I enjoy listening to records more than any other format!

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I like records. I have a great stereo cabinet from the 1960s. Its a Magnovox. I can't describe the sound other than "lush". Its just incredible.
I grew up with CDs, and I was always told CDs sounded better and were clearer and fuller sounding. Now I have come to discover that simply isn't true. In fact, CDs are lower quality sound. We're so used to digital music now, we are used to poor sound quality!

I have several turntables Ive collected. I find that the form and make of the wood in the stereo cabinets probably add to the richness of sound. I have several records that are 50 years old or more, but they still sound pretty good! I will admit that digital music is much easier to care for, and easier to store. But overall, I find the music listening experience more engaging with vinyl recordings.

Purists who grew up with vinyl have been saying since the advent of the Compact Disc that digital music doesn't have the natural warmth of analog recordings. When Cds first hit the market they made a big deal of stamping all fully digitally mastered stuff with a DDD rating and the music recorded that way was so crisply sterile sounding it would make your ears bleed. For a while they went back to at least mastering music on tape before putting it on CD, but after a while the digital recording equipment as tweaked to try to replicate the older, softer sound, but those who know can still tell the difference. For one thing, digitally mastered recordings have no trace of tape hiss, which is part of what created that warmer sound.

Last edited by Willard on 03 Nov 2013, 11:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I never really messed with records much, but my grandparents are really fond of them.

I will admit that the music coming from my grandma's stereo cabinet has always made her house warm and inviting, even to this day. c:

I think I'm one of those who would qualify as having grown up with vinyl; CD's began to come out when I was 22. I must say I don't miss vinyl at all. The first few times it is played, it does sound good, especially on a stereo with big speakers. But this type of sound recording is a mechanical process, and naturally wears down the record through normal use. Then this format not only doesn't sound as sharp, but tends to develop all sorts of other noises. It is arguable that vinyl sounds better than CD or MP3, but only on the first couple of plays. I just love having MP3's, and a wealth of music at my fingertips. It sounds as good after the thousandth play as it did after the first, and no noises.

I have vinyl that's 30 years old that sounds as good as it did the day I bought it. As long as you've got a well made turntable, keep the stylus fresh, don't ever touch the surface with your fingers and clean it with a discwasher before every play, they can stay pristine for longer than a human lifetime. And its the very "sharpness" that a lot of people dislike about digital sound. It isn't just 'real,' it's 'hyper-real' and to some, that just feels unnatural.

Sadly, most consumers don't respect their recorded music and toss it around like throw pillows, unfortunately - but I've seen them do the same thing with Cds, use them as coasters - and a Cd won't hold up to that kind of abuse, either.

Personally, I can tolerate the surface noise of a piece of vinyl much better than the skipping and digital yammering of a defective disc. And MP3 files develop transcription errors from being transferred from one device to another that can cause gaps and skips in the music A perfect system hasn't been invented yet.

I am equally fanatic about caring for my records but nevertheless they pick up clicks and pops [which I could never tolerate] no matter what I do, short of investing in a $500 record cleaning machine. so I long ago decided I would get one good post-cleaned play out of them, digitize them and play only the resultant CDRs. I use a CEDAR declicker/decrackler [bought cheap off of ebay] to first precondition them [remove the crackles and pops] before digitizing them. I myself can hear no difference in essential sound quality before or after they are digitized [other than the absence of impulse noises which the digital CEDAR units do a bang-up job of removing. they do not sound harsher or more metallic. if anything they are FAR EASIER to listen to sans crackling noise. I am not one of those gifted aspies with the facility for "not hearing" surface noise, I cannot tune it out.
anyways, records are generally a pain, in that most of them have surface noise issues and/or warping/off-center pressings resulting in audible wow and flutter. a lot of them were pressed indifferently with inferior vinyl compounds or were ruined by previous owners with mistracking phono equipment. just one play with a misaligned or blunted needle will ruin a record. I do wish I could afford the ELP laser turntable and megabuck record cleaning machine that goes with it, but both of them cost as much as a new car. so I make do with software solutions to the various aural problems I mentioned.

Willard, the way I see things, this old world is big enough for all kinds. So, if you like vinyl, I say the more power to you.

I will agree with you that vinyl is a particularly stable compound chemically, and will last for longer than we will. I say this as one with more than a casual knowledge of materials preservation.

But it is the case that phonograph records produce music through a process of mechanical abrasion, no matter how slight that abrasion may be. Over time, as Blabby notes, play will take its toll. A good analogy would be to take a good look at your pocket change. There are quarters and dimes that have been in circulation since 1965. Despite generally not being subjected to terribly rough treatment (i.e., being handled, thrown into cash registers or pockets, or money bags), these coins are worn down through the same kind of mechanical abrasion, and are made of much tougher stuff than vinyl.

