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The Vinyl Frontier

curiouspeter

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I finally got myself into the vinyl game. I bought a turntable and a few records to start. I began with low expectations but it still managed to disappoint. Am I missing something?
  • No matter how careful I tried to clean the record, there were still pops and crackles throughout the playback
  • I could hear the noise floor on the speakers
  • The sound felt heavily colored
  • The dynamic range felt highly compressed
It was a $500 turntable with >65db SNR and <0.1% wow and flutter. I suppose a high-end turntable could beat these specs but I doubt any can manage >90db SINAD. I also doubt any turntable can eliminate all the pops and crackles.

How can anyone take vinyl seriously in this day and age? I doubt even the best equipment can beat the $7 Apple dongle.

In the meantime, I am going to keep the vinyl hobby for therapeutic purposes. It forces me to tolerate imperfections and be present. I cannot fall asleep or it will just go on and on. Nor can I skip tracks I dislike.

I wonder why R2R tapes are not more popular than vinyl for retro-coolness. I have heard DSD files transferred from analog tapes and they sounded awesome. I am sure tapes (e.g. 15 ips) can be damn good. Alas, I have no space for more equipment. I will stick with digital for serious listening and vinyl for meditation.
 

abdo123

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the pops and crackles on a new vinyl are due to mediocre quality control during production. Specially if they're consistent in their position.

hearing the noise floor is not THAT common, what are using as a phono-stage?
 

solderdude

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solderdude

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How can anyone take vinyl seriously in this day and age? I doubt even the best equipment can beat the $7 Apple dongle.

For accuracy and absolute fidelity yes. The 'fun' part seems to be handling vinyl, the ritual around it, making combinations of carts, arms, settings, pre-amps and rummaging through boxes of vinyl sold cheap on 2nd hand markets.

I'll bet most of them aren't bothered by ticks and noise but probably are annoyed when it skips or hangs.

Have heard some excellent vinyl rips so it can sound good. It may not be exactly what was recorded but vinyl fans don't care. They want the experience and the 'tone' they prefer.

I am with you though... Vinyl is outdated and simply cannot reach the quality of digital.
I am annoyed by rumble, noise, cracks, hanging, distortion, having to clean, just 20 mins of playtime and having to turn them over, inconvenience, ties to a specific location, maintenance, microphony etc.

I can see the fun of it though.
 

muslhead

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For accuracy and absolute fidelity yes. The 'fun' part seems to be handling vinyl, the ritual around it, making combinations of carts, arms, settings, pre-amps and rummaging through boxes of vinyl sold cheap on 2nd hand markets.

I'll bet most of them aren't bothered by ticks and noise but probably are annoyed when it skips or hangs.

Have heard some excellent vinyl rips so it can sound good. It may not be exactly what was recorded but vinyl fans don't care. They want the experience and the 'tone' they prefer.

I am with you though... Vinyl is outdated and simply cannot reach the quality of digital.
I am annoyed by rumble, noise, cracks, hanging, distortion, having to clean, just 20 mins of playtime and having to turn them over, inconvenience, ties to a specific location, maintenance, microphony etc.

I can see the fun of it though.
Fun? Sort of like a tooth extraction without novacaine?
 

BDWoody

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I wonder why R2R tapes are not more popular than vinyl for retro-coolness.

Well, they are... You just have to add another zero onto the price of everything you buy.

I like playing my records and all that goes with it...but it certainly doesn't sound 'better' than a digital source.

And, I hate a crackly record.
 

Midwest Blade

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The price of records may be your next surprise, I am finding plenty of great collectable music on cd all generally from $10-20, a bargain for long term listening vs the typical vinyl album.
 

thrash

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I finally got myself into the vinyl game. I bought a turntable and a few records to start. I began with low expectations but it still managed to disappoint. Am I missing something?
  • No matter how careful I tried to clean the record, there were still pops and crackles throughout the playback
  • I could hear the noise floor on the speakers
  • The sound felt heavily colored
  • The dynamic range felt highly compressed
It was a $500 turntable with >65db SNR and <0.1% wow and flutter. I suppose a high-end turntable could beat these specs but I doubt any can manage >90db SINAD. I also doubt any turntable can eliminate all the pops and crackles.

How can anyone take vinyl seriously in this day and age? I doubt even the best equipment can beat the $7 Apple dongle.

