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arguments against starting a vinyl collection?

Hi,

I have a pretty elaborate setup for cd playback. I use the emmlabs cdsd transport and emmlabs dcc2se dac with the dartzeel amplifier and the wonderful evolution acoustic mm2 speakers with powered woofers.

I own roughly 2600 cds and about 175 sacds.

The vinyl crowd still swears of course that great digital playback cannot equal vinyl so have been somewhat tempted to dip my toes into analog and get a turntable and phono preamp. Here is what is holding me back!

Please note that I would not get vinyl to find obscure vinyl only vintage or otherwise recordings.

It would be mostly targeted at recordings that sound better on vinyl than cd.

Here is the arguments against:

1. hard to find a turntable and phono preamp that is class A and thus as good as my emmlabs cd equipment without spending serious bucks?

2. Even if I could find a reasonably priced class A turntable, the best sound requires more skill than a newbie like I would have? In other words, the better turntables are harder to setup and use?

3. A lot of heavy weight albums are double albums so you need to switch sides three times?

4. You need to clean the vinyl before every listen?

5. If you listen 15 times to a particular vinyl album you will likely begin to hear some deteoriation?

6. Even with a good setup, you will probably still hear pops and hiss on many vinyl albums even some well mastered ones?

7. I will not hear for modern recordings a big difference between vinyl and cds given that my emmlabs equipment is so good and I cannot afford a $10,000 phono preamp and a $25,000 turntable/cartridge....

thanks

Michael
128x128karmapolice
karmapolice's avatar
karmapolice OP
254 posts
 
I reiterate that I put question marks at the end of the things that were holding me back because of their possibility not as exclamations that this is what I believe to be true!

Michael
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carbonti
10 posts
 
My last setup for digital was also a emmlabs dcc2 (not SE) fed FLAC files from a linux server. This was my apogee setup as I worked my way up the digital upgrade path for redbook only. What I found was some vinyl rigs I'd heard were as good or better to my ears over my digi setup. The digi sound was very good indeed but it didn't often enough grab me in the guts like hearing good vinyl did.

And I agree with Kthomas in that the vinyl rigs I was listening to had far less expense than my emmlabs setup. It was then I decided, predisposed to vinyl if you will, to stop chasing digital upgrades. Started building a vinyl setup and buying used & new LPs. I still keep digital because some new music never makes it to LP so it's a neccessary evil but I downsized the dcc2 to an electro ecd1.

I find vinyl far more satisfying in that the sound signature can be tweaked without wholesale changes, well if you don't consider carts and phonopre's wholesale changes. With digital, it was swapping out a DAC and that's that.

Some items on your list are intrinsic to vinyl so when viewed through a digi-based prism it's no wonder they come across sounding as arguments against LPs. But go have a listen to a good vinyl rig before being convinced that it's an arcane medium and not worth the hassle (relative to digi). Then you'll know.
xiekitchen
821 posts
 
We seem to be having a lot of these vinyl vs cd threads lately. I don't think Vinyl is overwhemingly "superior" to cd. You do not have to spend $$$10K to get a good phono unit (but it wouldn't hurt!) or that much on table and cart...I'll bet for $8K total for table, cart & phono pre you can have something very satisfying. Also I find also once you really clean an Lp the first time, you don't have to clean it again or at least for a while. With properly cleaned records, stylus and properly set up cartridge parameters, vinyl does not deteriate that quickly.
karmapolice's avatar
karmapolice OP
254 posts
 
tvad,

I saw that you like porcupine tree lighthouse sun.....I just listened to it tonite and oh my god it was so yummy......great mastering to in my humble opinion....

by the way for other out there, I personally don't believe that any one medium is intrinsically better than another. If I was starting from scratch now, I would probably go with vinyl even. At some point, I will probably add vinyl but my speaker has one more upgrade that may make it even better and been itching to try the audio research ref 3 preamp so it just might be awhile till I get to the phono/turntable addition....I do think $7-8K is probably necessary to get comparable vinyl nirvana (table and preamp) to fairly compare with my digital bliss.

Michael
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