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just brew it!
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Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Jan 23, 2013 1:24 am

Forked from the speakers thread...

Captain Ned wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
Jeez, been a few years since I browsed that NeedleDoctor site I linked. Their "budget" phono cartridge category goes up to $650.

I've been trying to tell you that the Last Great Turntable Revolution (I think) has been on for 2-3 years.

I haven't bought vinyl LPs for years (literally decades). Other than my efforts to rip my old LP collection to FLAC, I don't listen to vinyl any more.

I was pretty anal back in the day, and would return LPs to the store repeatedly until I got one that was free from factory defects (warps, scratches, off-center center holes that caused audible pitch variation, foreign matter molded into the vinyl that caused audible "thumps", etc.). Sometimes this resulted in me running through the store's entire stock of a particular album over a period of several days; on a few occasions we (the store manager and I) even concluded that an entire run had been pressed from a bad master, since all had the exact same defect.

QA of vinyl LPs really was crap back in the day unless you paid a hefty premium for (and put up with the limited selection available from) specialty reissue labels like MFSL.

So... is the quality of current vinyl pressings any good, or is it just a hipster retro nostalgia thing?
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Jan 23, 2013 6:26 am

just brew it! wrote:
So... is the quality of current vinyl pressings any good, or is it just a hipster retro nostalgia thing?

It's good and it's not hipster nostalgia. The vinyl renaissance is actually about a decade old at this point, and the producers know that their customers are not the Columbia Record House shoobs from the '70s. The few remaining turntable manufacturers waited several years to make sure it wasn't a nostalgia bit before jumping in with new designs.
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Jan 23, 2013 6:39 am

What I don't get about vinyl is that it supposedly sounds better than alternatives, even though the signal is compressed and then frequencies are reinfused when it's played back. I do have some vinyl, though... but no record player for them, and I'm not sure it's worth it to get a really expensive turntable for what is essentially a life of iPod listening.
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Jan 23, 2013 6:44 am

FireGryphon wrote:
What I don't get about vinyl is that it supposedly sounds better than alternatives, even though the signal is compressed and then frequencies are reinfused when it's played back. I do have some vinyl, though... but no record player for them, and I'm not sure it's worth it to get a really expensive turntable for what is essentially a life of iPod listening.

Vinyl is a taste, no doubt. If you want to re-explore an old vinyl collection on the cheap with better quality than your '70s deck, look at the low end of the Music Hall turntable line.

http://www.musichallaudio.com/products.php?l=3&c=2
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Jan 23, 2013 6:49 am

As for me, the choice is between the Rega RP6 (which comes with a voltage re-regulation box that means 33 1/3 is 33 1/3) and the VPI Traveler. Problem is that no one local stocks either and I won't buy until I've heard.
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Jan 23, 2013 12:05 pm

FireGryphon wrote:
What I don't get about vinyl is that it supposedly sounds better than alternatives, even though the signal is compressed and then frequencies are reinfused when it's played back. I do have some vinyl, though... but no record player for them, and I'm not sure it's worth it to get a really expensive turntable for what is essentially a life of iPod listening.

Meh, definitions. Does "better" mean absolute maximum fidelity, or is it the sum of the total listening experience? Digital reproduction can give an identical reproduction of the source every single time, and has been doing so for years. With analog, no two listening sessions are ever identical, because of imperfections in the playback mechanism and the fact that the source takes a slight amount of wear with each use. But within reason, the slight variations that accumulate make each listening experience slightly unique.
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Jan 23, 2013 1:53 pm

FireGryphon wrote:
What I don't get about vinyl is that it supposedly sounds better than alternatives, even though the signal is compressed and then frequencies are reinfused when it's played back.

That's not entirely true; it isn't "compression" in either of the usual senses (see below). What they do is apply a particular EQ curve during recording (boost highs and cut lows), and the inverse EQ curve during playback. The process is "lossless" in the sense that a properly designed phono preamp will accurately re-create a flat frequency response. This is done to reduce the severity of surface noise (noise tends to be mostly high frequencies which get cut by the playback EQ curve), and to prevent the groove excursions from being too large when there's a lot of low frequency content (recording the lows at full amplitude would make the groove difficult to track and severely limit the length of an LP side since the turns of the groove would need to be spaced a lot further apart to keep them from cutting into each other).

