Are you listening? You're not really listening!

[Cup]

Well, here's the question.

 

How many of you out there are 100% vinyl junkies? A guy I work with collects records (I assume he plays them too) We share a similar taste in music and spend the terrible hours of manual labour trying to out-bullshit each other.

 

He seemed genuinely shocked when I said I didn't have a turn table, or regard vinyl as a superior format for listening to recorded music. His usual rant goes along the line of "If you were a true music lover, you wouldn't have c.d's anywhere near you. C.d's don't give the fullness of sound etc etc etc..."

 

I've listened to some vinyl, but if anything I find the sound quality crap. It's so full of bumps and background hiss, it puts me off.

 

Agree? Disagree? Are you an aging hippie who carries the vinyl junkies snobbery around with you? Or am I really not Listening to music?

 

Thanx.

 

CupMcMali...this monkey's gone to heaven

[fig]

I'm an aging hippie (46 seasons old) and don't miss records at all. Big, bulky, prone to scratching, inconvenient to play in the car, etc. They had their day, it's past their time.

 

Just my two cents.

[Bill C from Nashvegas]

Although I still play my old vinyls occasionally, I prefer the convenience of CD. And I don't miss the snaps and pops.

 

True "audiphiles"--by that I mean the snobs that'll pay hundreds of dollars for some magic elixir to make their stereo sound better--swear vinyl is better. They also swear their $3000-apiece monoblock, 10 watt single-ended tube amps are infinitely superior than a 100 watt transistor amp...

 

I have a friend who paid $7000 recently for a laser turntable (no stylus). Of course he's got 3000+ records. But he also has several Bryston power amps pushing tons of watts into Magnapan speakers, so I don't consider him a true snob.

[_Sweet Willie_]

If you've got a really nice turntable and take good care of your vinyl and have the space to store it, it's a great medium that sounds great. However, I have had a friend w/ a digital turntable burn some of my favorites onto CDs -- more convenient.

 

Also, album covers on larger vinyl are so much cooler than the little pics on CDs! Some of those old Yes albums and others had such over-the-top artwork that it's a shame to see it shrunk down to fit those little plastic CD cases!

 

My wife gave me a frame for my birthday designed to hold album covers. I hung up one of my cousin's albums and it looks great. I don't need to get at the record because (1) I've already burned it onto CD and (2) I don't have a turntable any more!

 

Of course, there's also a nostalgia factor -- Christmas at my folks' place wouldn't be the same without my dad cracking out his vinyl Christmas music!

 

Peace.

[Beermouse]

Record? Vinyl? What're those?

 

bitterling

The younger generation at work!

[GeorgeR]

Vinyl or CDs, I have both, side by side and they get along very well!

 

Yes, Vinyl sucks for S/N ratio and durability. Needles wear out too.

 

But I don't believe that CDs have any less noticable resolution than Vinyl does.

 

Songs recorded on CDs are usually done so with at least 16 bit data lengths (some more), usually more than enough for most listeners.

 

What I don't have is tape!

 

[_Sweet Willie_]

8-track anyone?

[Cup]

Fig, you mentioned size and the inability to play them in a car (p.s Someone please tell me there was/are record players for auto mobiles, homo-sapiens impress me so much already, if we've went to the effort of having car mountable turn tables, I'd completely worship wo/man's brilliance) But what about the actual sound quality?

 

Sweet Willie, l.p covers size vinyl really stand alone, a work of art should not, and usually can not be reduced to a c.d sized replica.

 

George, tape saved me so much money, I simply can't attack it.

 

CupMcMali...this monkey's gone to heaven

[JBFLA]

I think when CDs first came out, there may have been an audible difference - But it was more likely the fault of speakers and power sources. They weren't able to handle a digital signal, and the sound may have seemed 'clipped' or 'sterile'.

 

I still have (and use) my turntable - mostly for old vinyl that has been out of print.

JBFLA

[Cup]

So basically vinyl is just an outlet for snobbery.

 

I got ya

[Teahead]

Cup this is up there with the valve versus solid state argument. Those who are practically minded tend to go for the reliability and consistency offered by digital and s/s equipment.

