Questions about vinyl

MikeEnRegalia wrote: ^ that really sounds like black magic to me. Let's say that for some unknown reasons your first pressing of Led Zeppelin II really is the holy grail of all benchmarks ... the best recording ever in terms of sound. Then why would it sound crappy on your friend's amp? Why would a good source sound worse on a lo-fi amp than a bad source. The only explanation *I* can think of (doesn't mean it's right!) would be that you're simply used to how this pressing sounds on your own amp. Well, I guess I'll never have a chance to listen to that album on my system, so instead I'll try to set up my system so that the sources which I use sound great.

MikeEnRegalia wrote: ^ so what you're saying is that this recording will sound better than most others on a decent system? Sounds like an experiment I'd be willing to try ... I'm just not sure where to get the album. Remember that I don't live in the UK ... I guess that in Germany these pressings are a bit more difficult to find.

eBay - the repository of vinyl heaven.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/LED-ZEPPELIN-III-200-GRAM-AUDIOPHILE-CLASSIC-RECORDS-LP_W0QQitemZ310055893731QQihZ021QQcategoryZ1593QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

That's the Classic Records 200gm pressing, these are supposed to be awesome.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/BLACK-SABBATH-1st-V-Rare-Orig-UK-Vertigo-Spiral-Swirl_W0QQitemZ360057857201QQihZ023QQcategoryZ16138QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Black Sabbath debut album 1st press, Vertigo swirl label, looks like a good copy.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Led-Zeppelin-II-2-1969-Orig-Gatefold-slv-red-plum-LP_W0QQitemZ200227846593QQihZ010QQcategoryZ1593QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Plum and red label Zep II, bit overpriced but open to offers.

Just on the last bunch of posts, I know, Mike, that you don't buy the whole audiophile thing and there's little I can do to try to convince you and I agree with you that to some degree there is a law of diminishing returns that applies to audiophilia.

There is an awful lot of happiness in a reasonable CD player, amp and speakers. A thousand euro system will do about 70% of what a much more expensive collection  of obscure boxes will do. BUT (and it is a serious but) if you do go the extra few yards then there is a tangible reward in sound quality (from whatever source you choose). There's an awful lot of smoke and mirrors in hi-fi (cables, power conditioning blah blah blah) but there is also a lot to be gained in stealthy and considered upgrades of things that matter (source, amplification, speakers).

For financial reasons I lived with a budget hi-fi system for 10 years, (CD, amp and speakers together cost under a grand) and felt happy listening to it. But as finances improved I made subtle upgrades (good turntable, a better tonearm, a better cartridge, a better phono stage, better CD player, much better speakers). I didn't go mental and lash out ridiculous money but went carefully and matched budget to performance to system and the results are very very real and make me smile every time I listen to it.

I think you have the (very understandable) opinion that spending money on esoteric hi-fi equipment is for the deluded "more-money-than-sense" fraternity, people who would happily buy snake oil if offered to them. I can assure you, I'm totally sceptical of all hi-fi's arcane bluster and have no interest in a lot of the mummery that passes as science in hi-fi.

What I do try to do however, is use my ears. And my ears definitely tell me, that if you invest in the right source, match it to a decent amp and some good speakers then there is a vast improvement in sound. It doesn't have to cost a fortune either. You could buy an old Thorens TD160 from eBay, stick a Linn Basik arm on it, fit an Ortofon 2M Blue cartridge on it, change the platter to a Funk Firm Achromat and for under 300 pounds I think you would get a turntable that would beat the crap out of anything you could buy new for a grand. match that to a 50 pound NAD phono stage, a Prima Luna Prologue valve integrated amp and some Usher S-520 speakers and for just north of £1500 you would have a system that will astound you and one which will definitely reveal how good a 1st press Zep II can sound. If you want to go the whole hog, stick a Cambridge Audio 840C Azur CD player in there as well, at £750, and then for somewhere around £2500 you'll have a system that will open whole new worlds of enjoyment to you and give you 150% of what a computer based set-up will give and 90% of what 30k of obsessional stupidity will provide.











