Best records to hear on vinyl?

[Game Over]

Ehh, yes. Just yes. You may 'prefer' the altered sound you get from vinyl, but it's a less accurate reproduction by any objective measure. If you're used to hearing the more limited sonic range of vinyl then you think that that's how the music 'should' sound, but you're not actually hearing the music in that case, you're hearing the limited reproduction.

Do you have any information to back this notion of yours?

Because according to everything I have read you are dead wrong.

Did you bother to read the link I provided?

[Game Over]

Here is another. http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question487.htm

by definition, a digital recording is not capturing the complete sound wave. It is approximating it with a series of steps. Some sounds that have very quick transitions, such as a drum beat or a trumpet's tone, will be distorted because they change too quickly for the sample rate.


In your home stereo the CD or DVD player takes this digital recording and converts it to an analog signal, which is fed to your amplifier. The amplifier then raises the voltage of the signal to a level powerful enough to drive your speaker.

A vinyl record has a groove carved into it that mirrors the original sound's waveform. This means that no information is lost. The output of a record player is analog. It can be fed directly to your amplifier with no conversion.

This means that the waveforms from a vinyl recording can be much more accurate, and that can be heard in the richness of the sound. But there is a downside, any specks of dust or damage to the disc can be heard as noise or static. During quiet spots in songs this noise may be heard over the music. Digital recordings don't degrade over time, and if the digital recording contains silence, then there will be no noise.

[Dexter Rutecki]

I had already seen that article, and aside from some qualitative nonsense (and the lossless argument, which is meaningless at this point) what you posted actually partially proves my point.

Did you read what I linked to??

And what you just added only applies to crappy digital recordings from the 80's or crappy MP3's from a decade or so ago (or if people choose a low sample rate). Current sample rates are so high that no human can distinguish between sampled digital recordings and lossless analogue.

[Swine]

Umm, not even close. If you want to hear what the source recording sounds like (whether analogue tape or something digital), you listen on digital. I know the theory is that you're hearing the actual sound waves because of how vinyl records, which you are in one sense, but there is a reason records have to be mastered specifically for vinyl--it's to address the inherent limitations of the medium (vinyl always has issues reproducing low bass sounds and records are always mastered to address that limitation--very high frequencies also are lost on vinyl without remastering, which of course means you're actually not hearing what was recorded). Vinyl itself is not the actual wave and can only approximate it to some degree--very accurately in some registers, not accurately (or not at all) in others. Speak with a sound engineer or someone who works mastering records who understands this if you want to really figure it out--there is no better reproduction of what you hear in the studio than a quality digital recording.

http://diffuser.fm/do-cds-actually-s...er-than-vinyl/

We're definitely entrenched in thread drift but this is wrong. Yes, there is a higher noise floor and more distortion with vinyl, but with digital, especially CD's, you are actively cutting all frequencies above 22k HZ, there is absolutely less sonic range with digital, not more as you claim. Additionally, that distortion is what many people like about vinyl, there is that "warmth," "roundness," or what have you. Again, and to be clear, if you record to tape, mix and master analogue, and cut to vinyl you are preserving as much sonic information as possible. No quantizing, no jitter, none of the problems with digital.

There are different mastering practices for each end user medium, but that doesn't mean vinyl is somehow inferior. Digital, by all counts, is an inferior approximation because you are actually losing information in the process.

Anyway, Tipp and I covered a lot of this last year here:
http://www.tetongravity.com/forums/s...ur-music/page4

[Game Over]

Anyway, Tipp and I covered a lot of this last year here:
http://www.tetongravity.com/forums/s...ur-music/page4

Thanks I recall reading this thread. I searched but came up empty :/

[PNWbrit]

you are actively cutting all frequencies above 22k HZ,]

Which humans can't hear anyway? Surely?

[Swine]

I had already seen that article, and aside from some qualitative nonsense (and the lossless argument, which is meaningless at this point) what you posted actually partially proves my point.

Did you read what I linked to??

And what you just added only applies to crappy digital recordings from the 80's or crappy MP3's from a decade or so ago (or if people choose a low sample rate). Current sample rates are so high that no human can distinguish between sampled digital recordings and lossless analogue.

False. Humans can; although for some it seems to be subconscious. But it seems to have an affect on psyche.

