What's the deal with vinyl? (1 Viewer)

[Susan S]

Shane,

As to where to find them and how $$$ they are, vinyl can still be found very inexpensively, although it is getting more competitive as more young people "discover" vinyl. In Charlottesville, VA, due to the University of VA, they have used and new vinyl in all the music stores. Prices vary from $1 each to a healthier $3-10 for more popular used discs.Rare classical recordings will go higher depending on demand. Until about 24 months ago I virtually had the bins all to myself, but in the last year the students have really been collecting like mad.

Locally I find really good ones at estate auctions, Goodwill, VFW (Veteran of Foreign Wars)stores, and flea markets. I personally have had the most luck if I can get there right after someone brings in a big box. Auctions can be a lot of fun as you can get a huge box for as little as $5. Let's face it, people pass on every day, and they can't take their records with them. I feel it my duty to help their poor relatives to dispose of their burden. :=)

You can find them cheaply, get a decent starter turntable (vintage will be much cheaper...a nicer older belt-drive Dual for example...but buy a new cartridge for sure; if you have a little money to burn try the MMF-1 by Music Hall or the low-end Rega).Clean them as soon as you get them and keep them in sleeves and don't smear your paws all over them. Sit down with the album cover and read the copy and study the artwork, which will imprint the album in your brain's long-term memory and stay with you from that day forward.

So, no..it doesn't take a lot of money to enjoy vinyl..try it, you'll like it. And if you don't, I'm always willing to accept orphan vinyl that needs a new home...:=)
Susan

 

[Lee Scoggins]

As to where to find them and how $$$ they are, vinyl can still be found very inexpensively, although it is getting more competitive as more young people "discover" vinyl. In Charlottesville, VA, due to the University of VA, they have used and new vinyl in all the music stores. Prices vary from $1 each to a healthier $3-10 for more popular discs.Rare classical recordings will go higher depending on demand. Until about 24 months ago I virtually had the bins all to myself, but in the last year the students have really been collecting like mad.

Great post Susan. Are you a student at UVA? I went to school there and graduated in 1988. Charlottesville is one great place to live. I had a great time there.

 

[Lee Scoggins]

And if you have theoretically perfect D-to-A converters and filters, you can recreate that 20KHz frequency perfectly too.

The problem is that there are a lot of "real world" implementation issues with digital audio and far fewer with LP in many ways. I think Lance made some good points here with his links. And I also agree that hirez in either DSD or PCM improves the music playback nicely which is why I did not claim that hirez formats have more musical content than LP.

Digital has all sorts of problems: brickwall filters, jitter which we have discussed in detail, ADC/DAC imperfections (brickwall is a part of this), aliasing, inability to capture frequencies above 22.05 khz. As Saurav has stated many audio researchers now believe very high frequencies can affect the ability of digital to recreate a performance.

 

[Shane Morales]

DEMONS BEGONE!

Well, I got my questions answered, and then some.

 

[Chu Gai]

there is a difference between more data and more information. if it only takes 2 points to accurately, and I do mean accurately, as in faithful to the original that was fed in to the DAC, to represent a signal, then additional points are simply additional points. i'm a bit confused by what sort of proof you're looking for. since you've got contacts over at Sony, maybe that's a start. otherwise if you'd explain what sort of data you're looking for then I or others will know where to find it. perhaps my confusion has to do to with my taking myself up on my offer to have some beers!

No doubt the music industry as a whole, from manufacturers to the recording process, has struggled to properly implement the CD experience. Those who made the players quite frankly stumbled and topics such as jitter should never have come to pass. When the telecommunications industry has understood and successfully dealt with this problem for scores of years, it was foolish for manufacturers to not draw upon this experience. Just as foolish as some of the poor solid state transistorized amps and such that came out in the 60's. Just as foolish as the overcompression that's done on CD layers when it wasn't necessary. Just as foolish as to the correct information being not getting to the schools that teach the recording process. Just as foolish as issues of DAC non linearity with low level signals that affect trailing reverb, etc. Just as foolish as people applying techniqes learned from vinyl days arbitrarily to a digital medium. Just as foolish of the non-use of dither in the CD pressings of the 80's or the misunderstanding of how to implement dither. Maybe equipment costs need to amortized? Just as foolish as poor implementations of tone-arms or of cartridges.

Companies have and will continue to make bad chips or chips that improperly behave under certain conditions. After all they are not trained listeners and often they don't have people consulting with them telling them how the chip should behave under certain conditions. More of a problem in the early years...not so much now. However, those implementations that are shoddy will tend to be found in the pricey, revered players touted as musical by the high-end press. The lower end stuff, mid-fi if you will, is surprisingly good and has made good quality, durable audio available to the masses. This is a good thing to my mind.