Edited by arcer - June 04 2008 at 12:45

arcer wrote: MikeEnRegalia wrote: ^ so what you're saying is that this recording will sound better than most others on a decent system? Sounds like an experiment I'd be willing to try ... I'm just not sure where to get the album. Remember that I don't live in the UK ... I guess that in Germany these pressings are a bit more difficult to find. eBay - the repository of vinyl heaven. http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/LED-ZEPPELIN-III-200-GRAM-AUDIOPHILE-CLASSIC-RECORDS-LP_W0QQitemZ310055893731QQihZ021QQcategoryZ1593QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem That's the Classic Records 200gm pressing, these are supposed to be awesome. http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/BLACK-SABBATH-1st-V-Rare-Orig-UK-Vertigo-Spiral-Swirl_W0QQitemZ360057857201QQihZ023QQcategoryZ16138QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem Black Sabbath debut album 1st press, Vertigo swirl label, looks like a good copy. http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Led-Zeppelin-II-2-1969-Orig-Gatefold-slv-red-plum-LP_W0QQitemZ200227846593QQihZ010QQcategoryZ1593QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem Plum and red label Zep II, bit overpriced but open to offers. Thanks - these auctions are interesting, but many of the UK merchants don't ship to Germany, and I'd rather not pay 100+ EUR for one album ... at least *not yet*. Just on the last bunch of posts, I know, Mike, that you don't buy the whole audiophile thing and there's little I can do to try to convince you and I agree with you that to some degree there is a law of diminishing returns that applies to audiophilia. Well, let's put it this way: I'm quite willing to improve my system, but only if I'm convinced that it can work. There is an awful lot of happiness in a reasonable CD player, amp and speakers. A thousand euro system will do about 70% of what a much more expensive collection  of obscure boxes will do. BUT (and it is a serious but) if you do go the extra few yards then there is a tangible reward in sound quality (from whatever source you choose). There's an awful lot of smoke and mirrors in hi-fi (cables, power conditioning blah blah blah) but there is also a lot to be gained in stealthy and considered upgrades of things that matter (source, amplification, speakers). If you ask oliverstoned then he would undoubtedly say that even the system you describe would be worthless without power conditioning. Personally, I think that CD players can be really cheap - there isn't much difference between the sound of a cheap player (like 50 EUR) and an expensive player (like 1,000 EUR). Ten years ago the situation was different though, and particularly computer drives had problems with proper audio extraction. IMO the most important component are the speakers. Modern sources are almost perfect (even cheap ones), amplifiers too (with a little more bandwidth between cheap and expensive / bad and good), but speakers are still something which you have to choose carefully. For financial reasons I lived with a budget hi-fi system for 10 years, (CD, amp and speakers together cost under a grand) and felt happy listening to it. But as finances improved I made subtle upgrades (good turntable, a better tonearm, a better cartridge, a better phono stage, better CD player, much better speakers). I didn't go mental and lash out ridiculous money but went carefully and matched budget to performance to system and the results are very very real and make me smile every time I listen to it. I had a similar experience when I was about 15 years old and switch from my old, really lo-fi system to my Musical Fidelity amp and Magnat speakers. But I also remember that when I switched from that to my current system (Harman Kardon amp + Elac speakers) I didn't notice a big change. The amp sounds different, obviously ... I'd love to return to the sound of the Musical Fidelity amp, but today they're really expensive. Today I get that "smile" which you describe when I listen to music on my computer, through the Logitech system. I'm quite sure that it would put a smile on your face too if you listened to it ... not as a replacement of your audiophile equipment of course, but if you used it with your computer (I don't know whether you listen to music at the computer at all). I think you have the (very understandable) opinion that spending money on esoteric hi-fi equipment is for the deluded "more-money-than-sense" fraternity, people who would happily buy snake oil if offered to them. I can assure you, I'm totally sceptical of all hi-fi's arcane bluster and have no interest in a lot of the mummery that passes as science in hi-fi. Still, you believe in expensive CD players ... What I do try to do however, is use my ears. And my ears definitely tell me, that if you invest in the right source, match it to a decent amp and some good speakers then there is a vast improvement in sound. It doesn't have to cost a fortune either. You could buy an old Thorens TD160 from eBay, stick a Linn Basik arm on it, fit an Ortofon 2M Blue cartridge on it, change the platter to a Funk Firm Achromat and for under 300 pounds I think you would get a turntable that would beat the crap out of anything you could buy new for a grand. match that to a 50 pound NAD phono stage, a Prima Luna Prologue valve integrated amp and some Usher S-520 speakers and for just north of £1500 you would have a system that will astound you and one which will definitely reveal how good a 1st press Zep II can sound. If you want to go the whole hog, stick a Cambridge Audio 840C Azur CD player in there as well, at £750, and then for somewhere around £2500 you'll have a system that will open whole new worlds of enjoyment to you and give you 150% of what a computer based set-up will give and 90% of what 30k of obsessional stupidity will provide. Maybe I'll do something like that eventually ... although I'd probably try to get a good surround sound amp. If I'm going to spend a lot of money on a new system then it would have to be one which handles everything I need, which includes computer gaming, DVD and SACD/DVD-Audio(5.1). I know that multi channel systems are not taken seriously by most audiophiles, but I think that we'll see more and more 5.1 recordings, since more and more people have these systems in their living rooms. But thanks for your advice ... I'll take it into consideration.

