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Turntables - help me understand the appeal?

Mumstead

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You point about ritual is a big part of the mystique. I grew up with LPs, starting in the '50s. So vinyl was a huge part of my life, and I prided myself on my collection. But the ritual of Listening to Music (getting the LP, gently sliding it out of its sleeve, carefully setting the needle on the disc) isn't the same thing as listening to music. Reality trumps ritual for me. And digital gave me so much more transparency, so much more information, that I have no desire to go back. But that's just me.

I totally get that. I love the sound of my digital sources and Roon makes it a pleasure to use them. When I want to show off my system I use digital. The beautiful sound of the files and flat out cool of Roon never fails to impress. However for me music is more about feeling, and something about the ritual of vinyl (nostalgia probably) is comforting and increases my enjoyment. It is purely a psychological though and I'm not going to argue that vinyl sounds better because it doesn't but I love it anyway.
 

JJB70

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What I can never understand is why the basic turntable can be so expensive. It is just a round plinth rotating at 33rpm, how can something that simple cost thousands and thousands before adding the arm and cartridge? Speed control, torsional characteristics and vibration damping are hardly exotic and unknown disciplines and needn't be expensive.
 

bigx5murf

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If you factor in inflation. They cost the same as they always did. If anything maybe even a little less.
 

Sal1950

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What I can never understand is why the basic turntable can be so expensive. It is just a round plinth rotating at 33rpm, how can something that simple cost thousands and thousands before adding the arm and cartridge? Speed control, torsional characteristics and vibration damping are hardly exotic and unknown disciplines and needn't be expensive.
IMHO this should about get-er-done
acoustic_research_es-1_turntable.jpg
 

FrantzM

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IMHO this should about get-er-done
acoustic_research_es-1_turntable.jpg
What I am dreaming of to spin my prized LPs, one of those 2 ... about $150,000

Transrotor Artus
uEtC3VdNzyCXLmgRoK8Rvf-650-80.jpg


or that

Clear Audio Statement
CJxHVPYFZBoiTosrJ4Hmah-650-80.jpg


I especially like the round discs at the bottom to give bass notes the perfect weight[/QUOTE]
 

sergeauckland

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If you factor in inflation. They cost the same as they always did. If anything maybe even a little less.
I picked out a few turntables from my past HiFi Yearbooks and HiFi Choice books as follows:-

Ariston RD80 £170 in 1981, equivalent to £695 in 2018
Dual 505 £75 in 1981, equivalent to £307 in 2018
Linn LP12 £340 in 1981, equivalent to £1391 in 2018
Garrard 401 £40 in 1974, equivalent to £456 in 2018

The above except the Dual, exclude arm and cartridge. VAT rates have changed over the years from 8% up to 25%, currently down to 20%.

Today one can buy a Rega Planar 2 for £399 including arm, a Project Debut 3 for £249, so one can get a decent enough turntable for less than in the 1970s/80s although we now have those ludicrous monstrosities we were spared back then. The cheaper end has got cheaper, the expensive end has got stupidly expensive, what we I don't think have as much any more is the wide spread, commensurate with quality.

S.
 