Where as those who have tendancies to seek tonal Nirvana usually opt for the time proven methods such as valves and vinyl.

As for my personal tastes, lets just say that valves and vinyl were the popular choice when their respective markets exploded into the public ear.

This substantiation is akin to the guitar designs which still dominate our airwaves some fifty years since their conceptions.

 

The designs may have been updated, but if you're looking for the inspiration that comes with greatness, original format is the only true way to go.

[Cup]

So Teahead, the only way to experience anything worthy of effort, is to follow age old methods?! Surely the re-write is better than the original draft, the Jazz to the P, the Rickenbacker to the Jazz, the .... umm.

 

If age = authenticity, surely progress would only apply to cosmetics. Are we to assume the first of the line, is the best of the line?

 

For someone to say I'm not listening to music simply because of the format is unbelievable.

 

Cup. Shut. Up

[Flemtone]

Old fart here...

I listen to both - for the following reasons:

1-CDs are much more convenient, but vinyl has the great artwork, inserts, lyrics that are actually readable (especially from a music stand while jamming)

 

2-Digital sounds better on some things - Analog sounds better on others.

 

3-Some of my old vinyl does indeed have scratches, hisses, pops, skips, etc., but I can remember the time and place that those damages occurred, so it keeps me strolling down memory lane

 

4-Donald Fagin's "Nightfly" sounds better on CD. "Sgt. Pepper" sounds better on vinyl. Tower of Power sounds better on CD. CSNY's "4-Way Street" sounds better on vinyl. Tory Cassis sounds better on CD. "Aoxomoxoa" sounds better on vinyl.

 

In talking to a producer/engineer back in the early '70s, he told me that, in his studio, along with his monitor system, he had a selection of car radio speakers and transistor radios dating back to the early '60s. He played a number of disks for me dating from about '61 to '74, and I realized that the earlier tracks sounded MUCH better when played over the Blaupunkt or other car-speaker systems/transisitor radios instead of the studio monitors. The tracks were produced to sound better in that format, because that's where most people listened to them. In some sense, that's the same thing that occurs between CDs and vinyl.

 

I have some friends who swear by vinyl, some others who don't own anything but CD. I prefer the warmth of a nice virgin vinyl album, but the immediacy and convenience of a CD.

 

See? Now I'm more confused than ever!

 

Damn.

-Tim from Jersey

[RobT]

Another middle aged(42) guy chimes in:

 

Vinyl has a nostalgic quality to it. For folks in my age group we all can remember the first albums we bought. The fond memories that go with each purchase. You probably know every used record store in your city.

 

Advent of the CD supposedly brought better sound quality. Sounds seemed to stand out more. The format allowed for more songs. It remains to be seen if that means that those additional songs are better.

 

Some things sound better on the old vinyl. Dark Side Of The Moon comes to mind. Some things sound better on the new format. Recording techniques have changed along with the consumer format. They are what they are. As a former college DJ and former partner in a DJ company. There is nothing like that 12" vinyl. As a musician give me the tools that allow me to make the music that I want to make.

 

One thing I do miss is the album art. That just does not translate well on the CD format. Ah well..

[jeremy c]

So, Cup, you just start your post with an insult? Them's fightin' words

 

54 year old ageless hippie here. And I don't want to hear from any "46 year old aging hippies"---what kind of ex-hippie is that? You were 10 years old during the summer of love.

 

I have a turntable, Bang & Olafson as a matter of fact. I have hundreds of records. Most of them are in impeccable condition.

 

Many of them have never been released in cd form.

Of course I listen to them. And they sound great. I was just listening to Bright Size Life the other day. It was an exceptional experience.

 

When I listen to music, I am listening to music. I am not listening to scratches or background noise or anything like that. I listen to cassettes and of course I have been listening to the radio all my life. (and the first part of my life it was am radio only (most of you are too young to remember the days before fm.)) I listen to cds in the car all the time. Of course the background noise in the car means there is no hope of hearing any hi-fidelity clean sound.

 

My B&O turntable is less liable to skip than my cd player. It has great fidelity. Come on over and we can listen together. Please don't make any judgments without actually listening on better than average equipment to clean vinyl.

