[eaglejo]

And the winner by a landslide is the vinyl.  I had a non-audiophile listen and was able to play the same tracks via vinyl and AIFF via a solid state drive iMac fed to the Minerva.  Not even close.  Blind A/B'd it. The vinyl completely trounced the digital.  A ten second A/B was all that was required. 
 
 

 

[Jon L]

As amusing as these I-love-vinyl threads are, it's important to know which albums of which remaster/vintage you are comparing.  
 
For example, mediocre CD's from 80's and 90's have a much better chance of sounding better on vinyl.
 
However, if you compare a nicely-recorded recent CD, things may be different.  If you are playing 24/172 kHz native digital file via firewire, then the results may be quite different..
 
Then again, you may be one of those people who simply prefer the particular colorations/attributes of vinyl sound than different colorations/attributes of digital sound.  In which case, more power to you, and I'll do you a large favor by taking that awful Minerva off your hands

 

[eaglejo]

Yo La Tengo's  "Popular Songs".  A well recorded 2009 cd.  I should have been more explicit.  The cd sounds very good.  The album even better.  

 

[edstrelow]

Quote:

And the winner by a landslide is the vinyl.  I had a non-audiophile listen and was able to play the same tracks via vinyl and AIFF via a solid state drive iMac fed to the Minerva.  Not even close.  Blind A/B'd it. The vinyl completely trounced the digital.  A ten second A/B was all that was required. 
 
 

Maybe you could explain a lot more about your equipment and listening conditions too.  I have only the foggiest idea of what you were doing and with what.

 

[huhongyan]

I suspect we’ll see an initial boom of users setting up dedicated email accounts for FaceTime so they can regulate thelinks of london charm bracelets

people who can call them. Perhaps Apple will even offer facetime.com addresses for this purpose as they’ve already

gone through the trouble of buying the trademark from the previous holder.

Regarding my previous take on FaceTime on the next iPod touch, I stand by my assessment that it would not happen

without requiring some additional account, like we see here with the “Account” button. That said, I obviously did notlinks of london sweetie charms

give Apple enough credit as they acted on this more quickly than I thought they would. It’s also unclear how this move

will affect their attempt to negotiate iPhone FaceTime support from carriers. If they don’t offer a concession, such as

having FaceTime count as minutes (FaceTime minutes are tracked in your call records), it may be limited to Wi-Fi forpandora beads

the time being.
 

 

[nnotis]

Unfortunately, CDs are often mastered differently, and much worse, than vinyl albums are.  The noise wars encourage most to compress their digital recordings into blocks of sound.  It's not a problem inherent to digital, but rather, a very annoying mastering convention.

 

[eaglejo]

I guess I was surprised that the differences were so large in this particular case.  Same album on cd and vinyl.  Recent recording.  CD sounds really good, so it's not a case of a really bad cd recording.  The vinyl makes the cd sound so flat.
 
What do you mean by noise wars? 

 

[ManBeard]

Quote:

 
 
What do you mean by noise wars? 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

 

[nnotis]

Around 1997, people making pop, rock, rap, and just about all highly commercial recordings, realized that they could crank the volume of their digital recordings during the mastering process.  They could do so because digital limiters and compressors made it very easy to do without obviously audible clipping.  As a rule of thumb, people think louder music sounds better.  So if you were listening to some CD from 1996, and then switched to something from the following year, it would sound louder.  Superficially, people found that appealing.  Artists wanted their CD to sound louder than other artists'.  It prompted a constantly growing effort to further compress recordings during mastering, to get them louder than recordings made previously.  The limiters used during mastering kept getting better over time too.  Unfortunately, all of this heavily compromised the sound quality.  Smashing loud peaks drastically reduces dynamics.  Subjectively for me, that destroys the illusion of depth.  I would also describe the sonic effect as a flattening.
 
Vinyl can't be mastered like that.  Smashed peaks will cause the needle to jump off the record.  So this asinine competition for loudness can't happen there.  It has to be mastered differently.
 
Try this, take two CDs of the same genre.  Pick one from the early 90s.  Pick another from some time in the past ten years.  I'd say there's a 95% chance the newer CD will sound very noticeably louder.  Better yet, find two masterings of the same album, where one is from the 80s or early nineties, the other is from the past decade.  Again, I almost guarantee the newer master will sound much louder.  But sadly, the old will have a much better sense of depth to it.  And this is despite the fact that analogue to digital conversion has improved drastically since the 80s.
 
So, when comparing different formats of any kind, always be mindful that they were most likely mastered differently.  And unfortunately, that makes true comparisons almost impossible.  
 
Most likely, "Popular Songs" was recorded digitally.  If so, there can't be any added fidelity by converting it to analogue.  
 
So, enjoy those records.  I have no doubt that they do sound better.  It's just not because there's an inherent advantage over digital.

 

[Gazza]

I originally got into vinyl because of the vinyl wars AND because of all the horrific DRM that was crammed into CDs making them sound worse.