Frank Dernie

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The problem with many digital versions of old music is that both the original master tapes and the original machines were often worn out before the music ever got transferred to digital. It appears to me (by ABX testing) that a good vinyl pressing made from a fresh analog source will often times sound better than an old worn out analog source transferred to digital despite vinyls limitations. The problem is compounded when the old music is then "remastered" to both try to compensate for the lost information and to sound as loud as every other song being steamed. I wish there was a way to measure "musical information density" on a recording so we could objectively compare recording quality instead of just "that sounds better".
The best LPs were cut from digital recordings, before CD was released. Records were cut on lathes that had digital delay lines for adjusting the spiral pitch of the cut. You have to go a very long way back for LPs to have been analogue from microphone to cutting head.
It is true that the original tapes are sometimes in poor condition, with oxide shedding and print-through. The LPs were cut from copies of the tape though, and even first generation copies are audibly different from the master, so the LP is always inferior to the master.
Tape recorders have a poorer dynamic range than even the first digital recorders, and they are basically unable to record the highest octave at full level, so the top octave on analogue recordings is likely to be in (euphonic) overload unless high speed recorders are used and then the tape-head profile "woodles" move higher in frequency and are more audible.
Even the first digital recorders were transparent, ie the output of the recorder sounded the same as the microphone feed (to me, an amateur recordist) whereas I never heard a tape recorder where this was the case for my recordings.
The fact is that any recording mastered for LP will have had to be modified in certain ways, some in order to be cut others in order to be played. Mono bass, reducing the level of high frequencies and so forth.
A digital recording does not actually need to be modified to make a CD, even though they mostly are for one reason or another, particularly for popular music.
In summary an LP is likely to sound different to either a CD or a streamed file, simply because it is a different mix.
Whether it is "superior" or not is a matter of preference rather than fact. Heavily compressed music sounds better to a lot of people, maybe because it is louder without touching the volume control, though I hate it. A preference for one mix over another is entirely personal.
There is no doubt that LPs themselves and the replay process of LPs has orders of magnitude higher distortion than any current digital process and a relatively uneven frequency response (which can be tuned to taste by cartridge choice).
Any preference for an LP must be either a preference for the processing by the mastering engineer or an enjoyment of the distortion added, there is no other plausible explanation that I have heard.
In fact the discussion and horror at the performance of some DACs on this site makes me smile since even poor DACs have performance that makes the very best record players look awful. The finest pickup cartridges have distortion levels around 2% in the mid band, much worse at the frequency extremes and that is without the added tracing distortion of pivoted arms.
 

sergeauckland

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The best LPs were cut from digital recordings, before CD was released. Records were cut on lathes that had digital delay lines for adjusting the spiral pitch of the cut. You have to go a very long way back for LPs to have been analogue from microphone to cutting head.
:
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Any preference for an LP must be either a preference for the processing by the mastering engineer or an enjoyment of the distortion added, there is no other plausible explanation that I have heard.
In fact the discussion and horror at the performance of some DACs on this site makes me smile since even poor DACs have performance that makes the very best record players look awful. The finest pickup cartridges have distortion levels around 2% in the mid band, much worse at the frequency extremes and that is without the added tracing distortion of pivoted arms.

Add to the 2% or more cartridge distortion, the 3% or so analogue tape distortion on peaks, plus whatever the cutting lathe adds (any idea?), and an LP recorded on analogue tape, as were all the Beatles, all the earlier Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Who etc etc,and it would be rare to have less than 5% distortion between the mixing desk output and the LP at home. And yet........:)

S.
 

Killingbeans

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The other reason to get a turntable is because it's a tribal signifier. When we have people over, we usually spin records for background music because people think they're cool.

Exactly. People in this thread keep mentioning that vinyl will have no appeal to young people, but the word 'Hipster' immediately pops up in my mind. Maybe being a hipster is not a thing anymore, because it is sooooo yesterday, but I think of the culture as the main driving force behind the recent revival of vinyl as a media. It has definitely become more of a tribal thing than anything related to high fidelity.

...That and nostalgia.
 
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Sal1950

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Like all fad's, this one with the young hipster crowd will end.
But what continually amazes me to no end is how Mikey Fremmer and the like have managed to convince the High End crowd that the SOTA in music reproduction is vinyl and worth spending $1,2,300K on. Supposedly educated, intelligent, successful people reading Stereophile, TAS, etc have fallen into marchstep behind the pied pipers of a phony media money making machine. How can they not see they're being taken for a ride? It's all just crazy.

"The gullibility of audiophiles is what astonishes me the most, even after all these years. How is it possible, how did it ever happen, that they trust fairy-tale purveyors and mystic gurus more than reliable sources of scientific information?"
Peter Aczel
 

sergeauckland

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"The gullibility of audiophiles is what astonishes me the most, even after all these years. How is it possible, how did it ever happen, that they trust fairy-tale purveyors and mystic gurus more than reliable sources of scientific information?"
Peter Aczel

I think Peter's astonishment is explained by those fairy-tale purveyors keep stressing 'Trust Your Ears' and 'Science doesn't know everything' and disparage blind testing as artificial and too stressful. Then, they can easily persuade themselves that they have the golden ears to detect such esoteric differences denied to mere mortals.

