Would you buy a turntable? (1 Viewer)

[JeremyErwin]

At what price point do turntables sound better than comparatively priced CD players, then?

 

[Lee Scoggins]

At $500 imho but even a Rega P1 can offer up some advantages.

 

[King Ghidora]

I think anyone who bought an early CD can make that claim. Many of them were just plain junk. :frowning: None of them were up to the quality of vinyl at the time. But I think you overlook the obvious advantages of digital when you claim analog is better. I wouldn't argue that a primo LP is not better than a CD even with the limitations on signal to noise ratios etc.. But they don't stay that way for very long. And making analog copies is a guaranteed recipe for losing quality. That's the beauty of digital. The copies are as good as the original and the originals stay as good as they ever were until the CD's break down which generally takes many years (not always BTW).

Digital is here to stay because of these factors. I've heard very good quality turntables back in the analog days but I haven't heard any recently because I think the inherent problems with vinyl make it a losing effort eventually. And the price of admission to a system that degrades so fast is a losing proposition to me. I still own a quality turntable or what was once a quality turntable. It could be that great strides have been made in turntable technology. But IMO it isn't worth the price IMO because CD technology has also improved and there isn't that nagging problem of quickly degrading quality.

Now if they developed an analog system that didn't degrade like vinyl does I might go for that. I can hear the difference between digital and analog. It can be pretty drastic even without the bad mixes floating around on CD. But tape has it's own disadvantages and AFAIK there are no other serious challengers to the dominance of digital. I can and do find better mixes of old material that doesn't rely on brickwalling to sell. Buying brickwalled material is worse than badly mixed old material IMO. It sounds so harsh and it wears me out just to listen to it. Give me something with actual artistic value any day. If I could get it on an analog medium that didn't degrade quickly that would be a big step up IMO.

 

[Harpozep]

These days I listen to my small DVDA/SACD collection when I'm able, but recently........

I just bought a belt for my dreaded Dual 502. It has been dormant since my dorm days of the mid eighties. On it in the garage were the last 45's I ever purchased, Quarterflash's Harden My Heart and Nina 's 99 Luft Ballons

Moving three or more times a year for almost a decade, I gave up the old turntable for the convenience of Redbook. It was not a heartfelt good bye either, since LPS of the time were notoriously noisy and filled with reprocessed plastic etc. Pop LPs had worsening physical attributes and sound from the moment I got into them in the early seventies until their almost demise in the eighties. One had to seek out virgin vinyl and other elitist pressings to get the best out of an album. Still true I guess . Not that Redbook sounded better, sometimes it did, mostly just different, and sometimes not nearly as good.

I found myself about to buy a Lin Sondek or a Sota turntable at about the time CD players became affordable to the masses. With over a thousand LPs I had interest in getting better sound and I did like the sound stage that LPs presented when all went well.

Unfortunately, unless one had one of these type of tables, and could do the setups needed to them, the sound from LPs grew worse with cheaper turntables and repeat playing.

My Dual is no great table. I used it to make Dolby C cassettes or even ( DBX cassettes when I could over come their pumping problem ). I did this because I drove hundreds of miles each week and cassette was the only high fi option in a car at that point in time. In the dorm or back home , I'd play an album, but have problems arise when the volume got loud due to the fact that I had a real bedroom, not an AUDIOPHILE room.

I do agree that an album, properly pressed and played on a superior turntable with an expensive cartridge and needle can sound astounding. Add to that a properly dampened listening chamber, some cool Macintosh, or Leveitson tube preamps and amps ( We do love that analogue distortion/sound ).Oh, don't forget the record cleaning vacuum and such, since even at best a stylus is a lathe.......sigh


Few people ever really played and enjoyed LPS to their best. That is for sure. Only those who cared and had the money and know how.
Really, the masses had CONSOLE STEREOS for God's sake. A Turntable attached to the speaker boxes. Ours had two 12" woofs and a host of other drivers. Made for great feedback loops. Oh, how I do NOT pine for the days of LPs.

Joe six pack does not either since what he bought was garbage like the consoles or Emerson all in ones from Zayre's. Oh remember the multi album stack feature prevalent on all those consoles and such. Stack of LPS all falling on top of each other, looking like a pancake breakfast. Made for some mighty fine scratches. My dad had so many on the turntable that the weight dragged the pitch down unevenly. All the WOW and Flutter you could ever want ( NOT )!

