Records!!!!! Yes, the vinyl ones...

[Anderton]

I still have about 300 LPs, and a turntable. I don't listen to them often.

 

I like the tonal sound of LPs. Judging from the sax players I've seen in concert (Including my favorite, Stan Getz) the saxophone tone on vinyl is closer to the live sound. CDs distort the tone to make his (and others) tone brighter and with more edge. Getz sounds more like Zoot Sims on CD.

 

That's on the person who did the master for CD. Mastering for vinyl involved certain compromises in the high and low frequencies, which I believe is part of what gives vinyl its sound. If you just transfer a master tape over to CD, it's not going to sound the same. You have to make a conscious effort to compensate for issues the CD doesn't have.

[KenElevenShadows]

 

Got Physical Graffiti today...

 

dB

 

That's one of the first LPs I ever purchased. Yes, I still have it.

[Notes_Norton]

I still have about 300 LPs, and a turntable. I don't listen to them often.

 

I like the tonal sound of LPs. Judging from the sax players I've seen in concert (Including my favorite, Stan Getz) the saxophone tone on vinyl is closer to the live sound. CDs distort the tone to make his (and others) tone brighter and with more edge. Getz sounds more like Zoot Sims on CD.

 

That's on the person who did the master for CD. Mastering for vinyl involved certain compromises in the high and low frequencies, which I believe is part of what gives vinyl its sound. If you just transfer a master tape over to CD, it's not going to sound the same. You have to make a conscious effort to compensate for issues the CD doesn't have.

Thanks. That's more information for me.

 

I have dozens of Stan Getz CDs and LPs, and I've heard Getz live and his tone on CDs are more edgy than his tone live.

 

Perhaps it's a compatibility issue for the media???? (wild uneducated guess).

 

Notes

[Dave Bryce]

I have over 100 LPs and two turntables now.

 

I am SO far down the rabbit hole...

 

...and....lovng it.

 

dB

[Anderton]

I have a ton of vinyl in storage in Florida. I was just about ready to go get it when the Covid explosion took off there.

 

I'm really not sure what I'm going to do with them when I get them...part of me is tempted to just keep the ones that I don't have on CD (which is quite a few) and sell the rest of the collection in bulk.

[Notes_Norton]

I have an urge to digitize all my LPs, especially the ones that cannot be purchased on CD. The problem is allotting the time to do that.

 

I'd rather write new styles for Band-in-a-Box or learn a new song for The Sophisticats and make the backing track from scratch. There just isn't enough time in the day to do all the things I want to do (and today I spent the morning mowing the weeds on the road right-of-way, around the house, and under the clothesline. I don't call it a lawn because it is mostly native ground cover. I got rid of "lawn" years ago, but there are parts of the meadow that still need maintenance.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

[Greg Mein]

I found some fantastic record bags on amazon, they zip closed/sealed, have handles and hold about 36 records apiece. Having them all in crates was just too heavy. They"ll be moving along to the new house but it may be quite a while yet before I get a turntable and dig them out.

[Dave Bryce]

I"m over 100 at this point. Still loving it to bits.

 

dB

[Dave Bryce]

I admit it - I'm having too much fun with the CLUBS section of the new site.

 

Given my current infatuation with vinyl records, I thought it would be fun to start a new club for musicians who are still into it as well.  

 

If that's you, please come join the Vinyl Record Fans club. 

 

 

dB

[Anderton]

Can't wait to check out the Clubs thing...but it happens to coincide with perhaps the busiest time of my life ever in terms of clients with major needs 

[NewImprov]

On 8/17/2021 at 8:20 AM, Anderton said:

 

That's on the person who did the master for CD. Mastering for vinyl involved certain compromises in the high and low frequencies, which I believe is part of what gives vinyl its sound. If you just transfer a master tape over to CD, it's not going to sound the same. You have to make a conscious effort to compensate for issues the CD doesn't have.

My band released an LP in 2012, I mixed it, and we had it professionally mastered (Ryan Foster at Freq Mastering in Portland, he's great!) We did separate masters for vinyl and digital. When the actual vinyl master was cut, the cutting engineer messaged me and said he had 2 options for doing the cut, one of which offered more high and low-end, at the expense of overall loudness, the 2nd being louder. We chose the option for extended frequency response. When we got the test pressings a few days later, we were blown away by how much better the vinyl pressing sounded than the digital, it had a richer sound, and the soundstage, especially the front-to-back imaging, was clearer. Obviously, there was a level of confirmation bias, we really wanted it to sound good, especially given what we were paying for the pressing. But, a few days later, I organized a blind listening test where I volume matched the vinyl and the 24bit digital masters, and uniformly, everyone who listened chose the vinyl.

