Vinyl is where it's at???

Care to share?

C.

It doesn't matter what Mango prefer             this week

allthough I aggree with him this time, streaming is pants

Rp8 too flimsy.

didnt like Apheta+Aria too much. Wanted to keep it simple with stageline-N and not worry about other cartridges phono stages etc.

rp8 system sounded too clean. Almost digital. 

For the few records I spin every three months, i don't miss the rp8 at all.

b_lund posted:

...
allthough I aggree with him this time, streaming is pants

Bold assertion, care to support it?

MangoMonkey posted:

Rp8 too flimsy.

didnt like Apheta+Aria too much. Wanted to keep it simple with stageline-N and not worry about other cartridges phono stages etc.

rp8 system sounded too clean. Almost digital. 

For the few records I spin every three months, i don't miss the rp8 at all.

I get that. C.

MangoMonkey posted:

Eloise posted:

Question: (this may already have been raised) but is the OPs preference for Rega RP6 over the Naim NDS down to the reproduction provided by the Rega, or the recordings / mastering?

Using the Stageline-N. So the sound is as Naim as it gets..

Still - if I were to give one of the two up, it would be the RP6. Vinyl sounds better, but just isn't practical. Convenience trumps SQ. The DireStraits box set I bought over a year ago is still sealed. As are 4-5 other records.

What continues to amaze me though, is how a $1500 record player can even compete with a $15000 digital replay system.

You didn't address what I was asking though (IMO).

is the sound quality better because of the turntable vs the streamer, or is it down to the poor quality of the mastering of what you are playing on the NDS?

It's very difficult to compare the two as mastering is rarely identical. As a simple observation David Bowie Blackstar the vinyl has a DR of 10 and the digital versions around 5/6 (values are iirc). 

The closest you can manage (to my mind) is creating your own digital version using a good quality ADC and you can then compare direct playback to the digital transcription.

eloise

We are of course back to the old chestnut of diff'rent strokes and individual perception. One if the things which fascinates me as an audiophile is that some of us 'get' the sound of vinyl, and some do not.

We all play mind games in addition to listening, and if one applies the logic that the old mechanical replay technology can't possibly sound as good as the latest Digi-Box called Davina (why is the nomenclature so damned sexist?); then of course it won't sound any good. Some of us simply don't want to deal with a turntable and its impedimenta. Fair enough.

Like Tony, I enjoy my digital and analogue sources. My CD player is akin to a diesel locomotive. It does a good, practical job and gives me a terrific amount of musical pleasure. My LP12 is akin to a messy, difficult, inefficient steam locomotive, having the ability to stir my blood and arouse the hairs on the back of my neck.

There has of course to be compression/limiting applied to vinyl cuts or the stylus would jump out of the groove. So why is it that a good analogue recording on an LP can manage to sound more dynamic than anything from a digital source I have ever heard?

I guess it's largely just personal perception again. Radio One sounds (sonically) absolutely appalling to me now. Never mind the music - even the speech (the verbal diarrhoea between tunes) sounds horribly compressed. This was never so on popular music radio of the past. I really hate the sound of heavy digital compression, but the analogue compression on vinyl is no problem for me.

Illogical, Captain - with a raised Vulcan eyebrow of course.

John.

J.N. posted:

Like Tony, I enjoy my digital and analogue sources. My CD player is akin to a diesel locomotive. It does a good, practical job and gives me a terrific amount of musical pleasure. My LP12 is akin to a messy, difficult, inefficient steam locomotive, having the ability to stir my blood and arouse the hairs on the back of my neck.

John.

I love that analogy. 

John - you might be interested in these musings of the history of radio compression and compaction - from the early days of pre-emphasis for AM/FM to current mutli platform delivery systems (its not overly technical)

http://www.resolutionmag.com/p...ocompactcompress.pdf

tonym posted:

Me, I like them both! I tend to mostly listen to digital because of the sheer convenience and, yes, many recordings sound better that way. But I've a large collection of vinyl, most of it old stuff, that still sounds great (try Led Zeppelin 1 & 2 on plum vinyl & then compare to any of the digital recordings...) and much isn't available on the digital medium. 

 

As a committed CD guy I (regrettably) have to acknowledge this to be true. The plum-label Zep albums are better than any CD versions I heard, including the Japanese 'LP replica' CDs.  Another example, is Electric Ladyland which is awesome on vinyl.