I hacked a .pdf of an interview with Rupert Neve and cut and pasted below. The tl;dr version is:

RN: Let me just put a very provocative thought to you.
The Japanese showed some time ago that the brain
produces electric radiations in the presence of different
emotions and emotional stimuli

6
. If you listen to an
analogue music signal that is good quality, with no
crossover distortion and no digital sampling, it can be a
very satisfying experience. And as you start listening to it,
you do the thing which us older ones have done for a long
time – you come home after a long, hard day, put a long
playing record on, and put your feet up. Even if the record
is a bit scratchy, you can listen to it and enjoy it and relax.
But you can’t do that any longer…

GS: Because of the distortions of CDs and cheap
transistor circuitry?

RN: The Japanese have shown, and in fact a lot of us are
accepting quite happily, that these distortions – first of all
the lack of music-related frequencies above 20kHz, and
secondly the presence of the switching transient noises
above 20kHz – actually produce a different form of brain
radiation. They produce the kind associated with
discomfort, frustration, even anger. I am wondering
whether we can’t blame the CD for some of our social
problems.

GS: That is a very provocative thought…

RN: You can talk to others, it’s not just me. Talk to
George Massenburg, for instance, and he will tell you
exactly the same thing. He used to be able to come home
and listen to a record, and relax. Now all he does is feel
restless and frustrated and switch it off, because it’s a CD.
So you get some young person who is already feeling
frustrated in society, an angry young man perhaps, and he
is listening to CDs and digital sound sources 99 percent of
the time, and… you know, I just wonder whether there is
a connection there.

GS: There are distortions on vinyl too, although they
tend to exist on top of the signal and you can listen
‘through’ them. But on a CD or other digital sound
source, the distortions are embedded into the signal…

...................................full version below.............................................

This is part one of a three-part interview conducted in 1997 and published throughout 1998 in issues one, two and three of
AudioTechnology magazine (www.audiotechnology.com.au). This work is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionNoncommercial

RUPERT NEVE (1 of 3)

Musicality, warmth, transparency… In the history of
pro audio, one name has always been synonymous
with these qualities. In part one of our three part
interview, Rupert Neve talks to Greg Simmons about
the differences between analogue and digital sound,
the need for wide bandwidth, and his designs for
AMEKʼs System 9098 equipment.

Rupert Neve. The name is associated with some of the
most cherished and long-lasting pro audio equipment ever
made. With a career spanning four decades in pro audio,
his reputation has been built on the basic principles of
doing the absolute best he can, listening carefully to the
equipment he designs, and listening carefully to the
people who use it.

In the past, he established two of the most respected
names in analogue audio: Neve and Focusrite. His latest
work culminates in a series of products designed in
conjunction with British console manufacturers AMEK,
and collectively titled ‘System 9098’. When Rupert Neve
designs something, audio professionals listen. We
listened. Then we talked to the man himself.

Greg Simmons: Let’s start with your background as a
console designer…

Rupert Neve: I am not academically qualified. I am what I
call ‘QBE’, that’s my degree: Qualified By Experience. I
grew up with valves, and so I was making mixing
consoles using valves. One of my customers said, “Have
you heard about these new transistors? Do you think they
will be any good?” I really didn’t know the answer, but as
more people started to ask about them, I thought I’d better
find out.

I had to re-educate myself to start over on the
semiconductors. I found that you could actually do more
with them than you could with valves, and I got quite
excited about it. But there was a lot of folklore going
around about the fact that these devices were unreliable
and noisy. So it all started with making sure the
semiconductor designs produced a sound quality at least
as good as the valves. That meant a lot of listening, and a
lot of measuring. The more I got into it, the more of a
perfectionist I became. I think the same goes for not only
myself, but for a lot of people who design equipment –
you find that you can get a bit of an improvement, so you
put it in.

As I had very little in the way of competition in those
days – there were only one or two of the big companies,
and everyone favours the small man – I was kind of on
my own. I had very little overheads and could produce
something that was better, even if it was more costly in
terms of components. So I just went ahead and made the
best consoles I could.

GS: You said transistors can do a lot more than the
valve circuitry. I believe you’re a supporter of high
dynamic range and therefore high supply voltages. Is
that something you could easily transfer from valves
to transistors?

RN: With valves, you have a much higher supply voltage
and you can get a higher output level. But all the
impedances are much higher, so you pick up more noise.
If you can work with low impedances, then you will get a
greater dynamic range from a valve.

