Published on 12, July, 2020
I've seen so many people here who really do like to have a go at "winning an argument" and also a fair few people who really like to "cast aspersions" and use inflammatory language.
Clearly there''s a need for some of us to indulge in such behaviour, YET no -one seems to enjoy it really!
Let's mix it up a bit, then shall we?
As a public service to this community I am willing to invest my time in pontless argument to establish once and for all the superiority of CD over vinyl, and I offer to pepper any refutation you might foolishly try to make with inflammatory terms, and descriptions of why you must be mentally weak etc, in your frankly incomprehnsible and misguided affection for those unformed plastic flowerpots you call "records".
I seek a humourus bunfight where the object is to hurl as much metaphorical pastry at one's opponents simply for for the fun of it, and to see who can be the most creatively passionate in the pursuit of their cause.
I know there's at least one of you "diamond wasters" out there...
The more sensitive of you, can dip your toe into a fiercy fought argument and get a strong reply back maybe, SAFELY in the knowledge that the issue does not matter, the insult is being applied for style and humour points, and if it's me, you might learn some useless techie stuff about how it all works...
BIlly managed to get a good thread going where people were able to discuss things reasonably, I fancy a go at making a good thread where people discuss thinsg UN-Reasonably.
I believe the Neurotypicals call this sort of thing, "Banter" and I've found it pleasurable with people I can trust not to actually mean it.
Obviously it's a "trust excercise" which relies on GOOD NATURE and building understanding.
Who knows, at the end of it I might learn something about vinyl that I don't know.
I do know I literally started disposing of mine after a single listen of "Dark side of the Moon" on a CD walkman because of SO MANY reasons...
Let the game begin! (or not).
My ears were perfect until the last 5 years.
I have not been to any but one concert in my life and it was so traumatic I have hence avoided them.
The rest of my live music was in cellar rathskellers around Harvard square and Cambridge. In these little basement clubs for to blues, folk, jazz and the like. I really loved them as they were quiet and the mike set up and intimacy with the musicians.
Later, lots of alternative music scenes were popping up in private loft spaces in lower Manhattan and rented churches with good acoustics around St Marks Place. There was also a very vibrant buskers culture every night on the streets for decades.
I stand by my preferences as indicated above. Different waves for different ears, bro.
I Sperg said:how do you ruin a cd in 12 years??
These were prodiminantly store bought CDs that got a lot of use in both my Denon CD player and a laptop CD drive I had in the early 2000's - just before the advent of MP3 players.
They were stored in their cases for tha vast majority of the time but were decanted into slip cases (hold 100 CDs) for when I was sent overseas to work so I had a library of music to listen to.
It could have been the surfaces they were in contact with, the laptop CD drive (it did sound clunky, but this was like 2003) or the CDs suffering from bronzing.
Either way it resulted in the CDs skipping of stopping playing.
In the end I downloaded MP3 versions of the albums, gave away my HiFi separates and went fully mobile with an external hard disk and 1Gb memory card in an early MP3 player. So much more practical for my needs.
In the end I threw hundreds of CDs in the bin as nobody wanted them - a shame but there were no charity shops where I lived at the time.
After reading all these - maybe we should be like the buddy cop movies and team up... against Spotify and mono-speaker streaming. (My wife calls the Alexa device "the stereo" - I've given up correcting, but nothing compares with the headphones or well set up speaker experience whether CD or vinyl!
O.K. ya got my interest, how can you manage to f*$k up a CD in storage in a mere 12 years??
I heard a rumour that they were going for 200 years under optimum conditions...
EDIT> I may have actually pulled the 200 years out of thin air, (or somewhere much darker) but I've presented it as if it MIGHT be a fact.
This is advanced "pointless arguing" skills, and there are more fully worked examples elsewhere in the political and other threads. I'm sure Iain isn't fooled by it, but "pointless argument" is always about "winning the audience" in the minds of it's players, whilst often we are actually just "making a spectacle"..
But, really, how do you ruin a cd in 12 years??