All that said, I just purchased five thousand record albums and need to get a turntable up and running.

I do not miss the pops and scratches, or the funny EQing that went on to make the mechanical aspect of analogue work.

Some of the worst CDs I've ever heard had the same EQ from the albums on them, which was no longer needed since it was EQ'ed for a different format. Oh, the early days of CDs had some horrendous stuff. These days, things can be much better, unless the product is compressed to death as happens in the "Loudness Wars"

Properly processed and reproduced either format , LP or digital can sound convincingly good. More rests with the authoring in the digital world I'd say, since DA/converters and tube amps at the playback end can only do so much. Beyond redbook is the way to go there.


LP playback , I dare say , has more variables at the end user point of playback than a digital format does.
The user can choose so many components that contribute to the ultimate quality of LP play back, that the listening session and process becomes more dependent upon those decisions.
With a huge cash outlay , one can really enjoy an almost click free analogue vinyl adventure. One where you can control a LOT of the variable that shape the final sound.
For less money, one can enjoy digital audio and all its pitfalls and have a lot less ability to change the sound.
I wish SACD had caught on........sigh................Well back to my dreaded Dual and the five thousand new albums ( I hadda, the pile was only $500.00 )

 

[FeisalK]

holy...

sounds like you're in for a lot of fun (and dreaded record cleaning...)

 

[Harpozep]

Yup! That's another tool I have to get up to speed on. Twenty years back When I was going to buy the Lin turntable, I was also going to get a record vacuum. It was a large thing, but did a great job. I'll stop by the local high end audio dealer and see what's happening in this arena today.

I also have get a different turntable too, since the Dual only has two speeds and fully half of the five thousand albums are 78 rpm records.
Lots of interesting items that have been lost to time. I got three of these alone:

http://www.tias.com/cgi-bin/google.f...Key=1922725727

Funny thing about that site is they had this same record set at$125.00 US a couple of weeks ago. Now at $150.00 US. Must be the devaluing dollar thing?
I bought them from a neighbor friend who was moving and had an antique store. He had a buyer in the UK, but shipping costs for such a great weight brought the deal to a halt. So I stepped in.....

 

[Philip Hamm]

Yes, I have. And no, a perfectly mastered and pressed record even on a "good" LP rig, as great as it can sound (distortion can be pleasant), can not compare to a perfectly mastered redbook CD on a "good" CD player. In my experience of course.

 

[MarkMel]

I never said it didn't have any limitations. I said this;

"The advantage of an analogue recording is that there is no loss of information. If the source recording is analogue, the LP transfer would be a true reproduction of the music."

And I still don't think the statement is wrong. Perhaps I should've said "truer" nothing could be a "true" reproduction.

See here;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio

And you can't tell me that there is not a loss of information when analogue is converted to digital. Look at the wave form on the link I posted. The one where the smooth analogue waveform is compared to the ragged digital signal. You can see there would be missing/added information. Granted that is a 4-bit representation but the principle is the same for higher sampling rates but to a lesser degree.

My point was that analogue in to analogue out is the smoothest path to your ears. Look what the signal has to go through to go from analogue instruments to digital conversion back to analogue. I believe that all of that signal manipulation does color/change the sound.

Somewhat off topic;

When I was younger and in rock and punk bands digital processors were all the rage. Guitarists had racks full of digital processors. Gig after gig they would come up to my guitarist and ask what he was running through to make his guitar sound so great. He showed them his 1967 strat, showed them the guitar cable. They watched as he plugged it directly into his marshal tube stack. The look on their faces always cracked me up. Some would look all around the stage for a hidden rack not believing what they were hearing. Some put their racks up for sale.

So I don't agree with you saying that my statement is all wrong. This has been a debate ever since digital recording came to be.

And it will continue to be a friendly debate I'm sure for many years to come. Unless my ears are all messed up from playing in live bands for so many years.

Oh and to me an LP sounds warmer, more real, how can you quantify that? You can't unless you can get in my head and listen with my ears.

 

[Harpozep]

Analogue may be a truer path in some ways, but it includes pops, clicks and other alterations that color the music. I'd take a decent digital path over a lathe since the LP will incur the inevitable clicks and pos. Just the nature of the physical form.

