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Topic ClosedWhich is best - vinyl or CD ?

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stan the man View Drop Down
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 22 2006 at 23:36
I find listening to vinyls funner and more intiment.  It seems to have a warmer sound.  But overall CD has better quality sound imo.
true as a lobster in a pteredaktyl's underpants.


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 23 2006 at 03:14
No, vynil is better!!
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 23 2006 at 03:26
I think CD is like having a normal cup of coffee, and vinyl is then like an espresso with belgian chocolates with a glass of armagnac!  
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 23 2006 at 04:11

Originally posted by Eetu Pellonpää Eetu Pellonpää wrote:

I think CD is like having a normal cup of coffee, and vinyl is then like an espresso with belgian chocolates with a glass of armagnac!  

How about listening to CD while having an espresso with belgian chocolates with a glass of armagnac?

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 23 2006 at 05:08
Ok, so a big CD


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 23 2006 at 08:15
Originally posted by MikeEnRegalia MikeEnRegalia wrote:

Originally posted by Eetu Pellonpää Eetu Pellonpää wrote:

I think CD is like having a normal cup of coffee, and vinyl is then like an espresso with belgian chocolates with a glass of armagnac!  

How about listening to CD while having an espresso with belgian chocolates with a glass of armagnac?

No! A gramophone!  Well, a CD would go in emergency situation.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 23 2006 at 08:25


...Or a more polite way to say...digital sucks!

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 23 2006 at 08:44
Originally posted by The-Bullet The-Bullet wrote:

Originally posted by oliverstoned oliverstoned wrote:


Some vynils are 70 years old and still in perfect condition...

So, that's not an issue at all.

For sure, there are huge difference between a 180g and a flexible lower quality vynil.
But, anyway vynil -or rather analog in general- will always sounds better very simply cause analog doesn't alter the signal's integrity as digital does.

Now, you can have some pleasure in digital...but you have to pay a lot!!! more than analog!

But don't analogue sources deteriorate with every listen even using the highest quality hi-fi equipment and top quality vynil/tape ?.


TAPE:

-Pre recorded 60's/70's average quality tapes are indeed a little fragile and MAY deteriorate after many passages.
On another hand, much improvment has been done on blank tape cassettes through the late 80's and early 90's.
These high quality blank tapes are now hard to find (such as TDK SA-X for chrome tapes) but it's still possible thanks to Internet. These tapes are far more resistant on all levels.
BTW, tape is a reliable format, proof is that its used for DAT format.

VYNIL:

-When the sylus is clean and the vynil also (there are solutions to clean both), the degradation is very little.
It's like people who say that tubes amps slightly decrease in quality through the time, and so they prefer solid states.
Ridiculous! even a used tube does better than a solid state! Same for vynil versus digital.



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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 23 2006 at 09:47

Originally posted by oliverstoned oliverstoned wrote:

Ridiculous! even a used tube does better than a solid state! Same for vynil versus digital.

 I remember my old tube guitar amp with worn tubes ... it sounded disgraceful! Low frequency sounds actually made the small metal particles inside the tubes vibrate and create awful noises!

Face it: A tube is similar to a light bulb. I may last much longer, but at some time it will break and need to be replaced.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 23 2006 at 10:18
Yeah, indeed, when it's really worn, it's dead!
So, it's clear when it happens.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 23 2006 at 11:05
I've been collecting LPs since the 60s and I still love to spin 'em.  They still sound great to me.  CD's allow me to take my music on the road, so to speak, so I have many LPs duplicated in my cd collection.  The big difference is the fact that LPs gave me the cover art and liner notes experience that is obviously shrunken   and diminished on disc packages.  There's nothing like sitting back and taking in a new Yes album with Roger Dean's art covering your lap and that's a joy that the younger generations may never experience. 
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 25 2006 at 16:54
Neither! I do digital tracks mostly because they're cheap and have amazing
sound quality. I recently bought Yes - Relayer off iTunes and compared to
the Vinyl version. Digital blew it away. CD is better than Vinyl but digital
trumps all!
+FUSIONED+

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 25 2006 at 20:56
Digital trumps CD? That doesn't even begin to make sense..
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 25 2006 at 22:24

I like them both. they both have their advantages.

 

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 25 2006 at 22:48
Originally posted by Dick Heath Dick Heath wrote:

But vinyl is still a crap polymer for analog discs - although better than shellac of the old 78's, admittedly - but with plastic techology having evolved phenomenally 50 or more years since vinyl was first introduced, its about time a far better quality plastic or elastomer be used - they are certainly available - which

  • doesn't pick up static
  • doesn't  scratch so easily, indeed positively scratch resistant
  • doesn't warp
  • gives a far higher level of reproduction from the master, gives longer life to the sub-masters
  • comes in any colour you like

CD are made from polycarbonate metallised with pure aluminium, which is typical protected from oxidation by an acrylic-urethane lacquer, and as such 25 years on still is pretty cutting edge combination of materials.

