In reply to Soleil:
Total cost is about $1200 second-hand.
See, this is what I mean - equipment that most people can't or won't afford to buy.
I think it's a bargain. Hell, people can get a car for $20K without having being disturbed by that, but they can't spend $2K on a hifi setup.. I've spent perhaps $16K on my stereo stuff, and I think it's worth every penny since I enjoy it for hours every day, and it seriously enrichens my life.
in my days. The only critizism I have about it really, is that most CDs sound..boring. There's no "life" in them, even though I can't find anything particular to complain about, it doesn't provoke my feet to move, y'know?
No, I don't know. Are you sure it's not just the memories of your youth that you associate with the record player?
In my youth I had a really crappy record player, so no, that's not it :) High-end hifi is something I've learned in the last few years only.
See, you're moving into the whacky, poorly defined subjective terminology that audiophiles always seem to use to justify their religion.
I have no need for justifying - I'm just trying to explain :)
What is "AIR"? What is "real"? I say that CDs sound more real because there is little air involved - at least with electronic instruments no acoustic pickups are needed, cutting that troublesome and distorting air out of the picture all the way until your speakers.
"Air" in a recording means that the sound is not "boxy", e.g. you can't actually hear that the sound comes from a pair of speakers. It's flowing naturally from the virtual stage to your ears. A good hifi setup produces a soundstage which is more or less seamless. This is what people mean when they claim "the speakers disappear". Air is also sound. You can't cut off the air or you wouldn't hear a thing :) That's what's coming out from your speakers - modulated airwaves.
I also like it when music is mastered direct to CD because it eliminates
the annoyances that come with live performances - environmental noise, crowd noise, and mistakes.
Aww, you've missed the whole point of live music! Ambience!
Express" .. On vinyl it's a big pounding disco-bitch of a record, whereas on CD it's a cold and dull synth thingie that mostly sounds "cute". The difference is so overwhelming that it's silly, especially on side 2, the TEE song itself.
I find this hard to believe, and I lack access to the equipment to test it. What we need is to hook a good spectrum analyser up to a vinyl system and a digital system and see which one more accurately reproduces the sound from the studio.
I've never been a fan of measurements. I find them totally irrelevant actually. You know, it's quite simple to produce for instance an amplifier that measures virtually perfectly but sounds totally awful. I've seen fantastic equipment measure anything from average to downright awful, and I've seen lousy stuff measuring great. The reverse is also true of course - some measurements seem to back up the subjective listening tests, but far from all. Personally I'm only interested in what I hear, not if I have a harmonic distorsion of 0.012% or not :)
Did you never ask yourself why DJs play vinyl and not CDs?
I know the answer to that. Because vinyl is far easier to scratch and beat-match. But that will change eventually. Actually I know a DJ who is working on hardware and software to make it even easier to do DJ tricks with MP3 files than it is with vinyl records.
Yes, I know, and you're right about mixing and scratching - I was just teasing you slightly ;) I don't think that digital mixing stuff will replace it though. It's just a hunch I've got.
No matter how sophisticated your equipment and recording techniques are, it is impossible to perfectly reproduce an analog signal by using digital approximations. A sound wave is a coherent signal, whereas a digital sample is an approximation of this wave.
Very true! But analog recording systems are also unable to exactly reproduce analog sound because every step of the process introduces a distortion of some kind. I really think that digital instruments fed directly to digital recording devices are the more promising technology, and can offer better approximations.
Analog recording equipment do not sample the source, they record it as a coherent sound stream. As you're saying, some distortion is inevitable, but with today's equipment that's not really an issue. But I hear you, digital stuff has its moments, as an option - not as a replacement.
Digital clocks are highly accurate - to better accuracy than humans can detect. I can't imagine the source of the problem you're referring to, since everything in a digital system should be driven by a crystal oscillator, and all lags in the system should be constant.
In theory yes, but not in practice. If all clocks were running perfectly there wouldn't be much of a market for CD-players and DAC upgrades :) Most of the sound improvement comes from jitter reduction.
There is also at least one source of timing problems in a vinyl system: The motor. No electric motor keeps its speed perfectly. A feedback system is used to verify its speed and make adjustments as needed. Can't you hear that happening?
Yes, that is correct. The difference is that it's running at a fixed RPM so any delays are constant. Jitter tends to be totally random. As you're also saying, a motor can be tuned!
This isn't true. Lots of musicians use analog mastering, and in fact I've heard that some people have abandoned digital equipment completely, *recently*.
Luddites! :)
Perhaps ;) I'm a technocrat most of the time, but when it comes to audio and whether I should listen to what the humongous Japanese megacorporations want me to listen to or not however, I'm not. I don't think that things have evolved at all in the audio media markets. Sure, the CDs are very easy to use and durable and all that, but that's about the only good points. But well, I've seen many CDs that don't last more than 10 years before they become unplayable (and they were not mistreated in any way), so the longevity of them seem to be quite questionable. I've got lots of vinyl from the 50s and 60s and they play just great even today.
But, let me say that hearing any of the older albums (KW1, Autobahn, Radio-Activity, TEE) on a good tube amp and a nice vinyl player.. Now, that's Kraftwerk!!!
Um, those songs don't exactly push any system to its limits. In fact, I'd say that they contain mainly sounds that a cheap analog system is capable of reproducing reasonably well.
Hell yes they do! In general, the simpler a sound appears to be, the harder it is to reproduce. Try encoding Kraftwerk in VBR MP3 for instance - it'll use a LOT of bitrate even for the simplest songs.. The early records are great demo records actually, since they contain a lot of purely analog sound, and a few number of tracks in the recording. "Kristallo" and "Ruckzuck" are two big favorites when testing hifi - they're both quite tricky. I tend to go for "Radioactivity" to check the goosebump factor though, and "TEE" for the beat-check ;)
Damn right Oh Jay! But, this is not true for good equipment. A good vinyl player usually sounds clearer than a CD does,
Heh. "Good". Expensive. Whereas a typical CD player sounds better than a typical vinyl system. If I had money to spend on a stereo system, the first think I'd buy would be good *speakers*; they're what really makes a difference. Actually, good earphones are even better; less air between the wire and the ear.
Again, air is GOOD. When shopping for a system, I always start with the speakers as you suggest. When I find a speaker I like, I try to find a matching amplifier. When I do that, I'll find a speaker cable that works with them both. Then it's time to get to the source, be it analog or digital. I was taught that it's the best way to go about it, and it's worked great for me so far. In any case, in a system where you spend about the same amounts on speakers, amp and source, the source is usually where it helps to put more money in. There are many many good speakers and amps, even for little money, but much more care has to go into the selection of a cd-player or a record player. I've built wonderful packages with $500 speakers and amps and $1000 cd-players, for instance, that would absolutely kill an equally priced system with the budget reversed. But the one advice is: LISTEN :)
but it does so in a more "natural" way, e.g. not so aggressively.
What does that mean?
This is pretty hard to explain. A natural sounding system in my book, is a system where I can sit down and listen to something, and I'm not realizing I'm listening to a recording. It's those times where you just forget all about it and find yourself deeply immerged into the performance. An aggressive system, or artificial, may sound great, but it doesn't sound natural. I mean that, sure, it may be exquisitely clear and blah blah but I can immediately hear that it's a recording I'm listening to. It's not presented to my ears as a live performance in front of me, but rather music coming from a pair of speakers. The difference is huge, really. To know what I mean, find someone who plays the guitar. Listen to him/her playing some song in front of you. At the same time, record that to tape. When you hear the tape afterwards, the tape sounds different than the actual live performance did, didn't it? That's what I'm talking about. Cheers, Peo