With transistors, it is a question of using the type of
transistor that will give you a very low input noise; for
example, low rbb type transistors. In some of the early
designs, I had a lot of transistors in parallel to get the
noise down, but that was cumbersome. When integrated
circuits arrived – well, not immediately, but after a while
– we began to get some very nice integrated circuits with
low noise features, which made design a lot easier.
With the semiconductor design, it is very hard to get a
dynamic range as good as you can get with a valve. But
there are so many disadvantages to using a valve that we
sort of grin and bear it.

GS: So you adopted the semiconductor technology…

RN: Yes. Just to give you an idea about these things –
‘cause we’ve been working on some low noise designs
recently – a chip manufacturer not far from where I live
approached me and said they had a 24-bit 96k chip, and
they wanted to build a console on a chip. When I finished
laughing, they said, “No, we are serious! How do we get
the audio into this chip? Can you do an audio stage that is
as good as 24 bits?” So I said I would have a go. I said,
“24 bits, is that 144dB?
” And he said, “Oh no no, we
don’t get 144dB. We throw a lot of that away in the
housekeeping, 120dB to 126dB of dynamic range is all
we can get.”

GS: So they’re losing those last four bits?

RN: Yes. Everybody, in fact, who is honest does that.
You don’t get the full 6dB per bit. So I said, “All you
have to do is find some suitable devices. You’re a chip
manufacturer; maybe you could produce some chips for
me. We’ll bump up the rails
…” He said, “No, no, no. I
mean to get this dynamic range on a single rail of five
volts.” Theoretically it is possible – I’m digressing now –
in fact it is very possible. The problem is that you have to
redefine all of your source material; your circuits.

GS: So they want to get that extreme dynamic range
between zero and +5 volts, no negative rails, nothing.
Like TTL logic chips?

RN: That’s right. You can get a dynamic range on a
single +5 volt rail if you try, but the problem is that you
can’t put the rail voltage up, so you have to put the noise
floor down. The only way to get the noise floor down is to
drop the circuit’s input impedance down to very low
values indeed. It means a special kind of transistor input.
And then you would be looking at, say, a four ohm input
impedance for a microphone. Now, you go to a
microphone manufacturer and tell him you will give him
four ohms load on your input, and you want him to
produce a microphone with about 0.8 ohm source
impedance. He’ll go mad! It is not practical.
Another way to do this would be to use a transformer,
but that is rather self-defeating. A decent input
transformer that can handle that range is going to be about

1
The theoretical dynamic range of a digital circuit is calculated as
being 6dB per bit, so a 24-bit circuit provides 144dB of dynamic
range.

2
In electronics, the term ʻrailʼ is often used to describe the power
supply voltage, an abbreviation of the term ʻsupply railʼ. Most
audio equipment has positive and negative supply rails.
20 times the size of the chip and 20 times the price. It
may come in due course, but I am not excited about that
aspect of it.

[Swine]

[cont.]

GS: It’s interesting that you mention digital at this
point, because one of the last questions in this
interview was going to be: “What are your thoughts
on 24-bit, 96k digital technology?” If you don’t mind,
we can keep talking about that now…

RN: Well, okay, if you’ve got the patience to listen to me!
[Laughs]

GS: Absolutely.

RN: Well, the number of bits is OK, but the sampling rate
isn’t. It has to go to twice that. We have to do 192k
because we need a reliable audio frequency range, free of
distortion and noise, up to about 75kHz3. I can’t prove
that, but there’s a lot of evidence from a lot of people who
have done a lot of listening, and we think that if we could
get a really good pass band, up to about 75kHz, we would
lose absolutely nothing from the state of the art as we
know it. Sampling at 96k would give you barely a 50kHz
pass band, which is not quite enough; the resolution in the
time domain is still not quite what it should be. We can go
upwards from a 96k sampling rate, and every few kHz
you add is going to make it a bit better.

GS: The System 9098 components all have bandwidths
extending up to 100kHz, which obviously relates to
what you’ve been saying about the need for higher
sampling rates. It seems a bit arrogant of a designer to
assume that human hearing stops at 20kHz.
RN: Well, human hearing probably stops a good deal
lower than 20kHz, for most of us. I think I’m right in
saying that an average healthy eight-year-old child is able
to hear up to 22kHz or more. But as we get older, we start
progressively losing out on the high frequencies. People
who use their hearing professionally lose less because it is
being exercised. The analytical process, as it were, is kept
in trim and the neuron flow in the brain is kept active. Just
like any athlete, you know, if you keep up your athletic
activities you’re going to stay in better trim than if you sit
in an armchair for the rest of your life.

