Quote:
Originally Posted by usuallee
As a vinyl enthusiast I must respectfully object to this and the other dismissive comments. True, it's a fiddly format and there are about a thousand ways to get vinyl playback wrong. But that's part of the charm. To get good results you have to invest in a half decent turntable, cartridge, and preamp, and put in some work to get it right. But if you do that, the results can be truly magical. Forget about clicks and pops - they don't exist with a clean, good condition record in a proper setup. Also, the records themselves and their sleeves are fascinating historical artifacts and are beautiful to display.
These are some of the many valid reasons why vinyl has made a comeback. It's just plain wrong to dismissively chalk it up entirely to hipster-ism. Though admittedly, that's a part of it, and I'm as baffled as anyone at the cassette resurgence.
Don't get me wrong, I love digital music. Digital can sound great, too. I love playlists and on-the-fly song queuing. I have a full Roon setup, and a Qobuz subscription. But digital recordings are often brickwalled (no dynamic range i.e. "loudness war") which is impossible with vinyl, and the sound can be quite sterile and even harsh at times in certain recordings.
Anyway I just had to stick up for vinyl and offer a counterpoint to some of the comments. I guess my point is, as is the case with pbooks and ebooks, digital and vinyl both have different charms, as well as less charming aspects. There's room for both.
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I have no love for vinyl. In fact my old record collection was donated to an art student who used the vinyl for an art collage. Somewhere they are glued to a wall. That's where they belong. The album covers, thrown in the recycling bin.
I'm a Quboz subscriber, and have a decent collection of SACD, hi-rez recordings purchased from HD Tracks, and a bunch of CDs. There are some phenomenal recordings out there that vinyl will never touch, some recorded in DSD. (Joni Mitchell Both Sides Now) Brickwalling and loudness wars are not the same thing, but are commonly misconstrued on forums. Brick walling is the process of limiting the upper frequency range to 1/2 the sample rate. So for a CD about 22 kHz for a 44.1 kHz sample rate. It's a normal and necessary part of putting out a CD or any digital PCM file as required by the Nyquist theorem. (Nyquist theorem and anti-aliasing) For higher rez that would be 48 kHz for 96 kHz sample rates, etc. They don't have to be compressed (compressing dynamic range). That's a different beast altogether. Loudness or dynamic range compression is the process of limiting the volume difference in dB of the lowest sounds to the highest sounds. A cd has a theoretical dynamic range of 96db (16 bit) which can be 120 db with noise shaped dither, vinyl does good to get to 70. I have many great sounding CDs without compression (loudness wars) and they will all be brick walled at 22 kHz. A well mastered CD can be hard to tell from SACD or high rez files, some say impossible. Also, in today's modern era of recording almost anything new even in vinyl has spent some time in the digital realm prior to being run through a dac for making the record. When the Beatles first came out with their 2009 remaster of all their work, the original vinyl that was put out was produced form a 44/16 master, an error they have since corrected.