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Vinyl sounds great for increasing one's hipster cred, but last time I heard a vinyl album it sounded like, well, crap. The author seems to be comparing the sou

Vinyl sounds great for increasing one's hipster cred, but last time I heard a vinyl album it sounded like, well, crap. The author seems to be comparing the sound of the record shop's nicest player to an MP3, of god knows what bit-rate, played through ear buds. Maybe what he's really discovered is that a nice hi-fi system goes a long way and he should get more disk space for his audio files and go lossless.

dmix 14y ago
A ton of audiophiles with $5000 stereo systems still prefer the analog vinyl sound over digital if you read the magazines/forums. It's not quite adventurous or hipster to make that statement.
- bartl 14y ago
  And some audiophiles would pay up to $500 for a wooden volume knob: http://boingboing.net/2005/11/07/astronomically-overp.html http://boingboing.net/2005/11/07/astronomically-overp.html. I don't quite trust those people's judgement.
- PeterWhittaker 14y ago
  The same people who buy towers to lift their cables from the floor, perchance? Unless that $5000 rig is a perfectly engineered house (which it may well be, I admit), it don't make a diff. Especially if the furniture moves, a dog comes into the room, there's movement outside, a butterfly alights in Brazil.... There's a lot shared between oenophiles and audiophiles whose perceptions are seriously skewed by their expectations - as are all of ours, of course.
Agathos 14y ago
Now that vinyl is the exclusive domain of hipster audiophiles, the quality of the vinyl experience has increased a hundredfold. Households like the one I grew up in, with our scratched-up records and the player we picked up at Caldor, have no reason to miss it.
- JasonFruit 14y ago
  Well, yes and no. I had my vast collection of second-hand classical records, and I still hold that string sound from the best of the vinyl ones surpasses anything off a CD. Whether that was a difference in studio techniques and philosophy is another matter — I imagine that Walter Trampler was miked differently in 1975 than Yuri Bashmet in 2001, for example — but the sound from my prize vinyl was warm, full, and smooth, without a hint of the near-imperceptible metallic rattle I hear in even the best of my CDs. I may, of course, be imagining it. But I still bear a grudge against the people who stole my collection. I should work on that. EDIT: I'm certainly no audiophile, and my equipment was nothing special.
SageRaven 14y ago
For shits and giggles, I snagged a vinyl rip of Simon and Garfunkle's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" in 24-bit 96KHz FLAC format online, just to see what all the fuss was about. Some guys who do serious vinyl rips spare no expense, using pristine vinyl on high-end rigs, washing the disk before the first play, etc.. I don't pretend to understand all the jargon. Now I obviously couldn't perform scientifically sound listening tests on my own. But I did do repeated back-to-back plays (of snippets and whole song) comparing the 16-bit 44.1 KHz FLAC rip I performed on my S&G's "Greatest Hits" CD to the 24-bit vinyl rip. And as skeptical as I was, the sound is a little warmer and seems to have more spacial volume (I'm no audiophile, so my terms are probably making people wince) on vinyl than on the CD. I am using a low-end $60 Sony head-set and all audio from my PC competes with background clicks and chirps from my built-in audio jack due to bad poor grounding in the motherboard (I assume). I can think of 3 reasons the vinyl rip sounded better to me: 1) It is, in fact, a better sound; 2) The master used to produce the vinyl source was better than the one used for the CD I have; or 3) It's all in my head. I mostly ruled out #3 because I snagged a few more 24-bit vinyl rips to see if they were any better then my CD sources, but I deleted them due to poor sound. That all said, regardless of the technical details, I am quite fond of my new 24-bit 96KHz copy of "The Boxer". This song is amazing in its musical layering and depth, and the ever-so-slight improvements I personally hear from the new rip was well worth the bother.
- jff 14y ago
  Put several instances of each song into a playlist and hit "shuffle". Try to identify which is which. That's the best way to make sure it's a real difference, not just your head playing tricks.
  - glomph 14y ago
    Agreed. Blind tests are the only reliable way. If nothing else tests in this area have managed to show is that people are not good at judging without bias if they know which is which.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Vinyl is an analog system, as such it suffers from noise sources along the transmission path and so it can easily 'sound like crap' and 'sound exquisite' depending on the path it takes from the recording to your ear. I've still got a turntable, and I think I have exactly one cartridge left for it (that was the unit that contained the track sensor (the needle) and signal conditioning circuit). My hearing however is such that I can't tell the difference between easily between a 192Kbps MP3 and the analog equivalent. :-) That said, there is some research that the inner ear is not as oblivious to overlapping frequencies as the original compression algorithms assumed. I don't know if anyone has yet done a rigorous study on it to figure out if that is the 'source' of much of the audiophile complaints or not.