Uhane said:we would lie flat in the middle of the room and compare one after another CD and vinyl of the same material. Vinyl always won on the blind testing
Clearly you'd all spemt a lot of time having yrou hearing damaged at live gigs. I can think of no other explanation for you reaching such a conclusion!!
When I bought my first cd player I somehow manged to get teh poor shop staff to let me have three separte lsitening sessions where I literally listened to the same piece of music on every type of cd player they could roll out through ONE amp and speaker combo. Then I knew that the best possible sound was obtained mainly from the thousand pound cd players, there was ONE 400 quid cd player that sounded as good as the meridian MCD pro (their cd players went downhill after that) I knew technically why that was, and I could recognise the best sounding ones by ear. AS I turned to leave on my third visit, knowing I needed four hundred quid, and I was on the bloody dole and a months rent was 300 quid, I spied a well used Marantz CD73 on a low shelf by the door. I got them to play it. It really DID sound 99% as good as that thousand quid Meridian and they only wanted 200 quid...
For a while I was the neighbourhood soundsystem they tried to beat. Taht CD74 had clarity and would play anything, (we even did the pioneer "scissor gouges in the playing surface" on a twenty quid cd to test the advertising claims) Unlike my lovely elegant direct drive turntable, with it's option of normal headshell with a Grado ff55 cartidge or the awesome looking ortophon concorde, the CD payer JUST WORKED!!
And I could actually make out what the roadie is saying in the background on Darkside of the Moon, without the pops and crackles.
Eventually, A champion emerged on the vinyl camp known as "Linn Sondek" and the vinylites and I finally duelled the mighty CD73 against the Linn Sondek and compared teh sound those unfeasibly large disks that simply playing slowly destroys against the pure pertect and forever small lexan disks...
We observed the CD player ws overall vastly superior, (of course) in the detail and information it provided us, and one advantage of that early Phillips CD architecture is that it preserves the subtleties in tempo that most digital designs are not good with, but I remember preferring a female vocal album when it was played on the Sondek...
Phillips quickly went on to make a 400 quid cd player that had awful soldering, and that for a very short time no-one could fix but me, so I started buying busted ones cheap and selling working ones with my fingers crossed...
Only Phillips and Sony really seemed to get the "transport" right, and on Dark Side of the moon it sounds like the band "are a bit distracted"on the lesser layers, maybe "wanting the toilet soon" but they sound dead right on a philips based player. Once you hear it you know... ;c)
Having lived to see the demise of 78s.. and onward and studied on the newer varieties of formatting I would say we are dealing with an apples - oranges situation.
Vinyl has more analog range and captures nuance better. Digital is brighter and crisper but loses what used to be called 'soul' or fullness of experience. we would lie flat in the middle of the room and compare one after another CD and vinyl of the same material. Vinyl always won on the blind testing. This was the '80s, mind, and the CD quality much higher than today's' industry standards.
Neil Young had come up with a digital format that could capture all the lost info from the original recording tapes before the tracks were compressed down and tried to develop a player that could allow for the full range. The music was reissued and the players made available but it never caught on. The files sizes and the price of the player were prohibitive.
I would, if made to choose at this late date - and space and money no object - would go with tapes from the studios tracks on a tascam through Bose headphones with full dynamic range in a "clean room".
If I could not have that I would go with vinyl with a selection of various needles, also in a "clean room". I would bypass CD entirely and go to ...
Aiff files 'cut' from the original studio tapes.
Some remastered stuff from the pre-nuke era and early '50s I can store on 320 MP3 as they are already better than the available source material overall if that is how they were remastered, although, I would prefer Flac files for those if available.
If I can make my own, which is always preferable. I use "Amadeus Pro".
There is a fantastic website chock full of remastered old recordings at
theinternetarchive.org
Totally. There are records that always evoke joy, which are intrinsically linked to time and place. These are special. CDs don't do that. I still discover news "classics" that have existed for years but only discovered by me recently. Dark side of the moon being such an example.