The standardized definition of this vinyl EQ curve is one of the worthwhile things the RIAA did back in the day, before their primary focus shifted to being the music copyright police. Before the EQ curve was standardized (which was before my time, I'm not *that* old!), recordings released by different labels required different EQ settings for playback.

The word "compression" unfortunately has two very different meanings when it comes to audio. There's data compression (which reduces the size of digital audio files, and may be lossy like MP3 or lossless like FLAC), and there's dynamic range compression (which reduces the difference between the softest and loudest parts of a piece of music).

Data compression obviously doesn't apply to vinyl, since it's an analog medium.

Dynamic range compression on old vinyl recordings actually tends to be LESS severe than on contemporary digital releases. This isn't something that's inherent to vinyl though; it's due to an unfortunate trend over the past couple of decades to master recordings "hot" with a lot of dynamic range compression and/or peak limiting, to make them sound louder when they're played on the radio. (Google "loudness war" sometime if you want to get into the gory technical details.)

And speaking of words with two different meanings in an audio context, "loudness" is another one. The "loudness war" issue has absolutely nothing to do with the "loudness" button on the front panel of a lot of stereo equipment. The "loudness" button is effectively a bass and treble boost preset, intended to compensate for the human ear's non-linear response to very low and very high frequencies at low volume levels.

Heh... enough tangents yet?

The thing that has always amazed me the most about vinyl recordings is the ability to encode 2 channel stereo in a single etched groove using purely analog techniques. The sides of the groove form a perfect 90 degree angle with each other (45 degrees relative to the surface of the record). The left and right sides of the groove are then modulated independently to encode the left and right channels. A pair of microscopic electromechanical transducers (one for each channel) are precisely positioned in the phono cartridge such that each one only responds to motion along one axis, thereby recovering the two independent stereo channels. Crazy stuff!

FireGryphon wrote:
I do have some vinyl, though... but no record player for them, and I'm not sure it's worth it to get a really expensive turntable for what is essentially a life of iPod listening.

Other than replacing the cartridge a few years back I'm still using the same setup I had in college (which is, admittedly, on its last legs at this point).
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 6:50 pm

Sorta offtopic, but is anyone here interested in buying some old LPs? My dad has a few hundred LPs he bought in highschool and college just sitting on shelves in his house. He keeps saying he wants to sell them, but he never seems to get around to it ...

PM me if you want a list or anything! They're all in fair-to-good condition and with original sleeves.
 
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 7:37 pm

YGPM.

Suffice it to say I'm the resident vinyl lover. JBI knows this.
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 8:58 pm

I just don't understand.. I mean yes, I get the hipster/nostalgia/"because-I-can" factor of it, because let's face it, we're all geeks in some way... but!

Vinyl as a medium is just so awfully defect-prone that it makes no sense to use it as your primary storage *or* playback medium. The very fact that, in order to play it, you slide a metal pin along its surface.. So every time you play it, you're eroding the medium, decreasing the quality. Compare that to a digital file (Flac, Ogg, whatever), which remains the same exact sequence of 1's and 0's no matter how many times you listen to it. -- OK, let's put the whole "bit-rot" argument aside, because yes, hard-drives and flash-memory do also degrade over time, but by orders of magnitude less so than vinyl.

It just never made sense to me. I'm no audio-phile, but I can tell the difference between my old frostwire-downloaded-MP3s vs. my ripped-from-CD-wma's, and I do appreciate the quality difference. But it seems you would actually see a downgrade in quality if you went from a well-sourced digital file (uncompressed or lossless-compressed) to a vinyl.

Doesn't make any sense.
 
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 9:04 pm

raen7 wrote:
I just don't understand...
Wellll, let me start by saying that I'm 22 and have listened to maybe ten hours of vinyl in my whole life. However...