But manufacturers shave here and there and a 2 cent price difference is enough to make the decision towards the bottom line and not towards correctness. Conversely manufacturers will insert pricey, audiophile components solely for the reason of jacking the price up with no sonic benefit. Pick the way you want to get screwed, bent over or on your back. Whatever you do though, do a good job picking your speakers.

 

[Saurav]

Pick the way you want to get screwed, bent over or on your back.

Or just build all your own gear. It has at least one big advantage - everything always sounds great

 

[FeisalK]

sidetrack... Positive-feedback

 

[Saurav]

Thanks. That was a very enjoyable read.

 

[FeisalK]

Saurav,

glad you enjoyed it. I liked it myself, too

This from Soundstage is Srajan too

In a fictitious lower-Appalachian church, I follow a snake-handling audiophile's fire-and-brimstone sermon: "Father, I suffer tubesculosis. I beseech thee, please pray over me for a healing."

"Well son, the cure’s simple. Straighten out thy wretched ways and walk in the Spirit of the Lawd. Your amp ain’t tube-rectumfied. You must dig a wee bit deeper before you hit musical pay dirt. Open your ear to the glory of tubes and be healed of thy malady. Sin no more or consider yourself ensnared by the Horned One."

"Repent, repent" intone the supplicants in awe while the rattlers and copperhead serpents keep slithering about the preacher’s shoulders. They hiss and flick their forked tongues furiously in the air while the pastor, utterly oblivious to danger, continues his harangue.

 

[Lee Scoggins]

Great read. Gotta love Positive Feedback.

 

[Chu Gai]

As Saurav has stated many audio researchers now believe very high frequencies can affect the ability of digital to recreate a performance.

such as?

 

[Steve_AS]

I build/mod almost all of my gear, so I tweak the sound to be the way I like it by changing components, design, topologies, layout, and so on. That, in a sense, is fiddling with the sound to fine-tune it to my preferences.

Anyway, like I said, there's no right or wrong to personal preferences, and everyone has the right to prefer whatever they prefer

Undoubtedly. It's when people start talking about the *why* of it, that technically dubious assertions crop up.

 

[Saurav]

So it really boils down to whether you respond to them a bug, or a feature.

Well said. And I would add that in this case, one should shut down their left brain and let their right brain do the responding

 

[Steve_AS]

And from doing a search, I’ve found out that while Mr. Nyquist has a great mathematical theory, when implemented in the real world, things don’t look so rosy. Quite a few things have to be done to create good sound from 44.1kHz sampling rates. 96kHz and 192kHz make things much easier, particularly concerning the filters in the DAC which actually reconstruct the analog wave itself.

Yet, again, CD *playback* is a perfectly adequate 16/44. Higher rates and bitdepths are primarily useful during recording to allow further processing. This suggests that 'SACD' and 'DVD-A' *playback* media rates are being hyped.
Here's the final 'graf from that last link of yours again:

"If the post-processing all takes place at 96 kHz and all the steps which benefit from the higher sampling rate are completed, there is no reason to fear converting back to 44.1 kHz thereafter. It remains questionable whether 96 kHz also make sense for recorded media and consumer media players. In any case, increasing the resolution to 24-bit is much more important than using a higher sampling rate during the initial recording."

 

[Steve_AS]

Lee wrote, AGAIN:
This is not true-the recreated wave is still based on sampling that only represents a portion of the wave. In fact, it contains less information than what you will find on an analog tape.

I give up. Your *intuition* here about information -- and that's all it is -- is simply *wrong* but alas, apparently impenetrable.

Over to you, Chu.

 

[Chu Gai]

I've already started drinking. The poster has been presented with information from both sides. I found the young lady's post informative as to sources. If you like it, play it. If you don't, well you can always hum along with Mitch or the piano man BTW, I also heard the humming on a pretty low res mp3 sampling.

 

[Susan S]

Lee said "Great post Susan. Are you a student at UVA? I went to school there and graduated in 1988. Charlottesville is one great place to live. I had a great time there."

no..but my son is going there now..does that count? And I seriously dated a guy that lived "on the lawn" back in college, so I do have endearing memories of the campus. :=)

It is a great little city, but it's a shame the students have "discovered" vinyl. I live south of the city so I can run down to Lynchburg (a dry audio desert where the 8-track still reigns supreme) and find albums galore...only problem is, they tend to be either Jim Neighbor's, Lawrence Welk's, or Jerry Falwell's albums.

