[mark_h]

Not good to hear after I have blown a small fortune on a vinyl setup! Once again some of the enjoyment I was having sourcing all my favorite albums has been sapped by reading opinions rather than listening to music.

 

[jsaliga]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Publius /img/forum/go_quote.gif Part of this is their own damn fault (both the audiophiles and the labels) for demanding 180g/200g pressings. I guarantee you that if audiophile releases moved to 135g or even 90g, QC would improve dramatically. Pressing times would go down, fills would be more consistent, more time would be available for packaging, material costs would go down...

Maybe...but I guarantee you that if they went down to 90g vinyl that nobody, and I mean nobody would be willing to shell out $35 for it. I agree with you on the 200g vinyl, though I have had good experience with the several Universal Japan 200g records I have bought. For Classic Records however, 200g has been a dismal failure and frankly they are not doing all that well with 180g either.

Some labels/plants know how to get 180g vinyl right. Pure Pleasure Records and Speakers Corner are two of them. But several labels are putting out very bad product with insanely high failure rates. RTI seems to be setup for 180g pressings, but they handle the task like amateurs and I have no confidence in them whatsoever. So when I see "Pressed at RTI" on the label I know there is about a 30% chance that I am about to tear the shrink-wrap from a dud.

You are right about one thing...as long as people keep buying these records the situation is not likely to improve. That just goes to show you how strong the allure is of the music being released. Speaking for myself I know there is not much I would not endure to get certain Blue Note albums that are remastered by Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman. The 8 or so that I have are the best that these hard bop jazz titles have ever sounded. So for some of us it is about much more than just having a couple of slabs of 45 RPM 180g vinyl LPs on the shelf for collector value -- it really is about the music.

--Jerome

 

[ssportclay]

I really don't own much in the way of modern pressings but some of the best ones I do have are standard weight Japanese pressings manufactured during the 70s. Whatever they were doing then in their processing, everyone should be doing now. These are simply the very best I have ever seen or heard.

 

[TimJo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ssportclay /img/forum/go_quote.gif I really don't own much in the way of modern pressings but some of the best ones I do have are standard weight Japanese pressings manufactured during the 70s. Whatever they were doing then in their processing, everyone should be doing now. These are simply the very best I have ever seen or heard.

Part of that is they used 100% high quality virgin vinyl, and were not be driven by insane production schedules, so the presses for being run at speeds where they produced high quality stampings, with enough time to cool down properly.

As Publius mentioned part of the issue is right now is production capacity. I have RTI pressing from years past that sound great, but sadly as vinyl has become popular again, RTI can't keep up with their production schedule, and so quality is suffering. I remember reading when they took on the Doors box set for Rhino, it was such as big project that the release dates for other titles fell behind by a month. Sad part is, they still cut corners, and the SQ on those limited edition pressings sucked, and the Doors management have ended up agreeing to send replacement vinyl for everyone who bought one. I'm still waiting for the replacements to arrive.

I still love vinyl, and enjoy seeking out 'new' titles from the used bins, or known good masterings of titles I already own. Part of this is that I grew up with vinyl, and so my sensitivity to 'noise' is lower than those who are discovering vinyl for the first time. I think there is an age factor in play with regards to noise.

 

[memepool]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TimJo /img/forum/go_quote.gif Part of this is that I grew up with vinyl, and so my sensitivity to 'noise' is lower than those who are discovering vinyl for the first time. I think there is an age factor in play with regards to noise.

Not so sure. A lot of people especially classical fans who remember vinyl from back in the day embraced CD warts and all because they couldn't deal with the noise of vinyl or tape and that is it's raison d'etre for them. Whereas for many younger people the noise is part of the experience and so long as the records don't skip they don't seem to care at all.

I would say though that a lot of people who stuck with vinyl, myself included on occasion, arn't so enamoured always of the latest breed of turntables and stylii which sound too "CD like". As ADD says a decent modern turntable can sound exactly like a modern CD player but not necessarily in a good way, which is why a lot of people experiment with vintage equipment and rate things like the SME 3009 so highly for instance.

It's also interesting how many people now look for NOS multibit DACs which when they were first released were trying to sound like records or tape. Or indeed seek out early digital recordings which were lambasted at the time.

In general the sound of equipment both digital and analogue has changed a lot over the last 30 years, not always for the better and it's only when you put together a wholey "vintage" system that you notice by how much.

 

[nick_charles]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TimJo /img/forum/go_quote.gif Part of this is that I grew up with vinyl, and so my sensitivity to 'noise' is lower than those who are discovering vinyl for the first time. I think there is an age factor in play with regards to noise.