The music on an LP properly played back can be masterful and room filling in a great dimensional manner that leaves a lot of digital in the dust. This can be true, but so often is not because the experience to my ears is ruined with the first click or pop. I'm immediately transfered out of the music zone in into listening to an LP

True enough optical discs can skip too, leaving us with an earful of

So nothing is perfect. I just find the inevitable noise inherent in LP playback disrupting to the musical flow. The normal analogue distortion is much more pleasurable than digital distortion, that I'll give you.

These days though it is very hard to hear any uncolored music at all. Even at coffee houses, the musicians use a PA. The only pure uncolored music I hear is when I pull out my acoustic guitar or trumpet.

 

[KurtEP]

I view this more as an "everything in its place" situation more than an argument for the various theoretical or practical limits on recordings. In my experience, the quality of vinyl, Redbook and SACD/DVD-A simply depends on the recordings. I have Redbooks that are absolutely dire, SACD's that are unimpressive, and warped/scratched vinyl. However, I have (or in some cases had) several albums on all three formats where all versions sound good, each having its strength. I'm not sure I have any vinyl that I think is definitively better than the Redbook, but, given the quality of a few of the Redbooks I have, I can't imagine the vinyl could be worse.

I tend to listen to vinyl when I want to be actively engaged in the music, as opposed to using it for background noise. Vinyl is a pain in the ass, since you have to flip, clean, handle with care, etc. For serious listening, I prefer SACD, but we all know how limited the selection is there. Even when I have the SACD (and assuming I had SACD capability in my car), I could see no reason for using a SACD in the car. I have an incredibly noisy car (Subaru WRX), and pretty much all nuances of the sound get covered up in gear and tire noise. I need loud, and preferably a burned copy, since car duty tends to beat cd's up pretty badly. No point risking a good SACD, and no point in installing a turntable in the car, either (I've seen photos of installations in the past, not sure how well they worked, but I'm not optimistic).

In any event, this is a hobby for me, so I don't mind occasionally playing around with vinyl to get the 'vinyl' sound. It's just fun.

 

[MarkMel]

I think that is a big draw for some people, they like the whole process.

I just bought a Thorens TD-147. In playing some of my old vinyl it reminded me of how much I enjoyed the process. I was the hold out of my friends to get into CD. I held out because some of the fun of an LP is looking at the cover art and reading the liner notes even better if it was a gatefold. Not as fun on a cd that is so much smaller.

 

[Harpozep]

Yeah, I miss that cover art too. I'm going through the five thousand albums I just got and finding a lot of interesting things in the folding jackets, if you catch my drift. Double albums made for a convenient lap table for sorting herbs it seems.

 

[King Ghidora]

My friends used to loan me their albums because they knew they would come back cleaner than when they left. These were people that wouldn't let most people even touch their album covers (that artwork was always a big deal). I made a lot of cassettes off of other people's albums that they loaned me. Yeah I guess I was a pirate. Ahoy matey! They shouldn't have sold stuff that wore out so quick is all I have to say.

Early vinyl wasn't always so great either. I remember going through 6 copies of Electric Ladyland because they just would not hold up. It seemed that everything put out on the Reprise label was like that really. There was very cheap vinyl going back to the late 60's and early 70's. Some stuff held up well. Apple stuff seemed better but it had to be. If you didn't have a serious audio machine you were missing half of what went on a Beatles album (during the Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour days anyway).

I still remember the very first time I heard a Redbook CD. I remember thinking wow music is going to be different forever. You could hear every instrument and I knew it would sound that way forever. But none of the instruments sounded like they were supposed to sound. It was better in some ways and worse in others. But in the end the durability convinced me that it was a good thing.

Now the sound on CD's is much better than it was. MUCH better. Most stuff sounds pretty close to what it should sound like but it's still not quite exactly right. With all it's faults vinyl still produces a more accurate representation of what the music really sounds like. But everything had to be perfect to get that. Bad mixing, bad pressings, bad vinyl, bad reproduction equipment, dirt, the lathe effect, limited dynamic range (compression was a big problem back then too really), signal to noise problems, etc. etc. etc. all conspired to keep you from hearing that perfect sound. You might get that beautiful sound a dozen times from new vinyl then it was downhill after that. No I never had a studio quality turntable but I had a good turntable and more important I had a good cartridge. I still have it in fact but I'm sure the cartridge is way past it's prime (another glaring fault of turntables which needed constant attention).

