Feel as though I should chime in here. Vinyl provides an immersion and involovement that best emulates the live performance experience.
Playback devices and system matter as does the condition of the grooves.
But its just sto great to turn a moderately fun dance party into a swingin good time just by playing turntable.
I use expensive SOTA with very precise japanese cartridges.
A seriously guilty plesure is finding a great Herb Alpert TJB classic and making margaritas.
But now I have a two bottle limit to when I must go back to laptop or CDs.

I think you're right, John. Piano used to be the regular test of fidelity. Perhaps also because it is commonly available in a controlled environment. Striking the string gives quite rich harmonics featuring rapid rise and slow decay. These complex waveforms are probably a great test of any recording system where fidelity requires phase coherence as well as correct harmonic content, plus we know how it should sound. Similarly your bowed string. Much more difficult to know whether a digitally generated sound (eg. keyboard) is being well reproduced. The doof of computer generated rhythm is another easy one for MP3 compression.

Put a microphone close to any string instrument and you'll find the sound changes as you move the mic. These instruments have many lobes to their radiation pattern, that's what makes them so hard to record.

I had an Edison phonograph with a bunch of Edison Recreations. (they were on a disk like a Vinyl lp, but I think they were more of a ceramic material.)

The promotions on the sleeves of the recreations stated that it was hard to distinguish the recording from the live performance because the quality was so good. Now talk about lo-fi complete with hiss and scratch. But it was pretty amazing in its day.

Dave T2

I cut my teeth on 33's and even some of my sisters 45's so I too like the sound of albums. Not so much that they are better (in certain circumstances I think they are better) but more along the lines that there is something ingrained. Probably just that I had a lot of good times while listening to albums.

Even when the records started getting bad, there is something about the sound of worn vinyl and "bacon frying" that is a bit nostalgic. I even have fond memories of 8-tracks; not necessarily all good memories though. ;-)

This thread reminds of the saying that came about when TV was first being sold to the masses. They asked a kid if he liked radio or TV better and his answer was the radio as it had better "pictures". That is kind of a metaphor for how I feel about albums now. They were a pain to keep, maintain, play and eventually replace but it was a delightful torture.

IMO, on a nice, finely tuned turntable (near perfect speed and weighted stylus) with a new album and good amp, albums do sound good but they just don't last very long. IMS, the playing limit of an album, for a true "audiophile", was only about 10 times. Good thing I didn't consider myself to be an "audiophile".

Now, all things considered though - give me HDTV and digital 5.1 surround. I'll live with the imperfections. :-D

hehehe i still have my copious crates and my technics 1210's collecting dust.. lol

"the playing limit of an album, for a true "audiophile", was only about 10 times."

A large portion of my vinyl has only been played once or twice and transferred to cassette during that 1st or 2nd play. Now i'm working my way slowly through that stack again, painstakingly cleaning and transferring to digital. It is amazing how quickly vinyl gets bad after a few plays, especially when one isn't exquisitely careful about dust.

One musician i worked with a few years back had a buddy who cut a small hobby album at a local studio. Everything was tape, from original master to distribution. It sounded oustandingly good! However, he wasn't satisfied that he had made a real "record" album because there was no needle drop sound. He went to the effort of having a minimum pressing run done, maybe 25 disks or so, at enormous expense. Then he had the studio dub one of the records to tape, complete with needle drop and pickup included. That tape was the one he preferred to listen to instead of the cleaner copies. He even wanted to sell the tapes that way, but alas, most of his customers preferred the version without the needle sounds.

Of course, we also had 8 track tapes for the car. What a joy those were.

I had some, probably bootlegged, that the track would switch in the middle of the song. To this day, when I hear those songs, even from CD, I hear the track switch. I guess that is why we lived with vinyl so long. The pops and cracks became part of the song.

Dave T2

Actually Dave, the track switch in the middle of a song happened all the time on 8 track tapes. A buddy of mine had an 8 track player in his car and always bought his tapes from the big stores and same thing. Wow - was that annoying. The original form of the 8T cartridge was designed to play nothing longer than commercials at radio stations.

I waited until cassette tapes got really good for music (they were originally designed primarily for voice recording) before I put one in my car - about 1983. No switching problems there.

At a classic car show, I once saw a DeSoto from about 1959 with a 45RPM record player mounted on the transmission hump. It was original equipment. I bet that sounded interesting - especially going over any size bump.

I wonder how many accidents were caused by drivers changing records every 3 or 4 minutes.

The story i've heard was that Phillips was absolutely shocked when people started using their cassette format for music. They had never intended it to be used for anything other that dictation. Not too many years later companies like Nakamichi, Denon, Carver, Onkyo, and Tascam were putting out cassette decks that rivalled some of the finest 1/4" machines. Considering that cassette machines were so much cheaper to build many of them started including much better components and noise reduction built in. For the first time ever, the average home user could finally have essentially noise-free hi-fi.