 

I'm not a hi-fi snob, I've met some of them and they are truly weird. They aren't listening to music at all, they are listening to sound. And they have really strange words to describe what they are listening to.

 

But on the other hand, I think that the switch from analog to digital has been one of the great mistakes of the 20th century. I notice that everyone that records digitally is using tube pre-amps to warm it back up again.

 

And when your cds start degrading in ten years or so, I'll still have my albums around. I could make a list of albums that I own (to say nothing of 45s) that probably will never see a cd re-release version, but that would just be a waste of breath.

 

Would anyone like to buy 400 copies of a 45 I made in 1978?

[Mr. Phil]

I WILL invent a compact Record Player or aka CRP (damn, it almost spells CRAP. it would've been funnier that way.

If someone comes up with an acronym for that, post it!!

[davebrownbass]

Compact Record ALBUM Player?

 

I remember the first time I heard a CD...it was Sting...and the total crystalline nature of the sound, even through a boom box really impressed me. The first CD I bought was Miles Davis "Sketches of Spain" and again, I was really impressed by the clarity of the sound.

 

It seems like a version of the same old argument: "Weather Report is good, but they are spoiled by the use of a non-traditional instrument (Zawinul's Prophet), or, "True Jazz has to be recorded in a live situation (ala Bill Evans)" or "True Jazz has to be recorded direct to disc."

 

In my mind, audio perfection kinda misses the point, as do the arguments listed above. Music, if it is about anything at all, should be about the business of moving people to a higher plane (unless it's specifically designed to help you get laid.) For that purpose, the "audio" experience is secondary to the primary purpose.

 

However, we, the musicians, also listen to music to gain more musical insight. That gives our listening an added dimension that the non-musician doesn't have to worry about. CD's sure come in helpful there.

 

So...analog, digital, vinyl, tape, all of these things are mere ways of attempting to keep a performance alive. The recording studio itself did a lot to destroy "feeling" in music, by working to make the performance inhumanly perfect.

 

Humans need music in their lives to perform ritual, to breed, to connect themselves to God and Country and each other. The recorded performance allows music to be spread over a much wider audience...that markeplace eventually decides what it needs in a given time.

 

The "listening experience" only matters to most people insomuch as it adds or detracts from the musical experience.

 

DBB: expert fence-rider.

[Brendan Orr]

I'm a youngin' (and the young age of 19). I personally prefer LPs to CD because I too feel that records are more works of art than cd's. I prefer the "lo-fi" sound of records as compared their digital counterpart. For instance, I've listened to Weather Report's 8:30 on both the cd and record. The verdic: I like the record more In fact, I think I am one of the rare college students that has brought a turntable to school (direct drive, so I can keep on keeping on).

[Cup]

Jeremy, I may have asked my question with a slight tongue in cheek, abrasive twist to it, but I immediately followed with a question doubting my own preferred format!

 

Advocates of vinyl (like the friend from work) seem to care little about hurting the feelings of the "less authentic" music lovers (i.e the c.d generation). I have no intention of insulting anyone.

 

Flemtone, I think you may have hit the nail on the head (tho' I don't own a turntable or any records to back this up) Whatever format was/is most popular at the time of recording seems to dictate quality of sound. Basically, Modern recordings favour C.D and pre C.D format recordings favour vinyl.

 

Do we have any 103 year old,grammaphone devotees in our midst?

 

Cup

[Teahead]

"Advocates of vinyl (like the friend from work) seem to care little about hurting the feelings of the "less authentic" music lovers (i.e the c.d generation). I have no intention of insulting anyone."

 

Isn't this the case with all nostalgia based equipment snobbery?

 

So the question remains. What allows the devotees of ageing formats to take this moral highground?

Well the 'respect your elders' ethos, which is preached to us all from a very early age, allows for similarly dismissive treatment of youthful invention.

This influences every aspect of opinionated exchange. In many social situations you are expected to bow to the greater knowledge of the most senior man. Your Father, your teachers and your boss, you're conditioned to acquiesce with their ideals.

Of course whether or not you choose to accept the judgements cast upon you by those figures, is a choice we make a every single day.

