[wakibaki]

OK, here we have a digital master.
 
Shall we put it straight onto a CD or record it onto vinyl and then re-record the vinyl?
 
No, we should put every track on a 45 and play it over AM radio and then re-record it.
 
Just how stupid do I have to make the examples before you stop laughing and allow your face to go red?

 

[xantus]

that's a pretty stupid example.. you can do "better"

45 rpm remasters are the best sounding vinyl there is. higher physical resolution and they don't even use the inner grooves.

what is your bias contributing to the OP exactly?

 

[wakibaki]

that's a pretty stupid example.. you can do "better"
 

 
Jealousy will get you nowhere.

 

[castleofargh]

the answer is, the best master sounds the best. if one prefer the master on vinyl, and can't get it in digital support(because those retards will have ruined the CD master on purpose to make it loud), then ripping a vinyl might be the only solution.
but the opposite is also true, and I have a few albums with about 50db of dynamic that would end up compressed to about 30db on vinyls. so it's all about knowing what master you can get and how good it is.
sadly the marketing guys don't think it's a good idea to tell us all that because then they couldn't sell the crap anymore.
 
for the rest, obviously all modern albums are digitalized, and even old ones now have been, because keeping tapes can only last so long before it get damaged. so as long as we're talking same master, it wouldn't make any sense to rip the vinyl and add all the extra noise, distortions, poor crosstalk... on purpose. obviously digital sources are best kept digital.
 
from my point of view, nothing justifies having to endure the noise floor of vinyls anymore. but that's me and my hate for hiss and scratches. everybody's free to have his own preferences.

 

[bufferoverflow]

lmao, do you know how simply a needle is designed and works compared to... any digital rig? less components indeed...

 

I'm from Denmark, home of Ortofon.
A long-time friend of mine worked for the company for a number of years and,based on what he told me,
I can tell you one thing :
There is a World of difference between getting a purely digital mass-produced electronic component and a miniaturised in-house designed and manufactured electro-mechanical device to perform at their respective best.
The tight tolerances needed for a pickup to perform it's best do not come cheap .

 

[Hijodelbrx]

I've been using Ortofon cartridges for decades and yes, they can be costly. But I think it's important to point out that not only does Ortofon produce affordable cartridges, but there are totally affordable turntables available that have gotten rave reviews. No doubt that pursuing a vinyl set-up will cost you, but it can be done on the cheap. It's wrong to think that only the best, most expensive, gear is needed to get good results. I'm writing this for any rookies who may be checking this thread out!

 

[xantus]

if I could find a good standalone recorder (any reccomendations? ) id show you the light. I laugh at anyone that spends over 500 on their vinyl rig.. (preamp included)

stylus and transducer is everything.

my setup is revealing enough that I hear tape pre-echo in many modern recordings, not everything is digitally mastered

I still think the idea is a bit silly of downloading needledrops, unless you know what needle it has, the synergy with your phones/system could be off..

digital makes sense when you have all the time in the world to listen to every song ever.. but there's something important I feel to the mortality of analog.

 

[bufferoverflow]

I've been using Ortofon cartridges for decades and yes, they can be costly. But I think it's important to point out that not only does Ortofon produce affordable cartridges, but there are totally affordable turntables available that have gotten rave reviews. No doubt that pursuing a vinyl set-up will cost you, but it can be done on the cheap. It's wrong to think that only the best, most expensive, gear is needed to get good results. I'm writing this for any rookies who may be checking this thread out!

I agree 100% ..
A decent vinyl-setup doesn't have to cost you a gazillion credits, but the lowest base-point IS more expensive than a digital set-up for comparable "sound" .
 
Perhaps I should state my own analogue set-up ?
I'm the proud long-time (since 1992!?) owner of a Oracle Alexandria Mrk 4 turn-table .
ATM it has a Rega RB 300 tonearm mounted .
It sounds just as good as the 3-4x more expensive Mørk tone-arm I had and  wifey liked all the flowers and **** the sale got her ..
Pickups ?
I like, and have, various Audio-Technica, Denon and Ortofon  pickups in the non-insane price-range .
Pre-amp is an old 1990's Harman Citation .

 

[Hijodelbrx]

if I could find a good standalone recorder (any reccomendations? )

 


I've been into stand alone CD recorders since they 1st appeared. I've owned units from Phillips and Pioneer. The Phillips was early tech and hinky as hell. The Pioneer (Elite) was beautiful and reliable but with old age the CD mechanism skips (I still got it in the 'spares' closet!). Pioneer's out of the CD recorder business so it's been retired but maybe someday....Currently I'm using a Tascam CD RW900 that's proven to be outstanding (was just recording albums last night!).

 

[Johnny F]

With enough AB'ing done between ripped Vinly and ripped cd's and all through a very nice rig, the ripped cd's are always better sounding. if you just can't find a particular recording on CD, then you may have no choice. It does help to have a high end rig that will reveal the true detail, so I;m fortunate that way. Still is cool that people rip vinyl for the convenience and keeping that old school way of listening is sure neat!  Find what works for you and have fun with it. I did and I am!!  

