Got me a record player!

I completely agree Jules
Michael.

 

Ian

Here is sunny brockley ( sarrrf of the river - get to elephant and head east) we did have power yesterday and thankfully i wasn't stuck on the tube as i might well have been had it happened 24 hours earlier- phew.I thought that you, lee and i should get together for a beer.

atb

John

 

Yes vinyl is more of a hassle than CD, but it's worth the extra effort (to me) because of a) the better results and b) the lower cost of s/h vinyl.

I'm much more likely to splash out £2 on something I know nothing about than £14.99 for a CD which I know nothing about.

I'm glad the 'warm & fuzzy' caricature of vinyl has been laid to rest. As others have pointed out, it doesn't sound like that at all.

 

It always amazes me how tenacious people are to justify their personal choices, particularly if they are worst than mainstream...

 

Sorry Michael and everyone else, what we compared was in fact 96kHz/24 bit with 44.1kHz/16 bit.

Details here.

 

Yes - that would show a big difference, it's the 24bits thats doing it

Even HDCD which (by some trickery I don't quite understand) manages to extend CD to 20 bits sounds a lot better than regular 16bit CD, even though it's still got the same 44.1kHz sample rate.

Michael.

 

Tones:

OK, we're tied then. I'm the same as you in that respect.

Julian:

I've never made any claims that vinyl is superior. Just that I personally prefer it. I only reacted when people made generalisations about what vinyl-heads must be listening for, or how they must be tweakier than digitalians. As long as people listen to lots of music and enjoy it, I really don't care either way.

JohnH:

Splendid idea. Lee seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Is he still alive, or has he disappeared under a pile of valve amps?

A Thought Experiment for Digitalians:

Derek the Digitalian has bought a new CD player. He thinks it's much better than his older player, and it cost him £3K so it ought to be.

He invites his friend Albert the Agnostic to have a listen. Would Derek prefer it if Albert described the new player:

(a) As an improvement on the old, because it's much more digital sounding

or,

(b) As an improvement on the old, because it's much more analogue sounding

Supplementary question: if Derek prefers answer (b), shouldn't he consider that he might enjoy an analogue source?

-- Ian

 

Good question. It was only about five years ago that I first heard a CD player that I could actually listen to for more than five minutes.

 

When people say "analogue sounding", what the hell do they mean anyway? Sounds like their TT? Sounds like all TTs?

If I spent 3K on a new CDP I'd want it sound "better" - your thought experiment is loaded Digitalians have fallen into the trap of the vinylistas of assuming that their ultimate goal should be to get a CDP to sound like a TT and hence you get all this BS about "much more analogue sounding".

Michael.

 

Absolutely right, and also mirrors my experiences too.

Now, the earlier discussions about changing/replacing cartridges/stylus with vinyl vs laser/mechanism problems with CD... That reminds me of one particular aspect of t/t ownership that has a definite plus point over CDP ownership... that is that IMO t/t's are very much more "user-serviceable" than CD. If your catridges needs services attention, you just unmount it yourself, pop it in your jacket pocket and stroll down to the hi-fi shop, no grief. When you have problems with your CDP, you have to package up the entire beast and man handle it over to the hi-fi shop or take a day off work to wait in for courier to pick it up. OK, CDP's can be serviced at home by the user, but home many people actually have the skills compared to the ease with which the avergage Jo Bloggs can fault find and fix up a t/t?

For the record (pun not intended ), I sit on the fence too on the vinyl vs CD debate, and would much prefer to use CD if a) it did the things that vinyl did sonically, and b) I could replace all my vinyl albums/singles with CD eqivalents (that sounded as good). I'm also a newbie, only owned a t/t and significant amount of vinyl for the past 12 years. I was also not able to hear a significant difference between the two formats, apart from the pops and crackles, but after going to several hi-fi show the penny dropped and since then I've also been able to instinctively hear what CD lacks in comparison to vinyl - no one told me how to listen nor did I read about what those qualities were, it just happened rather like it did with Merlin.

Dynamic range... Yes, unequivalically, this is one area that CD is measurably and audibly superior to vinyl in. I think CD is about 102dB, but 106dB might about right too. Vinly is much less, a total guess here, about 85dB??? Older analgoue recordings from before the 70's no doubt had a narrower dynamic range due to limitations with studio technology compared to today's hi-res digital studio formats, but it's the preservation of harmonic nuances (in the time domain ?) which IMO that is the appeal of older analogue recordings played back on a good t/t. On the other hand, most contemporary rock/pop recordings are very heavily compressed from a dynamic range point of view. So despite apparent inferiority of vinyl's dynamic range, it's the old adage "it's not what you got, but what you do with it"!