 

We are in the process of doing another vinyl release. This time it's an EP, and we were originally going to put on a 10" 33. It turned out that the price was nearly the same to press it to 12", and the turnaround time for a 12" pressing was months shorter than for a 10". As it was, it still took 4 months to get the vinyl. Anyway, this current  is only about 12-13 minutes per side, and I'm kind of blown away by the bass response on it, from having a relatively short run time.

[RABid]

I remember the sound of early cd’s before they learned to mix for the new medium. Bright, brittle, unpleasant. A couple years later they were re-releasing cd’s with the highs cut back. I repurchased a couple of my favorites because the new mix sounded so much better.

[Anderton]

1 hour ago, RABid said:

I remember the sound of early cd’s before they learned to mix for the new medium. Bright, brittle, unpleasant. A couple years later they were re-releasing cd’s with the highs cut back. I repurchased a couple of my favorites because the new mix sounded so much better.

 

And don't forget about the D/A converters. They make a HUGE difference in the sound quality. A lot of the early CD players used 12-bit converters, which meant you were really only getting about 10 "real" bits of audio. 16-bit converters helped but you were still getting only about 12-14 bits of real audio. I don't think CDs sounded good until oversampled 24-bit converters came along, and people started realizing they needed to mix CDs to avoid intersample distortion when the output was reconstructed on playback. And of course, not all converters are created equal...I finally broke down and got Source from Dangerous Music to feed my monitors.

 

Ironically, I think that mastering for the limitations of vinyl often resulted in a better sound quality because you couldn't do the same kind of audio abuse you could do with digital.

[Notes_Norton]

I, too, hated CDs when they first came out. The tone was off, too tinny.

 

As time went on, technology improved, and skills improved they got better. They still change the tone of things a bit, but it's acceptable.

 

Any time you pass something through a circuit, whether it's an D/A converter, tube, amp, mic, speaker, there will be distortion of the original sound.

 

I still prefer a good vinyl record through a tube preamp/amp as that distortion is more agreeable to my ears.

 

On the other hand, after listening to CDs for decades, what really bugs me about vinyl, is the surface noise. When records were the way we listened to music, I ignored the pops and clicks that were added. I guess I forgot how to tune them out, because right now, they really bug me. And no matter how careful I am with my vinyl, the pops and clicks appear.

 

In my lifetime so far, the worst listening experience was cassette tapes, followed by low bit rate mp3s and followed by 45 RPM records. My dad's 78s were even worse.

 

I have a lot of vinyl and for convenience I've actually ripped some of the ones I play most often to WAV and then CD.

 

Notes ♫

[Anderton]

Dragging a rock through yards and yards of plastic, and going through +/- 20 dB of pre-emphasis and de-emphasis at both the high and low frequencies, does have its drawbacks 

[Notes_Norton]

Like I said, it's a matter of which distortion do you prefer.

 

And it seems most people don't care. When the SACD came out, I found it to be much better sounding than the regular CD, but not enough people wanted to pay for the better sounding product.

 

Perhaps we who care are the minority, after all, 8-track tapes sounded lousy and sometimes changed tracks in the middle of a song, cassettes were slightly better only because they didn't switch in the middle of a song, mp3s aren't exactly high fidelity either, and the audio on YouTube isn't any better.

 

Most people just want to hear the song and sing along or dance to it.

 

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

[Dave Bryce]

I have a whole bunch of SACDs, both stereo and surround.  I love 'em to bits.

 

The vinyl records aren't just the fidelity.  It's also the experience of selecting and playing them.  I find I pretty much always listen to the entire side in order without ever lifting the needle or skipping a track.  

 

Further, I'm one of thse folks that believe the ~20 minute length of an LP is an ideal slice of time to accompany many fun activities.

 

dB

[Anderton]

40 minutes ago, Dave Bryce said:

I have a whole bunch of SACDs, both stereo and surround.  I love 'em to bits.

 

The vinyl records aren't just the fidelity.  It's also the experience of selecting and playing them.  I find I pretty much always listen to the entire side in order without ever lifting the needle or skipping a track.  

 

Further, I'm one of thse folks that believe the ~20 minute length of an LP is an ideal slice of time to accompany many fun activities.

 

Totally with you on all three points. 

 

I can't help but wonder if the background hiss is why people perceive vinyl as being "warm." I've mentioned this before, but Waves was modeling a channel strip IIRC and the "golden ears" types doing the A-Bing kept insisting the model just wasn't as good as the analog hardware, that the digital version was somehow "cold."

