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How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

news.qthemusic.com

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Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#11

Post by dmix »

rdtsc wrote: post #10
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…

> 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.

Because I bought an expensive headphone amp and I like using it to its full ability. But 96khz is more than enough.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#12

Post by EliRivers »

rdtsc wrote: post #10
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…

> 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.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#13

Post by rdtsc »

dmix wrote: post #11
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.

Because I bought an expensive headphone amp and I like using it to its full ability. But 96khz is more than enough.

I tend to accept what is guy is saying when it comes to audio:

http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/index.html

See if you agree with him or not, especially the first 3 demos.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#14

Post by jff »

> However the static is soon forgotten as Whole Lotta Love rumbles out of the speakers and fills the room. Clear and all encompassing, it's as if the audio spectrum has opened up to me and now I'm swimming in the sound, rather than just watching the waves from the beach. Not that I'm trying to sound like I found God or anything, but this has to be the musical version of that revelation. "In MP3s it's all wedged up into one space, everything is compromised," explains my sonic Sherpa, Phil. "Whereas on a record like this on a decent system, you can isolate everything. Just listen to the voice, and now to the drums. Normally, you miss things, like bass players!" The music is like a big, warm melodic bear hug.

Ok, thanks, sonic douchebag Phil. The important part is "on a decent system". It's almost as though having this big set of expensive speakers all around you might make a song sound more "all encompassing" than listening through a pair of $10 earbuds.

I have some vinyl because I like old things, and I agree that it's an experience worth trying, but have you ever listened to an album like The Wall or The Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl? It's great as a chance to listen the way people did when it first came out, but on the other hand, these albums are meant to be listened straight through, with the "songs" flowing one into another, and it really messes up that flow when you have to flip and re-start 4 different times to finish The Wall.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#16

Post by kefka »

markfig wrote: post #8

There are plenty of reasons to listen to vinyl and it's fine if you are doing it to be hip. I do it because of the sound quality. CDs were invented in the 1980s. The digital resolution is simply not very high. Remember what the first digital cameras looked like next to film? That's the CD next to vinyl. And MP3s and AACs are so much worse. It's like comparing a compressed JPG to an Ansel Adams print on a gallery wall…

I have access to quite a different formats in our house. Our materials go all the way back to our edisongraph, with the cylinder box-eulas.

The best format I've heard is 24 bit depth, 96KHz full stereo audio files. That is assuming the microphones were tuned appropriately for their response. MP3's clip higher frequencies, as well as 'round the tops'. Other lossy encoders do other hard-but-easy to hear.

Of course, one also has to deal with the Monster crowd and other golden ear audiophiles. I've only seen one true audiophile: I attended an amateur radio club (fellow ham here). A guy named Stephen, who has been blind since birth, brought his 1 watt Argonaut with a crappy little omnidirectional antenna. We were in the basement of the red cross building (in the Midwest). After 10 or so minutes, he starts hearing something.... And initiates a QSO (contact)... With Hawaii! He talks for perhaps 11 minutes before signing off.

Nobody else could hear the chirps of morse code through that layer of static. He could, even in the basement of a steel and concrete building.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#17

Post by bartl »

dmix wrote: post #9
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.

A ton of audiophiles with $5000 stereo systems still prefer the analog vinyl sound over digital if you read the magazines/forums. It's not quite adventurous or hipster to make that statement.

And some audiophiles would pay up to $500 for a wooden volume knob: http://boingboing.net/2005/11/07/astronomically-overp.html. I don't quite trust those people's judgement.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#18

Post by IvyMike »

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.

You may be confusing kHz sample rate with kbps bit rate.

I do not think you can distinguish 48kHz vs 192kHz over bad earbuds; I have my doubts that most people can tell even on high-end equipment.

An in-depth technical exploration of the issue here: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl

#19

Post by PeterWhittaker »

dmix wrote: post #9
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.

A ton of audiophiles with $5000 stereo systems still prefer the analog vinyl sound over digital if you read the magazines/forums. It's not quite adventurous or hipster to make that statement.

The same people who buy towers to lift their cables from the floor, perchance?

Unless that $5000 rig is a perfectly engineered house (which it may well be, I admit), it don't make a diff. Especially if the furniture moves, a dog comes into the room, there's movement outside, a butterfly alights in Brazil....

There's a lot shared between oenophiles and audiophiles whose perceptions are seriously skewed by their expectations - as are all of ours, of course.

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