And what is more important to an audio person is that
you understand what you are listening to and listening for.
You may be listening to a particular type of sound, and
you’re listening for the artefacts that characterise that
sound. So you are much better educated. The more you
listen, the more you become aware of things and the
easier it becomes to do.

If you are not a professional and you listen to people
telling you, for example, that digital sound quality is the
best thing ever, then you assume that is the case until
someone teaches you different. Then you start listening
and making comparisons. And in course of time, you
don’t have to make any real comparisons; you can hear
digital a mile off. It’s got whatever it is that it’s got, that
particular character of sound. The difference becomes
evident to you. That is a matter of education and
exercising the qualities that you’ve got.

3
Theoretically, the highest frequency a digital circuit can sample
is equal to one half the sampling rate, so to sample a 75kHz
signal requires a sampling rate of at least 150k. In practice, we
tend to go higher than that sampling rate to allow room for
processes such as anti-alias filtering.
GS: Your comments on the sound of current digital
audio technology remind me of your comments about
‘the searing zip of massive crossover distortion’
associated with early Class B transistor amplifiers

4,
and your astonishment at how equipment reviewers of
the time heralded it as “the sound of the future to
which we should all become accustomed”.

5
It seems
the same thing has happened with CD-quality digital
audio. Am I making a valid connection?

RN: Yes, it is very similar. And it is very dangerous. We
now have a couple of generations of people who, for the
most part, have heard nothing else. Unless you frequently
go to live concerts and listen to real singers and
instruments, you tend to think that digital is all you need.
The digital process, as you know, samples, and every
sample of the waveform you are listening to produces a
switching click. The amplitude of that click will depend
on the rate of change of the signal being sampled. A click
is a Fourier train of frequencies that is totally random. It
is not related to the music. It is a click just like when you
click a light switch on and off, and you get a splash
sometimes in your hi-fi equipment or your console… er,
you wouldn’t get it in one of my consoles, but you might
get it in somebody else’s! [Laughs] I’d die rather than let
it happen in one of mine!

GS: Certainly!

RN: Well now, that switching click is a random splash of
frequencies. It goes on in terms of bandwidth until it dies
because your system doesn’t pass it any longer. It goes on
way above audibility. It is not related to the fundamental
of the music, it is not harmonic.

The same can be said of crossover distortion, where you
get a Class B amplifier with a crossover that produces
enough discontinuity between the two halves of the
device to produce a click. That too is not harmonically
related to the music. It’s just a splash.

GS: Like the light switch?

RN: Exactly. Now, the difference between digital and
Class B crossover distortion is that the crossover
distortion happens twice every cycle, so if you have a
1kHz sine wave, the crossover distortion will create 2000
clicks every second. But CD quality digital makes 44,100
clicks every second, regardless of the frequency. The
amplitudes are a bit different, but frankly, you are aware
of these clicks.

The mechanism by which we perceive what happens
above 20kHz is not known. We have our own private
theories about it, but we really don’t know. But there is no
doubt that a person is able to perceive frequencies well
above audibility, and at very low levels – you don’t need
much of it. You can put a signal through equipment that
has a pretty poor response above 20kHz, but you are still
aware of the presence or the absence of the extended
frequencies. Or you are aware of the switching transients
that splashed out into those regions above 20kHz.

4
Class B amplifiers use two amplifying circuits, one for the
positive half cycle of the audio signal, and one for the negative
half cycle. Crossover distortion occurs as the signal crosses
through the zero point, where one amplifier ʻswitches offʼ and the
other ʻswitches onʼ.

5
The digital boys have been very clever by saying that
you can’t hear beyond 20kHz, so they move those
switching transients – the ‘quantising noise’ – outside the
region of 20kHz by filtering. The whole question of
whether current standards of digital sound halfway
acceptable is to do with the filters. That is why things like
the Apogee are much better than others, because of the
filter shapes they have chosen.

GS: When you were talking about the filters and
moving the quantising noise out of the audible band,
were you talking about the actual low pass filters on
the output or the noise shaping?