Mike

MDS posted:

J.N. posted:

Like Tony, I enjoy my digital and analogue sources. My CD player is akin to a diesel locomotive. It does a good, practical job and gives me a terrific amount of musical pleasure. My LP12 is akin to a messy, difficult, inefficient steam locomotive, having the ability to stir my blood and arouse the hairs on the back of my neck.

John.

I love that analogy. 

I love that entire post.  Well said John.

ATB.

Hook

I was listening to Ry Cooder's 'Bop till You Drop' album on a friend's LP12 t'other day and it sounded fabulous. The 1979 recording has been berated as a poor example of early PCM digital multi-track recording/mastering, but it sounds damn good to me.

So digital encoding/conversion executed well can apparently sound great on vinyl too. The problem with new vinyl seems to be one of over-compression and very complex mixing-desks and associated digital sound-shaping devices which seem to mangle the signal.

If you read the excellent 'Perfecting Sound Forever' by Gregg Milner, it is stated therein that even analogue multi-track machines arguably lost some fidelity going from 16 to 24 track. 'More' is not necessarily better.

Why do those early Beatles albums sound so good? Relatively simple 4 or 8 track recording technology. Modern mixing desks are in a way, the antithesis of what we are trying to achieve with a Hi-Fi system, with the absence of sound shaping circuitry.

John.

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

John - you might be interested in these musings of the history of radio compression and compaction - from the early days of pre-emphasis for AM/FM to current mutli platform delivery systems (its not overly technical)

http://www.resolutionmag.com/p...ocompactcompress.pdf

 

Thanks Simon. That sounds very interesting.

John.

J.N. posted:

 

Why do those early Beatles albums sound so good? Relatively simple 4 or 8 track recording technology. Modern mixing desks are in a way, the antithesis of what we are trying to achieve with a Hi-Fi system, with the absence of sound shaping circuitry.

Indeed as do many jazz recording from that era.. it is interesting to note that compression was often achieved at that time by deliberately over driving the tape head into saturation on the four track - for a nice soft compression.. and of course Joe Meek built on this and learnt how to really mangle music so it would sound good and loud on cheap consumer radios - and arguably set the direction of much of what we have today in popular music  recordings..

Another one who prefers a Rega deck (this time an RP8 onto Superline / Supercap) to an NDS + 555PS. Wish I did't for all the reasons noted about convenience, but loving the vinyl to the point of considering either a RP10 or LP12.

J.N. posted:

I was listening to Ry Cooder's 'Bop till You Drop' album on a friend's LP12 t'other day and it sounded fabulous. The 1979 recording has been berated as a poor example of early PCM digital multi-track recording/mastering, but it sounds damn good to me.

So digital encoding/conversion executed well can apparently sound great on vinyl too. The problem with new vinyl seems to be one of over-compression and very complex mixing-desks and associated digital sound-shaping devices which seem to mangle the signal.

If you read the excellent 'Perfecting Sound Forever' by Gregg Milner, it is stated therein that even analogue multi-track machines arguably lost some fidelity going from 16 to 24 track. 'More' is not necessarily better.

Why do those early Beatles albums sound so good? Relatively simple 4 or 8 track recording technology. Modern mixing desks are in a way, the antithesis of what we are trying to achieve with a Hi-Fi system, with the absence of sound shaping circuitry.

John.

 

I've always found BTYD to be an excellent recording - even on CD.

G

It’s hard to contribute anything new to this old debate.

I began moving away from vinyl to CD in the late eighties. At that time CD players seemed to offer a better performance for less money. By that I mean no surface noise and free of any tracking errors, which seemed the preserve of top-end LP players then. In those days I used to set-up my modest Ariston/LVX turntable myself using a test LP (HFS75 rings a bell) and on some LPs I could never quite eliminate mis-tracking and sibilance. My newly acquired and comparatively cheap Philips CD player needed no set up and played those albums flawlessly and with no background noise. I guess I was sold then.

Of course both technologies have moved on in the decades since and while I remain committed to CD, I’m pleased to see a revival in vinyl. I’ve heard vinyl sounding superb so I know and understand the attraction. There’s undoubtedly less phaffing about with CD, a convenience that I continue to value, but on the other hand I must admit to there being something lovely and intimate about cuing up an arm and lowering it onto a piece of the back stuff. Oh, and LP covers will always be massively superior to what you get with CDs.

