Sound in Vinyl

I've known for a few years that a vinyl album sounds amazing. I just picked up a Soundesign turntable/radio/tape deck with tower speakers/subwoofers, for $30. The turntable was $30, and the guy selling it figured there was no point in parting with it if he didn't give me speakers, too.

The cost of the media is rather appealing, and the sound quality is pretty great - though a Queen album will still cost about $20, mainly because no one is willing to sell their old ones (played to death or just too awesome to part with). Anyone else have a turn table?

 

I don't have a turn table, but I appreciate the sound. For Christmas I bought an Abbey Road vinyl for a relative because they have one; they're still making Beatles' vinyls new which is cool.

I'm currently listening on occaision to this on youtube, mainly due to playing on Bioshock 2 recently and watching Jeepers Creepers a couple of nights ago. Not quite the vinyl experience when the vinyl is played through youtube I know, but still I thought it was worth a mention.

 

We got one for cheap from Lidl a while ago, and I just love it. We (strangely, since no-one's into it but me) have some classical records about the house and I basically get to get a massive hard-on from the gorgeous warm sound (the speakers are good ones) of a nice vinyl copy of Berlioz' famous symphony.

 

I had one, but I think I sold it to a friend. But. I have still a large collection of original vinyl records. From the Sergeant Pepper album, Beach Boys to a single of The Monkeys. Love it.

 

Jojo, you should pick up a turntable. Contemporary artists are rolling back to recording on vinyl simply because of the sound's fidelity.

I picked up a couple big band records (Baroque Brass, John Philip Sousa's Marches) as well as a Bach album. I've been looking for any albums recorded by my girlfriend's great-great-grandfather, Fred Geib, but I get the feeling anything he's recorded is pretty rare (read= pricey) at this point.

I actually picked Sgt. Pepper yesterday.

I also managed to find an unopened 1987 recording of the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack made with the original cast. An opened one with a tiny scratch on it is available on Amazon for $150 - currently selling the one I got which is in infinitely better condition considering it's never been removed from the cellophane. Now, what's incredible is I got it for a dollar at a flea market.

 

Sweet deal!

My old man was a sound technician for a while, and even built and marketed his own brand of speakers back in the 70s and I guess it's for this reason that I simply don't care about sound quality or music systems. Subconscious rebellion maybe.

Anyway, sell that collectable vinyl and buy an ipod, bruz!

 

I'll endeavour to get one. If wayne picked up a cheap one from Lidl (basically a budget store in the UK and Ireland if that wasn't clear from his link) I'm sure I'd be able to source one cheaply too and start a collection.

 

Nope. Car repairs.

 

I hope you guys all realise that the attachment you feel to vinyl is largely emotional rather than due to any superiority in sound fidelity. A CD or MP3 will reproduce a musical performance better than a vinyl record, and the perceived "warmth" that wayne-scales mentions is likely due to the filtering out of treble frequencies required to reduce hiss and pop from dust on the vinyl surface. In other words - it's actually due to a reduction in sound quality, and you could get the same effect by applying some kind of "old time gramophone" audio filter to a digital recording.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with obsessing over an outdated technology. I just don't want you to delude yourself that it's superior in any audio-related sense.

You're welcome.

 

The nature of the recording is different;

Analog versus digital.

In a vinyl record, the sound is physically transmitted to the recording medium, meaning the waveforms of the sound are preserved as opposed to a digital snapshot present on either a CD, or MP3. The hissing and popping is, of course, due to dust on the vinyl, which can damage your records further than simply playing them. This is why you clean both the needle and the vinyl. However, in getting used vinyl, the sound artifacts from physical damage are inescapable and you're left with that hissing or popping simply because it's an older recording.

You're comparing an audio track recorded at 44.1 kHz and 16 bits per second (65,536 output levels) to something with around 16,777,216 output levels and saying they're the same thing. The closest accuracy recordings available on a digital medium are DVD audio tracks, and while they're close - they're not the same.

The main drawback with this tech is wear over time. A good CD/DVD will outlive its owner. A vinyl has a lifetime wholly dependent on how often it's played and how well it's maintained.

I'm sure very soon, possibly right now, there's a reasonable facsimile of vinyl audio available in a digital format, but it's most definitely not automatically CD or MP3.

 

No, what you're doing is looking for a reason why you prefer the vinyl recording, and then deciding that it must be a digital -vs- analog issue, without any actual proof that it is.

After decades of testing, nobody has been able to show that the human ear is sensitive enough to can detect waveform artifacts as a result of digital sampling at CD resolutions. The difference in perceived sound quality comes from additional processing - for example a vinyl record contains reduced bass frequencies because they would take up too much space on the disc, and then the turntable amplifies the bass more to compensate. The resulting imperfect equalization of frequencies results in distortion that your ear happens to find pleasant, but the output waveform is a less accurate representation of the original music than a digital recording would be.

 

Thankyou for explaining why vinyl is better, Smuel.

 

I just wonder if anyone claiming vinyl provides better quality of music actually believes the words he says or is it all just discussing just for the sake of discussing.

Don't get me wrong, vinyl is strictly ring-a-ding, but redundant rationalising is redundant.

 

They're probably the same people who swear that they can hear an improvement when using expensive gold coaxial speaker cables instead of standard copper ones.

 

I'll gladly make the claim that analog audio signals are strictly superior to digital ones. Even a digital signal of an infinite sampling rate is inferior to the original analog signal.

I'll also be the first to admit that in the heyday of Napster and mp3 downloading, I would seek the lowest quality mp3s as a measure to conserve space because I could not discern any appreciable difference among the resolutions.

 

I'll gladly drag this argument out for several pages, but first I'll have to ask you to define what you mean by "superior".

 

What is the meaning of "asking"?

 

Completely lossless.