General Asylum

most importantly, what decades/genres

68.7.196.228

This Post Has Been Edited by the Author

In Reply to: RE: Will my CDs ever sound as good as vinyl? posted by ggking7 on March 08, 2012 at 07:29:04

are you making comparisons with?

This is seriously driving me crazy that people with cd/vinyl statements do not tell us what decades and types of music they are comparing. Because of their assumptions that all audiophiles listen to the same cds and records, I have needlessly wasted money.

Do you have vinyl from 70s analog recorded rock, 1950s jazz, or 2010s new releases where the vinyl was recorded from a digital medium?

Not all vinyl is the same!

I listen to new releases on pop, indie, hip-hop. There is no way that vinyl will ever surpass digital on these musics. The current aesthetic style of recording and mastering these days does not favor vinyl, the lack of vinyl cutting skills these days is a big factor, and the phono stage creates losses that are not found with digital. Keep in mind, it is important to weed out people who favor one or the other, when they have not put equal thought and time and consideration into both. I am not one of those people who favors X strictly because he spent more money on X. It is the opposite.

I have spent far more money and time setting up my analog eqiupment than digital, with so many types of alignments, cartridges, tonearms, platters, mats, preamps, vtas, bearings, coupling/decoupling, etc. I was able to make new vinyl music sound very good, but not as great as on digital. It had nothing to do with the playback equipment, or money, or time spent, or whether I was using a KAB SL1200MKII or Rega, whether I was using the stock tonearm or Origin Live, whether I was using the stock setup or sapphire bearings or whatever. It had everything to do with musical genre and decade!

Yes I can put on a classic MoFi record and it has excellent realism that no digital can match. But at the same time, people must realize that on new indie rock the cd release is far better than the vinyl release. No comparison!

Put on the same indie rock vinyl and cd. Flip the preamp select knob. The cd is so lifelike, the vinyl so flat. The cd so in-the-room, the vinyl so artificial and lacking expected detail.

My digital side is easy. Computer to firewire, to toslink, to reclock, to audio note dac. ERS sheets in everything. Ceramic fuses in everything. Everything on steady regenerated AC power.

Audiophiles need to wake up to the fact that not all of us are jazz/classical/70s rock music listeners. Music today comes over digital download or cd with very little loss in the mastering to distribution chain. Vinyl has much more lossy detractors prior to even hitting the playback equipment, and even then has to go through multiple lossy analog and mechanical processes to feed into another imperfect EQ phono stage even before it goes into the preamp.

Pick your decade, pick your music, pick your playback equipment.

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