Sorry, that does not follow. I also grew up with vinyl in the 60s, 70s and early 80s and the noise was always irritating , more so paradoxically as one upraded platforms. When CD arrived with it's dead black background I embraced it whole heartedly. Briefly last year I tried to get into vinyl again but the noise was just as distracting as 23 years before.

 

[Publius]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jsaliga /img/forum/go_quote.gif Maybe...but I guarantee you that if they went down to 90g vinyl that nobody, and I mean nobody would be willing to shell out $35 for it.

If it were 90g it wouldn't cost $35 to begin with

RTI's quoted prices mention a price difference of $1.40 per record when going from 180g down to 135g. Extrapolating further, it would be reasonable to assume a $2.80-$3 price differential between a hypothetical "RTI Dynaflex" and RTI's HQ-180. That's easily over half the per-unit cost, and would likely drive the retail value to $30 or less to achieve the same margins...

Of course, realistically speaking, a 90g pressing would make the most sense at the lowest price level for a record, rather than a collector's edition or whatnot. $10 records could still be very plausible with changes like that. The irony would simply be that said $10 records would sound better than the $35 180g ones

Of course, I'm not old enough to remember much of the horror stories about Dynaflex warps, but every 90g record I have is exceptionally well pressed.... I can't imagine how the "bad old days" of 90g pressings could be any worse than what we have now.

Quote:

You are right about one thing...as long as people keep buying these records the situation is not likely to improve. That just goes to show you how strong the allure is of the music being released.

And if I may speak rudely, it also goes to show how little the audiophile press has done to try to alleviate the situation. A few negative magazine articles would certainly whip RTI into shape.

 

[ADD]

The interesting thing is that background noise, clicks, pops, etc were not actually a reason I got out of vinyl. If I exclude Classic Record 200 gram pressings which were pathetically woeful (bar one - just one) I actually found the vinyl to be pretty darned quiet, especially after getting the RPM5 and Rondo Red. The background noises and distrubances became very low - hardly any worse than what I heard listening to the CD equivalents (we are talking about reissues of 50 and 60s analogue recordings).

On the subject of those darned Classic 200 grams, it might sound like sour grapes, but Classic Records and their rediculous and completely unustifiable obsession with 200 gram vinyl was a major - and mean major - reason for my quitting vinyl. I actually lost the most money of all due to Classic Records pressing faults. I would calculate that I threw away close to $500 on dud Classic Records pressings. All 200 gram. So it effectively meant that Classic Records - who are a major player in the vinyl market - were no longer a viable source for audiophile LPs.

I can honestly say I might have chosen to ride out the economic downturn and kept the vinyl setup if Classic Records got their albums pressed at RTI in 180 gram. But they are a stubborn and self righteous company who couldn't give a twopenny stuff what their customers think andf they are never going to change. They would rather go down as heroes on a sinking ship than admit to their customers they have been wrong for the best part of a decade. You could send them a petition with the signature of every customer demanding that they go back to 180 gram RTI pressings and they would just ignore it.

And you know those new so called "hand made" LPs on their newly acquired semi automatic press? They are the worst pressings of all, hampered by serious fill problems. Again, not that they would care about it. If those sorts of pressings had been the norm in the 1970s, vinyl would have died a decade before it did!

 

[ADD]

Quote:

Originally Posted by memepool /img/forum/go_quote.gif that's a shame, I'm not sure you could say Pro-Ject are the last word in vinyl replay but I don't really see myself living without being able to play any source analogue or digital within reason, as there are always great performances out there which may never see the light of day again. It does seem as though you are on a bit of a quest though.

hehe. I think most of us are on a quest. I just want to get the closest to being there in the concert hall at a live performance, and currently the only viable format that does that for me are live analogue FM broadcasts. The Project Tuner Box is actually excellent. It really sounds extremely good and this is coming from someone who did own at least a reasonably good vinyl setup. But Project really are good at making modestly priced stuff that really does sound superb in it's price range. To me the only weak point with this tuner is that is does really totally on a very proficient external antenna system.

I certainly admit my vinyl setup was nothing like the last word, but I nevertheless think I was also on the cusp of getting into really serious money to make signficant strides forward. Not worth it when you are trying to amass a collection from scratch as well. The price of vinyl had effectively doubled for me since I started buying it in late 2007, but as I mentioned elsewhere I was losing money big time on faulty Classic Records pressings as well.