The idea is that vinyl retains the analog sound all the way from the player to the listener. That is, it's played on (obviously) analog instruments, recorded on analog equipment, stored on analog (vinyl) media, and then played back on analog equipment. Supposedly it gives a warmer or richer sound, and I don't doubt it; some old vinyls that I've listened to on my dad's old McIntosh amplifier do sound amazingly good. (; `ェ´ ;)b三b

Still, I do agree that it does seem an awful lot of to-do for something like that. I'm sure for some of these old guys it's as much nostalgia as anything, and who can fault them for that?( ̄ー ̄)
Then again, I'm the kind of girl who choses $9 Auvio earbuds over $900 Grado headphones, so... ヘ(。□°)ヘ
just brew it! wrote:
The "loudness war" issue has absolutely nothing to do with the "loudness" button on the front panel of a lot of stereo equipment.
Heh-heh, showing your age, JBI! The only place I've seen a Loudness button/switch is on the relatively ancient Kenwood KA-3500 my dad gave me. ┐( ̄ヮ ̄)┌ Do recievers even come with those anymore? Heh-heh-heh.
 
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 9:16 pm

Dad was doing well if he could afford McIntosh. You don't want to know what they bring in the used market.

As for the rest of the disbelievers. There isn't a single objective measurement I could ever show you to "prove" my perceived superiority of vinyl. In the subjective world, vinyl just sounds right. I have no way of explaining it because it's not amenable to falsifiable methods.
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 9:17 pm

The resolution of a well-mastered DVD-Audio disc is high enough to nullify the concern of folks who claim to be able to hear digital artifacting on CDs. Queensryche's Empire is an excellent DVD-A disc. However, Metallica's black album on DVD-A just uses the high resolution format to demonstrate with extreme clarity that the sound engineer is an idiot. :P SACD can be pretty decent, too, if you're not satisfied with regular CDs.

I believe that if the recording and mixing are done at higher precision, CDs are fine for final output for the end user, just as JPEGs are good enough for final photo output, but rapidly show noticeable digital artifacts if you use them for photo editing.
 
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 9:19 pm

auxy wrote:
Do recievers even come with those anymore? Heh-heh-heh.

Receivers no longer exist for the most part. You go from iPod attachment devices straight to separate component stereo these days. Besides, non-classical music FM is a complete wasteland as JBI inferred with his loudness wars comment.
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 9:20 pm

My brother is a class-A audiophile nut, who happens to have the cash flow to support his habit. I've been educated, and the difference really is night-and-day, though not worth it to me.

Wanna hear a song? Oh no, God forbid you just punch up a 64Kbps MP3 on your phone. He gets out the white gloves and the dust remover thingy for the LP, recalibrate the turn-table RPM, warm up the bi-Amp'd tube Amp with separate pre-Amp (all with the carefully selected/matched tubes imported from Russia or god-knows-where) setup, connected to power bricks the size of Volkswagon Rabbits, sit in just the right place in the room where all the furniture and wall hangings are carefully selected and properly calibrated to avoid coloring the music. Etc., etc, ...

Anyway, when I care what it sounds like, I put on Sennheiser 650's connected to an Asus Xonar Essence XTS, playing something from my 64GB collection of Windows Media Player Lossless rips from my CD collection.

Vinyl through a good system still sounds better, more relaxing, less edgy, but 1 mouse click when I just wanna relax can't be beat.
 
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 9:26 pm

MarkG509 wrote:
Vinyl through a good system still sounds better, more relaxing, less edgy, but 1 mouse click when I just wanna relax can't be beat.

I see your brother suffers from the affliction described in Stereophile as "Audiophilia Nervosa"
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 9:43 pm

Captain Ned wrote:
auxy wrote:
Do recievers even come with those anymore? Heh-heh-heh.

Receivers no longer exist for the most part. You go from iPod attachment devices straight to separate component stereo these days. Besides, non-classical music FM is a complete wasteland as JBI inferred with his loudness wars comment.
Eheh, I was just kidding anyway. (*≧艸≦)
I definitely agree with the 'loudness wars' thing. I actually bought Metallica's last, Death Magnetic, because I really enjoyed it in Guitar Hero. When I got the CD, I was horrified at the quality of it, and that's actually how I learned about the 'loudness wars' (and then I asked my dad and he ranted my ear off.) I downloaded a remastered copy based on the Guitar Hero release and it sounds WAY BETTER! So, no, yah, I totally get what JBI is saying. I just wanted to poke fun. (・艸・*)
 
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 9:44 pm

TBH I've never entirely understood the vinyl fanatics either (sorry Ned!), even though I own a lot of it myself. That said, there are exceptions:

1. There's some rare stuff that was never reissued in digital form.

2. Even on material that has been reissued digitally, the mastering is sometimes inferior (excessive dynamic range compression), or the original source tapes have been lost, resulting in a sonically inferior digital product.

