What's your latest [non-technology] purchase?

There are a couple. Of items that give me chills whence the pop and hiss of the record shines through...but I only pull those out for special occasions.

The hardest part, for me, is knowing that every time I listen to it...I'm slowly killing it. :( no matter how good your turntable is, unless it reads by laser, there's friction on very very finely contoured plastic. It's just a matter of time before it wears out.

Is it? I have vinyl records from 1978 that haven't worn out yet... And I have even older records from my mother, who never put the vinyl back into its sleeve after playing - and they are still perfectly usable, too.

On the other hand I have a handful of CD's from the 1980's and 1990's that for various reasons have a scratch on them that confuses the laser and produces glitches and jumps worse than any vinyl ever could...

I guess it's all a matter of perspective and how well you treat your stuff...

The biggest issue I have with vinyls is that in mass production many labels never put any care into producing them and that a lot of older recordings are available in great remastered CD versions these days. Latest one I bought was this:

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Great to finally hear it undistorted and with bass!! ;)

(for the record: The old release on CD had lots of noise, almost no bass and the end of "Shine on you crazy Diamond, Part 2" was unbearable to listen to because of distortions)
 
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Main problem with digital music is the way it's mastered, the volume is usually turned up on all of the tracks and that ends up blending in all of the sounds and making things sound too bland. Vinyl tends to be done basically the way it's recorded so you end up with a lot more "depth" as it were to your music.*

Having said that, I will take a file over any type of physical media any day. Sure lossy formats (mp3, aac, ogg, etc...) will not sound all that great but on the other hand portable players that tend to be used with these formats won't be able to deliver high quality sound anyway. If you want quality you go with a lossless format like flac and a higher end audio hardware. I don't tend to treat listening to music as an "event" rather a way to drown out external noise so I just go with higher bitrate mp3s, won't be able to tell the difference on the hardware I got anyway.

*remember all music is recorded digitally in the first place so even on vinyl its analog->digital->analog same as you would have with a CD/file.
 
Main problem with digital music is the way it's mastered, the volume is usually turned up on all of the tracks and that ends up blending in all of the sounds and making things sound too bland. Vinyl tends to be done basically the way it's recorded so you end up with a lot more "depth" as it were to your music.*
This more an old vs new mastering technique problem rather than an issue specific to the medium though.

Also depends on how well old music was remastered for a CD release. I prefer my vinyl copy of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds over the "remastered" CD for example. Granted, the audio quality is considerably lower with odd volume mixing, "lumpy" audio and distortion but the CD release makes everything too clinical. All the highs and lows are evened out so certain aspects that really pop out on the vinyl copy get hidden away and it just sounds a bit more muddy to me... Although my CD copy is probably as old as me, perhaps there is a better one now.


Vinyl is pretty much the only physical form of music I buy any more, CDs are pointless to me and too easily damaged, everything I have is in 320kbps mp3 and FLAC digital formats for convenience. Vinyl in itself is a bit more of an event to listen to, it requires a certain amount of preparation and equipment that is no longer common place and the album artwork is large enough to hang on a wall as decoration making it feel a bit more worthwhile as a physical purchase. If stored correctly it stands the test of time quite well, even my Mother's old records still play, admittedly Led Zeppelin II is now a bit scratchy but it's been played hundereds of times and probably hasn't been cleaned since 1978. :lol:
 
You're looking for "dynamic range". Good read on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Thank you couldn't remember the name.

- - - Updated - - -

This more an old vs new mastering technique problem rather than an issue specific to the medium though.
Yes and no, while you can master a CD same exact way as you would master a record vice versa doesn't quite work so well (rather it can be done but has much lower limit because of the analog nature of playback) so it is at least somewhat medium specific. However I mostly agree that the issue is mostly mastering technique and not the end medium.
 
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Despite my understanding for the nostalgic value and the memories connected to some of my old vinyls, I never understood why he vinyl fans come to the conclusion that a turntable sounds "more musical". Yes, it can deliver a good performance up to a certain level but once you hit the physical limitations of a diamond stylus scratching through a tiny plastic groove, the weaknesses become too obvious for me. Mostly it's a lack of power and clarity and strong sibilants tend to be distorted - depending how good the vinyl print is. Even the best turntable in the world cannot overcome the physical limitations.

Also what people tend to forget: The recording wasn't directly pressed into vinyl, it was stored digitally or analogue on a tape machine. A CD represents what happened in the studio, a vinyl record is an inferior copy of that.

Again: I understand the appeal of vinyl. But saying it is better than a CD is in my eyes a result of a major error in reasoning. Because in the very center of our attention should be the music and not the device it is played back on. The best audio system is the one you don't notice as such anymore. Looking at the naturally limited abilities of the record and the fact that a CD represents the actual recording session more accurately, I fail to understand how people can think a CD is "less musical" than a vinyl record, simply because a vinyl lacks a big part of the information you need in order to "forget" that you hear music via a loudspeaker and not a live band or orchestra in front of you. With a vinyl, you are being constantly reminded that you listen to canned music. With a good CD player, you can at least start to forget that.

Except... your goal is not to listen to music as it was intended to be but prefer making your own sound. But of course that wouldn't be HiFi anymore then ;)
 
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There is some truth to the notion though - not because the medium vinyl is better, but because people still using the medium don't subscribe to the loudness bullshit as much. However, that would be true for their CD versions as well :dunno:
 
The thing is: Most hifi freaks know nothing about music. Most hifi freaks are completely surprised, when they get out of their stylish homes with state-of-the-art equipment and listen to pure, straight live music. The real sound and the real volume of natural instruments is sometimes really shocking to them. When I was still active in the scene, many have gotten so far away from what music really is, that live music is strange or even irritating to them. Mind you: When I say "live music" I mean acoustical instruments and voices without amplification, I don't refer to a rock concert!

