Ya know.. I'm from that vinyl generation too. I'll meet you halfway... couple vinyl with a good tube-driven amplifier, and the music is just delicious, even with my bad hearing... I/We still have hundreds of vinyl albums that span decades that we just don't want to get rid of.
That being said, I haven't listened to vinyl in decades. I need convenience and 99.9% of the time, I'm listening to music in an environment that would never bring out the qualities anyways, but I do respect the old-school medium.
I think quite a few people think vinyl sounds better than other mediums and valves sound better than solid state amplification, due to the limitations and inadequacies of the human auditory system, not in spite of it. The distortions inherent in these systems can create what is perceived as a warm and maybe slightly fuzzy sound that many people prefer...the analogue sound I suppose.
The baby boomers that were the LP generation (and I'm one), for the most part probably have such bad hearing these days that discussions about the differences are pretty moot, sadly. I can't even hear the beep of my electric toothbrush telling me to change quadrant let alone the difference between a valve amplifier and a solid state one.
The only people who really believe the vinyl is a decent recording medium are those too young to remember what it was like when that's all we had. I struggle not to laugh out loud when some young hipster is trying to convince me of the superiority of their vinyl records and how they capture the "true sound" of the artist and all that BS.
Speaking as a former owner of a 10,000 record collection (when vinyl was king) ... the sound quality is awful, even a single play of a record basically ruins it, the equipment is ridiculously "fiddly," it also produces heavily distorted sound and is as about far from "archival" as one can get.
Even back in the day, a real collector would only play their vinyl record for the one time that was necessary to transfer it to tape or CD. Then they played the tape or the CD and put the vinyl away. Vinyl not only sucks, it pretty much always has.
You must have only listened to a cheap Vinyl sound system! Apple is currently only selling you 20 bit processing of part of the entire sound wave. Even BluRay's produce 32 bit sampling. With a quality, "straight line" tracking (preferable w/a very light & extremely sensitive "moving coil" needle you get the entire sound wave. There are laser LP players that are great but they cost $5,000 - $10,000 & they remove the wows, hisses,pops etc. w/no wear to the vinyl. You clearly have never heard true recorded music! Look on eBay for one of those 1970's Beogram turntables. They sell for $600 today. What we need is for that $10,000 price to drop because if any one of the large manufacturers starts producing the laser readers the price will become reasonable. Want digital to compete then we need full sampling. Yet all they give us is similar to cassets which just cut off the top & bottom of the sound wave to make it fit. Pure physics & you clearly haven't a clue! Phil
The only people who really believe the vinyl is a decent recording medium are those too young to remember what it was like when that's all we had. I struggle not to laugh out loud when some young hipster is trying to convince me of the superiority of their vinyl records and how they capture the "true sound" of the artist and all that BS.
Speaking as a former owner of a 10,000 record collection (when vinyl was king) ... the sound quality is awful, even a single play of a record basically ruins it, the equipment is ridiculously "fiddly," it also produces heavily distorted sound and is as about far from "archival" as one can get.
Even back in the day, a real collector would only play their vinyl record for the one time that was necessary to transfer it to tape or CD. Then they played the tape or the CD and put the vinyl away. Vinyl not only sucks, it pretty much always has.
You must have only listened to a cheap Vinyl sound system! Apple is currently only selling you 20 bit processing of part of the entire sound wave. Even BluRay's produce 32 bit sampling. With a quality, "straight line" tracking (preferable w/a very light & extremely sensitive "moving coil" needle you get the entire sound wave. There are laser LP players that are great but they cost $5,000 - $10,000 & they remove the wows, hisses,pops etc. w/no wear to the vinyl. You clearly have never heard true recorded music! Look on eBay for one of those 1970's Beogram turntables. They sell for $600 today. What we need is for that $10,000 price to drop because if any one of the large manufacturers starts producing the laser readers the price will become reasonable. Want digital to compete then we need full sampling. Yet all they give us is similar to cassets which just cut off the top & bottom of the sound wave to make it fit. Pure physics & you clearly haven't a clue! Phil Steve Jobs went home & listened to his LP collection!
The only people who really believe the vinyl is a decent recording medium are those too young to remember what it was like when that's all we had. I struggle not to laugh out loud when some young hipster is trying to convince me of the superiority of their vinyl records and how they capture the "true sound" of the artist and all that BS.
Speaking as a former owner of a 10,000 record collection (when vinyl was king) ... the sound quality is awful, even a single play of a record basically ruins it, the equipment is ridiculously "fiddly," it also produces heavily distorted sound and is as about far from "archival" as one can get.
