jtaylor991
1000+ Head-Fier
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I've spent most of my weekend reading through a couple of these drawn-out vinyl vs. digital threads. My stance has never been that vinyl was technically superior to digital, because I totally understand how it simply ISN'T. That being said, I have collected some because I get a sense of space in the music that I rarely experience with digital (I can't say never -- just while I've been reading this weekend a couple of albums on Rdio streamed at 320kbps even wowed me with their vinyl-like (to me) fidelity in that regard). Someone in this thread or another pointed out that it may be some sort of psychoacoustical effect brought on by the noise floor or something like that. Maybe the music masks the noise floor just like it masks my tinnitus (I'm gonna get it looked at soon!) but the presence of it gives some sort of ambient air to the recording that tricks my brain into feeling a "room" so to speak. That seems like a totally rational explanation. I don't have any sort of nostalgic preference for vinyl, nor do I find any special tonal qualities in it; I don't find it inherently "warm" or "analog sounding", but listening to it compared to digital (in general) could be compared to taking off my sunglasses indoors. There's nothing new that I couldn't see before, but everything is more there and real. The weird thing for me is that that's really the only thing it brings.
I'm reading through these trying to convince myself otherwise because I hate everything else about vinyl. I deal mostly with new purchases of electronic music on vinyl (which probably seems even more stupid to some since it obviously would have a nearly completely digital path until hitting my turntable), so I don't necessarily need to worry about a whole lot of crackles and pops (just whatever debris is left from the plant), but it's expensive. And I still do have to deal with that from any other purchase. Sometimes stuff gets warped in the mail and I have to exchange it (Amazon makes that process easy and free, but it's still time I'm not listening to the record). I have to deal with knowing that I could potentially be degrading the quality of the media with a worn stylus or something. I have a couple of records that already have a skip or sticky place in them (it's just my cart/stylus not tracking -- one of them I just increase the weight by half a gram for that one side of four for the album and all is good). It's annoying to set up the turntable properly to ease worries about said degradation. I still am going to bump the cabinet every so often and possibly scratch something when the needle jumps.
What I've considered is doing digital vinyl transfers to the highest fidelity recording I can (DSD128?) for archival purposes and then listening to those.
I'm going to do some kind of A/B testing with digital and vinyl versions of the same release and try to see if I'm not actually experiencing what I mentioned earlier. After all, I experienced it with some records and then have been buying exclusively vinyl when it's available ever since (which is only a few years -- I'd rather get out of it earlier rather than later!), so it may be a farce. Like I said, even 320kbps streaming this weekend for a couple of albums totally wowed me. Some of my vinyl albums seem like they should be more "wow" for me. I feel like this may be evidence of the recording and master being different. I always thought that to be the case, don't get me wrong, I didn't think vinyl was actually superior on paper (as previously stated), but I may have been wrong in assuming that the vinyl master would be just plain better in the vast majority of cases.
Also, I wanted to mention that I've had the same experience with a reel-to-reel tape deck. I have a Frank Sinatra tape (factory recorded) that just sounds so great, such wonderful staging from what I remember (the deck is in storage). I have a bunch of other Peter, Paul, and Mary ones too that had a super wide soundstage, but not that realistic (not dissimilar to the Beatles stereo masters with the vocals and instruments split to separate channels?), and there was some hiss and what not in the recording (I deemed it OK because it was there on Spotify too, interestingly enough).
Anyone have any advice on proper A/B testing? I don't really know how to do it without "knowing", but maybe non-blind will be good enough for me. My vinyl rig is a Dual CS-5000 turntable with Ortofon Omega cartridge and stylus (well, the stylus is upgraded to one that's $20 from my record store that I got because I could buy it alone vs. a whole new Omega combo), which was like $40 on Amazon, so nothing too high-fidelity. Same receiver and cans in my sig that I use with my PS Audio DLIII DAC. It did make me curious how well my $40 cart+stylus performed compared to my ~$500 DAC.
