CDs Over Vinyl Any Day

[Pat D]

pat,

i just looked at your equip list and it seems that from all indications you have the right stuff to hear what i am going to relate. perhaps some of us should be saying "dynamic CONTRAST" instead of dynamic RANGE in regard to superior dynamics with vinyl.

the JUMP factor is many times more evident using vinyl playback than with rbcd. if you may have noticed, there has been a lot of banter about compression being too routinely used on cd but also with the reasoning behind it (SALE-ABILITY to radio types, louder is better).

needless to say, i dont believe that RBcd is superior, especially in sound. it has the potential in many areas to be so but usually doesnt live up to that paradigm. where it falters is in hi-frequency reproduction. PLEASE dont recite the nyquist theorem baloney. not true, not relevant to any real discussion about ACCURATE hi freq playback.

i too have a grace F9E, a good reason to keep your address secret. mine was bought new by me and used often enough to stay usable. i just wish i had gotten a ruby stylus (cantilever) for it before they became unobtanium.

Are you a mathematician who has disproved the Nyquist theorem, hifi? If not, how do you know it's not true?

Do you use Stylast?

[RGA]

it's not worth it.

[Lensman]

I'll take CDs over vinyl any day. I've got both, including the same recordings (one on vinyl, the other on CD), and the CDs sound better (crisper, clearer, quieter). Do an A-B comparison of Beatles records, and this becomes very apparent. Yes, I still listen to my LPs on my Thorens TD166 mk2 (coupled with a Sumiko Pearl cartridge - no wonder the CDs sound better; is that what you're thinking?). Ergonomically, CDs make more sense, and, as I've said, they sound better - bringing to life some 1930s opera recordings (like act 2 of Die Valcarie with Lauritz Melchoir) that sound like 1930s opera recordings on LP. And I certainly don't miss the clicks and pops which, since CDs came available, are almost intolerable. Go ahead, flame me.

I'll have to admit, I thought vinyl dead for some time after I got my CD player. CDs have no annoying static crackle, no pops from bad pressings, and require no meticulous cleanings to play them. When I got my first CD player, I went out and started buying CD versions of albums I liked and just didn't really play my records anymore. Then I started hearing about how "audiophiles" were returning the vinyl in droves because they "sounded better." I was really dubious of that and figured that trend would die after a while. But it didn't, it grew instead. So I got curious a few years ago and decided to compare some recordings I had on both CD and vinyl.

Now bear in mind I've never had the funds to sink into really expensive audio gear, so I was basing my evaluation on what I heard off a Radio Shack LAB-2100 turntable (linear tracking, direct drive) and a Kenwood DP-R894 CD changer. Not utter crap, but absolutely not even remotely high-end. So cheap equipment combined with my pre-existing doubts on the issue left me completely surprised to find I actually could hear a difference. None of it was major, and I really couldn't tell definitively that the sounds of instruments, voices, etc. sounded any different. But I did notice two very subtle things. First, when I listened to something like an orchestra on CD, I heard the orchestra. When I listened to the orchestra on vinyl, I heard the orchestra, and I could tell the size of the room the orchestra was recorded in. Second, vinyl somehow sounded more "comfortable" than CD. This is less tangible, but might be related to being able to better define the recording space.

I'm no sound engineer, so I have no idea why I heard differences or even what the differences actually could be attributed to. If I had to guess, I'd say maybe since a sound wave on vinyl is analog, it's a continuous curve. But on a digital CD, the sound wave is a closely approximated sound wave and this difference is just enough to lose some of the secondary sounds reverberating in the recording space. But really I don't know. I do, however, now believe vinyl can sound better than CD. Though on my budget I may never really know how much.

I was so surprised by the results that I had a friend over who has decent hearing and he heard the same things. Though he was surprised as well, he prefers to spend his money on the latest computer technology - not audio gear. It's just not that important to him. So now that the convenience of CDs are available, he'll NEVER buy a record again - despite what he heard. Perhaps if you have recordings of the same thing on both mediums, you might try listening to them again focusing exclusively on things in the background.

Regardless, there's no denying the convenience of CDs. Like you, I prefer to buy virtually all my recordings on CD. But I now look at vinyl vs. CD like film vs. digital pictures. Film grain still has more resolution than digital. Loaded into a professional camera wielded by an experienced photographer, it'll beat digital every time. But average users with average equipment will probably get BETTER photos off a digital camera. And there's no denying how much more convenient they are to use.