Even back in the day, a real collector would only play their vinyl record for the one time that was necessary to transfer it to tape or CD. Then they played the tape or the CD and put the vinyl away. Vinyl not only sucks, it pretty much always has.
You must have only listened to a cheap Vinyl sound system! Apple is currently only selling you 20 bit processing of part of the entire sound wave. Even BluRay's produce 32 bit sampling. With a quality, "straight line" tracking (preferable w/a very light & extremely sensitive "moving coil" needle you get the entire sound wave. There are laser LP players that are great but they cost $5,000 - $10,000 & they remove the wows, hisses,pops etc. w/no wear to the vinyl. You clearly have never heard true recorded music! Look on eBay for one of those 1970's Beogram turntables. They sell for $600 today. What we need is for that $10,000 price to drop because if any one of the large manufacturers starts producing the laser readers the price will become reasonable. Want digital to compete then we need full sampling. Yet all they give us is similar to cassets which just cut off the top & bottom of the sound wave to make it fit. Pure physics & you clearly haven't a clue! Phil Steve Jobs went home & listened to his LP collection!
I love my vinyl, but it's all a bunch of hype. Sales of new vinyl are actually quite small. In the U.S., in the first half of 2015, only 9.2 million LPs were sold. Let's say it comes in at 20 million for the year. Back in the day, there were single hit albums that sold 10 million units each. Now, in spite of all the hype, the entire industry is the equivalent of just two big hit albums of the past. Everyone claims that the CD is dead (and it is), but in the first half of 2015, there were still over 41 million CDs sold in the U.S.: almost 5x the amount of vinyl sold.
Furthermore, most hipsters who claim to love vinyl will tell you that it's better because it's analog. But 90% of vinyl is mastered from the same digital master as is used for the CD. With few exceptions, the only way it's an all-digital process is if you buy vintage vinyl from before the time when pop recordings started recording digitally.
There have been many occasions when I've put on a CD of a vintage album and thought that it sounded like crap and that the original vinyl LP sounded far better. Then I put on the LP and it sounds much worse, almost without exception. For a number of years, I transferred vinyl to CD-R for a NYC DJ. If I happened to also have CD versions of any of the tracks, I'd copy over those as "extras". They almost always sounded better. Most vinyl was mastered with a severe lack of bass. Paul McCartney always complained that he couldn't hear his bass on Beatles LPs.
What everyone forgets is that back in the day, we complained like hell about the poor quality of most LPs. In the U.S., audiophiles sought out pressings from Europe and Japan because we thought the quality of U.S. pressings were so poor. And except for those people who treated their vinyl really well and played it only on the best equipment, most people ruined their vinyl within a few plays. And these plastic garbage USB turntables that they sell today are really, really ridiculously awful. Unless one is primarily playing junky used vinyl, they're useless. Unless one is willing to pay "esoteric" money for a cartridge/stylus, it's very hard to find a decent one today. A few years ago I tried to buy a replacement stylus for my Stanton 681EEE and the styli I purchased from Stanton would not track well and were completely distorted. Stanton admitted that they weren't manufactured the same way as the originals.
As an ex-recording engineer, I believe that what people claim is the superior sound of vinyl is actually the sound of tube amplifiers. Tube amplifiers distort, but they distort with odd-order harmonics and our brains really like that sound (like the sound of a fuzz guitar). But one advantage to vinyl reproduction over CD reproduction is that analog systems can be tweaked. CD (in spite of absurd attempts, like marking the outside of a CD with a felt-tip pen) cannot really be tweaked.
But one thing that vinyl does have is far better packaging: larger images and liner notes that can actually be read. When vinyl was King, most of us knew who all the musicians, writers and producers were on every album we listened to. That made us much more intelligent consumers of music. It also made us more patient and we listened to the entire album (or at least the entire album side). One of the reasons why the record industry is doing so poorly is because downloadable and streaming media has returned the industry to a singles market, which is not financially sustainable.
For the first half of 2015 in the U.S., in dollars, physical units constituted 23.6% of the market, digital streaming was 35.4% and digital downloads was 40.9%. Digital streaming is (obviously) trending up, everything else is trending down.
I really wish these mass-market turntables would stop using record-destroying ceramic cartridges. And why do they all play 78s? I'm sure anyone who's going to play an original pressing of 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' isn't going to do it on a Crosley.