dmix 14y ago

A ton of audiophiles with $5000 stereo systems still prefer the analog vinyl sound over digital if you read the magazines/forums. It's not quite adventurous or hipster to make that statement.

bartl 14y ago
And some audiophiles would pay up to $500 for a wooden volume knob: http://boingboing.net/2005/11/07/astronomically-overp.html http://boingboing.net/2005/11/07/astronomically-overp.html. I don't quite trust those people's judgement.
PeterWhittaker 14y ago
The same people who buy towers to lift their cables from the floor, perchance? Unless that $5000 rig is a perfectly engineered house (which it may well be, I admit), it don't make a diff. Especially if the furniture moves, a dog comes into the room, there's movement outside, a butterfly alights in Brazil.... There's a lot shared between oenophiles and audiophiles whose perceptions are seriously skewed by their expectations - as are all of ours, of course.

Agathos 14y ago

Now that vinyl is the exclusive domain of hipster audiophiles, the quality of the vinyl experience has increased a hundredfold. Households like the one I grew up in, with our scratched-up records and the player we picked up at Caldor, have no reason to miss it.

JasonFruit 14y ago
Well, yes and no. I had my vast collection of second-hand classical records, and I still hold that string sound from the best of the vinyl ones surpasses anything off a CD. Whether that was a difference in studio techniques and philosophy is another matter — I imagine that Walter Trampler was miked differently in 1975 than Yuri Bashmet in 2001, for example — but the sound from my prize vinyl was warm, full, and smooth, without a hint of the near-imperceptible metallic rattle I hear in even the best of my CDs. I may, of course, be imagining it. But I still bear a grudge against the people who stole my collection. I should work on that. EDIT: I'm certainly no audiophile, and my equipment was nothing special.

SageRaven 14y ago

For shits and giggles, I snagged a vinyl rip of Simon and Garfunkle's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" in 24-bit 96KHz FLAC format online, just to see what all the fuss was about. Some guys who do serious vinyl rips spare no expense, using pristine vinyl on high-end rigs, washing the disk before the first play, etc.. I don't pretend to understand all the jargon. Now I obviously couldn't perform scientifically sound listening tests on my own. But I did do repeated back-to-back plays (of snippets and whole song) comparing the 16-bit 44.1 KHz FLAC rip I performed on my S&G's "Greatest Hits" CD to the 24-bit vinyl rip. And as skeptical as I was, the sound is a little warmer and seems to have more spacial volume (I'm no audiophile, so my terms are probably making people wince) on vinyl than on the CD. I am using a low-end $60 Sony head-set and all audio from my PC competes with background clicks and chirps from my built-in audio jack due to bad poor grounding in the motherboard (I assume). I can think of 3 reasons the vinyl rip sounded better to me: 1) It is, in fact, a better sound; 2) The master used to produce the vinyl source was better than the one used for the CD I have; or 3) It's all in my head. I mostly ruled out #3 because I snagged a few more 24-bit vinyl rips to see if they were any better then my CD sources, but I deleted them due to poor sound. That all said, regardless of the technical details, I am quite fond of my new 24-bit 96KHz copy of "The Boxer". This song is amazing in its musical layering and depth, and the ever-so-slight improvements I personally hear from the new rip was well worth the bother.

jff 14y ago
Put several instances of each song into a playlist and hit "shuffle". Try to identify which is which. That's the best way to make sure it's a real difference, not just your head playing tricks.
- glomph 14y ago
  Agreed. Blind tests are the only reliable way. If nothing else tests in this area have managed to show is that people are not good at judging without bias if they know which is which.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Vinyl is an analog system, as such it suffers from noise sources along the transmission path and so it can easily 'sound like crap' and 'sound exquisite' depending on the path it takes from the recording to your ear. I've still got a turntable, and I think I have exactly one cartridge left for it (that was the unit that contained the track sensor (the needle) and signal conditioning circuit). My hearing however is such that I can't tell the difference between easily between a 192Kbps MP3 and the analog equivalent. :-) That said, there is some research that the inner ear is not as oblivious to overlapping frequencies as the original compression algorithms assumed. I don't know if anyone has yet done a rigorous study on it to figure out if that is the 'source' of much of the audiophile complaints or not.