Vinyl making a comeback ?

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.

Squonk

http://sugarmusicnews.wordpress.com/2014/01/22/vinyl-makes-a-comeback-finweek/

IceCreamMan

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.

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

Made me think of this

http://nextstopmagazine.com/article/2014/1/7/Asking-Hipsters-About-Bands-that-Dont-Exist

singemonkey

Maybe it has got to the point where hipsters are now listening to Van Halen ironically. ???

Chocklit_Thunda

singemonkey wrote Maybe it has got to the point where hipsters are now listening to Van Halen ironically. ???

My vinyl guy has a test where he mentions that he has a vintage Culture Club LP tucked away to see if the hipsters bite.... Because only hipsters get "excited" for Culture Club....

Mixerboy

I'm pretty sure it coincides with the rise in Beats by Dre headphones.

« Previous Page