S.
 

tomelex

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Add to the 2% or more cartridge distortion, the 3% or so analogue tape distortion on peaks, plus whatever the cutting lathe adds (any idea?), and an LP recorded on analogue tape, as were all the Beatles, all the earlier Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Who etc etc,and it would be rare to have less than 5% distortion between the mixing desk output and the LP at home. And yet........:)

S.


And here is a point though, distortions are a funny thing. A good example is to play back a 1khz tone from a test record and then play a digital recorded pristine 1Khz tone from a test CD for example. The CD one will sound "clean" but to a lot of folks the vinyl playback tone, in all its limitations, will sound more pleasing. That tape will have primarily odd order distortions, and then the cartridge adds in primary even order distortions and phase distortions and mixes the two channels some and then the room FR and not even counting the tape FR and the cartridge FR distortions and if you consider them all you can easily be at 10 to 15% total distortions and in some parts of the room up to 25%, so not all distortions act on us the same way, and I am not saying this to refute your post just to add to it. the "and yet....:) part"
 

cjfrbw

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I do like the anal obsession crowd in vinyl who spend so much time and effort believing that they can 'perfect' the sound of their turntable by micro managing the needle at the groove. The cantilever and stylus is flexible, and a slave to the forces of the groove, and yet many of the 'philes insist that they can treat it as a rigid, precise assembly. Cartridges can vary from sample to sample, and they are so tiny, they just don't have the manufacturing precision or consistency that 'philes usually assume. I would bet that any ten high end cartridges on ten equivalent turntables with identical setups would still wind up sounding different from each other.

Also, any record set up you use will depend on a particular test record, which automatically will have different cutting angles, thicknesses, warps and vinyl compositions from the actual records you will play on your system. There are no pat generalizations that you can make about set up because the error margins can scarcely exceed one or two percent distortion in the most optimistic cases.

I said once on another board when there were discussions going back and forth about about some fozgometer or something, rake angles etc., that all you wind up doing is put the needle into a different area of the error envelope, you don't change, narrow or reduce the error envelope, and got lambasted. You should definitely be careful in the set up to a certain extend, but after that, just stop worrying and play your records.

The high ends critics also engage in a lot of 'cyclic fashion slutting' where they go back and forth about which particular tech is better or worse in terms of bearings, arm length, linear tracking, direct drive vs. belt drive, rim drive etc. It's all FOTM except that the prices seem to double or triple every time the fashion screw turns.
 

SIY

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IMHO this should about get-er-done
acoustic_research_es-1_turntable.jpg

See what those are going for these days? I looked at one when I saw the "new" pricing on replacement parts for my VPI, then gave up THAT idea pretty quickly.
 

MattHooper

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(Hi everyone, this is my first post here. This is a wonderful forum of a type I've been searching for, where one can be an "audiophile" but - a rational audiophile. I've been a denizen of many audio forums over the years as I enjoy swapping subjective impressions of gear, in particular speakers. However, I often argue against audiophile snake oil claims and defend blind testing in various audio forums, to the inevitable hostility of the purely subjective audiophiles. I meant to make a proper introductory post but I think this may have to do for now. It's long because it's meant to be as much an "introduction/my audio journey" post along the way to answering the OP question).

Turntables - help me understand the appeal?

I'll get to my explanation for the appeal vinyl/turntables currently hold with me, which includes some of the explanations already given. But first, as I've been fascinated with the vinyl revival I've followed tons of stories, comment sections, forum discussions etc all over the place. And one thing I notice is that there is a tendency among those who are not "in to" vinyl to reason from their own lack of interest to rather simplistic (and often dismissive) "explanations" for why other people must like vinyl: "It's clearly ONLY about nostalgia" or "It's ONLY about being a hipster or looking cool" etc.

These explanations really miss the full spectrum of motivations people have...for anything...let along something like buying vinyl records.
(And we tend to not reason well about other people's motivations, especially if it concerns their interest in something about which we are personally dismissive).

Vinyl buyers, young and old, have a variety of motivations from, yes, nostalgia to "I like the sound better" to "Iike the physical aspect" to "I like supporting artists I love by paying for their physical products" along with many other motivations, and with any individual likely having a mixture of any number of motivations. If you really pay attention to why vinyl has become so popular again, simplistic catch-all explanations just won't cover it.