 

ian,
in answer to your question i think the problem here is that the vocabulary has become corrupt. analog sounding and digital sounding are meaningless statements as, as we've seen in this thread, analog and digital have a wide spectrum of sounds. the words analog and digital used in this context are only useful as a point of reference to what the speaker has heard in the past not as an objective (or even subjective) quantity of better or worse to another person.

if the speaker said your new source is better than your previous because it has better timing, more detail and seems more real. then it could be referring to either analog or digital. i must admit i wouldn;t like my source to sound like some tt's i;'ve heard (wow-ey, crackly things) and i wouldn';t like it to sound like some cd players i've heard (overly smooth, bright and artificial) but stereotyping all cd's as being bright and artificial is as ridiculous as saying all tt's have speed problems and surface noise.

The media has fallen into the mind set that analog is always better than digital and therefore describing something as analog means that it is somehow better than it's digital origins suggest. this is blatantly untrue is a debut 2 better sounding that a cds2 or wadia 860? no? then analog is NOT always better than digital. it's a balance. however the stupid, lazy hacks writing for the hi-fi media cannot be bothered to actually dig into their, admittedly limited, vocabularies to describe what they are hearing and so trot out the old bollocks about sounding 'digital' or 'analog'. either that or they have to trim their articles so much so that they can squeeze in more pictures and advertising.

as for personally preferring a or b i don;t really care as either way it sounds better than what i had before and THAT'S what matters.
cheers

julian

 

I will add that we associate the brick wall filter effects of original CDPs + what jitter can do to sound, with digital versus analog, wich doesn't have this problems of course, so I think it is not that unfair to say a CD player sounds more analog, I used that analogy when I replaced the Siltech digital IC with an Apogee Wide-Eye, and that doesn't mean I think I have TT sound now...

 

Julian, has it ever crossed your mind that in one or two iportant areas, that are the focus of vinyl lovers, that maybe it actually is I'm sure most of us would feel the Wadia would slaughter the little Project, and indeed it would. I do think however, that those that are tuned into vinyl, would still find the Debut more natural Just hypothesising of course.

 

Clearly the goal of any good analogue system is to achieve a digital sound. On the other hand, the very best digital systems sound like analogue.

My own record deck is sounding so good now that I can no longer listen to it. It's too digital and no longer sounds real to me. It looks like I've got to go back to listening to my rapidly improving cdp to get the analogue sound that I crave.

And on the subject of improving my cdp, has anyone come across the ADE-24 Analog Digital Enhancer from Margules Audio (yes, I thought it was a good name too)?

Steve

 

As I said earlier, I'd prefer a properly set-up (on Mana) Rega Planar 3 to any CD player.

The CD medium offers reasonable sound quality, high convenience, low breakability when intoxicated and low noise.

 

Michael:

Julian:

You haven't played by the rules of the experiment. The whole point of a thought experiment is to honestly test your own reactions to a hypothetical situation. In this case, the experiment is obviously designed to test whether somebody regards the words "digital" and "analogue" as meaning "worse" and "better".

My guess is that most digitalians' instinctive reaction would be to prefer answer (b). You may say that's just a feature of corrupt language, but in that case you need to think about what "better" really means in a digital context, if it doesn't mean "closer to analogue". I entirely agree that "this CD player sounds more analogue" is nonsense (there isn't a CD player I've heard that sounds anything like analogue, and I've heard a fair few). Plenty of contributors to this thread have said they prefer CD for reasons of convenience, dynamic range, and a couple of other things. Nobody has come up with anything in defence of CD as eloquent as Merlin's description of what he likes about his analogue experience. I'd be interested to read such a defence.

-- Ian

 

The thing is, I don't thing CD needs defending. It's vinyl lovers who seem to think that vinyl requires defending in the light of CD and new formats, not the other way around.

I'm very happy with CD and see no reason to switch to or also have vinyl - why does that position need to be defended?

Michael.

 

I thought we were having a discussion about the merits of the two formats - don't you have a view as to why you prefer CD?

-- Ian

 

LP/CD comparison

I am really envious of tones for thinking that both his sources sound the same. I think that is the ideal position for music lovers and wish I were there too. Unfortunately, in my system LP sounds quite better to my ears.

I'd love to improve on my digital front to feel that they are at a similar level, but I would guess that it becomes way too expensive to even give it a try. I refuse to spend ridiculous amount of money for a 2nd source.

Joongul (with 1000 LPs/400 CDs)

 

It strikes me that part of the issue is the format itself.

LP have definite format limitations that restrict for example dynamic range and bass extension.
I think that the result of this is that newer well engineered CDs that take advantage of the potential of the disk should result in a sound that is simply impossible to achieve on a record deck.

Vice versa, I believe that CDs based on older analogue recordings that were setup for cutting to LP make no use of the capabilities of the disk, and this is where LPs IMO have a big advantage.

Over time, I really do believe the newer CD pressings should more than stand up to LP as they make better use of the technology.

So frankly, who cares about the arguement, base your buying decision on your musical taste. If you focus your buying on older pressings, go LP, for newer stuff, take CD.