Is analog & vinyl anoying? Is it worht it.

I gave up on Vinyl in 1985, that was the last time I bought a Vinyl album. Clearly I am blessed with "tin ears". I know all to well that Vinyl can sound excellent - I used to buy Japanese pressings and 12" 45 rpm singles whenever I could. However, in all honesty, I have never looked back. I have never been nostlagic or stuck in the past about things and my tastes in music kept moving forward too.

I will admit that CD Loudness Wars has become a real problem lately. This is the biggest drawback of digital - too much tweaking in the studios with Pro Tools etc. to get a compressed, in your face, distorted, loud, unpleasant sounding CD. (even in the 60's, compression to sound loud had become a problem with vinyl too, however, the analog medium remains that much harder to tweak & abuse)

As I said before. If you do not really care much for music, CDs are fine. Vinyl is for people that really like and enjoy music to a high degree. You obviously don't.

I often agree with your astute comments Pauly. However, this time you have me bewildered.

Surely people who like and enjoy music to a high degree would choose to listen to CD's or whatever popular medium of choice with the most widely available selection.

Gregadd's point about additional cost, limited music selections, and listening time lost tinkering around with previous generation technology is a fair one. Even if, as you contest, Vinyl always sounds better, it is certainly not without major drawbacks.

I have some lossy compressed iTunes music store stuff that sounds great when burned to redbook (despite the lossy compression). This is not always the case but I don't go round slamming iTunes as crap for non music lovers!

Anyone who cares to download Grace Jones "Slave to the Rhythm" Hot Blooded Mix from iTunes (and burn it to a redbook CD to play on their system) will be pleasantly surprised at the recording quality! Go on try it! It may be a bit over engineered but that is the recording engineer not the AAC 128 Kbit per second compression.

Now - try to find this track in a bricks and mortar CD store or try to find it on Vinyl!

So why did I download this poorer quality file?...because I love music!!! - so I do this kind of thing all the time to supplement my library. Music lovers hear something on the radio and bingo they impulsively want to get it. Music lovers often want all the alternate versions of a song/symphony that they like (live, re-mix, 12" monster mix, radio-edit, different venues, different conductors/orchestras etc.)

Given a modest quality Hi-Fi, music lovers realize that the musicians/venue/recording/mastering studio actually has a bigger impact on the sound & musical quality than the media it arrives; tape, Vinyl, CD, or iTunes. Just my two cents from 'ol "tin ears"!

Whart,

What always gets me is the sheer explosiveness of the kickdrum at my local club, even when the band is just warming up. I don't know of any system that recreates this effectively- it is not just a question of 'loud,' or 'dynamic' or 'deep' but all of them, and more.

The vast majority of what is commercially available has been compressed in the recording, mixing and mastering process(especially drums!) - often little more than 10 db of dynamic range is left. So unless you have an unusally dynamic recording you may never hear that live kick drum sound. I would add that professional audio equipment is specifically designed to faithfully handle the extreme dynamic range and loud levels of real instruments (mostly sound reinforcement gear at concerts and studio main farfield monitors - but believe me, properly set up, these can sound quite realistic, even on a kick drum.)

Eldartford,

04-18-07: Eldartford
I really question the need to clean CDs.

I agree with you. However my personal experience with CD rot did leave my faith in the robustness of CD's slightly shaken. (CD rot is pitting damage occuring on the silver CD layer of a badly manufactured disc which corrodes from the inside over ten years (below the lacquer surface)

What struck me as very odd was that the affected CD still played without skipping but with audible distorting scratchy noise (no skips)...so much for error correction! I must emphasize that this was one CD out of thousands - so this is by no means indicative of CD's in general. However, I was expecting a bad CD to NOT play at all!!!

Eldartford,

Actually I just answered my own question on the last post. So I thought I would share it.

Cross-Interleaved Reed Solomon Coding

It states

INTERPOLATION: If a major error occurs and a sample cannot be perfectly reconstructed by the error control circuitry, it is possible to "guess" the content of the sample; that is, obtain an approximation by interpolating it off the neighbouring audio samples. While this concealment will not "fix" the error, it will make it inaudible, offering a graceful degradation of audio quality as clicks and pops are avoided.

A corroded CD with errors from additional random pits over the surface would be a candidate for "interpolation" - as the data will be consistently affected rather than in "error bursts". (Corrosion being a very different situation from a scratch, dirt or thumb print on the surface)

I suspect my rotten CD was being interpolated in regions where data was bad for more than 2.4 mm.

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Now back to the Shine-Ola comments. Armed with the above informaton from Wikipedia it seems that Shine-Ola could cause an audible improvement if the CD surface was dirty enough to cause interpolation but not cause skipping. This situation would mean that the CD would sound OK to the listener (no skipping) but would still benefit from being cleaned because there was excessive interpolation going on (excessive interpolation would definitely be audible, at least I can hear on a CD with CD Rot)

However, cleaning is cleaning and there is no reason to suspect that Shine-Ola offers the only effective way to clean a CD.

BTW: I don't handle my CD's much, as I only ever feed them into the machine once and they stay there. So I may not need to clean my CD's - but others might benefit from keeping them clean.

Tvad,

I don't question your observation but it begs the question why shouldn't a brand new CD play properly from the get go?

Did you try other CDR's - like the clear silver ones that look more like regular CD's ( at least superficially)