Alot of these reissues were not what they were cracked up to be. I was just "lucky" that the first ones I ever bought were the Wilma Cozart Fine supervised Mercury reissues on Classic Records. Done before 200 gram became a big problem. Now that was seriously good sound like I have never experienced outside of a concert hall. But everything else was downhill from there. A lot of the Speaker's Corner reissues, for example, come from backup masters rather than the originals and you can really hear the loss of quality over the CD reissues that came straight from the 35mm masters. Nearly all the Decca reissues were terrible - they pailed embarassingly compared to that small excerpt you sent me from an original.

It was a similar problem with the Clearaudio reissues. The CDs were better. Infact one Clearaudio reissue was so bad (blatant and obvious compression and limiting from a second or possibly even third generation tape) that I can't believe the company saw fit to release it.

Some of these so-called audiophile reissues were bad enough that I can honestly say that the 320 kbps MP3 downloads are better than the vinyl - some of the Westminster and DG reissues being particular cases in point.

 

[jsaliga]

I am really surprised to see you slam Speakers Corner, but then again I don't own any of their Mercury Living Presence releases. I can say without hesitation that their Verve and Impulse jazz releases have all been first rate and I have no complaints whatsoever.

Doesn't Speakers Corner guarantee that their reissues are made from the original master tapes unless those tapes were lost and they were forced to use a backup master?

I generally don't buy audiophile vinyl for classical music. I do buy it for certain rock reissues and mostly for jazz releases from certain labels that have shown that they are incapable or unwilling to do a good job with their CD releases. I trust Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman at Acoustech Mastering and so far they have been doing a terrific job on the Analogue Productions Blue Note reissue project. Since Speakers Corner has access to the Verve catalog I really wish they would get around to reissuing several albums from Anita O'Day.

And I understand your frustrations completely about bad vinyl. I remember about five months ago or so I was about ready to throw in the towel on audiophile vinyl but I have stayed with it. And I have tossed perhaps just as much money down the drain on bad vinyl as you have (mostly on Classic Records 200g vinyl

). I still have some bad vinyl I need to send back to Elusive Disc and Acoustic Sounds.

--Jerome

 

[TimJo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TimJo /img/forum/go_quote.gif Part of this is that I grew up with vinyl, and so my sensitivity to 'noise' is lower than those who are discovering vinyl for the first time. I think there is an age factor in play with regards to noise.

Quote:

Originally Posted by memepool /img/forum/go_quote.gif Not so sure. A lot of people especially classical fans who remember vinyl from back in the day embraced CD warts and all because they couldn't deal with the noise of vinyl or tape and that is it's raison d'etre for them. Whereas for many younger people the noise is part of the experience and so long as the records don't skip they don't seem to care at all.

Quote:

Originally Posted by nick_charles /img/forum/go_quote.gif Sorry, that does not follow. I also grew up with vinyl in the 60s, 70s and early 80s and the noise was always irritating , more so paradoxically as one upraded platforms. When CD arrived with it's dead black background I embraced it whole heartedly. Briefly last year I tried to get into vinyl again but the noise was just as distracting as 23 years before.

Okay, fair enough.

It was just a guess, based on many comments I've read in threads here and over on Hoffman's site (including Steve Hoffman who actually started a thread debating the theory.) For me it isn't an issue of "noise as being part of the experience" as much as that I just don't hear it. It's as though my mind has been trained to ignore it. Part of that may be because I never really stopped listening to vinyl. Even those rare times when I listen to a 78 (which can be very noisy) the dynamic range is what I notice instead.

I suppose this is also an area where the type of music you listen to is a factor on how much noise bugs you. I tend to listen to 'rock' more than anything and so maybe its easier to ignore it. If I just listened to classical music, or crooners and torch singers, maybe it would be more of an issue, I don't know. What I do know is that the dynamic compression of modern CD's drives me nuts more than noise ever will. If every CD was produced with the dynamics of the 'Full Dynamic Range' audiophile CD's that were included with the vinyl pressings released by Mudcrutch, I might buy more CDs.

 

[jsaliga]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TimJo /img/forum/go_quote.gif I suppose this is also an area where the type of music you listen to is a factor on how much noise bugs you. I tend to listen to 'rock' more than anything and so maybe its easier to ignore it. If I just listened to classical music, or crooners and torch singers, maybe it would be more of an issue, I don't know. What I do know is that the dynamic compression of modern CD's drives me nuts more than noise ever will. If every CD was produced with the dynamics of the 'Full Dynamic Range' audiophile CD's that were included with the vinyl pressings released by Mudcrutch, I might buy more CDs.