Your original post demonstrates this perfectly, you can tell alot about a person by how many times they actually stop to consider what the experienced are really saying. When out of puberty of course. There it's a compulsion.

 

I believe this adolescent streak will serve you well Cup, nurture it. Use it to achieve, for yourself, the longevity which rationalises this whole debate, but when you get there...

Don't expect it to be the same as when you were young.

[StoneKnife]

Originally posted by CupMcMali:

(p.s Someone please tell me there was/are record players for auto mobiles, homo-sapiens impress me so much already, if we've went to the effort of having car mountable turn tables, I'd completely worship wo/man's brilliance)

Yes there was a car turntable- here it is: http://home.attbi.com/~docblase/columbia-open.jpg

 

Click here for story.

[alexclaber]

Vinyl has much better midrange resolution and dynamics than CDs. However CDs have more even frequency response and increased top and bottom extension and a better s/n ratio. It's easier to make a good CD player at a low price than a good record player because electronics are cheaper than electro-mechanics. I would love to have a really good turntable and a whole bunch of vinyl but as CDs are more readily available nowadays, play in a discman or in the car as well as at home, and are less easy to damage it's looks like I'm stuck with CDs for practical and financial reasons.

 

If I listened to more classical music I suspect I'd be more of a vinyl listener - the dynamics and complexity particularly with respect to the graininess of each instrument in the orchestra come across so much better.

 

It's not really a vinyl vs CD debate - it's an analogue vs early digital debate. If we were all using 24bit 96kHz CDs or SACD the extra resolution and dynamics of analogue would be less obvious.

 

Alex

[jeremy c]

Cup, no harm, no foul. (I hope this US basketball slang makes sense to you).

 

I knew you were posting tongue in cheek and my response followed suit, that's why I put in the Graemlins.

 

One issue that I would like to reiterate is about the longevity of media. Over the years, I have listened to 78s, 45s, 33s, reel-to-reel, 8-tracks, cassettes, dats, cds, and cdrs.

 

On all the old tapes that I have, including some master tapes from 25 years ago, the oxide is starting to fall off the tapes. It doesn't really matter, because finding a tape player with the right format to actually play these tapes is getting almost impossible. And I have had to buy new cd players because the old ones won't play cdrs.

 

I fear that the cds will eventually degrade and turn into coasters. Does anyone know what the shelf life of these things is supposed to be?

 

Meanwhile, the records will remain playable. And even though I hate djs and "turntablists", I thank them for keeping turntables on the market.

 

I grew up listening to my dad's collection of classical music on 78s. Yeah, you had to change records every 10 minutes, but the sound was awesome. Many of these records were recorded in what we would call "direct to disc" nowadays. Two microphones in front of the orchestra, connected to a cutting machine. One take by the orchestra, or pianist or string quartet.

 

Thick lacquer records with deep grooves. The 33 rpm LP was seen as an improvement because it was long playing, but nobody ever said the sound was better.

 

In the digital domain, one of the problems is constantly changing formats. I played on a cd which is due out in two weeks (although they have been saying that for a year), which began as a 16 track, then became ADATs, then something else, and finally ended up in Protools format, existing only on a hard drive.

 

Recovering "lost masters" is going to be tough for future historians because the hardware to listen to the media will be unavailable.

 

My dad just went through a long process getting some historical dictaphone interviews transcribed. There was only ONE person in the country that had the proper machine to play back the recordings. Even the Dictaphone company no longer had the right machine.

 

Some historical archives have already changed format a few times, each time at enormous expense. Read the writings of Nicholson Baker concerning library catalogues to hear an eloquent argument against changing data in an existing format to a new one.

 

One of the days I will be a "lucky one" chosen for a tax audit. If the IRS wants my tax records from 15 years ago, they will find them on 5 1/4" floppies in Commodore 64 format, saved in a database format designed by a long-defunct company. Good luck at reading them.

 

I'm not an anti-technology person, how could I be?, my house is filled with amplifiers, electric basses, and computers and I have a nice job teaching computers to children (where the school has to pay a fortune to replace all the computers every three years as they go obsolete).