arcer wrote: Actually I think you're very right. You can get an awful lot of performance from a cheap CD player. For example, I did think about selling on my Roksan (which I'm less than convinced by) and investing in an Oppo DVD player, the latest of which will also stream SACD and the CD playback is reckoned to be more than fine. They had had rave reviews everywhere, including Stereophile magazine and only cost £160. Could be the way to go. The point is, I don't think CD is a good format in the first place, so don't see why once a decent clock has resolved jitter problems (and most budget players have good clocks now) that a cheapy should perform much worse on an inherently flawed format than an expensive player. The reason I mentioned thre Cambridge is that it upsamples and apparently the upsampling gives a smoother more even tone. Again it is a machine that has had very positive reviews with again Stereophile saying it beats anything under $5000. In principle what upsampling does is that is smoothes the waveform. Generally that's a good idea, and the result should sound smoother ... but the problem is that this smoothing happens in a frequency range which is well above our hearing threshold (20khz). At least this is true for upsampling in the frequency domain (44,1khz -> 96khz), audible results may actually be possible in the bit depth domain (16bit -> 24bit). An interesting article in this month's Hi-Fi News posits this: "most musical information exists below 3kHz and the ear is most sensitive at 7kHz where digital distortion lies. What we have here is the most unfortunate psycho-acoustically structured music playing system ever devised, possessing a pattern of distortion the ear can readily detect." And again: "25 years of progress in digital convertor technology has reduced CD distortion at -60db by five times - from 1% to 0.2% which seems quite good until another little know complexity is taken into account. "CD distortion levels are not only level dependent but are also frequency dependent - and measuement is only made nowadays at frequencies where CD gives its best results. That 0.2% result rises to no less than 1.7% in the measurements made for this article (taking into account quantisation noise). "The point is CD had a complex distortion pattern, one that changes appreciably across the audio band, with levels reaching well above Harold Leak's declared 0.1% limit of acceptability, made back in 1945. "LP does the opposite being relatively benign in psycho-acoustic terms,. it is because LP is benign and also produces ten times less distortion than CD at low levels (0.1% to 1%) that we find it aurally acceptable." Now I'm no science geek but is that a case for vinyl over CD? It only tells me that audiophiles are very resourceful people ... this is the first time that I hear the term "cd distortion", and I've read a lot of articles about audio. I don't believe a word of it until I find some scientific explanation of it. In any case, the mere fact that it was posted in "Hi-Fi News" means nothing to me. But about the second paragraph: *Every* recording medium distorts silent sounds ... no matter whether it's digital or analogue. That's why recording engineers try to record each instrument as loud as possible - recording it with half the volume and boosting the volume later dramatically affects the sound quality. Heavyfreight once posted a good article which explains why (and how) vinyl also suffers from this problem - and I seriously doubt that it's 10 times better than CD. In fact digital is vastly superior here especially if 24 bit resolution is used, because the format is independent of mechanical limitations (these problems with vinyl are introduced by the interaction between stylus and the vinyl). But with that kind of dynamic range you would have to be in a very quiet room and really turn up the volume to make use of it. In fact, in order to really appreciate a dynamic range of more than 90dB you would have to damage your ears. And when you listen to 16 bit music at acceptable levels - let's say 60dB, that's still *loud* - the silent parts which might suffer from distortion are very silent compared to the rest. Let's try to keep in mind that many, many people enjoy CD recordings and describe them as being superior over old analogue media. You may think otherwise, but all those people aren't deaf either ... if this digital distortion was that obvious, they would not select that medium as their favorite.