That said, I have no regrets, and I believe that the limiting factor with both formats (and streaming) is the reproduction quality of the media. I’ve heard some albums on vinyl that are undoubtedly better than any of CD versions but it works the other way round, too. And I suspect for newer albums, which will be recorded originally in digital, it maybe more difficult to capture that vinyl magic.

I think trying to assert that one format is generally superior to the other is too simplistic and facile. As others have said on this thread, both formats are enjoyable and surely that’s a good thing.

Mike

MangoMonkey posted:

Eloise posted:

Question: (this may already have been raised) but is the OPs preference for Rega RP6 over the Naim NDS down to the reproduction provided by the Rega, or the recordings / mastering?

Using the Stageline-N. So the sound is as Naim as it gets..

Still - if I were to give one of the two up, it would be the RP6. Vinyl sounds better, but just isn't practical. Convenience trumps SQ. The DireStraits box set I bought over a year ago is still sealed. As are 4-5 other records.

What continues to amaze me though, is how a $1500 record player can even compete with a $15000 digital replay system.

My old Pro-Ject Xperience used to wipe the floor with my bare NDX. NDX + XPS + hiline got a little closer but it still wasn't a contest with nicely mastered vinyl vs redbook or better. So that would have been a $2,000 analog source vs a $10,000 digital source. I was amazed as well.

RP10 with Apheta 2 (if you don't like the Apheta, the A2 is really worth a try.. it's a huge improvement) + Superline / SC took made the gap between the NDX and the turntable gigantic... NDX into Hugo TT has levelled the field and now I feel I have sources that are relatively comparable... but the RP10 still takes me places digital can't.

It was finding the limitations of my NDS that eventually lead me back to vinyl, via a Linn Klimax. Anything released on vinyl is unlikely to be played again via the streamer. The vinyl is so immersive, you just have to listen.  Busy buying up more s/h records.  Just heard Parsifal for the first time on DG Vinyl (Karajan).  Just wonderful. And the typeface in the libretto is large enough for me to read.

In terms of the data, it seems quite simple to me:

Use one master for high quality material (digital Red Book and higher and vinyl) and another for lossy compressed distribution (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, etc).  Ok, vinyl may need a little extra processing for purely technical reasons such as limiting needle excursion to prevent groves colliding; but as this is a technical requirement only, it could be automated.  It would only need human intervention just to check it, and, on the odd occasions where the automated process made the wrong choices then correct it.

But then we're all at the mercy of marketing execs, some of whom, in my experience, believe that they don't need to know anything about the product, just "the market"; and through that lack of understanding actually make bad decisions.

I guess its mission accomplished for the fruit eating primate. 

The Strat (Fender) posted:

I guess its mission accomplished for the fruit eating primate. 

......until the next one. 

MDS posted:

J.N. posted:

Like Tony, I enjoy my digital and analogue sources. My CD player is akin to a diesel locomotive. It does a good, practical job and gives me a terrific amount of musical pleasure. My LP12 is akin to a messy, difficult, inefficient steam locomotive, having the ability to stir my blood and arouse the hairs on the back of my neck.

John.

I love that analogy. 

Me too,

i have an ubiquitous Class 47 CDS3 in Black Naim livery, and a specific Pacific Class LP12 naimed ’Salisbury Aro' with Radikal type tender built in the Cymbiosis Shed....

naim_nymph posted:

MDS posted:

J.N. posted:

Like Tony, I enjoy my digital and analogue sources. My CD player is akin to a diesel locomotive. It does a good, practical job and gives me a terrific amount of musical pleasure. My LP12 is akin to a messy, difficult, inefficient steam locomotive, having the ability to stir my blood and arouse the hairs on the back of my neck.

John.

I love that analogy. 

 

Me too,

i have an ubiquitous Class 47 CDS3 in Black Naim livery, and a specific Pacific Class LP12 naimed ’Salisbury Aro' with Radikal type tender built in the Cymbiosis Shed....

 

Debs - I would more liken the CDS3 to a Class 91 electric.  

MDS posted:

The Strat (Fender) posted:

I guess its mission accomplished for the fruit eating primate. 

......until the next one.