 

[arnyk]

  i would say yes. vinly rip is/can be better than cd. short article is below. older article but point is still valid.
 
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question487.htm

 
 
The article is pro-analog propaganda, not good science.  Here are the first two paragraphs of the article that expound on its thesis:
 
"
The answer lies in the difference between analog and digital recordings. A vinyl record is an analog recording, and CDs andDVDs are digital recordings. Take a look at the graph below. Original sound is analog by definition. A digital recording takes snapshots of the analog signal at a certain rate (for CDs it is 44,100 times per second) and measures each snapshot with a certain accuracy (for CDs it is 16-bit, which means the value must be one of 65,536 possible values).
This means that, by definition, a digital recording is not capturing the complete sound wave. It is approximating it with a series of steps. Some sounds that have very quick transitions, such as a drum beat or a trumpet's tone, will be distorted because they change too quickly for the sample rate.
"
In fact a digital recording can provide as good of a capture of an analog wave as the bandwidth and dynamic range used to create the digital recording can support.. Since the dynamic range and bandwidth of modern digital recording equipment vastly exceeds anything that was ever done or could be done with the legacy analog formats, this means that the potential of the digital recording to be a far more accurate capture of the original sonic event is manifest.
That makes the article that was cited false.  If the citation is false then whatever it is used to support cannot be trusted..
 
 
 
 
 

 

[arnyk]

most people who argue for CDs have never heard a perfectly aligned needle.. (that has a sound signature that they like, in a well matched system..)
vinyl releases often are mastered with dynamic range like they never release on CD

 
Aligning LP systems is such a lost art that this is probably true for just about anybody how has ever heard a LP setup.  
 
Of course one of the limitations of bent-arm turntables is that the needle is not perfectly aligned for all groove radii across the disk surface. In fact there are at most two radii for which this is true, all other locations are compromises.
 
The only way that a LP has more dynamic range than a CD is if someone chose to make it so. Unfortunately this happens not infrequently for business reasons. However unlike LPs, the digital medium itself does not limit the dynamic range of recordings delivered on it.

 

[Shaffer]

Aligning LP systems is such a lost art that this is probably true for just about anybody how has ever heard a LP setup.  

You're certainly correct about that, Arn. I still get calls for setup in a metro area of 1M, even though the service hasn't been offered in years.

Another lost art, identifying LP pressings. Walked into my store of choice the other day and saw the staff marvel at a first pressing of ZZ Top's Deguello. It was the second pressing, not the first. Pretty easy to tell, if you know what to look for, but the staff in the store didn't. And, those folks were their LP guys. I'll be the first to assert the overall sonic superiority of the LP, but not if I didn't setup the (high-performance) system and the 'table. I trust Myles Astor's system and setup, though, the former being said.

 

[sonitus mirus]

You're certainly correct about that, Arn. I still get calls for setup in a metro area of 1M, even though the service hasn't been offered in years.

Another lost art, identifying LP pressings. Walked into my store of choice the other day and saw the staff marvel at a first pressing of ZZ Top's Deguello. It was the second pressing, not the first. Pretty easy to tell, if you know what to look for, but the staff in the store didn't. And, those folks were their LP guys. I'll be the first to assert the overall sonic superiority of the LP, but not if I didn't setup the (high-performance) system and the 'table. I trust Myles Astor's system and setup, though, the former being said.

 
Could you provide any objective evidence to assert your claims about an LP's sonic superiority?   I would settle for what you feel is better about them other than just a sweeping "overall"?  If you could share a bit about your setups without spilling any proprietary information, I would truly be interested.
 
I'm just a simple garbageman that rides on the back of the trash truck every Tuesday, so please don't ask for my credentials or for me to make my college transcripts available.  Me, dummy.

 

[vinylvalet]

Someone posted earlier about the unacceptable noise floor of vinyl. Many of my LPs produce no more noise that the electronic background noise of my system which is very low. In either case, electronic noise or vinyl noise, I'd have to put my ear right up to the speaker to notice it. Never an issue from my listening position. Generally tape hiss from many original analog recordings is louder than the other two and you can have that with both LPs and CDs.
 
In the past Michael Fremer, among others, used an Alesis Materlink ML-9600 master disk recorder to make CDs from vinyl sources to create reference CDs for audio shows. The digital files from this fairly old recorder were exceptional, at least good enough for evaluating subtle differences between very expensive stereo systems by professionals with very good ears.
 
Although I haven't experienced this personally, I've read that digital files made from an excellent LP playback source using Pure Vinyl software with a high quality preamp and ADC are consistently better than the vinyl could ever sound because the RIAA equalization is done by Pure Vinyl in the digital domain; far more accurate than could ever be done with passive electronic components.
 
I believe both formats can produce superior sound. It's much easier with digital. If one does not already have a large LP collection and doesn't have the technical skills, money and patience to put together a very good analog source, they should stick to digital and just enjoy the music. I enjoy both formats equally but then I've gone to great lengths to properly setup up, modify, tweak, etc both my analog and digital source components.