That off my chest...:)....here's the appeal vinyl/turntables currently hold for me. It starts first with the appeal I found with digital:

I'm 55, grew up listening to records like many here. Once CDs came along I hopped on board pretty quickly and never really looked back in terms of the ease of use, sonic quality. My "audiophile" systems have always been based upon CD players/DACs as a source and I've loved the sound. I did however have a nice old micro seiki turntable, long ago given to me by my father in law who was in to great sound, but ditched vinyl as fast as he could once CDs showed up.

For various reasons the turntable wasn't a permanent set up in my system - essentially I'd haul it out for the occasional bout of listening as, mostly out of laziness, I'd kept many of the records from my youth. Spinning my old records was indeed a nostalgic experience. Though I also found myself really enjoying the classic "warmth" and crispness of the sound on many albums. It was in it's own way equally enjoyable, but sonic accuracy favored digital sources. And I am NOT a fan of the hiss, crackle and pops of vinyl. Many news stories on vinyl often mention the "romance of the crackle and pop" of vinyl. Not for me. I have no love for it and much prefer as quiet a record as possible.

Anyway, vinyl listening was a very rare thing for me; I was mostly all digital. Quite a while back I'd ripped all my CDs to stream to my Benchmark DAC, to my Thiel speakers (had the 3.7s, now use the 2.7s). It sure was amazing to have instant access via my ipad to my entire collection. And good riddance to CDs! I never liked them as physical objects: they felt cheap in the hand, and pieces snapped and cracked at the merest provocation. In fact they seemed designed to explode apart if dropped even from a modest height. Liner notes tiny. Yuck. For me they are simply carriers of the digital bits I really care about on those discs, so just getting the bits and being able to toss the CDs was wonderful.
Of course many of my pals - not to mention countless music lovers - had long ago downloaded and swapped with others countless songs and albums via torrents and all that. People have libraries with terabytes and terabytes of music! (I had always refused to download music I didn't pay for, as this to my mind is stealing, hence my much more modest collection of digital music, around 500 CDs worth).

These massive libraries of music seemed both appealing and odd to me. The appeal can be easily described as "any piece of music I may ever desire to hear is likely in my library and at a finger-press or two away." I get that. At the same time, and maybe it came from a lifetime of buying only the music I knew I wanted, it seemed strange to "own" vastly more music than one could ever even listen to in a lifetime.

Once I added Tidal streaming I essentially joined that club - seemingly endless amounts of music at my fingertips. This, combined with streaming my own collection was at first thrilling. I spent many nights just trawling through Tidal listening to new music. But I couldn't help noticing a trend over time in my listening habits. They'd changed with the ease of accessibility to music, both in my high end system and on my phone, in the car etc. I found myself often sampling through music, rather than just listening to songs or albums. Given that for any song there may be something I like even better just a flick of a finger away, I often took that option and left the song before it finished. Searching, searching for the next sort of musical, or sonic, "hit." This tended to impart a sort of restless quality to my listening sessions. And there was something oddly devaluing about both the ease of use, and the unlimited access, and the fact that music just didn't seem to "exist" as a "thing" but as some sort of "out there through the air" entity. And the occasional purchase of digital music had all the aesthetic appeal in the process of paying a bill on line.

So, yeah, I loved the ease and convenience and sound quality. But this Digital Eden seemed to have a snake or two that I hadn't been told about ;-)


The first thing that caught my eye in terms of the vinyl revival was how many soundtracks started being released on vinyl - both old titles being re-mastered, and new soundtracks I hadn't heard yet. I'm a huge fan of soundtrack music so I purchased a few, finding myself thrilled by the experience. First, people producing new vinyl had understood that their physical appeal as collectable objects was important. So the packaging, aesthetics, artwork, liner notes, creativity with the vinyl colors etc, were just off the charts. As a fan, as objects to hold and admire the aesthetics, it was a thrill.

The next thing was the sound. I hadn't bought new vinyl for I didn't know how long, but putting on a record that hadn't been through my teenage mill of ill-use and abuse was really something. Just beautifully quiet, and the sound quality was fantastic on many of these albums! I was luxuriating both in the physical aspect of the record, and the sound.

