A place for gourmet aviators. Musicians are also welcome.

Moderator: Dave W

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By Steve D
#618391
There was, most definitely, a time when vinyl sounded better than CD at any price, no question. CD seemed to come of age about 5 or 6 years ago, and now even modestly priced kit sounds pretty decent. I'd say a good CD player offers something vinyl never will, mainly in the realms of stability, tonal accuracy and so-on due to a lack of dependence on speed stability. I agree with shunter though, many modern pop recordings are compressed to the point of unlistenability.

That said, £ for £, a decent turntable playing decent (i.e looked after and properly mastered in the first place) vinyl still has that certain something that eludes CD at the same price. But, vinyl is a PITA compared to CD.

I have a very good CD player, and a moderate turntable. I find I hardly ever play vinyl. Mind you, if I had a turntable as good as my CD player, that would surely change.
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By Sharpie
#623943
Vinyl is a pain to listen to because of the scratch noise etc. But they sound warm and "nice".
CDs, on the other hand can often can sound harsh and edgy.
The problem is not just with modern compression techniques that attempt to bring the music up front and make it "exciting" sounding but with the basic difference between digital and analogue.
Digital recording samples the signal at time points which although may be rapid they are still disjointed sections of the original music. Rapid enough that the cracks don't show but maybe this causes a harder listen than one gets with a smooth sound analogue recording.
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By Morley
#623950
I'm thinking of selling all my hifi gear and getting a Sanyo music centre.
[[imghttp://www.technology-props.co.uk/frames/images/sanyo_vtx_5000.jpg[/img]
They sound so much better than the $hite you can buy nowadays. Some of them were nearly 30 watts peak.

Mind you, I would take out that turntable and stick in a Garrard SP25.
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By Morley
#623961
Oh, and beef up the audio with a pair of Sinclair Z30 power amps.
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By Morley
#623988
Oh deffo. The purity of Mono cant be beat.
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By Steve D
#624259
You may be jesting (or maybe not) but there's certainly a stunning catalogue of older vinyl on mono, some of the truly great jazz artists of the fifties, for example.

You really need a mono pickup to get the best out of it, though. If you haven't heard what a decent mono cartridge can do with a looked-after mono record, then you have no idea what mono is capable of.
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By steve355
#624536
CDs are 16 bit ****. The only thing worse than CDs is mp3s which are (bit) compressed 16 bit ****. These days, nothing is recorded at 16 bits. Everything is recorded at 24 bits and it sounds ok (assuming it was well recorded). Then it gets bus-compressed and mastered to whack up the loudness, which destroys the dynamic range and squashes it horribly. Then it gets dithered down to 16 bits to make it sound worse. Then the radio station compresses it even more to make their station sound louder than all the others. The result is the unlistenable Carp you hear on Kiss FM.

A decent, relatively unsquashed recording from the 70s, well mastered onto vinyl sounds loads better than the modern Carp. BUT digital can be very good in its own way and has a whole load of good things like much lower noise, easy editing etc.

But these days everyone is buying vintage gear/tube mics & desks etc to get that vintage sound because it was, well, lovely.
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By Steve D
#624613
[quote='steve355']CDs are 16 bit ****. [/quote]

No argument from me that 24 bit is better, but I've heard some pretty damn fine-sounding 16 bit ****, as it happens.

Some CD labels do take care with mastering and stuff, I'm thinking of labels like ECM, Naim, Harmonia Mundi and others, but the mass parket pap is, well, mostly exactly that. Even a well-engineered CD player is going to struggle to get something decent out of that, but a decent CD player with a decent CD? Well let's just say that I was seriously amazed just how good the 'limited' capabilities of good ol' 16 bit **** could actually be when I heard it done properly for the first time.
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By Sharpie
#624666
On the vintage theme, there isn't a single decent guitarist in the whole world who doesn't use tube (valve) amplification.
By Ian H
#626196
They once did something on tv in which they cooked a frozen and a fesh turkey and asked the "experts" to tell the difference. No-one could.

Much the same with this argument I suspect.

But if you like the old fashioned stuff, why not?.......
User avatar
By jaycee58
#626303
Sharpie wrote:On the vintage theme, there isn't a single decent guitarist in the whole world who doesn't use tube (valve) amplification.


Well I use a transistor amp....oh, you said "decent guitarist". That's me out of the running then :(
User avatar
By Steve D
#626510
[quote='Ian H']They once did something on tv in which they cooked a frozen and a fesh turkey and asked the "experts" to tell the difference. No-one could.

Much the same with this argument I suspect.

But if you like the old fashioned stuff, why not?.......[/quote]

I remember one similar with Rick Stein, might be the one you're thinking of?

FWIW, I do think there's an enormous qualitative difference between vinyl and CD and a good vinyl system will still outperform a good CD system in many respects. However, I do think that these days it is possible to get an astonishing level of performance out of good old CD, which gives the lie to the '16 bit, 44.1kHz isn't good enough" argument. Sure, higher resolution formats can be better, but there's still quite a lot of life in the old dog, yet.