3. Sometimes the producer of the digital reissue insists on fixing something that isn't broken (e.g. re-recording parts). I will be eternally pissed off that I did not get the original vinyl versions of ZZ Top's early albums (drum tracks were re-done on the digital reissues to make them sound friendlier to an MTV-era audience).

4. As a long term archival medium, it is arguably more stable than any of our contemporary digital media.

The CD data format (44.1 kHz 16-bit PCM) was a compromise dictated by the limits of 1980s consumer electronics tech. It isn't truly "lossless" at all, and yet it is somehow considered the gold standard of audio quality by most people today. But... for most use cases it might as well be lossless, and TBH my 5+ decades old (and subjected to far too many rock concerts over the past 3+ decades of that) ears can't really tell the difference any more.

In my case, I was also a bit peeved at the prospect of paying again for content I had already paid for, just to have it in digital form. The solution was, as I listened to my old vinyl I ripped it to WAV (and encoded to OGG for portable use).

auxy wrote:
Heh-heh, showing your age, JBI! The only place I've seen a Loudness button/switch is on the relatively ancient Kenwood KA-3500 my dad gave me. ┐( ̄ヮ ̄)┌ Do recievers even come with those anymore? Heh-heh-heh.

Well, the receiver in my basement entertainment center isn't *that* old (actually supports video switching, heh) and has a Loudness button. I suppose it may have been one of the last ones to do so, haven't really shopped around for audio equipment in a long time! But then, to me "ancient" means from the 1980s or before. There I go showing my age again... :lol:

Edit: Just saw your last post. Yes, I'm a member of the "old fart" contingent here. You're young enough to be one of my kids. Now get off my lawn! :lol:

JustAnEngineer wrote:
I believe that if the recording and mixing are done at higher precision, CDs are fine for final output for the end user, just as JPEGs are good enough for final photo output, but rapidly show noticeable digital artifacts if you use them for photo editing.

Yup. A lot of the "harshness" attributed to digital is likely due to this, IMO. And yes, quality digital recodring/mixing are done at higher precision.
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 9:49 pm

just brew it! wrote:
TBH I've never entirely understood the vinyl fanatics either (sorry Ned!), even though I own a lot of it myself.

I'll be the first to admit that I can't explain it in an empirical way.

EDIT: In the first wave of digital, a lot of old & obscure stuff was shoved to CD straight from the LP cutting tapes instead of the master tapes. After all, the cutting tapes were already there in the plant. Problem is, the LP cutting tapes had the RIAA equalization already applied to them (JBI discussed this above). Without the inverse RIAA coming from the phono pre-amp (CD players went into a line input instead of the phono input), CDs mastered from the cutting tapes had no bass and were full of screechy treble. In the rush to capitalize on CD, no one spent the time to deal with this issue.
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 10:26 pm

Captain Ned wrote:
EDIT: In the first wave of digital, a lot of old & obscure stuff was shoved to CD straight from the LP cutting tapes instead of the master tapes. After all, the cutting tapes were already there in the plant. Problem is, the LP cutting tapes had the RIAA equalization already applied to them (JBI discussed this above). Without the inverse RIAA coming from the phono pre-amp (CD players went into a line input instead of the phono input), CDs mastered from the cutting tapes had no bass and were full of screechy treble. In the rush to capitalize on CD, no one spent the time to deal with this issue.

I thought they figured this out fairly quickly? I was a pretty early adopter of CDs (1984), and did not have any CDs with this issue. (Had a few with *other* issues, just not this particular one.)
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 10:52 pm

just brew it! wrote:
I thought they figured this out fairly quickly? I was a pretty early adopter of CDs (1984), and did not have any CDs with this issue. (Had a few with *other* issues, just not this particular one.)

It wasn't many, but for the few I bought the sound of an uncorrected RIAA pre-EQ curve was pretty nasty.

