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A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

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Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#161

Post by hbn »

ryukoposting wrote: post #103
kstrauser wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That whole line of thinking just blows me away. It's possible to accurately sample and reproduce any vinyl recording in the digital realm. It's absolutely not possible to accurately record every digital recording onto vinyl. For instance, it's not hard at all to make bass so loud that it causes the needle to leap out of the track, or treble so high that the needle can't accurately track the high frequency vibrations.…

I absolutely despise most of the vinyl community. Don't get me wrong, I love my records. I have hundreds of them and I play them regularly. For some reason, almost everyone I come by has this delusion that vinyl is objectively better than a good digital recording. Anyone who dissents from that narrative gets gaslit: "oh what kind of turntable do you have? oh that's not good enough, there's your problem right there."…

I recently got a record player and have been amassing a small collection of my favourite albums. Including the reasons you gave, my excuse for buying/listening to records is I like having a physical representation of albums I like, and something that won't disappear because a contract expired with a streaming service.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#162

Post by egypturnash »

kstrauser wrote: post #67
egypturnash wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On OSX Music, window>equalizer. You can also grab Rogue Amoeba’s “SoundSource” to have volume controls for every noise-generating app on the computer, and apply effects chains to them, including EQ.

I love SoundSource so much. I bought it so I could use the volume keys on my keyboard to adjust the system volume on my HDMI monitor. I was blown away when I found out I could plug my collection of VSTs into the output pipeline.

Yeah, adjusting the volume on my monitor was really the reason I bought it, too. All the other stuff's a nice bonus.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#163

Post by JJMcJ »

ryukoposting wrote: post #103
kstrauser wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That whole line of thinking just blows me away. It's possible to accurately sample and reproduce any vinyl recording in the digital realm. It's absolutely not possible to accurately record every digital recording onto vinyl. For instance, it's not hard at all to make bass so loud that it causes the needle to leap out of the track, or treble so high that the needle can't accurately track the high frequency vibrations.…

I absolutely despise most of the vinyl community. Don't get me wrong, I love my records. I have hundreds of them and I play them regularly. For some reason, almost everyone I come by has this delusion that vinyl is objectively better than a good digital recording. Anyone who dissents from that narrative gets gaslit: "oh what kind of turntable do you have? oh that's not good enough, there's your problem right there."…

I remember when CDs were very very new the first review of them in an audiophile magazine a friend subscribed to. The reviewer was quite unhappy.

The next month he reviewed a different player. He basically retracted his opinion of CDs but said the player from the previous month was obviously terrible, at least the particular one that he did his review on, if not the entire brand.

And for audiophiles themselves, I notice many of them seem to have very poor taste in music. Like do you really need $50,000 of equipment and sand weighted speakers that weigh 700 pounds each to play 1968 bachelor pad music?

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#164

Post by hbn »

wk_end wrote: post #123
kstrauser wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I listened to "Disintegration" last week exactly like that, but with Apple Music. It was the first time I'd listened to an album start-to-finish in years, and I highly recommend it. I like not having to flip the record halfway through, or being able to listen to "The Wall" without 3 flips.

The structure that side/disc limitations impose is part of the listening experience, to me - I like having to take a moment to consider the sub-narrative of the side as a whole before moving on. Even when streaming I’ll often look up the vinyl track listings to get a sense of the artist’s intended schema.

> I like having to take a moment to consider the sub-narrative of the side as a whole before moving on.

That's a great way of putting it! And something I hadn't considered before I bought a record player and started listening to it. There's that point in time where you realize the A-side is done, you get up to go and flip it, and you have a half-minute or so of reflection on the first half. Then the B-side starts and it's like the second act of a play is starting after intermission.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#165

Post by jef_leppard »

This whole thing reminds me of the time some renowned wine connoisseurs blind taste tested vintage wines and they slipped 2 buck chuck in there. A few of them picked the 2 buck chuck as their favorite. None of them called it out as inferior wine. They all said stuff like "hints of smoke. Berry finish."

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#166

Post by analog31 »

mod wrote: post #31
jrajav wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time people will argue that vinyl has "warmth" and this makes it subjectively better. This is true, but it's actually because of the pleasing distortion record players add to the music. Being distortion, even if it improves your listening experience (and this depends on genre, though it generally does), it is certainly objectively worse in terms of accurate reproduction.

Can't the warmth just be reproduced in a digital player anyway?

My son told me that some hip-hop recordings incorporate digitally generated tics and scratches to simulate vinyl.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#167

Post by Beltalowda »

In 2006 a "Controversies" section was removed from their Wikipedia page[1] after "a letter of complaint". You can still read it of course[2], part of which is:

"Additionally, some both inside and outside the audiophile community have criticized MFSL's [aka MoFi] willingness to stretch its "Original Master Recording" logo. For example, critics note that several MFSL Mk I releases are not from the original masters; one notorious example is the Beatles "Magical Mystery Tour". More troublesome to some, though, is MFSL's recent habit of releasing gold CDs that are sourced from digital master tapes instead of the original analog masters."

So it seems these allegations go back quite some time.

For what it's worth, I don't really buy in to the whole "audiophile" stuff and am skeptical you can hear the difference, but delivering "B" while it says "A" on the label is essentially defrauding your customers, and possibly illegal (or at least, it ought to be).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mobile_Fidelity_Sound_Lab...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mobile_Fidelity_S...

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#168

Post by iasay »

jef_leppard wrote: post #165

This whole thing reminds me of the time some renowned wine connoisseurs blind taste tested vintage wines and they slipped 2 buck chuck in there. A few of them picked the 2 buck chuck as their favorite. None of them called it out as inferior wine. They all said stuff like "hints of smoke. Berry finish."

I've heard a "wine expert" spew a load of rubbish like that and when offered it was obviously corked. Tasted like vinegar.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#169

Post by libraryatnight »

jef_leppard wrote: post #165

This whole thing reminds me of the time some renowned wine connoisseurs blind taste tested vintage wines and they slipped 2 buck chuck in there. A few of them picked the 2 buck chuck as their favorite. None of them called it out as inferior wine. They all said stuff like "hints of smoke. Berry finish."

I recall reading a similar piece where they gave expert wine judges flights of wines to judge but some glasses would be the same wine from the same bottle and they'd judge it differently.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#170

Post by GuB-42 »

taylodl wrote: post #106

Nyquist Theorem - learn it, love it, live it. I'm a musician and my mates and I have been going round and round on this issue for years. They swear analog is "warm" and "captures the whole wave." It's all BS. It's always been BS. What the vinyl lovers never stop to realize is the audio signal has to be modified to record on vinyl - you're not listening to the music as recorded on the master tape, you're listening to…

> Fast forward 30 years and the only people still debating this topic are the rock & metal guys.

An it makes sense. Rock and metal are played with electric guitars, and electric guitars are not much unless they are plugged into an amplifier. What it means is that the amp is not just part of sound reproduction, it is actually part of the instrument.

It is especially true in metal, where amps are frequently overdriven for that characteristic sound, here the idea of sound reproduction completely goes out of the window, the sound characteristics come as much from the amp as they come from the guitar itself, if not more. And if you look closely during rock/metal concerts, guitars are almost never plugged directly into the PA system, the band come with their own amps and if necessary, the sound is picked up using microphones and then sent to the PA system.

So it make as much sense for guitarists to want a specific kind of tube amp as it is for a violinist to care about the wood their instrument is made of.

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