The kind of music you listen to absolutely is a factor. Anyone who could pick out surface noise on a vinyl record of Waiting for Columbus should get on the phone to the Guinness Book of World Record people right away, since they probably have the most sensitive ears on the planet.

I don't mean to make light of the problem. I listen to far more jazz than I do classical or rock, and trust me when I say that noisy pressings and other vinyl sins can ruin the listening experience on a lot of small group quartet and quintet jazz recordings. And it is every bit as annoying as it is for classical music listeners.

--Jerome

 

[jsaliga]

One other thing...it is really easy to be overcome by negativity and bitterness with this stuff...and I mean music buying in general. Some of us are sinking enormous sums of money into our passion for music, after all.

Right now everyone in this thread is going off on a tear about how bad vinyl is...but let me tell you something. I have about 150 Blue Note jazz CDs sitting in my rack from the Rudy Van Gelder Remaster series and most of them are just plain terrible. And musically speaking, unfortunately for me this also represents some of the most important music in my library. If I were listen to any five of those CDs at random I would probably get so pissed that I would start a thread and go off on a diatribe about how bad CDs suck. But the problem is not with CD per se; the problem is with the people who created these particular CDs.

I did not buy a vinyl rig because I thought vinyl was the greatest sounding thing on the planet. I bought a vinyl set up so I could get access to music that I otherwise would not have. I have not stopped buying CDs. Since adding the vinyl setup I have added a reel-to-reel setup and have been buying commerical tapes like crazy, most of which sound simply amazing and offer me yet other choices. I love tape for vintage classical music recordings. They are readily available, they sound terrific, and for the most part they are less costly than a CD.

I endure issues with RTI because their vinyl happens to be the medium that carries the Blue Note remasters being done by Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman, and if this music is important enough for me to buy 150 RVG Remaster CDs that sound lousy, then it is also important enough for me to buy records that are expensive but sound quite exquisite, and to deal with having to exchange the defects as they occur. I don't expect everyone reading this to understand what motivates me, but then again it is my time and money, and the music is much too important to me to let it pass.

What I have to do to safeguard myself from being stuck with bad vinyl is to play test it within a week of receiving it, and then calling for an RMA to exchange any defective records. Sometimes the dealer will try to me convince that certain types of defects are normal, and I just won't have any of that. For $50 the record had better be free of defects in materials and workmanship -- period.

--Jerome

 

[HippieTom]

Is there some videos online that shows the process in making LPs? I can not understand how in earths name they did make those back in the days.
Are there different size on the bumps on the LP?
How do they know where to put witch bump?
I feel alittle stupid asking this but i really dont know.

 

[ADD]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jsaliga /img/forum/go_quote.gif Doesn't Speakers Corner guarantee that their reissues are made from the original master tapes unless those tapes were lost and they were forced to use a backup master?

Yes, they do make that claim. But may my heart turn to stone and may I banished to the darkest corner of the universe if - for example - the sources they are using are always the same quality as those which Wilma Cozart Fine used when she made the compact discs 18 years ago. Either that, or a lot of those Speaker's Corner vinyl reissues are the best advertisement ever of what CD is capable of. Anaemic and lacking in body and dynamics are a good way to describe these Speaker's Corner reissues, apart from the fact that the colouration distortion is much higher than on the CDs. Though that is one reason why people love vinyl.

As an example, the sonics of the Schumann Cello Concerto vinyl reissue pale in comparison to the CD. The CD was cut directly from the 35mm film. The vinyl was cut from...? Speaker's Corner did not use the 35mm masters and it painfully shows.

Then there is the issue of continued deterioration of these old master tapes. In my opinion based on listening to so many of these reissues, the time for these masters has already passed. Listen to the Speaker's Corner reissue of Prokofiev Romeo and Julliet as an example. Compare that to the CD made about 16 years ago. No comparison - the CD sounds pristine. The Speaker's Corner reissue sounds like the master tape was due for the rubbish bin. And in this case, it is difficult to understand why it is so bad. If they did not use a 35mm film machine, then they had to have used a 1/4 tape machine. So where did they get that "master" form and when was it made? It was just about dead.

It is a sad sonic fact - for me at least - that the best sound comes from the Classic Record remastering process but that the worst pressings come from there as well. It's a pity that companies like Cisco (now effectively) Boxstar do not have massively high outputs. Quality mastering and pressing 100% of the time. And they really show what a good vinyl rig is capable of.