Anyone remember the ill-fated Elcassette? ;)

I got an 8 track player from my guru buddy and a whole bunch of old 8 track tapes. Some of the tapes had pinch rollers that had dissolved into some kind of mush. Of course those were unplayable. Most of the pressure sponge in the tapes was permantly squashed and would not keep the tape firmly up against the rollers in the player. Taking them apart and fixing them can be a nightmare with tape all over the place like a three stooges episode. Then again they use the same tape size as 1/4" reel to reel decks. Then I read the huge Ampex tape book which brings reality to tape people---like after 50 plays with the best equipment the heads will erase the high frequency response down 3 db and much worse with worn heads. Also one particle of cigarrette smoke between the tape and the heads will drop the high frequency response by 3db and more. They also stated that they recorded the best wow and flutter test 2" tape ($300.00 in 1965?) by accident (non weighted) and could not duplicate the results. The specs were +-.03 % so when you see those .01% specs touted by turntable people you know they are lying. Haven't a clue what's going on now.

JJK

I have a stack of records, not vinyl, from my grandfather. I need to transfer them to digital some day, but my 78rpm turntable bit the dust. These are so old the copyrights are expired, I think.

I too have inherited a HUGE box of old vinyls in addition to my own collection.

I just need a new turntable now.

I had a 45rpm record player for the car, but it did not work when I got it. I found it at a yard sale. The tone arm had a spring to hold it against the record. I bet after a couple of plays, that groove was pretty smooth:)

Dave T2

My wife recently retired after 33 years as a general music teacher. She had amassed a considerable collection of vinyl over the years and frequently used them in class.

Early in one school year, she pulled out an LP for use in a first grade class. One little boy exclaimed - "Wow, Mrs M..., I've never seen such a big CD!"

The kids of all ages were completely fascinated by how she knew where to put the needle to find the song she wanted. She also learned that kids had no idea of lifting the arm before moving it (ouch)

Talk about feeling old..

For those in need of quality phonographs or record turntables - Here's a source:
Prices are NOT outrageous:

http://www.kabusa.com/frameset.htm?/index.htm

On eBay you'll see 8mm cameras editified as "Vintage Video Camera". So full circle from the time when people called video cameras "movie cameras". Got to admit I've given up on it and now say "out on a filming job" even though that pedantic demon is whispering "you mean videoing, you idiot".

Just like film always looks different than video, analog recordings will always sound different than digital.

I don't think that difference is so huge and digital is way more convenient, but when comparing absolute best quality, digital, no matter what dynamic range, how many bits and frequency you talk about, cannot sound better than analog tape recorder ( or so say those who worked with both ) . The problem is these analog recorders used to cost at least $20000, 10-15 times more than you pay for the best sound card.

If money/budgets was not an isue, I do go with analog and film. But it is, so..........................

Anyone with vinyls but no way to play them may be interested in
THIS piece of Retro Design.

It's called a Lenoxx Classic - costs only A$210 and as well as the deck, which includes 78rpm, there's an AM/FM tuner and the bronze bit at the bottom is a CD PLayer!
The deck is nothing special - I'd much rather have paid more for a better deck, but that's how it comes ...

It has built-in Stereo speakers, plus Stereo audio outs at the back, so you can play through your favourite system.

For fun take a good stereo WAV source and encode it with your favorite encoder. Drop the encoded output on a second track, invert the phase and play. What you hear is what changed during the encoding.

Sometimes the tracks don't exactly line up so, with quantize to frame off, zoom FAR in till you see the individual samples and slide the tracks around till the peaks line up. (you will want the polarity reversel turned off for this step)

Larry

Hey Serena,
I'm tryin' to git rid of mine. Over 10,000 records, mostly Hip Hop\R&B from 1987 to 2002. Some classic stuff. My wife is trying to talk me out of it, saying it's something worth keeping. I'm not sure what to do. I tried to record all of them. managed to record 5%, but lost it all when my hard drive crashed. DOH! Right now it's furniture in my editing room.

Yes, digitising all that would be quite a job. A friend was in a similar situation and gave up when he realised that the disks have to be played in real time. That's what the digital age has done -- everyone expects to be able to copy at 32x real speed! I guess you could sort through for the cream of your collection and make sure (before copying) that there hasn't been a CD "remaster" released. Donating to a music archive is another avenue. Selling on eBay might be a way of turning some of the collection back into money. But most people are faced with this situation when their partner classifies a valued collection as "rubbish cluttering up the place -- you never play it anyway". This doesn't seem to be your wife's reaction. 10,000 disks is quite a collection.