Ha ha, so true!
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The Vinyl Frontier
- Thread starter curiouspeter
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Ha! Vinyl isn't for everybody that's for sure !
I've expressed this before, so others can avert their eyes
, but since you started a thread asking a question....I jumped in to vinyl with both feet a few years ago and have had more fun with my system and music listening/collecting than ever.
Though I was nutty enough to roll the dice on a "higher end" turntable, upgrading from an already very good micro seiki.
As you have hinted at, it almost sounds like a contradiction but the "unpractical" ergonomics of vinyl, along with an aesthetic I like, actually ends up allowing me to focus more on the music. If I'm playing my digital system, streaming ripped CDs and Tidal, I flit around from song to song, or just surf music. Given I have a phone in my pocket all day long, and I work in front of screens, and we have a smart speaker in the kitchen, digital music is just sort of ubiquitous and for me it feels more disposable. I put on a record and I usually listen to the whole album.
As to the sound: It's possible that no vinyl system could satisfy you. You have to have some level of tolerance for imperfection. However it's also possible you could be quite impressed by some vinyl playback. Unlike the sentiment expressed by others here, for me vinyl is not simply a nostalgia trip where I feel I take a major hit in sound quality. I'm enjoying my vinyl playback as much for the sound quality as for the aesthetics.
I actually don't find vinyl artifacts like ticks and pops and high surface noise charming. I seek to reduce them. The first thing I noticed when I got the new turntable and much better cartridge was how low surface noise had become. Almost all my albums seemed quieter and less distracting.
The sound quality seemed to move more towards digital in the sense of clarity and a sense of less gritty distortion. Comparison of some re-released vinyl albums I have with the digital counterparts (both coming from the same original master, excepting of course the specific mastering necessary for vinyl), showed very little sonic difference. As in both sounded frigging amazing!
These days I'm as apt to demo my system with a good record as with a digital source. Either or gets head-shaking amazement at the sound.
So ultimately I found, for me, a sort of best of both worlds: all the aesthetics I like in terms of vinyl albums, and turntables (I think turntables are really cool on aesthetic and engineering grounds), and record collecting, while being over the moon about the sound quality I often experience.
I have no idea if you'd agree about the sound if you heard what I'm hearing, but it seems all my guests agree. I had my brother-in-law over who has always been in to great audio, and who ditched records when he could for digital (he gave them all to me), and he was absolutely puzzled that I was listening to vinyl. When I played him some stuff (including some from his albums) he was amazed and said he never knew a record could sound like that. Then he wasn't so puzzled.
Since you've already doled out the money, I hope you manage to get some fun out of your vinyl set up! Maybe some will have suggestions for a better cartridge or something to see if that helps.
Old Listener
Senior Member
Three more analogies:
- Vinyl isn't where the Next Generation lives. It's somewhere they go on vacation. They aren't going to give up streaming, listening on the go with a phone and headphones or listening in a car.
- For the more committed. vinyl is their second home for weekends and summer vacations.
- listening to vinyl is like cosplay.
JP
Major Contributor
15 ‘tables going up for sale immediately...
111db
Member
True, and an inspired quip!
Welcome to the reality of vinyl playback.
It is possible to get very good sound from vinyl but it will cost you a lot more than 500 bucks. I own a full blown Linn LP12 - full blown based on the late 90ies, that is LP12 cirkus, Lingo PS, Ekos Arm, and a Van den Hul MC1 special. All bought used except the basic table with standard PS. In todays money this would be about € 5000 (inflation disregarded - a current full blown LP12 is closer to 15 grand, I think). Although I don't use mine often I'm not going to sell it with 1300+ records on store, but I would never start with vinyl if I had no records.
Regarding noise floor, klicks and pops you need:
- a good pressing: if the vinyl is ruined in the making nothing can help to improve it
- a clean record (you can clean dirty records)
- a stylus with a very sharp line cut: the contact to the side of the groove is better and wider than with a round or elliptical stylus so it will track better on records which are (partially) ruined by weared round/elliptical stylusses. More about that here.
