To Vinyl or not to Vinyl - Page 4

Personally I don't like Vinyl. Don't get me wrong, it sounds great. It's just that a vinyl record is cumbersome and they take up way more space than a CD player. Other than that, they do sound better than CD.

I would have to say no and just stick with CD. Vinyl is also a lot more in terms of money,

Almost everything worth listening to is still available on vinyl. You just have to find the right record store. It's pretty easy to find online too. But shipping is usually pretty expensive. It's cheaper to order it through a record store.

Good site: Jazz, Rock, Funk, Soul, Rap & Hip Hop, and Latin New Vinyl Records, 180 Gram LPs, Vinyl Records at SoundStage Direct

There are lots more but this one has a fairly diverse selection. I'm sure there's lots of metal out there.

check out gemm.com i've found good deals on there. i decided to get back into vinyl a few years back and have slowly built up my collection to about 100 records. Most I bought used for about $10 or less on there, it takes searching but you can find good deals. There's one guy on there I just bought a bunch of records from at a decent price, mostly jazz and salsa though. www.donmiguel.gemm.com. I like cdandlp.com too. Amazon is also another surprising place for decent vinyl but it is odd that new vinyl cost so much these days. But as a listening experience, you can't beat it. I just wish there was a way to listen to record in the car.

Actually, the stereo LPs that I buy (mostly classical and some jazz) cost me 25 cents for each LP. Thus, I get > 60 LPs for the price of one CD. I buy mine from a music archive that's located at our main county library. This archive has thousands of donated LPs that duplicate their main collection, and I've bought about a thousand LPs from them in the last year, and most sound great after an appropriate cleaning.

Same here. I've got some new albums (maybe 100) but most of my growing collection are give aways, hand-me-downs, donations, or steals at $1 or less. Usually in the .25 range.

Vinyl does seem really interesting, but I don't think I would be able to commit to it with all the cleaning. The whole idea of flipping through albums, putting it on the turn table, listening, and just enjoying the giant album artwork is all appealing, but I have to be able to take my music, and I would not want to have to rip vinyl. For taking my entire music collection, I would rather do it with a laptop rather than bringing crates of records. As for sound quality, I think there are quality DAC's now such as the Red Wine Audio Isabellina, which is claimed to be analog like withe some reviews confirming the claim. I have been struggling over the decision on vinyl, but with the comments of others, I see that it is not for everyone, including me.
Plus, for my interest in music, vinyl is actually pricier than the CD.

Thanks for the info regarding devices such as the Red Wine Audio Isabellina. My problem is that I've been really turned off by the harsher sound of most CDs, and SACDs, especially since I've developed a taste for the sound of vinyl. After listening to hundreds of stereo LPs on a fine vinyl rig, I'm so turn off CDs and SACDs that I'm thinking of getting rid of my CD collection, and CDPs. Perhaps use of DACs that modify the sound of CDs to be more like LPs will save the day. BTW, I'm especially bothered by the sound of CDs, when listening on active studio monitors, and it's not as much of a problem when I use heaphones.

No problem mikeg. Here's the link to the review. He uses the same songs on vinyl and digital to do comparisons. I myself have never heard vinyl, but would like to one day. The description of the sound as warm, smooth, lush just sounds so seductive.

Thanks very much for this link, and the valuable info that it provides. If you ever choose to pursue vinyl, I suggest that you listen to stereo, rather than mono LPs. IMO, old vinyl (often > 30 years old) is just fine, sounds great, and can cost as low as 25 cents per LP. But, before making final judgement, be sure to listed to a really fine (and IMO contemporary) player/arm/cartridge combo. Take a look at my profile for an example of such a (Pro-Ject/Suminko Blackbird) player combo. Try to listen to a source that's in the same class as mine. I find that the sound of vinyl that's provided by a high quality rig, as opposed to that produced by my AR turntable/Shure V15 cartridge combo, is much more refined, and this difference really dramatizes, for me, the benefits of most vinyl stereo LPs, versus most CDs and SACDs. But, since my listening is mostly to classical music, through active studio monitors, my opinion regarding vinyl versus digital is mostly based on this experience.

Where to buy Vynil Lps reliably?

I'm pretty certain Shure V15s aren't cheap and are very highly rated...

and you're saying not to use those???? :O

No, he's just saying that he likes the Sumiko Blackbird better. There's going to be a big difference between a classic cart. like the V15 and a modern cart. costing ~$900 (a high-output moving coil design).

Vinyl

lets face it... vinyl is superior to Digital.

So is Reel to Reel tape

so are 12" virgin vinyl LPs

even the lowly 45- whose entire track suffers from skating distortion- it sounds better than the very best digital.

Frankly..and many would argue against me... to some extent some compact Cassettes when played back and recorded properly - can best digital......quite easily on a Tandberg unit - don't believe me... buy my Tandberg 3014 for $500 and experience sound you never thought was imaginable from pre recorded casettes.

You can take a digital source- measure wide frequency response of 20hz - 20khz supposedly up to 100 db of dynamic range no measurable wow and flutter or rumble..and still have it sound lifeless.

You can take the same music - recorded on vinyl with supposedly less than 100mdb of dynamic range, add wow and flutter, and skating distortion and still it KILLS digital.

