Hi
jtaylor991,
The first thing to investigate in order to sort out why vinyl sounds superior to you is the couple cartridge / headphone or cartridge / speakers. The cartridge used to play records can have a strong influence on the sonic result, especially in terms of frequency response : some have a lot of treble, some have a lot of bass, and others not. The Grado Gold, for example, emphasize treble a lot. Stanton Cartridges, on the other hand, have a tendancy to attenuate treble.
It can happen that your cartridge compensates a shortcoming that exist in your speakers or headphones. Too much bass from the cartridge + too little bass from the speakers, and your hifi sounds just fine playing records, and not playing CDs. If this is the case, starting to collect records is the wrong way to go. The right thing to do would be to upgrade the speakers, and buy CDs.
Secondly, you talk about "ambiant air", "room". I think that there is a possibility for some cartridges to artificially enhance the stereo effect. That's what I feel with my Stanton Trackmaster, and not with a Grado Gold, Grado ZC, or Denon DL-110. Technically, it may be a side effect of a given frequency response.
In both cases, the effect should be completely preserved if you make a low resolution digital copy of the vinyl (44100 Hz 16 bits). That's an interesting test that you ought to make. Can you still feel the room and ambient air of your records in a 44/16 copy ?
An interesting fact : in order to make a vinyl record, it is necessary that the signal goes through a delay line before driving the cutting stylus that makes the original groove (the realtime signal is used to setup the groove spacing in advance, then the delayed one is actually cut into the groove). These delay lines are either analog tapes, or digital buffers. Before the 80's, they were only analog tapes. In the 80's and 90's, I guess they were digital buffers. I know that in the 2000's some companies specialized in audiophile records restored the old tape recorders in order to provide 100 % analog vinyls again. But when you listen to a vinyl made after the 80's, chances are high that it is a copy of a digital signal !
If you find that the analog sound is not preserved when you make a 44/16 copy of it, you are in a complicated situation. You might just choose to listen to records, but as I understand it, you are going to invest a lot and want to make the good choice. It would be worth to try ABX testing in this special case (vinyl sound not preserved in a 44/16 copy). If you are lucky, you can preserve the analog feeling on a 24/96 copy. Then you can setup an ABX test between the 44/16 and the 96/24 copies without too much work. You may learn a lot while practicing this kind of listening test, and your perception can even change.
If the analog quality is not preserved even in a 24/96 copy, it will be very difficult to setup an ABX comparison. You can as well skip this part and go for vinyl. Keep in mind, though, that, unless you have an exotic DAC (with a special filter, without filter, with tubes...) the difference with the digital copy is 50 % psychological, 50 % caused by subtle differences in playback level and left / right balance, about, say, 0.5 db in loudness, and that translates in a feeling of space rather than a feeling of a louder sound.
What if you find out that the quality of analog records is preserved if you make a 16/44 copy of them ? That is the case for me, and what you were told in the Audiokarma forum sounds right : the best support just depends on the album.
Pop music from the 80's sound often better on vinyl. The CD's have often too much treble. Depeche Mode is a good example. Let's forget the atrocious remasters that were made in 1998 for their two compilations and for the reissue of their single collections, and let's have a look at their excellent SACD re-issues. They sound very much like the old CDs, except that they have a bit less treble, which makes them sound closer to the original vinyls, even in the CD layer of the SACD discs.
Sometimes the CDs are really bad. I have never been able to listen to the beautiful album "Treasure" of Cocteau Twins on CD. I have both the resmastered and original CDs and they sound awfully thin compared to the vinyl. I lived with a good copy of an unfortunately worn out vinyl that crackles a lot, until I performed an operation that proved to be successful with many albums of these times : I rip the CD, I copy the vinyl. I then get the spectrum analysis of a whole track from both versions, I superpose both spectrums in Photoshop and read the difference at each frequency. then I setup a paragraphic equalizer so as to make the CD sound like the vinyl. The result is usually great : I get the pleasant sound of vinyl, with its depth and natural spectrum, without any of the problems of vinyl : no clicks, no noise, no distortion, no loss of quality at the end of each side.
I think that this works because albums, in the 80's, were deliberately mastered for vinyl: they ought not to have dynamics in high frequencies (vinyl can't manage it), and I think that, though compressed, the treble were maybe a bit pushed up, to compensate for the short frequency response of 33 rpm records, and for the wearing of the groove... This is just a supposition.
I've also heard that in order to cut a microgroove record, the signal had to go through a de-esser filter. That also can explain why vinyl sounds different by itself, and still sounds different once copied back in 44/16 digital. I don't know if there was a treble dynamics compressor in addition to the de-esser in the record factories, to avoid overloading the groove, but that would explain a lot about "analog sound".