 

But it is depressing being a studio musician these days. I never see any of the other musicians anymore. I just play into a computer and tracks are added and subtracted. Solos are moved around, parts of songs are cut and pasted, individual notes are moved from here to there. Tracks are subjected to pitch correction and quantized. I never get to sit with a band and play a song anymore. Everything is direct to digital and then warmed up with tube pre-amps. And then the artist samples the scratches from and old record and puts some of that on their finished cd.

 

What about the good old days, , when I walked to school two miles in the snow, uphill both ways, after getting up at dawn and chopping wood for a fire, and we liked it.

 

We drew pictures on the wall of our caves and our mothers said, "that'll never come off in a million years". Nowadays, our kids draw pictures in an art program on the computer, print it out in washable inks from a cheap inkjet printer and that's the end of it.

[Cup]

Originally posted by StoneKnife:

Yes there was a car turntable- here it is: http://home.attbi.com/~docblase/columbia-open.jpg

 

Click here for story. [/QB]

 

StoneKnife you're a dying mans granted wish!

Thanks for the pic.

 

CupMcMali...this monkey's gone to heaven

[MartinJ]

Originally posted by CupMcMali:

Fig, you mentioned size and the inability to play them in a car (p.s Someone please tell me there was/are record players for auto mobiles, homo-sapiens impress me so much already, if we've went to the effort of having car mountable turn tables, I'd completely worship wo/man's brilliance) But what about the actual sound quality?

 

CupMcMali...this monkey's gone to heaven

Actually, I recall reading (in Road and Track or something like that) that there WAS a car - in the 1940s or 1950s - that had a turntable. It was mounted where the glove compartment normall is. I think that the article stated that this was only an option for a year or two, since it was impossible to keep records from skipping - no matter how they suspended it.

[Cup]

Jeremy I agree that it's a shame to lose so much of the old recordings, but everything has a shelf life. Surely as soon as a new format becomes the widely accepted norm ,record companies should convert everything they own to that format.

 

CupMcMali...this monkey's gone to heaven

[doc taz]

I have a set of $20 Radio Shack phones that sound like old Jensens. Individual volume controls for left and right earpieces, passive. Makes my CDs and MP3s sound a little like old vinyl, without the pops and scratches.

 

Would that help?

[The Bear Jew]

So wait... If I'm correct, this guy Cup works with is saying that you can't appreciate music unless it's being played on vinyl? What a douchebag! Why even bother talking to this fool? I work with a guy like this -- he collects records and sells them. He's an idiot.

 

Saying you aren't really listening to music if you're listening to CDs instead of vinyl is like saying you're not really playing bass unless you're bowing an URB. Silly, silly people.

[jeremy c]

If you are listening to sound quality, you are not really listening to the music.

 

If the media type distracts you, try listening harder to the music.

 

Be like Mozart, go to a concert, then go home and write down everything you heard.

[rumpelstiltskin.]

i think one of the original problems with CD was that no one knew how to use it. for example, with analog tape recording, high frequency response degrades with each playback, so engineers would boost the treble while tracking, because they knew it would degrade over time and it sounds better to add it before degradation than after.

 

with CDs no one really knew how to use the new medium. it's a completely different process to press a CD than it is to cut a record. in the beginning of CD, most people had no idea how to make things sound right on CD, only for tape and vinyl.

 

i have come to love SACD. i have an SACD player and some pretty nice speakers. there is far more definition and cleanliness to the sound. it's really quite wonderful having the increased sense of space and realism while listening to SACD. i'm hearing more of the detail in the recording.

 

Jeremy has it right -- if you're not listening to the music, you're listening to the wrong thing. there are a lot of different tracks that sound more satisfying on vinyl than on CD, but it does it for to hear it on CD, too, because it's really the music that matters.

 

i used to work for a hi-fi shop, and i found that good components do make a difference. with my system, i hear more details of the recording. and that's what i like. even on the cheapest discman with earbud headphones i can still hear the melodies and hooks. however, sometimes the strange frequency response really kills my enjoyment, as does not hearing what i'm used to hearing. really, though, my speakers are good because i like them. many people like what they have, and that's great. it wouldn't satisfy me, and maybe it wouldn't satisfy them if they heard better, but it's what they like. and they're hearing the music.

 

the music is what's important.

 

robb.