It is true that analog distortion sounds more natural than digital distortion. Analog sounds more warm than digital. But ask any recording artist what it was like just trying to get a good pressing of their albums. They would spend months mixing to perfection only to have everything come out sounding awful because they couldn't get the pressing right.

I think a factor we're all missing here is that albums were originally recorded on tape. That meant you got tape hiss on albums too. Some were better than others but some were just plain awful. Drag out that old copy of Aqualung and listen to the hiss. It was terrible. But the fact is that if you had the original tapes that would be the Nirvana of audio. Of course tapes had their own set of problems but you're looking at being the closest you can get to the original. Those original tapes still exist so there's hope yet for that perfect sound in the future. Digital does continue to improve. Some day we'll all have the best of both worlds and it will be digital.

In the meantime I'm not forgetting I grew up in a world with AM radios stuck to people's ears. Audio has come a long way. I'm happy with the sound of digital because I know it could be a lot worse. We just weren't born at the right time to hear perfection. But it really is getting better all the time. Unless mp3's kill off everything else we'll all be hearing it done better some day. Those iPods are a real threat to genuine music quality. Thank goodness fads die quick.

 

[KurtEP]

Ultimately, it's all about music. I was listening to a song I have called Deusa Do Amor that I have on some random CD and realized that I'd rather be listening to that, whatever flaws it might have, than the most perfect copy of 99 Luft Balloons that might be available. I have some strange music, including old LA punk on vinyl and local bands on tape that are simply never going to be available on any other format. It's always good to have the gear to listen to that stuff...

 

[Lee Scoggins]

I guess we just have a different opinion on this one then.

 

[Lee Scoggins]

"I think a factor we're all missing here is that albums were originally recorded on tape. That meant you got tape hiss on albums too. Some were better than others but some were just plain awful. Drag out that old copy of Aqualung and listen to the hiss. It was terrible. But the fact is that if you had the original tapes that would be the Nirvana of audio. Of course tapes had their own set of problems but you're looking at being the closest you can get to the original. Those original tapes still exist so there's hope yet for that perfect sound in the future. Digital does continue to improve. Some day we'll all have the best of both worlds and it will be digital."

If it is by a higher sampling rate then I agree, say like 24/96. As a part-time recording engineer I can tell you however that 16/44.1 does have enough resolution to capture high frequencies well or do soundstaging perfectly.

My hope is that we get to faster downloads so hirez PCM with web access is a reality. I know of at least a few record labels offering hirez downloads.

 

[King Ghidora]

Redbook was a compromise from the beginning. They could have gone with higher res from the start but they were limited by the amount of data on the available digital format. They choose to put more material on CD's instead of better quality CD's. I've always thought they made the wrong choice.

I had high hopes that music would be re-released on DVD with higher res but it didn't happen despite the large installed base of DVD players. As it stands people are recording better res with portable equipment than you can get on a Redbook CD. I'm hoping that market might drive the development of higher res discs but we know the disappointments we've seen so far in that area. I could see a problem with the installed base of SACD etc. but almost everyone has a DVD player. It wouldn't have been hard to include the ability to play much higher res music. Instead we get the ability to play much lower res music ie the MP3. Arrgghhhh!!!! Maybe someday.

As for some things never appearing on CD I have to say I've been amazed at what has been re-released on CD. Back in the early, early days of FM radio we had underground/progressive music stations that played stuff that was never heard anywhere else. I've actually seen some of that stuff show up on CD and I know it never was a mass market item the first time around. I have a couple of CD's from that era too. Ever hear of a band called T2? I have that on CD. I was amazed to see that happen.

 

[Lee Scoggins]

I listened to a Marantz 11S2 redbook and SACD player today on a superb system and was blown away. It really showed what 16/44 is capable of. Still not quite as good as hirez on cymbals but very, very good, almost analog like.

My friend had a West German CD of Moondance and this disc on the Marantz sounded better than Moondance LP I have heard.

 

[FeisalK]

Assuming the LP of Moondance is a constant (good sound), there shouldn't be this differentiation "West German CD of Moondance" business. If that disc highlights the capability of CD medium then all CDs should sound like that. Anything less is a travesty - shouldn't we be able to send them back as defective goods?

 

[Lee Scoggins]

Well the West German CD is a different mastering and my wife really noticed the improvement as well. It really is spectacular. Very rare but it seems the Germans got ahold of better tapes. Why Warner can't figure this out is beyond me.

I wish all CDs did sound this good.