RN: Both really. But the filters on the output actually
don’t do enough for you. You have to actually move the
noise artefacts away from the audio band, but that’s about
as much as I know about digital.

GS: Okay, moving on to the next question…

RN: Let me just put a very provocative thought to you.
The Japanese showed some time ago that the brain
produces electric radiations in the presence of different
emotions and emotional stimuli

6
. If you listen to an
analogue music signal that is good quality, with no
crossover distortion and no digital sampling, it can be a
very satisfying experience. And as you start listening to it,
you do the thing which us older ones have done for a long
time – you come home after a long, hard day, put a long
playing record on, and put your feet up. Even if the record
is a bit scratchy, you can listen to it and enjoy it and relax.
But you can’t do that any longer…

GS: Because of the distortions of CDs and cheap
transistor circuitry?

RN: The Japanese have shown, and in fact a lot of us are
accepting quite happily, that these distortions – first of all
the lack of music-related frequencies above 20kHz, and
secondly the presence of the switching transient noises
above 20kHz – actually produce a different form of brain
radiation. They produce the kind associated with
discomfort, frustration, even anger. I am wondering
whether we can’t blame the CD for some of our social
problems.

GS: That is a very provocative thought…

RN: You can talk to others, it’s not just me. Talk to
George Massenburg, for instance, and he will tell you
exactly the same thing. He used to be able to come home
and listen to a record, and relax. Now all he does is feel
restless and frustrated and switch it off, because it’s a CD.
So you get some young person who is already feeling
frustrated in society, an angry young man perhaps, and he
is listening to CDs and digital sound sources 99 percent of
the time, and… you know, I just wonder whether there is
a connection there.

GS: There are distortions on vinyl too, although they
tend to exist on top of the signal and you can listen
‘through’ them. But on a CD or other digital sound
source, the distortions are embedded into the signal…

RN: Absolutely. That’s right.

GS: Okay, but with CD, the filters roll off everything
6
Refer to ʻHigh Frequency Sound Above the Audible Range
Affects Brain Electric Activity and Sound Perceptionʼ by Tsutomi
Oohashi, Emi Nishina, Norie Kawai, Yoshitaka Fuwamoto, and
Hiroshi Imai. AES preprint No. 3207 (91st convention, New York
City).
above 20kHz quite severely, so how do these switching
transients above 20kHz get through?

[Swine]

[cont.]

RN: They come through in the form of noise. If you plot
the noise spectrum, you will find that in the immediate
octave above 20kHz, up to 40kHz, there is very little
noise, practically nothing. But it starts to show itself in
the octaves above that, up to 80kHz and higher. This is
why I think that frequencies up to 100kHz are really very
important. Produce them clean and you are OK. Let the
dirt creep in, and you are still frustrated.

GS: In the AMEK brochures, you talk about the
importance of having no resonances or ringing in that
area…

RN: Yes. That is part of it. Any sharp filter, like the ones
used on digital devices, is going to produce this ringing. If
you ever listen to a long distance phone line handled on
long copper wires, like in the old days – it’s not so much
these days because long distance phone calls are not
handled on copper wires – you would find that they were
heavily equalised in the range of 2.5kHz to 3kHz, huge
amounts of a sort of presence boost were put into the
signal to try and get it up and make the signal crisp and
intelligible. You could hear that ringing sound, that highly
over equalised line sound, it was very very evident. Hence
the name ‘ringing’, it sounded like a bell. It was
frequency coherent – you could tell the frequencies in it.
If you now move the frequencies higher, you’ve got the
same effect. But you reach a point where it is no longer
obvious. This gets back to my original point that the
educated ear will hear it, even if it is out of band. This is
the thing Geoff Emerick did years ago.

GS: Geoff Emerick, the famous British producer?

RN: Yes, he started me off on this trail. A 48-input
console had been delivered to George Martin’s Air
Studios, and Geoff Emerick was very unhappy about it. It
was a new console, made not long after I had sold the
Neve company in 1977. George Martin called me and
said, “please come and make Geoff happy, while he’s
unhappy we can’t do any work”.