Which inspired ever more purchases, expanding beyond soundtracks. And as my vinyl album numbers grew, being the inveterate audiophile, this inspired the thought "Ok, it's clear I care about vinyl now - time to look in to upgrading my vinyl rig!"

I'm no electrical engineer and hence I don't know where the point of diminishing returns occurs, and how steep, when it comes to turntables/cartridges/phono stages. And I frankly assume it's always probably well below whatever I've ended up paying :) But I ended up with a second hand purchase of a Transrotor Fat Bob S turntable, with an expensive Benz Micro cartridge thrown in to the deal, all barely used but well below 1/2 retail. I can't of course vouch at all for any of the technical claims that may be made for big-arsed turntables, 55 lbs of aluminum, magnetic drive or all that. But I can say that simply as a beautiful, cool looking piece of equipment, that thing rocks! It looks so much the "precision German engineered" object it is, and it just "feels" of super high quality in every detail.

But the sound for me was a revelation. Now, when I use such a term it's within the context of purely subjective impression. But if the question from the OP is to be answered, it will by it's very nature include the subjective reasons as those are part of the reasons people have for enjoying vinyl. That acknowledged....

My previous turntable played records with a sound that had a slight burnish over everything, just a bit of "noise" or "burr" over everything, similar to what you get when a record has been played really often and not taken care of. And complex passages seemed to add this noise up to become a bit more confused. I'm talking subtle, but a distinct slightly crispy character, and record noise/hiss was usually audible.

The first thing that struck me when I played records on my new Turntable/cartridge/phono stage was how quiet records now sounded, that background "hiss" seemed reduced not only on new albums but my older albums. The other thing was how clear, detailed and clean good recordings sounded! I'd never heard this from vinyl playback before, and never realized how closely it could approach digital in that respect. There was a sort of "limitless" sense of resolution in the sense that the sound was so clean and *every* detail in a mix seemed completely clean and separate no matter how dense the mix became. And I could hear in to the most subtle nuance, the tiniest reverb trails seemed to just trail off unimpeded until they disappeared in to a very quiet background. This no longer to my ears sounded "nostalgic" but simply "amazing sound quality!"


It had me revisiting album after album. I remember an "Air" album I bought on vinyl and I put on a song I've listened to a billion times via my digital source. A woman's voice came on as a background vocal and...it sounded so human! I was like "hold on, I've heard this part a million times and I never remember that background vocal sounding so real. Am I forgetting something?" I cued up the digital version and compared and sure enough, there was this obvious difference where the digital version vocal sounded sort of flat, canned, glassy, hardened...a 'recording.'
Where the vinyl version the voice seemed softened, rounded, dimensional and sort of popped free of the mix in a way that just sounded more like a real person had entered the mix, rather than a digitized sample.

Not every comparison to digital favored the turntable sound, but I was continually surprised at how often it held up, and how often I found myself preferring the vinyl version. And constantly surprised at how great the sound was from the turntable with so many records.

A member wrote on this thread:

"Let's be honest, on it's best day, with the worlds best vinyl gear and the best pressed LP, if the same master was recorded to a RedBook digital CD, the CD would cream the LP in every measurable and audible area of sound quality.."

And I would take issue with that claim.

If we are talking strictly about the technical potential for accuracy, no question, we all know even cheap (but good) digital beats a vinyl/turntable.
(Though it's been acknowledge vinyl has the potential for more accuracy than digital *in the sense* that you may end up with a crappier digital master on a CD where the vinyl got the superior master, allowing the vinyl version to actually be more accurate).

BUT...that claim includes that CD would "cream" the LP in the area of sound quality. Now we are in the area of qualitative, not quantitative, of how it sounds to us. We have to be careful about leveraging our personal perceptions into objective-sounding claims. And I think the claim like CD sound quality "creams" vinyl skirts in to this divide.

My experience comparing the best digital masters I have with the comparable vinyl does not align with the claim the digital "creams" the vinyl in sound quality. It's one thing to point to all the kludges necessary to get sound on to and off a record - it's a miracle it sounds good at all! It's another to to talk about large differences in sound quality. Because as we know, our perception can be fairly insensitive to various types of distortion, and even digital compression takes advantage of this. The reduced file size and the amount of sound "thrown away" by various compression schemes may lead to the intuition it will sound obviously worse. "You've thrown away tons of the music!" But they don't, because they are "distorting" in the sense of "throwing away part of" the original signal in a way that our ears are not sensitive too. So a much smaller file size can sound surprisingly similar - if not indistinguishable - from a larger uncompressed file.

