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Originally Posted by Publius /img/forum/go_quote.gif
You're likely not going to get any additional satisfaction out of upgrading your kit. It doesn't sound like there is anything particularly wrong with what you heard. A better cartridge would improve the high end response, but the whole texture/detail/emotion thing is way blown out of proportion by vinyl lovers.
The best vinyl I have sounds, well, CD-like.
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I would have to agree with that. I have spent monumental amounts of money on vinyl and vinyl equipment over the last 18 months and quite honestly I now wish I hadn't.
After numerous petty upgrades I ended with with a Project RPM5, Ortofon Rondo Red cartridge and Project Tubebox II with expensive NOS Brimar tubes - only to find that I got much more satisfaction listening to live broadcasts or recorded live performances on analogue FM radio.
Half the LPs I bought sounded no better or noticably worse than their digital counterparts, though there were ocassions when the potential of my playback system was realised when I ran into a well pressed and well mastered LP. But this was the exception rather than the rule. Maybe 10% of pressings qualified in this way.
Then there are all the inherent problems of vinyl - faulty pressings, the costs associated with replacing them, tracking issues, noise issues, static issues and the almost inevitable decrease of playback fidelity and frequency response at the end of a side. Not to mention the overall cost of maintaining the setup. My Rondo would have had a limited lifespan after which I would have had to fork out a heap of money to buy another cartridge. And anything less than what I had didn't sound good enough to warrant listening to.
Then there is just the cost of collecting vinyl if you don't already have a big collection. It might be fine if all you care about are bargain bin second hand items tht you can pay for and collect yourself, but if you are after specific audiophile pressings they are very expensive to buy and have shipped.
And to cap it all off, vinyl doesn't even sound accurate any more. If a live performance is the benchmark, all vinyl I ever heard was just loaded with harmonic and intermodulation distortion that excessively coloured the sound and just made it unrealistic to listen to.
Mind you, most CDs I own also sound unrealistic, as do high resolution digital recordings too. I tend to live by a rule that 85% of listening pleasure is gained or lost by the person who hangs the microphones and works the mixing desk at the initial recording. 10% is the gear we use (assuming it is not garbage) and 5% is the potential or otherwise of the format.
So now I listen almost exclusively to live or recorded live concerts on analogue FM radio. To my ears these approach a much higher level of realism than I have ever experienced with vinyl or CD at a much lower cost and I don't have the hassle of buying and maintaining a collection of recordings and the associated playback equipment. I n view of what I have written above, I can only really surmise that the live radio braodcasts sound better because they better replicate the listening conditions at a live concert (i.e the venue is full of an audience - so the acoustics change - and it is usually more difficult to stuff microphones far too close to the musicians - something which seems to be done way too frequently in studio recordings).
I've gone from being one of the biggest vinyl advocates to realising that the only thing attractive to vinyl is all that distortion and colouration. Because the better the playback system, the more it sounds like...um...digital. I would not have felt this way even a year ago, but exposure to high quality high resolution digital playback gear has completely changed my mind, though I still have a distaste for the sound of CD and only use them for background listening.