- a decent phono preamp:
- low noise ensures that the noise floor of the best vinyl is much worse than that of the preamp
- high headroom ensures that impulses (pops and klicks) are not widened due to long recovery times. Where a bad preamp outputs a loud tock a good preamp outputs a quiet dig.
If you still intend to go with vinyl I would recommend to start with a better stylus.
R2R is becoming the next hype. The problem is that there are very few recordings on sale and they cost what - 10 times of a record? Forget it.
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Yeah, the whole R2R thing falls flat for me. To me it has none of the aesthetic, or even ergonomic, appeal of turntables and vinyl, and once I'd bypassed the quirks of vinyl (including the different sound of vinyl) I may as well go with digital. R2R is a sort of no-man's land to my mind.
(And..ugh...it still drives me bonkers when highfalutin' audiophiles, and some audio writers still treat vinyl and R2R as "the ultimate" sound quality.
Every time I read in a review of, say, a new expensive DAC and the writer says "after all these years digital has *almost* caught up to vinyl/analog" I want to puke. I mean clearly I like the sound of my records, but I hate the woo-woo stuff that imputes some sort of magic-technical sauce to analog
that somehow escapes digital, leaving digital "inferior.").
OP
curiouspeter
Addicted to Fun and Learning
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- #48
Looks like the difference between $500 turntables and $5000 ones are much bigger than the difference between $500 DACs and $5000 ones.
No wonder audiophiles love analog.
Robin L
Master Contributor
Yes. For what it's worth, my Linn Sondek LP-12 set me back all of $1000, Ittok arm and Audio Technica high output moving coil cartridge, plug and play. This was back in 1998, the 'table had Valhalla mods, but that was the extent of it. It's probably a good thing that I don't own it anymore. Did it make that much difference? Yes, but that much difference wouldn't be enough for me. I'd still hear everything that bothers me about LPs, but in higher fidelity.Looks like the difference between $500 turntables and $5000 ones are much bigger than the difference between $500 DACs and $5000 ones.
No wonder audiophiles love analog.
If you get a chance to get to a well known audio show, listen in to a high end system playing high priced turntable etc. If conditions are right, you will not hear "clicks and pops and noise" issues which are absent when the vinyl is used at its best. CD (and digital) gave the little guy what the highest end analog vinyl gave the 10 percenters. Except of course, for the particular "vinyl embellishments" that enhance two channel stereo "sound" for many folks, you can count me in that group, although good quality recordings in any medium are just good, period. I can see folks getting some vinyl since they are in the hobby, or some R2R but the price is you need to know what you are doing when it comes to gear selection.
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Looks like the difference between $500 turntables and $5000 ones are much bigger than the difference between $500 DACs and $5000 ones.
No wonder audiophiles love analog.
The quality of the recording trumps all, no matter which platform.
Next comes the setup (especially turntable/tonearm/cartridge/preamp) (almost no challenge these days with dacs)
Have heard some modest vinyl rigs sound much better than expensive ones (getting all them parts matched and working together is the fun and challenging part for us crazy ones)
Absolutely understand why some folks think we are nuts and use dacs and streaming, lots of advantages.
I think it is a myth that you have to spend a lot of money to get good vinyl playback. Diminishing returns sets in pretty quickly and vinyl has so many inherent limitations that for me at least it doesn't make sense to chase the last 1% of performance. Having said this I have noticed in the last year or so the prices of anything to do with vinyl like new or used TT's or carts or stylus or first press records has literally skyrocketed. I bought a Denon 103 R for $225 less than 2 years ago on Amazon and now they want $405?
Sometimes, I make photographs using a Pentax 67 just because it’s such a beautiful machine to own and use. But my digital Pentax 645Z gets better results. Large format is more an expression of deep skill for its own sake.