CD's, on the other hand, are played with a laser beam, which means nothing more than light has to touch the CD to make it play. But if you are looking for a good argument against CD's, it is something called laser rot, which destroys the vinyl coating on CD's in much the same way that the dashboard of an old car will crack and discolor after many years in the sun. The only way to avoid this problem is with CD's with gold, rather than aluminum particles, and then coated with glass. This is obviously very expensive, and not terribly practical.

Audiophiles claim that MP's aren't as good as CD's or vinyl. I will take them at their word, since I'm hard pressed to tell any difference. MP3's are my preference more out of convenience than anything else. I have tens of thousands of songs on MP3's in different genres. When I want to listen to music, it's only a matter of selecting a genre and either selecting shuffle or selecting which particular songs or artists I want to listen to.

Though I am listening to music on a set of Bose computer speakers that are so good I can hear background studio voices and other noises, I do miss the big cabinet speakers of old. There is nothing like the bass that comes out of them that you can feel as well as hear.

Happy listening.

I normally don't care much for bose products [generally overpriced and underperforming] but I take exception to the bose cinemate sr-1 soundbar [which I got used and relatively cheap off of amazon]- this product sounds for all the world much wider [as wide as the listening room from almost any position in it up to right in front of it] than its apparent size. it is easily the best-sounding product bose makes and is almost worth the money. anyways, I digress. compressed audio formats [ones that use lossy compression AKA "perceptual coding" can sound acceptable over mass-market transducers, but when you listen to them on lab-grade [audiophile] equipment you can quickly hear what the compression has taken out or distorted. this applies even with the mildest data reduction rates of up to 355kb/s with variable compression rate, which represents roughly a 4:1 reduction in file size. I can hear the results even with inexpensive bargain headphones. the problems I failed to adequately describe earlier [with vinyl and shellac] are-

*surface noise- even the quietest virgin vinyl played with a top-notch table and shibata stylus, has a characteristic "whoosh" and roar and rumble in the background at anything approaching live sound pressure levels, not subtle at all. and of course all the crackling and hiss.
*cumulative mistracking damage [from even just one play on bad equipment], which makes for a characteristic "lisping" quality especially on vocals.
*poor pressing quality, with molded in warps and bowing and lumps of junk in the vinyl itself, causing thumps and pops and frequency modulation of the music, or even skipping from the groove.
*having to religiously clean them and apply antistatic treatment ["xerostat" gun] with each play.
*having to have a HEPA filtered totally dust-free room for listening, any other environment will greatly accelerate the deterioration of vinyl and shellac.

digital, OTOH, avoids all these problems, and with 2x-upsampling can sound very fine [and neutral] indeed.

While I like music, my hearing isn't all that good. The Bose speakers were expensive, at least compared with other computer speaker systems. The reason I got them is that a friend has a set and really like them. To me, they sound good. But then, my hearing isn't that acute as a lot of other people's.

bose equipment is designed to be appreciated by non-audiophiles, which is not a bad thing. anything that enables music to have as wide an audience as possible is only good. it is just that one of my aspie perseverations is sound. all my life I have been acutely aware of the subtleties of sound and so naturally when I listen to high-grade sounds on high-grade equipment it makes me ol' neurons light right up. I also used to sell audio equipment for a brief time, but I could not handle the BS that is endemic in the audio industry.

If I may ask, what kind of setup do you have? A business associate I knew had a McIntosh setup. Everything had tubes. He paid a fortune for his setup.