Plan 9 in Charlottesville has three locations and tons of records should you ever come back to the homeland.
Susan

 

[Lee Scoggins]

Yet, again, CD *playback* is a perfectly adequate 16/44

If you find 16/44 adequate, you need to get a higher resolution stereo.

 

[Erik Cartman]

Shane, I may be repeating others but I just couldn't read through all four pages.

I live an excessive life, but since I only get one shot at it I think that's the better way to go (especially when your wife lets you get away with it).

If you like sound, don't unload your digital gear, just get an analogue set up too.

We've got at least 37 seperate speakers including a half dozen or so subwoofers and this doesn't include those needed for a new home theater set up so I never have to worry about whether or not stereo music will sound right through a home theater set up.

Just keep collecting and next thing you know you'll not need or want one system that does it all.

They still make brand-new turntables, cartriges and phono pre-amps shane and some very good ones are available at reasonable cost (reading Stereophile might leave you with the impression that nobody's made a decent turntable for less than $10,000 in years. Crap. Music Hall, Project and Rega all make sub-$1,000 turntables that are just fine. Music hall even includes a cartridge I believe. Pay attention shopping as some don't even include a tonearm.

Brand new records are actually being pressed even today though they are usually expensive pressings of jazz and classical. But I have heard that some popular music is being released on vinyl as sort of a combination retro-chic marketing ploy and way to combat piracy.

Tube amps sound different because they introduce distortion. At least one writer above mentioned "harmonics" and this is correct but sounds better when speaking glowingly of the technology. It is harmonic distortion. Lower order harmonics actually sound good to many people and give the impression of a full rich sound. Higher order harmonics sound like crap to everyone.

The harmonics introduced by tubes is so enjoyable that some solid state manufacturers in the 1970's actually built their solid state equipment to copy this effect--in effect, degrading the accuracy of the solid state equipment in order to please the consumers' ear. I think McIntosh was one manufacturer to do this.

How can anyone claim, as many do, that this sound is a more sonically accurate reproduction of what they heard in a concert? I don't know for sure but my theory is that what is recorded in a studio is recorded in an envioronment professionally designed to cut down or elliminate wayward sound waves which, as you may have guessed, generate harmonics. How many concert venues have you attended which were so accurately tuned? I'm guessing zero.

When you hear some of the writers above talking about analogue (vinyl through a turntable) giving you a more pure version of the sound without having to go through analogue to digital and then digital through analogue conversions, what is happening is as follows:

A fine diamond stylus rides in groves on a record and is vibrated by the bumps cut into the record. As the stem the stylus is attached to vibrates this vibration is converted by a moving magnet or moving coil in the cartridge into electrical impulses which equal the frequency of vibration of the stylus.

These signals are fairly weak so they are then amplified by a phono stage preamp (different depending on whether you use a moving magnet or moving coil cartridge) to a level which can then be amplified by your amplifier. Your amplifier then sends these same electrical frequencies backed by a varrying amount of current (the length of the wave is the same but the amplitude can change--most noticeable on classical recordings where volumes varry within a song--and I'm hoping I'm remembering this right but I'm pretty sure I am) which is then sent to your speakers. Your speakers then use the power (current) supplied to activate electromagnets which move in and out remarkably fast at the same frequency at which the stylus (needle) first started vibrating when running over the grooves in the record and you then hear those frequencies yourself as the speakers compress and move air.

Digital, on the other hand, takes these frequency signals and converts them to binary code--zeros and ones, on and off. Some folks don't trust the converter to really transfer every single frequency of sound and I believe, at least before Audio DVD and the CD equivelant, they are right and are probably "technically" right even after the latest sampling technologies.

Then of course, some don't trust the next converter in the chain to convert those zeros and ones into the frequencies you'll hear.

I have not been able to figure out which one is "better"--they both kick arse.

Thus, break out the credit cards and build systems around both formats. I've got a McIntosh system with B&W speakers just for stereo playback.

I hope this makes some of the stuff discussed above easier to understand as a layman and I hope I didn't repeat too much either.



Despite l

 

[Lee Scoggins]

How can anyone claim, as many do, that this sound is a more sonically accurate reproduction of what they heard in a concert?

Erik,

I work in a recording studio often and I truly believe that a good tube amp is better at more naturally representing what I hear after I microphone instruments. Particularly on mid-bass, midrange and highs, tubes seem to me to better capture what is going on.

I also can listen to tube amps longer without getting as much listener fatigue. The same applies to vinyl over 16/44 digital. I think this has a lot to do with the extra conversion processes in digital which are imperfect.

You can create tube amps that emphasize harmonics, but the better manufacturers these days are striving for accuracy.