The first CD transfer of Joni Mitchell's "Court and Spark" was (and remains) unlistenable.
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 11:06 pm

just brew it! wrote:
(Google "loudness war" sometime if you want to get into the gory technical details.)


I don't particularly buy CDs anymore, but this drove me crazy before I discovered ReplayGain and specifically mp3gain.
 
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Wed Feb 27, 2013 11:14 pm

peartart wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
(Google "loudness war" sometime if you want to get into the gory technical details.)

I don't particularly buy CDs anymore, but this drove me crazy before I discovered ReplayGain and specifically mp3gain.

Yup. Dynamic-range-compressed content still doesn't sound *great*, but at least it doesn't give you a heart attack when it pops up in your playlist!
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Thu Feb 28, 2013 9:32 am

raen7 wrote:
Vinyl as a medium is just so awfully defect-prone that it makes no sense to use it as your primary storage *or* playback medium. The very fact that, in order to play it, you slide a metal pin along its surface.. So every time you play it, you're eroding the medium, decreasing the quality. Compare that to a digital file (Flac, Ogg, whatever), which remains the same exact sequence of 1's and 0's no matter how many times you listen to it. -- OK, let's put the whole "bit-rot" argument aside, because yes, hard-drives and flash-memory do also degrade over time, but by orders of magnitude less so than vinyl.

It just never made sense to me. I'm no audio-phile, but I can tell the difference between my old frostwire-downloaded-MP3s vs. my ripped-from-CD-wma's, and I do appreciate the quality difference. But it seems you would actually see a downgrade in quality if you went from a well-sourced digital file (uncompressed or lossless-compressed) to a vinyl.


Vinyl records can be played with lasers which keeps the records from wearing out, but only one company makes a laser based record player. They say it's mainly used for archival purposes, and it's incredibly expensive.

Anything that isn't fully analog is a downgrade in quality. ;) We still can't replicate or capture an actual sound wave 100% with our computers. People can increase the sampling rates all they want, but it's not going to be an analog signal. An continuous algorithm is going to be more precise then a piecewise function.

Vinyl is different. The constrains of the media produce a very different result then CDs. The natural compression of the records produces a more mid-range sound then CDs, and because the bandwidth of the medium is so constrained, the people mastering and mixing the record can't do a lot of silly things they can with CDs. The result is a much more pleasant listening experience for most people.

I personally like CDs more then vinyl, but the mixing is getting really bad.

Link about mastering vinyl: http://www.emusician.com/techniques/076 ... nyl/134677
 
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Thu Feb 28, 2013 10:27 am

Flatland_Spider wrote:
Anything that isn't fully analog is a downgrade in quality. ;) We still can't replicate or capture an actual sound wave 100% with our computers. People can increase the sampling rates all they want, but it's not going to be an analog signal. An continuous algorithm is going to be more precise then a piecewise function.

OTOH, given that everything is recorded and mixed digitally these days, it doesn't really matter once you get to equivalent resolution (both bits and sampling rate) to the original recording equipment. Not saying we're anywhere near that point (CDs are far from it), but once you get there at least it's not a downgrade at the user's end.

Flatland_Spider wrote:
Vinyl is different. The constrains of the media produce a very different result then CDs. The natural compression of the records produces a more mid-range sound then CDs,

Not sure what "more mid-range sound" means. If all you mean is that the mid-range is boosted, that's not a property inherent in the medium, it's how the content was mixed/mastered.

Flatland_Spider wrote:
and because the bandwidth of the medium is so constrained, the people mastering and mixing the record can't do a lot of silly things they can with CDs. The result is a much more pleasant listening experience for most people.

In theory, vinyl actually has more bandwidth on the high end than CDs. CDs hit a brick wall at 22 kHz (1/2 the sampling rate, a.k.a. Nyquist frequency). Vinyl is capable of exceeding that. In fact, back in the 1970s the CD-4 Quadradisc standard facilitated the encoding of 4-channel audio on vinyl, by using an ultrasonic carrier superimposed on the main signal. A special ultrasonic-capable phono cartridge and decoding electronics was used to detect the carrier and recover the 2 rear channels.
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Thu Feb 28, 2013 10:45 am

I sometimes beatmix trance as a hobby on a pair of Numark TT-1625 direct drive turntables. I have about 90 trance singles on vinyl. Unfortunately, the company I ordered from no longer carries any new label releases on vinyl, so I switched to a Numark Mixtrack Pro. I really, really love the feel and accuracy of mixing on vinyl. You can make very, very subtle pitch adjustments to lock in your beat matching when using vinyl and turntables. I have a few singles on vinyl that have yet to see an official, label-sanctioned digital release. That's a shame.
 