That said, there’s no analogue here with vinyl, which is a source, and assumes one owns the source material. That source material already gives me free playback rights in perpetuity, unlike streaming.
My table is a Thorens TD166II that roars at about -40 dB FS below about 40 Hz. But I can listen through that as easily as I can listen through falling rain outside.
I was watching one of those Herb Reichert binaural bunker YouTubes where he was listening to some Joseph Audio speakers, and recording their sound using a binaural microphone. He played a DSD file, an LP, and a CD. He played the LP on a Linn LP12. Let’s just say it was easy to know which one was the LP.
Rick “concert noise levels are louder and those don’t usually bother me, either” Denney
That said, there’s no analogue here with vinyl, which is a source, and assumes one owns the source material. That source material already gives me free playback rights in perpetuity, unlike streaming.
My table is a Thorens TD166II that roars at about -40 dB FS below about 40 Hz. But I can listen through that as easily as I can listen through falling rain outside.
I was watching one of those Herb Reichert binaural bunker YouTubes where he was listening to some Joseph Audio speakers, and recording their sound using a binaural microphone. He played a DSD file, an LP, and a CD. He played the LP on a Linn LP12. Let’s just say it was easy to know which one was the LP.
Rick “concert noise levels are louder and those don’t usually bother me, either” Denney
Taketheflame
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As a vinyl enthusiast, I'll share my $0.02.
- Record cleaning is one (of many) of the inconveniences of vinyl. In my experience, basic hand cleaning methods aren't very effective on many records, as very fine dirt/dust can get stuck in the grooves that isn't easy to get out. You definitely don't need to buy expensive cleaning machines to get the job done, but I've had far better results using a Spin-Clean than I ever did using a Discwasher D4 - with some records becoming almost completely pop free after a good cleaning and using an anti-static brush before playback. Be aware that some modern records have lousy QC and a cleaning is always a good idea before the first play. And older records will always have some pop/crackle if there are audible scratches/damage - no amount of cleaning will fix that.
- No doubt that the noise floor will be lower with vinyl. Rumble can vary quite a bit between turntables - some tables can be very quiet, and others quite noisy. The vinyl itself can also play a role in this (poorly cut vinyl can be noisy).
- The coloration is very real, but is also a big part of vinyl's appeal for many (including myself...). However, you can mitigate this by using a cartridge with more accurate/flatter frequency response. I like the Ortofon 2M series for a less colored presentation than some of my other cartridges (some of the die-hard vinyl folks complain about them making records sound too much like CD, so I interpret this as meaning they're more tonally accurate).
- Dynamic range is also limited in vinyl. If you value maximum dynamic range, then CD/Digital wins. It's not a contest tbh...
Vinyl is far from a perfect medium, but it can sure be a lot of fun for the right people, and can sound great when done right - it may simply not be for you, and that's OK. (And on topic of R2R tape, it's a lot more money to do it right than with vinyl - plus the media is far less stable).
OP
curiouspeter
Addicted to Fun and Learning
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- #55
I accept that it's fun. That's why I still embrace it despite dinner of it's flaws
That's just the way it is, much of what's written by the vinyl guys glosses over or denies the problems.
1. Expense, both the gear and the tape is very costly today.
2. I believe tape handling can be a major turnoff for many. Many find the ritual of playing LP's enjoyable but I never met anyone who found the chore of tape threading, rewinding, and all the rest fun in that way?
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+1
Yeah, I've never seen anyone say tape threading, handling, rewinding was a ritual. I guess the LP hit the sweet spot for just enough delay to be a ritual without being a real pain in the rear. But hey, my CD player is belt driven and has a weight to put upon each CD played. Re-creates some of the ritual.
OP
curiouspeter
Addicted to Fun and Learning
- Thread Starter
- #59
As an archival method, nothing beats a digital file constantly being replicated across the internet. With so many perfect copies on so many places, not even a total nuclear war can nuke the master.
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