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How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

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Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#21

Post by musicdewd »

dmix wrote: post #2

I love vinyl too but I don't like spending $20 on a record any more. It's entirely possible to build a decent collection from "crate digging" and bargian hunting. But most good albums have increased in price. You can find 192kHz/24-bit rips of vinyl records on torrent sites or convert them using a USB record player. Then use a proper audio DAC and it's a perfect audio replication without the additional drag of having…

I seriously doubt half the newer music you listen to was even recorded at 192kHz, most of music that's put through a DAW is done at 96kHz at the most. 192kHz would be rare.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#22

Post by Agathos »

IanDrake wrote: post #4

Vinyl sounds great for increasing one's hipster cred, but last time I heard a vinyl album it sounded like, well, crap. The author seems to be comparing the sound of the record shop's nicest player to an MP3, of god knows what bit-rate, played through ear buds. Maybe what he's really discovered is that a nice hi-fi system goes a long way and he should get more disk space for his audio files and go lossless.

Now that vinyl is the exclusive domain of hipster audiophiles, the quality of the vinyl experience has increased a hundredfold. Households like the one I grew up in, with our scratched-up records and the player we picked up at Caldor, have no reason to miss it.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#23

Post by SageRaven »

IanDrake wrote: post #4

Vinyl sounds great for increasing one's hipster cred, but last time I heard a vinyl album it sounded like, well, crap. The author seems to be comparing the sound of the record shop's nicest player to an MP3, of god knows what bit-rate, played through ear buds. Maybe what he's really discovered is that a nice hi-fi system goes a long way and he should get more disk space for his audio files and go lossless.

For shits and giggles, I snagged a vinyl rip of Simon and Garfunkle's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" in 24-bit 96KHz FLAC format online, just to see what all the fuss was about. Some guys who do serious vinyl rips spare no expense, using pristine vinyl on high-end rigs, washing the disk before the first play, etc.. I don't pretend to understand all the jargon.

Now I obviously couldn't perform scientifically sound listening tests on my own. But I did do repeated back-to-back plays (of snippets and whole song) comparing the 16-bit 44.1 KHz FLAC rip I performed on my S&G's "Greatest Hits" CD to the 24-bit vinyl rip. And as skeptical as I was, the sound is a little warmer and seems to have more spacial volume (I'm no audiophile, so my terms are probably making people wince) on vinyl than on the CD. I am using a low-end $60 Sony head-set and all audio from my PC competes with background clicks and chirps from my built-in audio jack due to bad poor grounding in the motherboard (I assume).

I can think of 3 reasons the vinyl rip sounded better to me: 1) It is, in fact, a better sound; 2) The master used to produce the vinyl source was better than the one used for the CD I have; or 3) It's all in my head.

I mostly ruled out #3 because I snagged a few more 24-bit vinyl rips to see if they were any better then my CD sources, but I deleted them due to poor sound.

That all said, regardless of the technical details, I am quite fond of my new 24-bit 96KHz copy of "The Boxer". This song is amazing in its musical layering and depth, and the ever-so-slight improvements I personally hear from the new rip was well worth the bother.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#24

Post by geon »

EliRivers wrote: post #12
rdtsc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 192kHz@24bits I know disk space is cheap, but why 192kHz? Why not encode at 48kHz and use the rest of it for more music, or heck, cat videos.

I'm no kind of music fan, and even I can hear how crappy 48kHz sounds next to 192kHz; you can hear it even over a bad pair of earbuds.

CDs use 44.1 kHz and 16 bits. There is just no way you can tell if it is anything better than that on earbuds, no matter the price.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#26

Post by ChuckMcM »

IanDrake wrote: post #4

Vinyl sounds great for increasing one's hipster cred, but last time I heard a vinyl album it sounded like, well, crap. The author seems to be comparing the sound of the record shop's nicest player to an MP3, of god knows what bit-rate, played through ear buds. Maybe what he's really discovered is that a nice hi-fi system goes a long way and he should get more disk space for his audio files and go lossless.

Vinyl is an analog system, as such it suffers from noise sources along the transmission path and so it can easily 'sound like crap' and 'sound exquisite' depending on the path it takes from the recording to your ear.

I've still got a turntable, and I think I have exactly one cartridge left for it (that was the unit that contained the track sensor (the needle) and signal conditioning circuit). My hearing however is such that I can't tell the difference between easily between a 192Kbps MP3 and the analog equivalent. :-)

That said, there is some research that the inner ear is not as oblivious to overlapping frequencies as the original compression algorithms assumed. I don't know if anyone has yet done a rigorous study on it to figure out if that is the 'source' of much of the audiophile complaints or not.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#27

Post by JasonFruit »

Agathos wrote: post #22
IanDrake wrote: post #4

Vinyl sounds great for increasing one's hipster cred, but last time I heard a vinyl album it sounded like, well, crap. The author seems to be comparing the sound of the record shop's nicest player to an MP3, of god knows what bit-rate, played through ear buds. Maybe what he's really discovered is that a nice hi-fi system goes a long way and he should get more disk space for his audio files and go lossless.

Now that vinyl is the exclusive domain of hipster audiophiles, the quality of the vinyl experience has increased a hundredfold. Households like the one I grew up in, with our scratched-up records and the player we picked up at Caldor, have no reason to miss it.

Well, yes and no. I had my vast collection of second-hand classical records, and I still hold that string sound from the best of the vinyl ones surpasses anything off a CD. Whether that was a difference in studio techniques and philosophy is another matter — I imagine that Walter Trampler was miked differently in 1975 than Yuri Bashmet in 2001, for example — but the sound from my prize vinyl was warm, full, and smooth, without a hint of the near-imperceptible metallic rattle I hear in even the best of my CDs.

I may, of course, be imagining it. But I still bear a grudge against the people who stole my collection. I should work on that.

EDIT: I'm certainly no audiophile, and my equipment was nothing special.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#29

Post by GaryGapinski »

Vinyl is inferior to good (not lossy) digital.

Using vinyl as a medium is daft.

I do miss album covers. I don't miss the noise, defects, expense, and fragility.

Good speakers are worth the money. Vinyl is not in any way worth any money nor is worth obsessing about (unless obsession is the goal).

I do have an un-played Mosaic MQ10-177 available for anyone daft enough to be interested in vinyl. I thought it a worthy specimen of obsolete technology.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#30

Post by __david__ »

EliRivers wrote: post #12
rdtsc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 192kHz@24bits I know disk space is cheap, but why 192kHz? Why not encode at 48kHz and use the rest of it for more music, or heck, cat videos.

I'm no kind of music fan, and even I can hear how crappy 48kHz sounds next to 192kHz; you can hear it even over a bad pair of earbuds.

> even I can hear how crappy 48kHz sounds next to 192kHz

:-) No you can't. All raising the sampling rate does is raise the Nyquist frequency and unless you have super human ears that can hear up to 96KHz (you don't), then all you're doing is wasting disk space.

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