Something to consider is whether or not nowadays which format has the majority of the better masters of the two. Does anyone have anything to say on that? I initially began investing in vinyl under the assumption that the vast majority of the time it would be home to a better master than CD, but now I'm beginning to reconsider this. I'm starting to feel like if I hear it and it sounds great on digital streaming, it's going to sound just as good if not better on Redbook CD and vinyl too, and if it sounds (relatively) like crap, being on vinyl isn't going to make it a whole lot better at least.
This being about what it's like now is my rationalization for kinda, y'know,
Thanks for your time! Happy listening in whatever way you choose
[Disclosure: (most of) this is cross posted from another thread but after giving it a day or so it hasn't really gotten much attention and I figured it wasn't entirely undeserving of its own thread anyway.]
I'm reading through these trying to convince myself otherwise because I hate everything else about vinyl. I deal mostly with new purchases of electronic music on vinyl (which probably seems even more stupid to some since it obviously would have a nearly completely digital path until hitting my turntable), so I don't necessarily need to worry about a whole lot of crackles and pops (just whatever debris is left from the plant), but it's expensive. And I still do have to deal with that from any other purchase. Sometimes stuff gets warped in the mail and I have to exchange it (Amazon makes that process easy and free, but it's still time I'm not listening to the record). I have to deal with knowing that I could potentially be degrading the quality of the media with a worn stylus or something. I have a couple of records that already have a skip or sticky place in them (it's just my cart/stylus not tracking -- one of them I just increase the weight by half a gram for that one side of four for the album and all is good). It's annoying to set up the turntable properly to ease worries about said degradation. I still am going to bump the cabinet every so often and possibly scratch something when the needle jumps.
What I've considered is doing digital vinyl transfers to the highest fidelity recording I can (DSD128?) for archival purposes and then listening to those.
I'm going to do some kind of A/B testing with digital and vinyl versions of the same release and try to see if I'm not actually experiencing what I mentioned earlier. After all, I experienced it with some records and then have been buying exclusively vinyl when it's available ever since (which is only a few years -- I'd rather get out of it earlier rather than later!), so it may be a farce. Like I said, even 320kbps streaming this weekend for a couple of albums totally wowed me. Some of my vinyl albums seem like they should be more "wow" for me. I feel like this may be evidence of the recording and master being different. I always thought that to be the case, don't get me wrong, I didn't think vinyl was actually superior on paper (as previously stated), but I may have been wrong in assuming that the vinyl master would be just plain better in the vast majority of cases.
Also, I wanted to mention that I've had the same experience with a reel-to-reel tape deck. I have a Frank Sinatra tape (factory recorded) that just sounds so great, such wonderful staging from what I remember (the deck is in storage). I have a bunch of other Peter, Paul, and Mary ones too that had a super wide soundstage, but not that realistic (not dissimilar to the Beatles stereo masters with the vocals and instruments split to separate channels?), and there was some hiss and what not in the recording (I deemed it OK because it was there on Spotify too, interestingly enough).
Anyone have any advice on proper A/B testing? I don't really know how to do it without "knowing", but maybe non-blind will be good enough for me. My vinyl rig is a Dual CS-5000 turntable with Ortofon Omega cartridge and stylus (well, the stylus is upgraded to one that's $20 from my record store that I got because I could buy it alone vs. a whole new Omega combo), which was like $40 on Amazon, so nothing too high-fidelity. Same receiver and cans in my sig that I use with my PS Audio DLIII DAC. It did make me curious how well my $40 cart+stylus performed compared to my ~$500 DAC.
Something to consider is whether or not nowadays which format has the majority of the better masters of the two. Does anyone have anything to say on that? I initially began investing in vinyl under the assumption that the vast majority of the time it would be home to a better master than CD, but now I'm beginning to reconsider this. I'm starting to feel like if I hear it and it sounds great on digital streaming, it's going to sound just as good if not better on Redbook CD and vinyl too, and if it sounds (relatively) like crap, being on vinyl isn't going to make it a whole lot better at least.
This being about what it's like now is my rationalization for kinda, y'know,
Thanks for your time! Happy listening in whatever way you choose
[Disclosure: (most of) this is cross posted from another thread but after giving it a day or so it hasn't really gotten much attention and I figured it wasn't entirely undeserving of its own thread anyway.]