In the meantime, I am going to keep the vinyl hobby for therapeutic purposes. It forces me to tolerate imperfections and be present. I cannot fall asleep or it will just go on and on. Nor can I skip tracks I dislike.

I wonder why R2R tapes are not more popular than vinyl for retro-coolness. I have heard DSD files transferred from analog tapes and they sounded awesome. I am sure tapes (e.g. 15 ips) can be damn good. Alas, I have no space for more equipment. I will stick with digital for serious listening and vinyl for meditation.


Welcome to the world of vinyl reproduction.

I own more than 1.5K records (collected them between 80's and 90's) which i enjoy listening not because they are Hi-def or Hi-fi. The vinyl is flawed but since i am of a certain age i got used to it's flaws and i enjoy the whole "ritual". In fact some of the music i listen sounds better on vinyl because of it's limitations (i listen to a lot of metal). The records are pure nostalgia and there is no reason to invest in vinyl if you do not have a prior collection.

As for your findings, the pops and crackles on a brand new record can be either bad QC as mentioned above by abdo123 or static and dust from packaging that you can reduce or even eliminate with a few passes with a carbon fibre brush. I do not use fancy antistatic liquids as i found that most of the time they make the things worse.

As for the noise floor it can be from the TT preamp or you may be listening the noise floor of the recording gear, if the recordings are old and not digitaly treated, that happens especially on classical recordings and acoustic blues records.
Frankly at present i wouldn't start a vinyl collection as the cd and Digital files are far superior if not heavilly compressed for loudness.
 

daftcombo

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What are your cartridge and phono stage?

A good phono stage (like a Cambridge Duo) eliminates a lot of noise.
 

sergeauckland

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I finally got myself into the vinyl game. I bought a turntable and a few records to start. I began with low expectations but it still managed to disappoint. Am I missing something?
  • No matter how careful I tried to clean the record, there were still pops and crackles throughout the playback
  • I could hear the noise floor on the speakers
  • The sound felt heavily colored
  • The dynamic range felt highly compressed
It was a $500 turntable with >65db SNR and <0.1% wow and flutter. I suppose a high-end turntable could beat these specs but I doubt any can manage >90db SINAD. I also doubt any turntable can eliminate all the pops and crackles.

How can anyone take vinyl seriously in this day and age? I doubt even the best equipment can beat the $7 Apple dongle.

In the meantime, I am going to keep the vinyl hobby for therapeutic purposes. It forces me to tolerate imperfections and be present. I cannot fall asleep or it will just go on and on. Nor can I skip tracks I dislike.

I wonder why R2R tapes are not more popular than vinyl for retro-coolness. I have heard DSD files transferred from analog tapes and they sounded awesome. I am sure tapes (e.g. 15 ips) can be damn good. Alas, I have no space for more equipment. I will stick with digital for serious listening and vinyl for meditation.

High Fidelity from vinyl, I think, misses the point.
Vinyl allows me to play music I don't have in any other form. It's also an intellectual exercise in seeing just how good I can get it, out of sheer cussedness.

And as you mentioned above, it makes me accept the limitations, pops and crackles and the physical fragility of it. That use to irritate the hell out of me when LPs was all there was, but now, I look on their imperfections with a certain fondness.

As to R-R tapes, I think analogue tape is the worst of all possible worlds. It's even more finnicky than vinyl for line-up and maintenance, it doesn't have results anything as good as even the cheapest digital, and it costs radically more than both. Having said that, I get my old Ferrograph out every now and then, just for the sheer pleasure of watching the reels go round, and the PPM twitch.

S.
 

Grotti

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I think you can't compare vinyl and digital sources directly; vinyl is outdated nowadays by any means. It's like comparing digital and analog photography: digital cameras have reached a level of quality, that is not achievable by analog products anymore.

But still there are photographers or artists being satisfied by and relying on analog photography being fully aware of its limitations.

I guess it is the same with people still listening to their crackling vinyl records and I am one of them. If I listen to vinyl, I know about the limitations and I do not care: it's the music that matters...
 

Robin L

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I finally got myself into the vinyl game. I bought a turntable and a few records to start. I began with low expectations but it still managed to disappoint. Am I missing something?
  • No matter how careful I tried to clean the record, there were still pops and crackles throughout the playback
  • I could hear the noise floor on the speakers
  • The sound felt heavily colored
  • The dynamic range felt highly compressed
It was a $500 turntable with >65db SNR and <0.1% wow and flutter. I suppose a high-end turntable could beat these specs but I doubt any can manage >90db SINAD. I also doubt any turntable can eliminate all the pops and crackles.

