I am at that sweet spot in age where I had lots of vinyl records and decent equipment to listen to it on and then CDs came out. Vinyl sucks. You can fetishize it all you want, and it still sucks. I think many of the younger folks that think it sounds better have never listened to anything other than compressed digital audio. Streamed music and satellite radio sound like garbage. You've got to compare a good CD played on a good CD player through a good amp and good speakers with a good turntable and a good stylus. Otherwise, it's apples to oranges. If you listen to an LP on a good turntable connected to good components, of course it will sound better than streaming a song on Spotify through Bluetooth headphones.

If you look at the hard science, digitally recorded and played back music reproduces the original sound more accurately than an analog playback on an LP. It just does. Maybe you like the distortion and noise of an LP, but call it what it is. Don't call it "better" or "more soulful" or "fuller" or some other subjective mess.

Here's at least somebody who agrees

High end Hi-Fi makes NFA machine guns look like Hot Wheels.

I've got the new Music Direct catalog here and have been going through some current pricing.

This is just basic stuff that they carry, not the really boutique and spendy stuff:

VPI Avenger Reference TT & Arm:  $20,995

Lyra Atlas MC cartridge:  $11,995

Balanced Audio Technology (BAT) VK-P12SE SuperPak phono stage:  $12,495

Most audiophools will recognize those names as been common and somewhat affordable.

You might find to above for 10%-25% off if you know you dealer.

Chris

I was watching a TV show on the Carpenters on DTV running it through my sound system.

They played a part of Rainy Days and Mondays as recorded, then they played it as it came off the master recording tape.
There was a big difference in the sound.

Same when I watched that show with Ozzy and his son.
When they played the master tape of Blizzard of Oz - Crazy Train it was like I had never heard that song.

They were both fucking amazing.

Old vinyl (and tape) does sound better.

Generally speaking, analog does sound better than digital.  I noticed it the very first time I played a CD.  Digital has that sterile, something-is-missing, aspect to it.

hipster trends

You sure about that? Because when I was DJing (around '98-05 or so) I was around quite a few "audiophiles" who looked at me like I grew a third arm out of my forehead when I mentioned I used such a thing as records....in fact a lot of people I talked to then didn't even know vinyl records were still being made or that they'd never stopped being made.

I'm an audiophile with a shit ton of money invested in my 2 channel system.  At that level the source becomes the limiting factor.  Then once you've got a really nice stereo even mediocre recordings, all the flaws are revealed.  But good recordings are mind blowing, deep, 3d holographic, band is playing in you living room, singer is 5 feet in front of you sound.  Oh, and you have to have the room setup right with acoustic treatments on the walls.

I was in Urban Outfitters with my lady looking for a gift for her niece when I ran across a large display of new cassettes and "vintage" looking new walkmen. They had all sorts of reissues like NWA, De La Soul and Hall & Oates, as well as new artists released on cassette.

I can see the reasoning behind vinyl for the nostalgia and sound quality, but cassettes always sounded like balls. Fucking hipsters...

That's normal for audio guys. I knew a guy that had probably 100 grand worth of video and audio gear..... He was tone deaf.

If only the human ear was a scientific instrument that followed scientific principles.

TL;DR

My son is 19 and has a turntable (NOT a "record player"). He has an extensive collection of '60's rock albums and likes them because they are more original. Digital is fake.

TC

Yes, when CDs came out a large portion of the audiophiles complained it sounded too sterile and brittle and lacked warmth.  Every high end shop still had systems devoted to vinyl and tubes.  My audio obsession started in the early 80s.

You're definitely a hipster, you just like country and guns. Your jeans may not be that tight, and you may not have a handlebar mustache, but "Merle Haggard and Don Williams sound better on vinyl" is a hipster statement.

Well I can guarantee most people here that if you played a brand new vinyl copy of the Clash's "London Calling" or whatever else on a good TT with good speakers, then listened to a few of my friends who DJ in both the vinyl and digital realm....you couldn't tell a difference.

Whatever

^^^
QFT

SMH, as well.

Digital music is stored as 1's and 0's. It comes out of the speakers sounding just as good (or better) than analog. Please look up digital sampling theory including Fourier Transforms and the Nyquist Theorem.

Hell, I've played stuff for people on my 2 channel with some of their favorite songs and they say "There's like 2-3 instruments I didn't even know were in the song".