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Thu Feb 28, 2013 2:22 pm

Just a small point about records and needles. The record is not worn to any extent by being played. Even a ginsu knife style stylus never gets to the bottom of the groove, they are just knife shaped as opposed to round like a cheap stylus. The stylus rests on the two sides of the groove.

What does wear a record out is playing it before letting it recover from the last play. You should wait at least an hour to allow all the stress generated by playing it to go away. If you play it before then you lock the previous stress into the record and you have degraded it.
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just brew it!
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Thu Feb 28, 2013 2:33 pm

PenGun wrote:
Just a small point about records and needles. The record is not worn to any extent by being played. Even a ginsu knife style stylus never gets to the bottom of the groove, they are just knife shaped as opposed to round like a cheap stylus. The stylus rests on the two sides of the groove.

Well... there is always *some* wear. But assuming you replace the stylus periodically it is indeed minimal. A worn or damaged stylus will destroy an LP in fairly short order though.
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Thu Feb 28, 2013 2:53 pm

My mom had given my dad a record player to USB so he could convert his albums over to digital. He loved the idea but never really got around to using it. As a gift for him one year I took about a hundred or so records from his collection (total was a bit over 150 if I recall correctly) and converted them to MP3. I used the aforementioned record player and Audacity.

It took me months but after all was said and done I was able to fit about 100 albums onto a music DVD. Believe it or not, his Audi actually plays DVD audio so it worked really well. I did screw up some of the metadata with flip flopped data (Album name was the band name and vice versa), and some it was hard to determine where some of the tracks began and ended. I remember the "Dark Side of the Moon" album was a particular pain. It was pretty wild to see all of that music fit onto one DVD.

In the end, I got to keep the records as an additional 'thank you'. I kept the MP3s, but ended up selling all 150 records. I tried local shops but most weren't buying. I ended up getting sick of them sitting in my apartment so I put them up on ebay. I think I made $45 between local shops and ebay. Shipping wasn't too bad either. Thank you, media mail! :D
 
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Re: Vinyl LPs... who still listens to (or buys) them?

Thu Feb 28, 2013 3:01 pm

just brew it! wrote:
OTOH, given that everything is recorded and mixed digitally these days, it doesn't really matter once you get to equivalent resolution (both bits and sampling rate) to the original recording equipment. Not saying we're anywhere near that point (CDs are far from it), but once you get there at least it's not a downgrade at the user's end.


That's true. Most of the time anything recorded now a days was recorded digitally from the start, and people aren't missing anything.

However, unless the original instrument was a digital synth, recorded from the line in, or a software synth, there was an analog waveform some produced somewhere. Bouncing stuff between analog and digital or sampling rates isn't good. It can produce some interesting effects, but it's a destructive process.

There are still purists who insist on recording everything to tape using an entirely analog recording equipment. Mainly in the rock 'n roll community.

Not sure what "more mid-range sound" means. If all you mean is that the mid-range is boosted, that's not a property inherent in the medium, it's how the content was mixed/mastered.


Yes, the mid-range is boosted in the EQ. Right, the EQ of records is compensating for the limitations of the medium.

In theory, vinyl actually has more bandwidth on the high end than CDs. CDs hit a brick wall at 22 kHz (1/2 the sampling rate, a.k.a. Nyquist frequency). Vinyl is capable of exceeding that. In fact, back in the 1970s the CD-4 Quadradisc standard facilitated the encoding of 4-channel audio on vinyl, by using an ultrasonic carrier superimposed on the main signal. A special ultrasonic-capable phono cartridge and decoding electronics was used to detect the carrier and recover the 2 rear channels.


That's cool.

Bandwidth is probably a bad term to use. CDs can store more data, which, when properly used, can be amazing.

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