How can anyone take vinyl seriously in this day and age? I doubt even the best equipment can beat the $7 Apple dongle.

In the meantime, I am going to keep the vinyl hobby for therapeutic purposes. It forces me to tolerate imperfections and be present. I cannot fall asleep or it will just go on and on. Nor can I skip tracks I dislike.

I wonder why R2R tapes are not more popular than vinyl for retro-coolness. I have heard DSD files transferred from analog tapes and they sounded awesome. I am sure tapes (e.g. 15 ips) can be damn good. Alas, I have no space for more equipment. I will stick with digital for serious listening and vinyl for meditation.
No, you're not missing something. There's clicks and pops during playback, even with cleaned LPs. The noise floor of the LPs themselves is variable, usually not as good as it should be. The sound is usually colored. The dynamic range is compressed.

I was involved with LPs for 50 years, collecting and getting many different turntables, cartridges, phono preamps [usually built into receivers but also including preamps of various sorts]. LPs are variable in sound quality. Depending on what you're focusing on, they can be pleasant or really annoying.

The most annoying aspect for me is the off-center LP. People have suggested re-drilling the spindle hole, that never worked for me. There's low-level speed variation you might not notice unless you've got the recording in its digital equivalent or are a musician who is more familiar with the real thing than recordings. This applies to any kind of sound that is supposed to be absolutely steady, like a piano or digital keyboard. That speed variation might be due to an off-center record, or a warped record, or surfaces that are less than perfectly flat.

LPs have certain dynamic and frequency response limitations that are not necessarily present with digital formats. While brickwalled CDs are an issue, CDs don't have to be brickwalled---severely compressed, top to bottom---that's a marketing decision that only audiophiles are concerned about, and there's not enough audiophiles to move the needle for most popular titles. There are LP masterings that are better than CD re-masterings, but they are few and far between. Bass often has to be reduced in level for LPs and almost always is summed to mono. The treble has to be limited to reduce sibilance.

The biggest problem is that spiral, analog discs, have less energy as the stylus gets closer to the deadwax. The groove [one per side] starts out much faster [relative to the stylus] at the start of the record, slowing down by 60% by the time it reaches the end of the side. This means, among other things, that the inner groove is more susceptible to groove wear than the outer section of the groove. A lot of advice with turntable set-up has to do with getting the tracking angle right, and about advanced stylus tips that trace the finest groove. These things get you closer, but it's Xeno's paradox in action, you never actually get there compared to the source tape [nearly always digital these days, by the way].

There's people on this forum who have first rate turntables who have made first rate LP to digital transfers and shared them at this forum. They get very close in sound quality to digital formats, but never quite as good, at least to my ears. Appreciating LPs and turntables means accepting those things that make LPs different from digital formats. If you throw a lot of money and expertise at your LP habit, you can get something that sounds nice enough. If you are looking for that last little bit of detail, or of bass, or of dynamics, LPs will never get you there. You've already invested $500. If you put more money into your turntable, things can get better, but if you're bothered by what you're hearing right now, I doubt you'll be able to improve your LP experience to the degree that you're satisfied. A better cartridge and a fine adjustment of your turntable will doubtless improve things, but that could cost at least $500. Your money, your choice.

By the way, the reason R to R tapes never became a big thing [and never will] is that they have to be copied in real time in order to be worth the expense and effort. And the format itself has plenty of self-noise to start with. A Redbook [CD quality] digital transfer of an analog tape will have less noise and distortion than a R to R tape anyway.
 
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paulraphael

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My vinyl has been in storage for years, and I'm not nostalgic for it. But I still think that on some records—probably due to more careful mastering, and distortions that happen to sound good—the vinyl sounds better than some equivalent CD releases. This may have less to do with the qualities of vinyl than with cases of horrible rock 'n roll CD mastering.

digital cameras have reached a level of quality, that is not achievable by analog products anymore.

I think it's a little more complicated in the photography world, especially if you're interested in making big prints. For a cost that many people could manage (not necessarily comfortably) you can get a big camera and shoot 8x10" sheets of film. To get comparable resolution and dynamic range in the digital realm, you'll spend around $50,000 on the camera back alone.

I'm stunned by the quality I can get out of a 36 megapixel small-format camera, in prints up to 50" wide. But It's less than what's possible with a higher-end format or a giant piece of film.