I simply contend that just as trained wine tasters have been fooled.....most average listeners don't know what the fuck they're talking about regarding sound quality. Warmth and depth my ass.

Both of those will demonstrate why digital fidelity is limited by bandwidth and bit-depth.  You're making analog's argument

Because some people can be fooled some of the time, hardly invalidates their skill set, no?

Well, you're actually wrong about the 'warmth and depth,' but I agree with you that people can be fooled and bias does come into play.  How can I ever prove to you exactly what I'm hearing?  It's very subjective, no doubt.

The really proper way to do it is to constantly attend live, unamplified concerts, be they folk, classical, or jazz concerts and hopefully in different venues.

Once you have a baseline, you can move on to Hi-Fi gear.

Try to listen to as many high end systems, in as many different rooms, using as much differing gear as possible.  

Then you'll be able to get on idea of what sounds right to your ears.

Chris

Warm is a very real way to describe a song or sound as it literally sounds warm to the ear, it tends to have more lower midrange and smooth splashy sound in the highs.  As opposed to cold which has tinny/harsh highs and scratchy midrange.  Depth is referring to sound stage depth front to back.  The more you know.

Nice

I sure hope so

Say wut??

All the old men remember the downfalls of the vinyl music age. Every time a record needle travels the groove, it wears it a little, or if things go awry, wear that grove a lot!
And even with attentive care, dust gets into the grooves, resulting in pops and clicks. Running your record player in the unregulated atmosphere of a club is going to accelerate that dusting.
For those reasons and others was the practice in the olde days of buying records and recording them immediately to less expensive tape to save the record from repeated playings and degradation that resulted!

And that's just exactly why we left analog recording for digital.  If anyone believes that the current popular digital audio containers like MP3 results in a loss of loss of clarity and quality can always choose a high bitrate with a lossless format.  But for Christ's sake, let's not go back to Diesel Punk recording methods!

This isn't making sense.

Listen, there is no such thing as digital music. All music starts analog, some is sampled digitally and then turned back into analog and sent to a speaker. Speakers can only work with analog electrical signals.

Any analog signal can be sampled and reproduced EXACTLY as long as the sampling rate is at least 2x the highest harmonic frequency within the sound. Granted, 2x sampling is the mathematical minimum for AD conversion but we all know 5x is more practical and used more often. The Nyquist sampling theorem is quite clear on this.

You give me 2 discrete points on a sampled sine wave and I can reproduce the exact wave. AD- DA all day.

Any extra sounds you hear might have been from eating pot needles

I have an Iron Maiden "Number of The Beast" PICTURE DISC!

There are overtones on the waveform that are higher frequency than can be digitized.  Hence the need for SACD and DVDA.  The flaw of Nyquist and CDs are well known, you should research it.

No they don't. They demonstrate that an analog signal can be digitized and then reconstructed exactly as it was. The limitations are imposed simply due to resource limitations--storage, processing power, time, etc. I'll give you that in the mid-80's there was an issue. That's no longer the case. We have the resources to record, digitize, and store (without compression) sound encompassing the entire dynamic range of human hearing.

Anyway, I don't care about vinyl vs mp3. People can listen to whatever the hell they want. I do care that people think digital music means 1's and 0's are entering their ears or that the sound waves are actually stair-stepped. If you think vinyl sounds better I'm not hear to tell you otherwise. (ETA...haha, that pun-via-misspelling was a bona fide mistake :) )

Same with film. I get the romance associated with using film, but digital images are just as good.

Brb, going to buy a 12k gold plated audio cable and get a coffee enema, while microdosing lsd.


You just wouldn't understand. MASSIVE FLOWSTATE when I'm listening to my herb alpert on vinyl.

Depends on the DJing.  Electronic stuff was still big into crate digging and vinyl.  So was hip-hop.

And, of course, in the punk world you aren't a real band until you get a 500 unit lot of your single on 7 inch vinyl.

Nyquist was a bit low in his estimate, but to be fair, a lot of the DACs (and digital filtering) back in the early 80s really sucked and were poorly implemented.  It wasn't just the sample rate, in fact, that probably had less to do with the suckiness than the hardware components themselves.

Basic redbook CDs have gotten a lot better, sonically and have dropped in price quite a bit.  There is still some clamor/demand for some of the legacy DACs, but those are far and few between.

