So many opinions and suggestions, many good ones.
My reaction to al of this; As some of you know I, over the last year, decided to dig out my old 2055 Kenwood turntable, all my albums, and decide if vinyl was something that would interest me again. Lots of issues, bad ones, and began correcting one thing at a time. Still not convinced, but intrigued enough to delve further, I purchased a very modest new TT; a Pro-Ject Carbon Debut, replaced the platter with an acrylic one, installed the Grado red cartridge I purchased for the old Kenwood, an inexpensive Schiit Mani phono stage, put the damn table in a tray of sand per millercarbon’s recommendation, but one of my most important purchases, an inexpensive record clamp. I also reinforced the floor below my equipment and TT with a couple 2x4’s to help stabilize the wood floor framing. And a Spin-Clean record cleaner. All in all, a very modest return to vinyl.
Why? My CD’s with my transport or streaming through my DAC sounded fine. Why go through this? Well, because after 50 years, I came to realize that after listening over the past year that, yes, there is indeed a ‘magic’ of vinyl that is hard to explain. For well over 40 years of moving onto cassettes, CD’s, and now streaming, I saw no reason to deal with the inherent problems with vinyl again, particularly the maintenance, noise, clicks, pops, cleaning, etc. Well, I will admit, I may have been wrong.
Currently I listen to mostly classical music, where the music can be extremely quiet to crescendo’s, I am very picky about noise on those albums, and it does get frustrating, but much of this I can blame on myself as I’m buying used older classical vinyl, which is a crap shoot at best. But, I’m loving it regardless. That is all correctable, it’s just a matter of how much money I’m willing spend on future albums, my set-up, and the extra care to treat this format properly.
I’m in the process of cataloging all my music on Discogs; vinyl, cassettes, and CD’s. I’ve gone through all my CD’s and cassettes, and now going through all my old vinyl from the 60’s and 70’s. Well, for me and my friends in those days, we ‘partied’, didn’t take great care of our vinyl, stuff scattered around and unprotected while listening, it wasn’t something we over concerned ourselves with as that was the only real medium of its day (besides 8 track tapes). Or, I was just a little kid putting (throwing) my oldest Beatle albums on the family console stereo unit without a care. And going through all those albums is rough, as the lack care for them shows.
But, the biggest take-away for me is through this whole process, regardless of its imperfections at times, is the vinyl sounds better to me. I’m not smitten with vinyl again, as it was the only real source at one time I purchased most of this music. But directly comparing to the other formats (and I do have some of the same albums on multiple formats), it’s sounds better to me even with its perceived imperfections.
It just sounds ‘right’, and unless I’m willing to take huge steps cost wise to try and get rid of those imperfections completely (I would say that is impossible), I try not to compare to those other formats, and simply enjoy vinyl for what it is, and right now, I prefer it, and understand my current limitations for it to sound better. But if I had a choice between a CD and a vinyl album, I’ll likely choose the vinyl and just enjoy the music because it sounds more like music to me.
