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Originally Posted by dr__red /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I'm willing to explore beckoning pleasures of fully analog playback that vinyl promise. Spending 1k gbp on a deck is easy. What is not so easy is to find reliable source of vinyl records I will want to posses. I don't have time or desire of becoming vinyl junkie constantly on q quest for that perfect vinyl loot roaming backs of second hand shops or boot sale markets. What I want is consistency. E.g. I type "Tosca" into Amazon's search, what it brings back is 740 CDs and 4 vinyl records. Is it that bad? I look through classical music magazines and all new releases are advertised on CDs. Is it that bad?
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CD is the dominant media for all music. That's just the way it is.
Making a commitment to vinyl can mean a big investment. At the very least you will need:
- A Turntable
- A Tonearm (if the turntable you buy doesn't come with one)
- A Cartridge and Stylus
- An Alignment Guide or Protractor
- A Phono Pre-amp
- Cleaning supplies and tools to clean your records and stylus
- Records to play.
It doesn't necessarily have to add up to a lot of money, but it can. Now would be a good time to ask yourself why you are considering vinyl. I can't tell you what you should do (there are plenty of other people here who are happy to do that). What I can do is explain to you why I have a vinyl setup and what it means to my music enjoyment, and some of the downsides of it as well.
CD is great; it truly is. Much of the time you can get great sounding music on a small, convenient disc that's easily portable. It's also very flexible. You can rip CD tracks to lossless or compressed digital formats for use on a computer or music server, for example. I got into vinyl not because of my love of classical music, but primarily because of my love of jazz and secondarily rock. What I was starting to discover is that a lot of jazz and rock CDs of music I grew up with on vinyl in the 1960s and 70s did not sound as good on CD. This is not a unilateral condemnation of CD; the problem was that the mastering of these titles for CD was bad. There's nothing wrong with the CD format itself as far as I am concerned.
Here's an example from the ZZ Top album Tres Hombres:
Waitin' for the Bus clip from the CD
Waitin' for the Bus clip from the LP
Of course, the above is a pretty extreme example. But a lot of Blue Note jazz albums that have been remastered for CD are turning out bad too, with compressed dynamic range. Again, this isn't as much a problem with the CD format as it is a problem with the mastering engineer. Sometimes it's the artist or producer who tells the engineer to master these things hot.
Classical music on CD has not for the most part been subjected to this sort of mastering wankery. But there are a lot of poorly mastered classical CDs out there, mostly of 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s recordings. There are a few audiophile vinyl labels that have seen this as an opportunity to do these great recordings justice. But it doesn't come cheap, most audiophile vinyl pressings on 180g and 200g vinyl cost between $25 and $35.
As great as a lot of new pressings sound, I have had mixed results with buying audiophile vinyl. The largest problem I have had to cope with is physical defects in the pressing. So the art of pressing records and getting them safely to customers has not yet been perfected. It's one thing to throw away a bad used record that came as part of a large lot since that album only cost you a few cents. It's another thing to open a brand new album that you spent $35 for and see a series of long running deep scratches on a track (as I just did five minutes ago on Jascha Heifetz 200g LP). So I will have to send it back. It can be frustrating...but for me that is no less frustrating than buying a new CD and being disappointed with bad mastering. At least with a defective record I can send it back.
On a positive note buying vintage vinyl can be a lot of fun and very rewarding if you do it smart. I have several hundred vintage classical music LPs. I buy them in bulk lots at yard sales, local record shops, eBay, and you can find them in your local classifieds too. On average, when I buy lots of 50 or more LPs the per record cost is something like 50 to 75 cents per record. I expect to get a few bad LPs buying this way. But if I buy 100 LPs and throw 20 of them away then my per record cost might go up a few cents per album but it leaves me with 80 or so great sounding records for a mere pittance. It's also true that you don't get to hand pick the titles when buying in bulk. So if it's a specific recording you are looking for, then buying a bulk lot is not the best way to get it.
If having older recordings isn't important to you (only you can decide that for yourself) then I think you can probably skip vinyl and not really miss anything. But I can tell you that the ONLY way you would get my copy of the Fritz Reiner/CSO performance of Scheherazade on 200g vinyl would be to pry it from my cold dead hands. The Living Stereo SACD of this recording is good, but when you hear this LP the digital disc will be found seriously wanting, and Reiner's performance of it is my favorite out of the 10 or so that are in my library.
Here is my turntable and audio setup:
And it's all in the service of music that I very much enjoy.
--Jerome