Truth is, given the right recording and equipment, vinyl does sound AMAZING. Thing is, to get that sound, you're going to be spending a lot of money. A good cartridge, phono stage, amplifier and speakers will run you thousands before you start to hear an improvement over your CDs/Mp3s. But when all the pieces are there, and you put on Kind of Blue, it just sounds like you're right there with the musicians.
yeah, the music industry is cashing in on the resurgence of vinyl, and unfortunately, most consumers are paying a premium for a product that's not going to give them a better sonic experience than a high quality stream through their same stereo would. But calling vinyl hobbyists "hipsters" is just ignorant.
Go pick on the kids that are buying cassette tapes, instead.
Ya know.. I'm from that vinyl generation too. I'll meet you halfway... couple vinyl with a good tube-driven amplifier, and the music is just delicious, even with my bad hearing... I/We still have hundreds of vinyl albums that span decades that we just don't want to get rid of.
That being said, I haven't listened to vinyl in decades. I need convenience and 99.9% of the time, I'm listening to music in an environment that would never bring out the qualities anyways, but I do respect the old-school medium.
You know, a tube amp will make a CD sound "delicious" too. It's really less about the vinyl than it is the delivery method.
Comments
The baby boomers that were the LP generation (and I'm one), for the most part probably have such bad hearing these days that discussions about the differences are pretty moot, sadly. I can't even hear the beep of my electric toothbrush telling me to change quadrant let alone the difference between a valve amplifier and a solid state one.
Why do some people have to take issue over what some people like and they don't?
Just sad.
Furthermore, most hipsters who claim to love vinyl will tell you that it's better because it's analog. But 90% of vinyl is mastered from the same digital master as is used for the CD. With few exceptions, the only way it's an all-digital process is if you buy vintage vinyl from before the time when pop recordings started recording digitally.
There have been many occasions when I've put on a CD of a vintage album and thought that it sounded like crap and that the original vinyl LP sounded far better. Then I put on the LP and it sounds much worse, almost without exception. For a number of years, I transferred vinyl to CD-R for a NYC DJ. If I happened to also have CD versions of any of the tracks, I'd copy over those as "extras". They almost always sounded better. Most vinyl was mastered with a severe lack of bass. Paul McCartney always complained that he couldn't hear his bass on Beatles LPs.
What everyone forgets is that back in the day, we complained like hell about the poor quality of most LPs. In the U.S., audiophiles sought out pressings from Europe and Japan because we thought the quality of U.S. pressings were so poor. And except for those people who treated their vinyl really well and played it only on the best equipment, most people ruined their vinyl within a few plays. And these plastic garbage USB turntables that they sell today are really, really ridiculously awful. Unless one is primarily playing junky used vinyl, they're useless. Unless one is willing to pay "esoteric" money for a cartridge/stylus, it's very hard to find a decent one today. A few years ago I tried to buy a replacement stylus for my Stanton 681EEE and the styli I purchased from Stanton would not track well and were completely distorted. Stanton admitted that they weren't manufactured the same way as the originals.
As an ex-recording engineer, I believe that what people claim is the superior sound of vinyl is actually the sound of tube amplifiers. Tube amplifiers distort, but they distort with odd-order harmonics and our brains really like that sound (like the sound of a fuzz guitar). But one advantage to vinyl reproduction over CD reproduction is that analog systems can be tweaked. CD (in spite of absurd attempts, like marking the outside of a CD with a felt-tip pen) cannot really be tweaked.
But one thing that vinyl does have is far better packaging: larger images and liner notes that can actually be read. When vinyl was King, most of us knew who all the musicians, writers and producers were on every album we listened to. That made us much more intelligent consumers of music. It also made us more patient and we listened to the entire album (or at least the entire album side). One of the reasons why the record industry is doing so poorly is because downloadable and streaming media has returned the industry to a singles market, which is not financially sustainable.
For the first half of 2015 in the U.S., in dollars, physical units constituted 23.6% of the market, digital streaming was 35.4% and digital downloads was 40.9%. Digital streaming is (obviously) trending up, everything else is trending down.
Truth is, given the right recording and equipment, vinyl does sound AMAZING. Thing is, to get that sound, you're going to be spending a lot of money. A good cartridge, phono stage, amplifier and speakers will run you thousands before you start to hear an improvement over your CDs/Mp3s. But when all the pieces are there, and you put on Kind of Blue, it just sounds like you're right there with the musicians.
yeah, the music industry is cashing in on the resurgence of vinyl, and unfortunately, most consumers are paying a premium for a product that's not going to give them a better sonic experience than a high quality stream through their same stereo would. But calling vinyl hobbyists "hipsters" is just ignorant.
Go pick on the kids that are buying cassette tapes, instead.