AwkwardKid said:As an autistic male who grew up emerged in music, this is heaven
Albums used to be something to be experienced and now are largely reduced to tracks to be built into playlists to be used in the background while you do something else.
The focus has clearly shifted away from the immersive experience but when you find the right music, it can be a pure pleasure to close your eyes, focus on the threads on instruments making up the noise and to focus on the lyrics when they are present. It makes the whole thing about it and not it being a backdrop to what you are doing.
I have probably 20 albums I prefer to listen to this way and thousands more that are used for walking, driving, working out, flying, waiting, shopping etc. The bulk are only suitable for the backdrop category but those special few evoke not just the sound they make but take me back to the time and place I first heard them too.
The physical act of listening to a record has become ritualised for me. Amp and pre amp switch on. Headphone and extension plugged in. Record on turntable. Quick brush. Pour beer. Lift tonearm onto record. Sit in My Chair. Headphones on. Breathe out deeply. Repeat.
As an autistic male who grew up emerged in music, this is heaven. Better than CD every time. No skipping tracks. Whole albums. Warmer sound.
I Sperg said:the keen eyed student of stupid arguing skills
you called m'lord?
Well you must be doing something wrong.
I've had nigh on 400 in a bloody great sony carousel and they play flawlessly. At least they did until the bloody rubber band that turns the carousel broke, and repairing the unit has so far proven less attractive than playing the same music which we ripped wholesale into 320Kb Mp3's... I've only experienced what you report of bootleg and copied discs.
They promised us pure perfect sound forever, and provding you use a first or second geenration Phillips CD mech with a decent laser, that so far is what I got. The vast majority of my CD's were acquired at the same time, as replacements for my collection stolen in a burglary in 1995 so they are only 30 years old.
Anyway vinyl turns into a stylus roller coaster ride if it even catches sight of a glowing heater, and the act of pulling teh thing out of it's sleeve seems to produce about a small village worth of static electricty, whch does not dust the room as effectvively as it ensures ones (cloth) ears can hear in the defening noise produced when a tiny diamond hits a cat hair at 33rpm, and the entre tonearm runs off to sulk in the middle runout groove, forcing the poor vinyl lover to have to jump up and secure a situation that will other wise mean he'll have to buy anotehr stupidy expensive (and fragile) stylus for his Ortophon Concorde.
Sorry, too long. I was triggered by your artwork truth, which I find totally unacceptable, and just an indication of poor focus. This is all about sound quality not bloody pictures!!
(the keen eyed student of stupid arguing skills will note that I don't actually have any valid refution of Iains point, so I attemot to steer the argument to an area where I feel more comfortable, and I preceded it with an insult in the hope that he responds to the insult and lets it appear that I sucessfully replied to his actual argument.I've seen this used quiet effectively on forums a lot, by more vulgar people than me) .
Mark (formerly Spikey) said:I've had records warp in summer
Whoa, you didn't store them flat with something on top? The coin gods are punishing you for this now with the folly of supporting the vanity mirrors of music.
2 Hail Marys and 1 wikipedia article for you! ( https://www.wikihow.com/Fix-a-Warped-Vinyl-Record )
Because the quantisation noise after conversion is so so sweet.
(I secretly agree, but the coin gods chose me a side). I've had records warp in summer, even past the wobbly pitch stage and into throwing the needle and scratching the record stage.
Yet original mastering and DVD's use (IIRC) 14bits / 48Kb/s resolution, why do they do that if the human ear only needs 16bit/44.1 Kb/s?
*edit* <forgot the required abuse> "Thought you were being clever there, didn't ya!"
I'm for vinyl on the basis that it does not degrade with age anywhere near as much as a CD does.
I had numerous CDs that started having problems playing after 12 years (stored in the CD case, out of sunlight) as the substrate broke down.
If records are given the same care then they have a lifespan of easily 10 times longer.
Lets not even get into the cover artwork either - that just brings vinyl to a whole higher plane.
(throws a coin to pick a side...) The CD format has 16 whole bits of level (65536 loudness steps) played at 44,100 of these levels per second. The human ear can not possibly need anymore!