I bought my Sony SCD-1 SACD player back in 2000, so I was on board early on.  My DVD~A Denon DCD-1600 player came a year after that.

Chris

Still have record players and records.  Have digitized some of them.  Some of the more dynamic recordings don't digitize too well.  Probably don't have the right equipment to do it.  

So you're saying at one point a Roland TB-303 was analog?

Not obsolete, I still have a record play attached to my stereo, but then again, I don't download music, I listen to the real stuff.

Listening to vinyl doesn't necessarily make you hipster, but vinyl has become the hipster trend as of late. I think some in this thread are missing the point.

You can pry my sony 777es from my cold dead hands.  Think I got it in 2002.

The ear's doing fine. It's the brain that's the problem.

I'm probably one of the more annoying vinyl evangelists on the site. I own north of 1,000 records and sometimes do a silly little Internet radio show where I spin them for the enjoyment of others. I refuse to buy physical copies of music unless they're on vinyl. I still can't wrap my head around the idea of actually paying money for a CD (or worse) a digital track/album encoded as FLAC. I never feel like I own it. I fucking love vinyl. I love the ritual, I love the care it takes to make it work well, I love the tinkering required to get the most accurate reproduction possible out of the experience. I. Fucking. Love. Vinyl. 

With that out of the way...

...vinyl records are an inferior playback medium to decent digital formats, all else being equal, being as objective as possible. There is absolutely no technical reason why a recording played back digitally, can't sound indistinguishable from it's vinyl counterpart...or vice versa. The problem with vinyl, from a purely technical perspective, is that it requires a great deal of expense, labor, and even technical know-how to achieve the same results (as a playback medium) as even the most pedestrian of digital playback mediums. 

When you've isolated as many variables as humanly possible, vinyl sounds no better than a proper digital format. And it's a lot easier for it to sound worse, or at least be reproduced inaccurately. The reason many of my old vinyl copies sound better than my newer CD or streaming releases of the exact same album has nothing to do with the playback medium itself, and everything to do with intentional differences in mastering between the two formats. When listening to brand new vinyl copies of modern music in my collection, recorded with a 100% analog signal chain (these bands do exist...) and comparing them to the FLAC copies the band gave me for "free" because I bought the vinyl LP...I can scarcely tell a difference. And if you A/B tested me (making sure my LP copy was absolutely pristine and damn near medically clean), while also making sure to carefully level match the two...I seriously doubt I could reliably tell you which one was which. The biggest difference? My FLAC copy is always going to sound exactly like it does right now, when played through the same equipment I'm playing it through right now. My vinyl copy? It will be close enough 10 years from now, but only because of heroic efforts on my part of make sure of it. 

And BTW, "warmer" is probably better described as a euphemism for "muddy lows, and rolled off highs". I'm looking at you, fellow tube junkies. 

And knowing that, I still prefer to drop the needle on it vs opening the file...given my druthers. But these aren't for objective reasons that I can defend. They're purely subjective, and admittedly irrational as fuck. I like records. I like the idea that what I'm listening to is literally carved into a piece of polyvinyl chloride, and could even be listened to with no more than a really fine sewing needle and a rolled up paper cone, if I really had to. I just like the idea that I could.  I feel like I actually own something tangible. And you know what? It's a hobby. To get accurate playback out of vinyl records requires some effort and even a little expense. I like the ritual of it all. I like the effort it requires. I like that, for reasons I can't explain, I will sit and enjoy an entire vinyl record uninterrupted...critically listening to the music itself as it unfolds from track to track, while getting bored with the exact same record on my laptop - even played through the same stereo. 

I dunno. Maybe it's as simple as this - you can't roll a joint on a jewel case or your iPhone, man. It's just not the same. 

It's kind of like lawn darts, a lot of the people who rave/rant about them aren't old enough to have had them collecting dust and black widows in the garage.

Technics SL-1200 MKII  FTW

Regarding the audio quality of vinyl...

At the time the audio is being fed to the cutting lathe there is usually some sort of last in chain mastering processing being applied to make the sound "fit" on the record.   You'll hear this processing on vinyl records that you may not hear on CD's, wav. files etc in addition to the magnetic cartridge and phono pre-amp magic that happens.

wait wait wait wait.....

you say a analog recording on TV sounded better than the digital recording on TV?

Woah it's like the analog vs digital argument in the 2CH forum on AVS.

A more wretched hive of scum and villany you aren't likely to find...