Probably the fundamental difference is that in photography, we enlarge the image, and so frequency response scales in a useful way. In audio, beyond a certain point, frequency response just lets us record songs for bats.
 

Zensō

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I finally got myself into the vinyl game. I bought a turntable and a few records to start. I began with low expectations but it still managed to disappoint. Am I missing something?
  • No matter how careful I tried to clean the record, there were still pops and crackles throughout the playback
  • I could hear the noise floor on the speakers
  • The sound felt heavily colored
  • The dynamic range felt highly compressed
It was a $500 turntable with >65db SNR and <0.1% wow and flutter. I suppose a high-end turntable could beat these specs but I doubt any can manage >90db SINAD. I also doubt any turntable can eliminate all the pops and crackles.

How can anyone take vinyl seriously in this day and age? I doubt even the best equipment can beat the $7 Apple dongle.

In the meantime, I am going to keep the vinyl hobby for therapeutic purposes. It forces me to tolerate imperfections and be present. I cannot fall asleep or it will just go on and on. Nor can I skip tracks I dislike.

I wonder why R2R tapes are not more popular than vinyl for retro-coolness. I have heard DSD files transferred from analog tapes and they sounded awesome. I am sure tapes (e.g. 15 ips) can be damn good. Alas, I have no space for more equipment. I will stick with digital for serious listening and vinyl for meditation.
This isn’t going to help, but I gave up vinyl and never looked back. My recommendation would be to get out now before you end up at the bottom of a very expensive black hole chasing SQ that will likely never be totally satisfying.
 

digitalfrost

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I got into vinyl ripping a couple of years ago. If you want good transfers, you need a good cartridge with linear frequency response, and fitting cartridge loading (capacitance for MM, resistance for MC) to get the correct frequency response.

The stylus also plays a role in how quiet the needle will be in the groove. Even if all of those things are properly controlled, some records simply suck and will have high surface noise and clicks and pops.

The price of the turntable acutally doesn't matter that much, I started with a 20$ turntable from the 80s...

I can get transfers that sound almost like the CD version, if cut from the same master and compared at identical levels.
 
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paulraphael

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There's people on this forum who have first rate turntables who have made first rate LP to digital transfers and shared them at this forum. They get very close in sound quality to digital formats, but never quite as good, at least to my ears. Appreciating LPs and turntables means accepting those things that make LPs different from digital formats.

I had a friend years ago who collected rare 60's soul records. He had a high-end turntable and a decent ADC, and digitized all the records. When I heard those digital files it was a revelation—it's not that they came close to digital formats, but that they perfectly captured the sound of the old vinyl. In a blind test I don't think I'd have ever been able to tell the difference between his turntable and his transfers.

This was my wakeup call that a record / turntable is basically an effects unit in the signal chain. It isn't a hi-fi medium, but a signal processor.

The good news is, if you like the sound of that signal processing (or if you just can't find music in a different format) a digital transfer will capture everything.
 

ahofer

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Having grown up with Vinyl, I kept it for many years (and I still have a SystemDek turntable in storage - anyone want it?). My second system in my weekend place has a Thorens that I don't use.

I liked the sound of vinyl, but I never got why people thought it was more realistic. It clearly isn't. My sense is that the fiddling, the microphonics, and the RIAA curve implementation are all potential sources of somewhat pleasant, but inaccurate reproduction. Bass always seemed elevated. Closer-mic'd piano recordings were always a disaster on Vinyl - either recorded so low the noise floor became an issue, or distorting like crazy. So once I found a good digital recording of anything, I'd stop listening to my favorite vinyl version. Over time, all the LPs were replaced, and I sold the majority of them in 2018. I have my parents LPs in my weekend place, but those will be sold soon too. It seems a bit like the bloomy low power tube+horn speaker thing - a preference, but one that moves to annoyance when you listen to cleaner reproduction regularly.
 

JeffS7444

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I don't think that anyone is arguing that a turntable setup costing many thousands of dollars can match the sonic fidelity of say, a $40 Raspberry Pi, but like a steam locomotive, it has it's own anachronistic charm which can engage your other senses.

And while it may make no sense at all from the perspective of sonic fidelity, Record Store Day has given people a reason to visit b&m stores once more for oddities like 3" records + record players. I think many new albums are as much about art as anything else, and this is especially true of movie soundtracks released by the likes of Mondo.
 
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