I think this lesson has to be remembered when moving from a critique of the technical kludges involved in vinyl to the perception of sound quality. Yes it's one technical kludge after another to get music on to and off vinyl. And yet...the end sonic result can be surprisingly excellent sound. It's been engineered as best possible, with clever solutions to the challenges along the way, to sound good to our ears, and can can largely succeed. The best vinyl can sound very much like good digital.

For instance a while back the Talk Talk album Color Of Spring was remastered and there has been a CD and a Vinyl release from that new remaster. This is a stellar sounding album that I (and I know many audiophiles) have used as demo material, not to mention loving the album.
Playing the digital version I hear incredible detail, richness, spaciousness, precision etc. Playing the vinyl I hear all those attributes. In fact they sound incredibly similar - there are no details that I can hear that have gone missing between the vinyl and digital version, and no loss of any other sonic quality. They both sound absolutely spectacular. Except I slightly prefer the vinyl as it seems to have a tiny bit more "texture, air, presence" that makes the vocals and instruments seem even more believable to me. Distortions of a sort? Sure. BIG distortions? No. Subtle. But ones that have a somewhat more than subtle effect on my preference for one over the other. I now use the vinyl to demo my system over the digital. And it is a dead quiet background - people always think at first it must have been a CD because the sound comes out of nowhere. And the vinyl gets all the sonic raves as the CD ever did.

So I respectfully can not agree with the claim that all other things equal a redbook CD would "cream" a vinyl pressing in sound quality. I've experienced this to not be the case. Someone may indeed hear some sonic difference leading him prefer the sound quality of the CD. But the idea that it is a difference in the order of being "one wiping the floor with another" I believe would be an exaggeration, and a subjective call in any case.

So back to why I'm liking vinyl. While some instances can show very little differences between a vinyl and CD from the same master, generally it's my experience they tend to sound different, and the various ways vinyl often strikes me as sounding richer, chunkier, warmer, more organic, with a leading edge presence that is somehow at once exciting yet relaxed. It seems to fulfill many checkmarks in the boxes of what I'm looking for in terms of sound quality.

And I've gotten very heavily in to all sorts of music that has never been released digitally, in particular LIbrary/Production music from the likes of KPM, Bruton Music etc - vinyl recorded in the heyday of analog reproduction, but by nature rare. These albums sound utterly glorious on my system, producing among my favorite listening experiences both sonically and musically. As have many other albums.

My sense is that what I now get from vinyl is all the subtle forms of distortion that I seem to like - built up from all the technical kludges, re-EQ, and the equipment it's played on - but with a reduction of the distortions that I don't like - less background hiss, removal of that "burr" of distortion for a rich clean sound. The subjective result of this balance is utterly seductive to my ears.

To finish off this Moby Dick of a post:

I'm not a vinyl snob in the sense of only listening to vinyl, declaring it "superior" etc. I still listen to plenty of digital music and enjoy it. In fact, I can enjoy music streaming through my iphone speakers! But....

I get now why many audiophiles have been in a froth over vinyl for many years. On a really good system it really can sound "better" if it ticks the boxes of one's personal perception and criteria for "good sound." The problem comes when audiophiles move from "I like it better" to making up bogus technical arguments for the "technical superiority" of vinyl - e.g. all the "digital doesn't capture the entire sound waveform like vinyl does" mythology. And people getting newly in to vinyl, including many young people, are susceptible to this as well. They may like the sound of vinyl and then just swallow and repeat the bad explanations for "vinyl being superior." (Or they may have just swallowed that claim because they've heard it, even before buying their first record).

But my enthusiasm for vinyl/turntables these days is mirrored by the reasons many others give for getting in to it.

It cured my music ADD for one thing. When I put on a record I inevitably listen to a whole side, if not the whole album, and I no longer have that fidgety experience listening. Listening is more of a special, concentrated experience vs sampling music or having it on in the background.