They’d had engineers from the company there, and so
on. The danger is that if you are not sensitive to people
like Geoff Emerick, and you don’t respect them for what
they have done, then you are not going to listen to them.
Unfortunately, there was a breed of young engineers in
the company (I hasten to say this was after I sold it!) who
couldn’t understand what he was bitching about. So they
went back to the company and just made a report saying
the customer was mad and there wasn’t really a problem.
Leave it alone, forget it, the problem will go away. They
were acting like used car salesmen. I was very angry with
it. So I went and spent time there, at George Martin’s
request, and Geoff finally managed to show me what it
was that he could hear, and then I began to hear it, too.
Now Geoff was The Golden Ears – and he still is – and
he was perceiving something that I wasn’t looking for.
And it wasn’t until I had spent some time with him, as it
were, being lead by him through the sounds, that I began
to pick up what he was listening to. And once I’d heard it,
oh yes, then I knew what he was talking about. We
measured it and found that in three out of the full 48
channels, the output transformers had not been correctly
terminated and were producing a 3dB rise at 54kHz. And
so people said, ‘oh no, he can’t possibly hear that’. But
when we corrected that problem, and it was only one
capacitor that had to be added to each of those three
channels, I mean, Geoff’s face just lit up! Here you have
the happiness/unhappiness mood thing the Japanese were
talking about.

GS: So they had left the same capacitor off each of the
three offending channels, leaving their output
transformers unterminated?

RN: Oh yes. All of the principal parts in my designs are
transformer outputs. There is a huge advantage in the total
isolation, which we’ll talk about later. But a transformer
has leakage inductance. In a good transformer it’s a very
small leakage inductance, but it is there. You have to
make sure that it is damped out, so that when you are
adding long lines or any other load to it, it isn’t going to
obtrude. So we put an RC network across the transformer
output, which neutralises the leakage inductance. That RC
network, which is only a resistor and capacitor, was
incomplete on three of these transformers. We fixed the
network, and then there were no problems.
GS: So someone could hear the effect of a 3dB boost at
50kHz. I would imagine that gave you some food for
thought…

RN: That was what Geoff was not happy about, it was
upsetting him. So I went back, sort of scratching my head
and thinking, “well, I’m not going to try at this stage and
find out why that’s happening, but I know it does happen.
So let’s make sure it will never happen again”. If Geoff
and others could hear things going on as high as 50kHz,
how high could they actually hear? I did a bit of
development work, and found that I could do new
circuitry, with a much wider bandwidth, relatively easily.
So I redesigned all my transformers and output circuitry,
and the general electronics.

GS: Sounds like an important lesson for technicians
and equipment designers!

RN: The danger here is that the more qualified you are,
the more you ‘know’ that something can’t be true, so you
don’t believe it. Or you ‘know’ a design can’t be done, so
you don’t try it. Ignorant idiots like me don’t know it
can’t be done, so we have a go and it works. [Laughs]
Next issue, Rupert Neve talks about cables, transformers,
and tweaking the performance of integrated circuits…

[iceman]

A link would have been sufficient.

Interesting stuff but it's from almost 20 years ago. Technology has changed, just for one example sample rates are radically different than back then so the digital music he is talking about is simply not the digital music of today (or at least not the high-end digital music), so his comments are sort of worthless in reference to modern recorded music.

There is something "warm" about analog sound that is often missing from digital sound (maybe always missing), but that doesn't mean that analog is a more accurate representation of the real sound.

[Swine]

A link would have been sufficient.

Interesting stuff but it's from almost 20 years ago. Technology has changed, just for one example sample rates are radically different than back then so the digital music he is talking about is simply not the digital music of today (or at least not the high-end digital music), so his comments are sort of worthless in reference to modern recorded music.

There is something "warm" about analog sound that is often missing from digital sound (maybe always missing), but that doesn't mean that analog is a more accurate representation of the real sound.

Can't link boss, it's a protected .pdf

His comments are absolutely not worthless. Yes, we have 24 bit/192khz recording now, which would be great to listen too except nearly everything gets bounced to 16 bit/44.1khz, so you still have all of the negatives that he talks about. And that's the best quality most people are getting; streaming, mp3, aac, are all huge compromises and suffer from the switching he talks about.

It depends on your interpretation of "accurate", if everything is analog there is vastly more information in the recording. Is that more real? Or is the ultra low distortion with missing information of digital more real?

[TomCrac]

Ponosayswhat?

