Why vinyl?

If you hear a well produced/mastered piece of vinyl and the same well produced/mastered piece on CD in a good system, I believe you will have your answer? Is vinyl more troublesome than just popping in a CD and pressing play? Well hell yes but, for audiophiles convenience is not the #1 priority. Sound quality is. There are some really good digital front ends out there but, for me, they can't compete with a high quality vinyl setup.

Regardless of the content of the articles, the thing that poped out at me, was that the anti-vinyl article was written in 2006, whereas the pro-vinyl article was written, a year later, in 2007. Apparently as time goes by, things are getting better for vinyl, and worse for CD.

As far as the content of the articles, I disagree with both of them. In the first article, obviously this guy is out of touch, as the current vinyl boom is not being driven by us audiophiles, (we are way too few in number, IMHO), but instead is being driven by the college crowd, who, for some reason, (hopefully, because they sound better than CDs!), have determined that vinyl is worth buying, and hence the industry is now producing it in greater numbers than they have for the past decade. And in the second article, personally, I think CDs will remain the industry standard means of distributing music in a non-downloadable format. (At least for the near future, until something cheaper and smaller come along anyway.)

My two cents worth anyway.

I am into vinyl and believe it to be better, for all the well-known reasons, but there are serious quality control issues with vinyl - my sense is that there are more 'weak links' between a good master and a good LP than between the master and a CD. there is some seriously bad sounding new vinyl out there, so it's important that there are forums like audiogon where people can discuss these matters and warn each other of the junk. I have bought great sounding LPs that were just low-price, indie rock (bonnie prince billy's 'master and everyone') as well as overpriced 'audiophile' LPs (waterlily's Imrat Khan doing 'Ajmer') that are pretty much unlistenable.

the generalization that one is better than the other breaks down when you compare specific recordings. both have instances of winners and losers. having both formats in a stereo simply gives you choice, and the ability to find music which is exclusive to one or the other. as an artform, the long player, be it cd or lp, is fun to collect, and each have their place.

Musicslug is right to some degree. However, there have always been quality control issues - both on LP and on CD. Why would we have Mofi reissues of standard LP's if the originals were perfect? Many, many CD's are poorly mastered. Some of mine are only playable on the truck system - i.e. Cher's Greatest Hits (OK; I have no taste).

to me, the hallmark of either a good CD system or a good vinyl system is that I can hear what's reproduced - and that includes a poor sound stage, compression of the music signal, and the subway rumbling under the church the baroque quartet was recorded in.

Just my two cents,