 

Waves went back and re-checked all the specs - identical. They really had modeled everything...except for preamp hiss and hum. Once they added that in, people perceived the model as sounding identical to the analog hardware, and could no longer differentiate them. Thankfully they made it switchable for people like me

 

[KuruPrionz]

On 8/24/2021 at 8:12 AM, Anderton said:

I have a ton of vinyl in storage in Florida. I was just about ready to go get it when the Covid explosion took off there.

 

I'm really not sure what I'm going to do with them when I get them...part of me is tempted to just keep the ones that I don't have on CD (which is quite a few) and sell the rest of the collection in bulk.

I've owned (and sold) 3 different record accumulations. The last time I did it, I broke everything down to genres and sold the genre as a lot. That worked better for me than selling the entire lot as one item. Bear in mind the Post Office considers records to be "media" and you can ship a buttload of them for very little money. 

ONLY IN WINTER!!!! Do not ship records during warm weather. Don't ask me how I found this out!!!...

 

The only records I made any money on were "The Beatles and Frank Ifield In Concert", issued on VeeJay just before their contract to sell Beatles records expired. A collector in Austria paid $60 and shipping (I paid 80 cents at a thrift store). The record was not in great condition but somehow, the cover was. I made that known in the listing, the buyer probably had a clean copy of the LP in a beater cover.  AND 13 Elvis on RCA Movie Soundtracks in fantastic condition and MONO, those did well locally pre-craigslist. I think I paid $3 each and sold them for $30-40 each, nice and worth the trouble. 

 

If I did it again (doubtful), I'd probably save myself the trouble of listing and shipping and just donate everything to Goodwill or Starvation Army. 

I have a pile of CDs but I don't listen to much of anything, once in a while a friend sends a link to something on YouTube and I give it a chance. 

If I really like it I may listen to it 2 or 3 times, maybe. 

 

Now that I'm not playing out all the time, I can listen to my own tracks as I go but that uses up almost all of my listening time. Just not into it, who knows why?

[Notes_Norton]

23 hours ago, Dave Bryce said:

<...snip...>

I find I pretty much always listen to the entire side in order without ever lifting the needle or skipping a track.  
<...>

I listen to my LPs and CDs that way. I never skip tracks and prefer to listen to the tracks in the order they have been chosen to appear. Half of my recordings are symphonies, and it's blasphemy to listen to it any other way. It's why I hate classical music radio, I actually heard this once: "Here's the 3rd movement from Beethoven's 2nd symphony, before he got too wild." Aaaaaarrrrrrrgggggghhhhh, I couldn't turn it off soon enough. I have all Beethoven's symphonies complete, including the 'wild' ones (I actually prefer #4 and #7 which I have on the same CD by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra).

 

In my car, since there are no radio stations around here that I care to listen to, I bring a digital Walkman, with 10,000 tunes on it, mostly from the non-classical part of my inventory, and play it in the shuffle mode. There are a couple of short classical pieces, but most are pop from the 1940s to almost the present (I haven't added in a while), Jazz, Blues, roots R&B and a little country, a bit of klezmer, and a lot of 'world music' (Brazil, Cabo Verde, Tuvan, China, India, Italy, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, Argentina, Madagascar, Spain, Egypt, Romania, and on and on and on.)

 

I have a lot of my father's records, from Artie Shaw, to Spike Jones, to Sinatra, and so on.  I have is violin too, but I can't play it yet - I do OK on his uke.

 

I like listening to music from all over. It mixes up in my mind and seasons the music I play on stage in hopefully interesting ways for the audience. I've been playing sax and other instruments professionally for most of my life so far, so I guess it's working.

 

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

[RABid]

A few years ago while having lunch with some close cousins one of them mentioned her parents 78 collection and was not sure what to do with them. I suggested she frame some of the 78's with a little plaque stating "From the musical library of..." and give them as Christmas presents to her family members. She did, and it was a great present to receive.

 

I wish I had some of my collection that was stollen when my parents house was broken into. I had some 1970's albums in clear holders with the artwork in the vinyl. One that I remember was Steve Miller Book of Dreams. It would be great on the wall of my music room.

[Anderton]

1 hour ago, RABid said:

A few years ago while having lunch with some close cousins one of them mentioned her parents 78 collection and was not sure what to do with them. I suggested she frame some of the 78's with a little plaque stating "From the musical library of..." and give them as Christmas presents to her family members. She did, and it was a great present to receive.

 

You seem to keep coming up with really good ideas for gifts for your family. Some people have a talent for that.