It adds a physical connection to the music I own in a way digital just doesn't reproduce for me. I'm absolutely giddy when a new album I ordered shows up at my door, in a way that is entirely absent when just downloading a file, or flicking through Tidal. Albums are often so beautiful that, nicely stored, they have become part of our decor.

I thoroughly enjoy owning and interacting with my turntable. To me it's an object of physical beauty and fine engineering. It gives playing music the type of aesthetic and tactile pleasure over digital that owning a great analog watch gives over a cheap (but more accurate) digital watch.

Plus, as someone who has always wanted to support musicians (I've been one, many of my friends are struggling musicians), I like the fact that buying the vinyl version of an album means more money goes to the artist than if I'd streamed it.

So there's my own answer to the OP....my subsequent replies will be shorter!....and it's a pleasure to meet you all!

Cheers,

MattHooper.
 
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SIY

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Hi Matt, and welcome. A cultural note: when people here talk about "sound quality," it is understood to mean "accuracy to the input signal." But yes, that's not universally precise, as you pointed out.

Getting a really excellent phono system together isn't necessarily hideously expensive, but it does take a bit deeper thought than the sort of stuff dished out by vinyl "experts" with no deep understanding of the systems engineering involved.
 

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At this site I think I can say we are into replicating the recording as accurately as possible, so you preferring sometimes the vinyl version of something fits right in, you would want to as accurately as possible replicate the information in those vinyl grooves.

What a post, and in a correct thread for "sound preferences". As you know, these kinds of comments don't fit in most of our threads here as we are seeking science, but in threads like this, personal preferences are expected.

Enjoyed your post.
 

MattHooper

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SIY

Thank you for that note of clarification. I’ll keep that in mind. Though as you indicate there seem to be some grey areas to explore there.

Agreed with your comment about turntable expense and audiophile wisdom. :)
 

levimax

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For those who have not tried vinyl and are dismissing if for technical reasons or because it is "in style" with certain people you may want to consider that you may be missing out on a very enjoyable part of the Hi-Fi experience. It may not be for everyone but many people do enjoy vinyl and they are not all fools or deaf or technically ignorant or enjoy listening to distortion. While vinyl does not have nearly the technical specification of digital a well made LP played on a decent turntable can approach "transparency" (with noise from damaged LP's being the biggest problem) even though distortion is thousands of times higher than a DAC. Vinyl is of course heavy, inconvenient, fragile, inconsistent, takes up space, and is more expensive than streaming. So why do I listen to vinyl as part of my Hi-Fi experience the other parts being CD's, Tidal, hi-res files, DVD-A, SACD's, DVD and Blue-ray videos, and even u-tube.

Any preference for an LP must be either a preference for the processing by the mastering engineer or an enjoyment of the distortion added, there is no other plausible explanation that I have heard.

#1. Mastering on older music. This is the big deal for me. Most of my favorite music from the past has been "hi-jacked" and remastered to conform to the modern norm of "loudness" with low DR value. Some may like it, I do not. For me part of the Hi-Fi experience is having a system than can pick up the subtle differences in recording technology over time. The reverb in the early sixties, the weird original stereo mixes, the original mono mixes, the mastering choices etc. Vinyl is often the only way you can listen to old music presented as it was when new. I really enjoy this part of the experience, others may not care.

#2. Music for me has historical and artistic context to it. Back ground music is one thing but with a Hi-Fi system I sometimes like to pay more attention and listen and learn about what I am listening to. There is nothing better for this than holding a big old album cover and reading it and looking at the pictures and dates. Album art is art and is for me a enjoyable part of the "Hi-Fi experience" you don't get with streaming.

#3. I am mesmerized by as was stated here before, "how can a rock in a ditch make such a nice sound". Yes just a toy but at the end of the day any Hi-Fi systems is nothing more or less than a cool toy which can be enjoyed many different ways.
 

jsrtheta

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Yep, you see them everywhere now, in the TV commercials and primetime shows. Can't remember what I was watching just the other night and in the background at someones house was a Marantz 22X0 receiver with what looked to be a AR turntable, took me back to my 1974 rig.

There's one ad with a young couple who have a small child, and they go to a yard sale, where the couple buys a cheap vintage record player and some vinyl. In the next scene, the mother is playing a record for the young daughter. Smiles all around.

I always thought that was child abuse.
 
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