[iceman]

It depends on your interpretation of "accurate", if everything is analog there is vastly more information in the recording. Is that more real? Or is the ultra low distortion with missing information of digital more real?

I think you could make a clear scientific case that a high-quality digital reproduction is more accurate and thus more "real" but ultimately all that matters is how it sounds to your ears and what you like, so I'll just call a truce on all of it and move on.

[Swine]

Ponosayswhat?

Still haven't laid hands or ears on one. Somewhat sadly it will probably die. People don't want a chunky standalone player when they have a phone that streams. So crazy. I distinctly remember 9 years ago the prediction that we would have access to nearly all of music ever made in one player (they were predicting the death of the iPod). It's essentially happened although we're nowhere near all music ever made available via streaming.

[Swine]

Need to know if your receiver has a phono preamp, if so then probably try and score used with a good cartridge. If no preamp, then maybe new, or will have to find a table with a built in preamp.

Don't think you need to get too snobby with a table, cartridge matters as much as the table.

Right or wrong I like straight tone arms, and if you play your shit loud, belt drive can help with rumble.

This is pretty spot on. I had an old kind of shitty table. Left it at my folks. Would like a Pro-Ject Carbon. For 400$ seems like the upper limit of what I'm willing to spend. This is a pretty good article about table selection.

http://m.thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-turntable/

Back on track though. I just got Alabama Shakes "Sound & Color". It's the impetus to get a new high quality table. I'm sure I didn't do the old one any favors running tons of thrift store vinyl through it.

[Whiteroom_Guardian]

We can argue this till the cows come home, but the reality is the $1.00 copy of "name your favorite record here" on my $40 turntable at home ALWAYS sounds better than the HD audio I can play on my stupidly over priced B+O system in my car.

[MagnificentUnicorn]

If you really want the best experience, there are companies now offering copies of original analog master tapes as well as NOS studio issues on 1/4 and 1/2 inch reel to reel tapes. My parents had a nice reel to reel when I was a kid and nothing aside from live music is nearly as good or natural sounding.

[Core Shot]

[Benny Profane]

We can argue this till the cows come home, but the reality is the $1.00 copy of "name your favorite record here" on my $40 turntable at home ALWAYS sounds better than the HD audio I can play on my stupidly over priced B+O system in my car.

Well, if you set up a separate speaker system at home with all sorts of road noise blasting at a decent volume while you were playing music, yeah, it would suck, too.

[Benny Profane]

Back when I had a nice high end system I wasted too much money on (tubes, electrostatic speakers , the works), there were certain albums, first pressings or low volume pressings, that we're pretty awesome recordings to show off the capabilities of said system. My favorite was a Muddy Waters acoustic thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_Singer_(album) which was pretty awesome. Young Buddy Guy on guitar. You were in the studio with them. Another was a Louis Armstrong/Ella Fitzgerald thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_and_Louis which, again, was recorded super well.
James Macmurtry''s Too Long in the Wasteland is a superb listen, if you can find an early copy in good shape. Great songs, of course. There is a Dusty Springfield album out there that is sorta the holy grail of studio recordings, but, I forget what it is. Absolute Sound geeks used it to evaluate equipment.

That's all I can remember now. I'm a Spotify listener now, and I'm more than ok with that. Everything went downhill when digital recording started. But, it's pretty awesome to walk around with a massive record store in the sky I can summon up in my phone and play on speakers or headphones. Most music is recorded like shit anyway. It's only rock and roll.

[bodywhomper]

I always wanted to hear the original pressing of the album “Dafos” on a good sound system. Supposedly, some of the recording of “The Beam” could not be heard, but could be felt, and shit in your house would rattle. The lows were truncated in digital version and vinyl re-releases of the album.

[billyk]

I used to have a vinyl recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by I Musici that I absolutely loved. I can remember how disappointed i was when I bought the CD version of the same recording. Just dead sounding in comparison. None of the ringing harmonics of the record. Unfortunately, by that time I had ditched my turntable and record collection. What a mistake that was.

[alesheres]

Checked so many good records above. Thank you all.

I am looking for a turntable with preamp as the old one I had isn't working anymore. Any suggestions?

[utagonian]

Depends on budget. You could be talking a hundred dollars at a garage sale to six figures for state of art stuff plus everything in between. TGR might not be the best forum for this question either. I’d read up at Audiogon, audiohilics, audio nirvana, audio karma etc