i would have to win the lotto to even be allowed in the same room as a macintosh. as for tubes, that is what I auditioned some magnapan speakers on, they had a golden sound, those SET amps, but they also doubled as room heaters. bob carver came up with something he called "a transfer function" so that his transistor amps could emulate the sound of an SET amp, and to my ears they sounded about as sweet. I used to have a pair of old magnapans powered by a bruiser of an old amp that put out about 200 watts per channel peak, and those maggies would suck up every watt and then some. those speakers were very demanding not only of juice but also of placement, both of the speakers themselves as well as the listener, note listener singular- their sweet spot was about as wide as the listener's head and even just a few inches of movement to either side would collapse the stereo image to that side. but if you keep your head in a virtual vice and just sit and listen to 'em they basically are akin to an aural hologram of the original recording venue. monophonic recordings would seem to play back in a tight vertical slice of sound smack dab in the center, but well-made stereo recordings [not multimike but with something akin to ORTF miking] would seem to float in mid-air over the entire front half of the listening room. I heard this effect very vividly when I auditioned all the maggies at definitive hifi [seattle] back in 1983. this was before CD, and they were playing a mildly worn direct-to-disc recording of a pipe organ recorded in a church someplace, and it sounded by god like I was in that church! all the ambience was right there! IOW nothing was subtracted from the recording in playback, and the funny thing, was that in terms of coloration or additional sound of the playback equipment or recording media, the record surface noise seemed to float like a cloud in the middle of the room between me and the speakers and added an almost corporeal opacity to an otherwise transparent recording and playback. all I could afford was the compact models, the tympani III that I heard was about as expensive as a new car [with all the associated equipment needed to power them]. the compact model if set up correctly, had most of that essentially ethereal sound quality and was relatively a bargain. it only lacked in the deep bass for which a subwoofer is necessary. that is what I used to have. now I make do with the aforementioned bose soundbar and 2x-upsampling CD player [mathematically extrapolates a 96khz signal from the 44.1k signal]. the bose unit surprised the dickens out of me in the showroom, in that I heard sounds coming from either side of me [180 degrees] just from that little soundbar, even when I was standing off to the side of it! it also does a passable job reproducing pipe organ [my fave sound in the universe] which is surprising given the compact size [as big as two stacked shoeboxes] of the bass bin that comes with it. they did their psychoacoustic homework on that thing, I will say, It is audio trickery, aural sorcery. but it works. I could not listen to the maggies [they are in storage] in my little tin can that I had to move into when my folks passed away last decade. only have room for little things like the bose. as far as phono playback, I have a separate setup just for that- an old Garrard 78 rpm table for the 10" records with a basic 2.5 elliptical stylus shure cartridge, and a denon servotracer with a basic elliptical stylus AT cartridge, a good match for my old records. I use a Marantz A/D converter/digital toolbox to digitize the signal so my CEDAR dcx declicker and crx decrackler can remove the impulse noises [got 'em off of ebay over the last decade, for a substantial discount over new, when I was still working- they do the impulse noise elimination better than anything else on the market]. I ate ramen until those babies were paid for. I then put the sound on an SD card which I put into my SD card slot on my laptop and then I do additional sound work before I burn a CDR. I am glad I got most of that stuff when I was able to work, otherwise I could never afford it now, ramen or no.

Yes, this fellow's stereo could certainly heat up the listening room. It also took time for that stuff to warm up. He also said that it was a challenge finding some of the tubes.

Interestingly, much modern tube technology comes from Soviet research. The US largely abandoned tubes in favor of solid state electronics back in the sixties, and little research was done in the West. The Soviets kept developing tube technology. Solid state is generally much superior, but music is one use for tubes, including electric guitars.

As far as the rest of it goes, you are far beyond my simple ears.

What do you think are the best computer speakers? What kind of music do you listen to?

the soviets were very pragmatic about some things. almost nothing can beat the sound of an SET amp. they have a euphonic coloration in the trebles that gives them an extra zing which, when combined with a warm overall balance makes them sound golden and makes the bulk of transistorized amps sound dull and cold in comparison. but here is an interesting factoid- back in the late 80s the Canadian national research council did a double-blind test of golden-eared listeners' ability to discern differences between different amps, and a wide variety of amps were tested this way, including both high-end SET amps as well as low-end consumer transistors including a 45 watt per channel pioneer receiver. the consensus findings? the pioneer beat all the other amps in terms of overall listenability, response smoothness, accuracy and dynamics. and it was the least expensive of the bunch!
anyways, I digress. the best puter speakers I can think of, are what professional recording studios use, and those would be mackies. they are neutral, full-bodied but bulky in that they are meant as "near-field" monitors but they do function as puter speakers these days as almost all studios have gone to computers. if you want something more compact and traditionally "computer" then take your pick among many. the most neutral ones I found were made by boston acoustics. don't expect much deep bass, though. the bose cinemate sr1 would work if you had the on the wall in front of your computer workstation, just plug 'em into the headphone jack and turn up the computer system volume, and In this capacity they would certainly be the best-sounding "computer" speakers you ever heard, with relatively full deep bass you won't get from regular puter speakers.

This is the set of Bose I have, except mine are about three years old now. They don't have deep base, or fill the room with music as much as I would like, but they sound almost as good now as the day I bought them:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/bose-compan ... nsionType={adtype}:{network}&s_kwcid=PTC!pla!{keyword}!{matchtype}!{adwords_producttargetid}!{network}!{ifmobile:M}!{creative}&kpid=7996403&k_clickid=608e56eb-89a0-3f49-d284-00005058f5e8

those are not bad. I could live with the for general music listening. you could improve the bass by placing the bin in a corner under or close beside your computer desk, if you are close to a corner. you could improve the "room filling" aspect if you separated the speakers more, especially if your puter workstation is in the corner, that will Improve the angular dispersion of the sound and make it more room-filling. if you do both those things you may be pleasantly surprised.