Wow, that's pretty interesting.

 

 

 

Seriously though, I'm in the slow process of ripping most of my several hundred vinyl albums to mp3 and putting the ones I want to take out of the house on CD.  I can't really tell the difference as far as quality since my turntable is the trusty $109 US Sony PS-LX250H with a cheap $30 stylus, but when I see the amount of the analog spikes that get cut off when converted to digital, I do sometimes wonder if I'm missing anything.

The biggest advantage to having music on a digital media is that I can rip my CDs to my hard drive and if the original ever gets damaged, I can recreate it from mp3 files.  You can't do that with vinyl, and since most of my vinyl albums are more than 20 years old (and quite a few of them are long out of print), they would be expensive (or impossible) to replace. 

I'm pretty sure the fine humanitarians who run the music industry don't have any kind of convenient replacement policy for damaged albums.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 26 2006 at 00:46
The only vinyl I have left in my collection are the audiophile pressings from the 70's and 80's, Mobile Fidelity, Nautilus, Direct Disc etc. To me these blow CDs away. I got about 150 of these pressings. I just went on a binge of buying these. They used nothing but high density virgin vinyl and pressed them from the studio master tapes. Standard vinyls at the time were just crap.

I don't play them much anymore since I transfered them to TDK metal cass. and reel-to-reel tape with dbx noise reduction. They sound just as good on tape anyway. In fact I still have some duplicates still sealed like Floyd's DSOTM and Beatles Abbey Road I've been offered as much as $200 a piece for.

But about 80% of my listening is CDs for simply practical reasons. CDs can sound great if mastered right, but I've heard some bad sounding CDs too.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 26 2006 at 01:14
The very first time I listened to Close To The Edge on vinyl, it practically jumped straight out at me how inferior it sounded to the Rhino Remaster. The best way to describe it is it sounded muffled and soft(especially the drums) whereas the CD version sounds crisp and clear.

Just a personal anecdote, interpret it how you will, maybe I just have a bad pressing.

Other albums, however, I notice no substantial differences between LP and CP(DSOTM, for example)..

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 26 2006 at 03:07

Originally posted by goose goose wrote:

Digital trumps CD? That doesn't even begin to make sense..

It's odd ... sometimes, when I'm listening to some stuff that I ripped from CD in 192kbps WMA, it sounds really amazing and leaves nothing to be desired ... then again sometimes the compression artifacts jump right at me and destroy my listening experience. I don't know why that happens ... it's not just differences in the quality of the files, it also has a lot to do with your current situation (stress) and a whole bunch of other factors not related to music.

BTW: While it's actually impossible for a compressed version of some source to sound better than the source, there are some explanations:

  • The compressed version was ripped from a better source (e.g. the remastered CD)
  • The compressed version is in 24bit/96khz (my new Creative X-Fi can create that from 16bit/44.1khz).
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 26 2006 at 18:27
Be very glad if you can't hear the difference between cd and vinyl. I can't and I love it. No reason for me to spend 1000 bucks just for a cd player, god that would suck. For me it breaks down like this...Cd's are better because they never develop pops and cliks. Vinyl is better just becuase its cooler artwork wise. To me cd's have zero artisitic draw. They just are not big enough to matter. its like having a poster of the mona lisa compared to having just a postcard. no one proudly hangs a postcard over the mantle :)

 For what its worth I still have and play all my vinyl. I buy and play cd's. One  important thing though, you can't clean your stash on a jewel case
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 26 2006 at 19:24
Originally posted by Laurent Laurent wrote:

The very first time I listened to Close To The Edge on vinyl, it
practically jumped straight out at me how inferior it sounded to the
Rhino Remaster. The best way to describe it is it sounded muffled and
soft(especially the drums) whereas the CD version sounds crisp and
clear.

Just a personal anecdote, interpret it how you will, maybe I just have a bad pressing.

Other albums, however, I notice no substantial differences between LP and CP(DSOTM, for example)..


It may have to do with when you bought this vinyl pressing. It could've been a later pressing in which a 2nd or 3rd generation master tape was used. Also later vinyl quality was getting pretty bad from the late 70's on to keep the $5 price tag. One of my audiophile lps is CTE pressed from the original studio master and it sounds either equal or better than the new CD remaster.

I remember the best vinyl quality for standard issues even back in the later 70's came from the big labels like Warner, RCA and Columbia. They kept their quality pretty good for the most part. But Atlantic really dropped the ball along with smaller labels like Mercury, Arista etc.

I remember buying Rush's Moving Pictures and damned if that thing already had clicks and pops fresh out of the jacket as well as Signals and some of Alan Parson's albums. That's when I went binging on the audiophile pressings. They were about $12 a piece then but well worth it.

Edited by marktheshark
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