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).
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
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)