^ Funny how people like you completely ignore when people like me say that they *have* heard good analogue equipment.

Have you ever heard my Logitech system? No? Then shut the f*ck up.


Edited by MikeEnRegalia - June 05 2008 at 04:53

oliverstoned wrote: One more time, i'll repeat myself, and you will too, until your death... I don't need to listen to your "whisper boxes" to know how crappy it is. You can't judge nothing with that, whereas i had the chance to listen to some of the best digital and analog sources on real big systems in bi amplification. So i know what the best of the best digital source does (imagine a 60 000 dollars Mark Levinson CD setup), i know that it's impressive for some CD, but it's ridiculized by a good turntable of the third of its price. So please don't repeat endlessly what other ignorants and/or jealous say on Internet. I know a little what im talking about, whereas you have no experience in Hifi. You can have a look at my portable system into the heaphones thread, and everybody who listen to it agrees that the good Sony Discman is completly smoked by the Sony cassette Walkman. Much more low, highs, dynamic, detail, image, mateer, precense, smoothness...Now i don't say that vinyl and cassette is simple or convenient, but it's so superior to digital... You're welcome to your opinion, I simply disagree. Let's leave it at that ... and for the record: I'm neither jealous nor ignorant. I don't spend my time thinking "oh if I only had a 10,000+$ system", and I listen to all the points made by audiophiles and try to respond in a civilised manner.  Now it's not a mater of price, a second hand 100 dollars Nad Cd player will explode any computer or Ipod, and "Imod" (modified version of the Ipod by the american company "Red wine audio") beats the Ipod and so on...well you can listen to music through the worse equipment and still enjoy it...your brain will "fill the gaps" just like with digital... but you're more likely to end up with an headache than when listening to good digital and a tube amp or better to a decent turntable such as a Rega 3, a little good tuner such as a Rega Radio. About this "iMod": I checked the specs and found out that it uses Lossless formats. This means that in order to listen to a CD, you put it in a computer drive (!) and rip it to WAV - or other lossless formats like FLAC - and then copy it onto the device. Now, as far as I can remember, you never accepted that computer drives could extract the audio information properly, so how come that you accept this device?

22khz is already well outside the hearing range ... isn't it? I doubt that there are many adults around who can even hear anything beyond 18khz.

^ I checked the various wikipedia pages about upsampling and digital/analog conversion ... they don't contain much information about the effect you're describing. But: If a signal contains both 20khz and 22.05khz waveforms, the modulation effects are not unwanted at all. Only if by the conversion new signals were introduced, that of course would affect the signal. Are you sure that this happens during digital/analog conversion? I thought that it was primarily a problem when mixing several digital signals into one, which is why professional digital audio in studios usually works with 24bit/192khz.

Don't take me too serious here ... I currently don't have the time to brush up on my knowledge in this domain.

^ where does that 22.1kHz signal come from ... why should it be "automatically" present in the digital signal? Or in other words: When/How is it added to the signal?