My theory is that many music lovers have submitted to the notion that they cannot recreate the live experience in their own four walls anyway, so they try to find something different in hifi. I have always considered that the wrong way, because with the right equipment you can actually come quite close to the original... Unfortunately the industry today doesn't seem to care about sound quality anymore and the small hifi or high end manufacturers serve a group of customers who almost completely lost contact with musical reality. It's really a shame...

I always have to think about when I visited the leading German hifi exhibition in Frankfurt back in the year 2000, I think. It was held in a hotel back them and every manufcaturer had a room or a suite to present their stuff. Not the best acoustical environment when you consider that all the doors were open. One of the exhibitors had the idea to take on a guitar player and put him into the corridor in front of his room. Every full hour he was to play a song, so people could listen to real music instead of canned music for a change. It was meant to be a demonstration of how music has to sound.

Let me say the reaction of both the visitors and the other exhibitors were less than friendly and by noon the guitar player was forbidden to play anymore, because he was "too loud and disturbing" ;)
 
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Yeah, and rightly so - can't have an exhibitor use more space than he paid for.

It was meant to be a tease and a provocation, yes. But it worked. It showed that real music is considered a threat in certain circles of hifi enthusiasts.
 
A major difference also is that vinyl has an effective sample rate of around 192 kHz, where as the max you can get on a CD is 48. On the other hand, vinyl isn't that good for definition on the edges of the frequency spectrum. If you really want the best possible recording, you'd need a lossless copy of the studio masters (which you can sometimes get), but for that you need playback equipment well beyond any of our budgets and even then it'd be questionable if most of us could hear the difference.

I'm just fine with CD quality (or v0 mp3).
 
Not to mention that it would be totally unreasonable to expect either a concert experience or perfect sound quality, given the restrictions on space and budget most people have. For a decent home experience, a system that can clearly play the 20hz-24khz at say 80db is plenty. This type of system can still run into the thousands, depending on components chosen.
 
A major difference also is that vinyl has an effective sample rate of around 192 kHz, where as the max you can get on a CD is 48. On the other hand, vinyl isn't that good for definition on the edges of the frequency spectrum. If you really want the best possible recording, you'd need a lossless copy of the studio masters (which you can sometimes get), but for that you need playback equipment well beyond any of our budgets and even then it'd be questionable if most of us could hear the difference.

I'm just fine with CD quality (or v0 mp3).
Sample rate is somewhat meaningless if your master is below that rate, there is also the point where your ears "resolution" is too low to detect it.
 
The thing is: Most hifi freaks know nothing about music. Most hifi freaks are completely surprised, when they get out of their stylish homes with state-of-the-art equipment and listen to pure, straight live music. The real sound and the real volume of natural instruments is sometimes really shocking to them. When I was still active in the scene, many have gotten so far away from what music really is, that live music is strange or even irritating to them. Mind you: When I say "live music" I mean acoustical instruments and voices without amplification, I don't refer to a rock concert!

You are right and wrong at the same time, I'd say. For thinks like classical music, jazz and some kinds of blues you are right, as the live performance is the primary medium of this kind of music and any recording "only" is a reproduction of a live performance at a certain time, date and place - even if said performance was staged for the sole purpose of recording it and no audience except for the engineers was present.
That's why every performance is comparable - no matter if it's a school orchestra trying their hand on Beethoven or Daniel Barenboim, no matter which jazz combo is improvising on "Changes", they all share the same direct relation to the original sheet music - some performances are better, some are worse, but all are directly linked to the sheet music.

For pop music, as a broadly put genre (you can use "rock" or "rock and roll" as a descriptor here as well), it is different. Here, the studio recording, produced in one or a series of sessions by musicians and engineers/producers is the primary medium. "Folsom Prison Blues" by Johnny Cash refers to the song as he and his band recorded it under the auspices of Sam Philips at Sun Studio, Memphis, TN on July 30, 1955. And not to any take (or "cut" in early recording parlor) they put down that day, but the single one they selected for release. Any other recording of the same material, even if done by the same people in the same space, is not the pop song Folsom Prison Blues, but a cover, a copy, a fake. The reason for this is that pop music has always been thought with mass reproduction in mind, with the fact that it is possible to make identical copies of the same recording taking center stage. With the advent of recording techniques like Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" or the excesses possible by multi-track consoles, like "Dark Side of the Moon", Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsoody" or even any 80s Iron Maiden Album (which generally feature four or more guitar tracks), it becomes blatantly obvious that a huge chunk of pop music was never even be conceptualized to be reproduced in a concert - of course, Floyd and Maiden regularily play these songs on tour, but these live performances have to feature stripped-down versions of the original songs (it should come as no surprise that both Maiden and Floyd have a reputation for excessive retouching of their "live" releases in studio).

So, if you primarily listen to pop music, emphasizing on getting your playback equipment right makes a whole lot of sense. Sadly, many "audiophiles" are jazz or classical music buffs. For them, it's a different story...
 
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I don't make a difference between certain styles of music. The same technical and physical rules apply to all sorts of electronic music signals, no matter if they contain classical music, heavy metal or the recording of a steam locomotive. If the signal is being processed accurately, there shouldn't be any differences than that in the recording itself. I admit it's difficult to achieve but not completely impossible. And of course there is the budget question...
 
This topic has taken on a life of it's own, and needs a new thread in my opinion.
 
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