Why?

Because analog is a representation of a continuous waveform. It allows for the harmonics to form when two different frequencies come together. (The sum and difference frequencies). You can not create ANY D/A converter and expect it to create a smooth waveform that is truly seamless out of 1's and 0's for every frequency combination To assume that this is possible is a delusion.

The attack and decay of every instrument and every note (Except for instance in the case of digital synthesizers) is different. So to expect a "Dumb" D/A converter to stitch every 1 and 0 stuffed through a D/A converter to a smooth seamless realistic blend is just illogical.

Lets not call it vinyl.. lets call it analog ...analog is simply smoother. Mostly because it is an "ANALOG" of a continuous waveform caused by air pressure differentials - ie. sound.

If you up your sampling rate to a million bits per second....analog is still better because the sampling rate of analog is only limited by the atomic level of resolution of the material it is recorded on. If you were to etch a groove in brick... well the resolution would be poor- and vinyl was selected for a number of reasons. Personally... I don't know the limit of vinyl resolution- but I would assume it is safe to say that the highest frequency that can be recorded on vinyl is the limit of its resolution.. but mind you... even at a 35hz tone... there is still more resolution with analog because it is continuous. and of course music is the combination of many tones... whcih is why..piano likely suffers the most under digital because the harmonics are compromised.

A faster moving, wider REEL TO REEL tape is simply analog with more resolution and headroom.

So for the original poster of this thread..

forget isolation bases... instead decouple your speakers which sit on the floor (I will assume you are not using bookshelf speakers) from your turntable by bolting a shelf into the studs of your wall. Take cheapo brackets to do this and before resting the shelf on it take Blue tack and make a little worm of it to coat the bracket so that it is isolated from the shelf itself. Voila... better isolation than a $1000 + isolation platform (Spend that $1000 on a better tonearm).

buy a Sota...very musical... or a Goldmund... or even a old used Linn Sondek. buy it used..

Make your own record cleaner- you only have to buy the brush and vacuum tube and use an old vaccum cleaner... I amde a far better one than Any of the commericallly

If you don't have cash... buy a music hall... don't bother with the REGA's.

Toss out your receiver... the phono preamps in them suck... buy a used pre-amp...even the Old APT Holmans are ok. Any old Audio research would be nice.

Dynavectors are quite true to the sound Koetsu cartridges are thick and lush but not true to the sound.

Try to move away from standard cone speakers... they are too slow to react to transients and too slow to stop the mass of the driver.. instead look at Planar speakers.

oh...and the cassette thing... If you really want to hear the limit of the compact cassette you can buy my Tandberg 3014 cassette deck.. it kills all the Nakamichi's I had before it.. and even with some pre-recorded cassettes easily beats digital..

The human ear.... it is best at discerning the human voice .. it has hte most practice with that. You can easily tell between two identical twins speaking if you hear them a bit... but you might have trouble identifying a particular drum head or high hat cymbal.

Analog simply gets the midrange right... the area where we are most sensitive... but people get obsessed with the extremes (How high is the highest frequency- or how low is the lowest frequency..???)

Marketers have a far easier time pointing out that a piece of audio gear can produce lower bass than trying to explain that the midrange sounds more realistic.

Now.. don't get me wrong... You need low bass... at least down to 25- 35 cycles...and if you get to 15 cycles you are doing really well (Forget CD it won't go that low) and IMHO you need HF that goes up to 35khz (yes at least 1/2 an octave further than you can hear so sum and difference harmonics and be adequately recreated)...and OOPPS CD doesn't go that high 20khz is the limit for CD.

All that being said some Wadia gear the 800 series of CD players minimizes the faults of digital so that it can sound about as good as an above average analog recording played through an above average analog rig. But Wadia still can not compare to a great vinyl recording played through a great vinyl rig.

All that being said.. you can buy the same vinyl record and if it was made from a later generation pressing.. it can sound lousy. This tends not to happen with digital- because.. digital is well.. digital and should not suffer from generation sound loss.

As for me... my vinyl is 1/2 way across the country... to heavy to ship with me... and ...I MISS IT.

I recently took the plunge, but for the limited purpose of ripping the old vinyl to the server, so that it's available anywhere within reach of the wireless network.

I can afford better, but I chose to go entry-level: Rega P1 (which comes with an entry-level Ortofon MM cartridge pre-installed) and Music Hall pa 1.2. The output from the Music Hall goes to the line-in on my MacBook Pro via an Audioquest cable, and I am using Audacity to create 96/24 WMA files and Max to convert to AIFF (for unknown reasons, Audacity won't output AIFF files, even when it is set to do so).

I am pretty happy so far. Listening through my desktop rig (HeadRoom ultra micro amp and Grado RS-2s), I can definitely hear a difference.

However, the vinyl and the turntable are going to the storage unit when this project is completed. I no longer have sufficient tolerance for the Vinyl Ritual. When I want to listen to something, I want to listen to it Where I Am, and I want to listen to it Right The **** Now.

Oh, and a word to the wise about the Music Hall. It is EXTREMELY sensitive to RFI. It goes nuts every time a cellular device within six feet of it receives anything.