about the experience.

Well yes. Unless you buy box sets now there's nothing like getting your hands on and then opening FOR THE FIRST TIME a copy of Yes Songs or Thick as a Brick. Even if it's a box set the booklets are pretty skinny.

Album sleeves presented all sorts of fun and interest. Sometimes the packaging was more interesting than the contents.

I think CD packaging has improved, but the size constraints mean that it will never be as good as we used to get.

Downloads.... sometimes you get quite good packaging with them, but often you get somewhere between zero and zilch.

Cleric

What I love about vinyl is that it forces me to pay attention to my music. I experience it, instead of pushing play on random in iTunes and letting whatever echo through the house.

And +1 for the packaging. Worth half the value.

I have a pretty large collection, including many original Beatles and Rolling Stones albums from my dad, Beach Boys, some early Metallica, NIN, and I even love the added aura that the pop and crackle of vinyl adds to Nora Jones. Feels sexy ?

Psean

Cleric wrote: What I love about vinyl is that it forces me to pay attention to my music. I experience it, instead of pushing play on random in iTunes and letting whatever echo through the house.

chris77

OK, I've never listened to vinyl on anything other than my folks' old Pioneer system, so my experience is severely limited here. But what would give the purest sound? A vinyl record played through a R100k system or a CD played through a R100k system?

Squonk

chris77 wrote: OK, I've never listened to vinyl on anything other than my folks' old Pioneer system, so my experience is severely limited here. But what would give the purest sound? A vinyl record played through a R100k system or a CD played through a R100k system?

I might step on people's toes here. But like I said a bit earlier, a friend of mine who is a bit of an audio freak has a decent setup and we tested a couple of CD's and vinyls to see what sounded better.

Dire Straits - Love Over Gold
Christopher Cross - The album with Sailing and Ride like the Wind

Dire Straits was an imported LP and to me the LP was a lot warmer sounding than the CD, The instrument distinction was a lot more obvious

Christopher Cross - we had a scratchy SA copy and an imported copy of vinyl - The SA LP although scratchy seemed to have less compression and was a lot brighter than the imported and sounded that much better. Still more instrument distinction than the CD!

But this was my Prog Rock ears opinion , I am sure others will disagree but I will be visiting him soon to try out a couple of Queen albums.

Bob-Dubery

Squonk, what sort of gear did you use?

It's possible that a top notch turntable with a great arm and cartridge might have an advantage over a component CD player. Serious hi-fi types that I know insist that you must have a CD "player" that just reads the CD and then have a separate DAC that actually sends a signal to the pre-amp. DACs are not all equal, as you can tell by listening to a CD on a budge priced system - you get weird distortions as the tracks fade out that you wouldn't hear on higher end equipment.

One of the things I liked about the old way of doing things was that you could experiment with different cartridges (if you had the time and the inclination and the cash). They differed in all sorts of ways.

Hard, I think, to compare two fruits of the same quality.

Bob-Dubery

Also I think that at a certain point in time the MO was to take the vinyl master and just use that for the CD or even to get a vinyl record - because you didn't actually have access to the masters - and use that as the master for the CD. Which didn't produce the best results as the master was not optimised for the medium.

Bob-Dubery

Discs are not all equal either. I had a friend who worked at the SABC in the 70s. He came home one day and asked if I'd heard about Dire Straits. I said I'd read about them in NME but hadn't heard them. He brandished a disc with a plain white label. It was heavy as heck. Apparently a metal disc with a thin vinyl layer on top of it. It was the first Dire Straits album - this white label disc was at the SABC but they were not broadcasting yet. We listened. We liked. We made a cassette recording and the white label disc went back to the SABC (the guy doesn't work there any more, so he's not likely to get fired because of my revelations). A few months later "Sultans of Swing" became a big deal and the album was selling like hot cakes and we already had it. I bought the album anyway out of guilt, and we couldn't believe the difference in the sound between this heavy weight disc that the SABC had and what you could get in the shops. Even our cassette sounded better. EDIT (or at least noticeably different - "better" is a subjective term in this case).

SABC were not using that disc for broadcast BTW. They played the single of "Sultans of Swing" rather than the album track and the single had a solo that was edited down substantially to reduce playing time. I recall playing my cassette to a guy I worked with who played in a band, and he was astonished to hear the whole solo.

I suppose it's possible that the high quality disc was used for late night FM shows, but it certainly didn't have the version of "Sultans of Swing" that went up the charts.

singemonkey

Part of the reason that modern vinyl is so expensive is they tend to be pressed on explicitly heavy-weight vinyl - as opposed to the flimsy records you bought in the late-80s and early 90s.

Gearhead

Contrary to popular belief, CD players differ greatly. It's not just the error correction (rereading), if there is upsampling, the clock, the DAC itself or even the resistor banks. The stability of the power supply and the quality of the analog stages also make a vast difference. This is why I would up with a Shanling CD player...

selbydoodl

Great debate here.

I should first state that I officially joined the old farts club last year (65 and counting!)

Vinyl to the purists has never gone away or out of style.

A good pressing played on a good turntable on decent equipment will blow away CD, MP3 and all the rest by a mile 100% of the time!

Oh yes - you have to get our of your comfy chair and turn the disc over - what a chore!

Anyone want a test drive of good sound can come round to me and I'll prove it to you.

I also agree with Gearhead CD on the right equipment has an "acceptabe" sound too.

Bob-Dubery

Another thing that is driving vinyl costs up is the number of discs per album. Richard Thompson's most recent album (of course you all have at least one copy) runs to 50 minutes on the standard, no bonus tracks CD. It's a double disc on vinyl. Probably has to be because 45 minutes on a 33rpm disc is pushing things a bit (Genesis had some albums that went past that, but quality suffered and you couldn't record them on one side of 90 minute cassette >☹ which may have been part of the point).

So the album proper is spread over 3 sides of vinyl, with the last side being bonus cuts (which you get on the "de luxe" CD and they're inessential).

In the good old days Thompson would have dropped a track or two and had a good 40 minute album. These days the CD format encourages longer running times which means the amount of vinyl used goes up. And on this album it's "180 Gram Audiophile Virgin Vinyl" - so there you go.

I'm still working through David Byrne's very interesting book How Music Works. He offers the notion that retail recorded music has always been out convenience V quality, with convenience usually winning. 33 RPM long players actually had a worse quality than 45 RPM singles, so if you really want quality then a stack of 45s would trump a long player - but you'd spend a lot of time flipping discs and you wouldn't have time to ~~enjoy the joint, let alone roll it~~ enjoy the cup of tea let alone brew it unless you had an auto-changer (for those of you that remember those).

Finally Byrne offers the notion that we can get too hung up on sound quality and sound. He writes that the first rock songs he heard he heard on a cheap, tinny AM radio - terrible quality, but they changed the world for him.