judgmentday
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Feb 18, 2003
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Well, for what it's worth, I agree that the CD track here sounds almost ludicrously bad. I apologize about the "noisy" vinyl but I have a very modest setup consisting of a new Sota Moonbeam (entry-level solid table with a decent Rega tonearm mounted) using the cheapest MC cartridge money can buy (Denon) with an elliptical stylus. But it's 10 dB quieter than my vintage Thorens was with the same cartridge so, I'm moving up in the world. I also don't have a record-cleaning system. But I do use Stylast, and I proved in another thread that these two products (cleaner+lubricant) decrease rumble by 5-10 dB.
safulop, thanks for bringing this up!
I can understand why digiphiles perceive vinyl as "inferior" or "noisy" in comparison to a digital recording. The fact is that the comparison is never fair or done with a state of the art TT and LP and all the vinyl requirements for the format to sound acceptable. If there are pops, needle noise or anything that is in the way of the music, yes, this recording is not acceptable to my taste either.
I don't share the notion that digital per se is bad. That's why, to my ear, the vinyl recorded onto CD is essentially indistinguishable from the live vinyl playback, when done correctly. I have a professional-grade CD recording deck from Tascam, and it is adequate for this purpose.
Well, if you don't hear differences probably there are not many, but a good sounding LP stands out vs. a CD and you can hear the difference without too much effort.
I think that CD sounds good if you have nothing else to compare to. Our planet earth is big but when compared to Jupiter is real small. Everybody can see the huge difference between the two planets. Digital was meant for convenience and portability. Vinyl was meant to be listened in a room with a suitable and decent 2 channel stereo high resolution setup. Something like a decent room, respectable TT & cartdridge, tube Preamp, tube Amp, decent speaker cables and interconnect cables, decent speakers.
My point has always been to prove that the differences arise almost entirely from differences in mastering, and that these differences are usually so great that the inherent mechanical inferiority of vinyl is swamped by the vastly better masters that are commonly available on this format.
Mastering for vinyl has always been superior to CD because it takes a lot of skill and is very expensive to produce. Any body can do a master for CD using protools and it does not even require an educated ear to do it. Mastering for vinyl are great engineers that actually are great musicians also. They do have a great ear and great talent to create magic. Just ask anyone on the vinyl mastering community. They are geniuses.
So yes, I think the CD track of this sounds dreadful by comparison, but the reason is not because it is on a CD. The reason is because it was poorly mastered, as usual.
But even the 24bit/96kHz HDtracks have some thin and unnatural sound to it. Even if you digitize the LP onto CD it does not mean that it sounds identically to the real live playing LP when played in a high resolution setup. Listen to the Diana Krall Live in Paris LP vs. the CD but use a high resolution setup with really good speakers not headphones.