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Hi everyone, this is my first post here. This is a wonderful forum of a type I've been searching for, where one can be an "audiophile" but - a rational audiophile. I've been a denizen of many audio forums over the years as I enjoy swapping subjective impressions of gear, in particular speakers. However, I often argue against audiophile snake oil claims and defend blind testing in various audio forums, to the inevitable hostility of the purely subjective audiophiles. I meant to make a proper introductory post but I think this may have to do for now. It's long because it's meant to be as much an "introduction/my audio journey" post along the way to answering the OP question).
Turntables - help me understand the appeal?
I'll get to my explanation for the appeal vinyl/turntables currently hold with me, which includes some of the explanations already given. But first, as I've been fascinated with the vinyl revival I've followed tons of stories, comment sections, forum discussions etc all over the place. And one thing I notice is that there is a tendency among those who are
not "in to" vinyl to reason from their own lack of interest to rather simplistic (and often dismissive) "explanations" for why other people must like vinyl: "
It's clearly ONLY about nostalgia" or "
It's ONLY about being a hipster or looking cool" etc.
These explanations really miss the full spectrum of motivations people have...for anything...let along something like buying vinyl records.
(And we tend to not reason well about other people's motivations, especially if it concerns their interest in something about which we are personally dismissive).
Vinyl buyers, young and old, have a variety of motivations from, yes, nostalgia to "I like the sound better" to "Iike the physical aspect" to "I like supporting artists I love by paying for their physical products" along with many other motivations, and with any individual likely having a mixture of any number of motivations. If you really pay attention to why vinyl has become so popular again, simplistic catch-all explanations just won't cover it.
That off my chest...
....here's the appeal vinyl/turntables currently hold for me. It starts first with the appeal I found with digital:
I'm 55, grew up listening to records like many here. Once CDs came along I hopped on board pretty quickly and never really looked back in terms of the ease of use, sonic quality. My "audiophile" systems have always been based upon CD players/DACs as a source and I've loved the sound. I did however have a nice old micro seiki turntable, long ago given to me by my father in law who was in to great sound, but ditched vinyl as fast as he could once CDs showed up.
For various reasons the turntable wasn't a permanent set up in my system - essentially I'd haul it out for the occasional bout of listening as, mostly out of laziness, I'd kept many of the records from my youth. Spinning my old records was indeed a nostalgic experience. Though I also found myself really enjoying the classic "warmth" and crispness of the sound on many albums. It was in it's own way equally enjoyable, but sonic accuracy favored digital sources. And I am NOT a fan of the hiss, crackle and pops of vinyl. Many news stories on vinyl often mention the "romance of the crackle and pop" of vinyl. Not for me. I have no love for it and much prefer as quiet a record as possible.
Anyway, vinyl listening was a very rare thing for me; I was mostly all digital. Quite a while back I'd ripped all my CDs to stream to my Benchmark DAC, to my Thiel speakers (had the 3.7s, now use the 2.7s). It sure was amazing to have instant access via my ipad to my entire collection. And good riddance to CDs! I never liked them as physical objects: they felt cheap in the hand, and pieces snapped and cracked at the merest provocation. In fact they seemed designed to explode apart if dropped even from a modest height. Liner notes tiny. Yuck. For me they are simply carriers of the digital bits I really care about on those discs, so just getting the bits and being able to toss the CDs was wonderful.
Of course many of my pals - not to mention countless music lovers - had long ago downloaded and swapped with others countless songs and albums via torrents and all that. People have libraries with terabytes and terabytes of music! (I had always refused to download music I didn't pay for, as this to my mind is stealing, hence my much more modest collection of digital music, around 500 CDs worth).
These massive libraries of music seemed both appealing and odd to me. The appeal can be easily described as "any piece of music I may ever desire to hear is likely in my library and at a finger-press or two away." I get that. At the same time, and maybe it came from a lifetime of buying only the music I knew I wanted, it seemed strange to "own" vastly more music than one could ever even listen to in a lifetime.
Once I added Tidal streaming I essentially joined that club - seemingly endless amounts of music at my fingertips. This, combined with streaming my own collection was at first thrilling. I spent many nights just trawling through Tidal listening to new music. But I couldn't help noticing a trend over time in my listening habits. They'd changed with the ease of accessibility to music, both in my high end system and on my phone, in the car etc. I found myself often sampling through music, rather than just listening to songs or albums. Given that for any song there may be something I like even better just a flick of a finger away, I often took that option and left the song before it finished. Searching, searching for the next sort of musical, or sonic, "hit." This tended to impart a sort of restless quality to my listening sessions. And there was something oddly devaluing about both the ease of use, and the unlimited access, and the fact that music just didn't seem to "exist" as a "thing" but as some sort of "out there through the air" entity. And the occasional purchase of digital music had all the aesthetic appeal in the process of paying a bill on line.
So, yeah, I loved the ease and convenience and sound quality. But this Digital Eden seemed to have a snake or two that I hadn't been told about ;-)
The first thing that caught my eye in terms of the vinyl revival was how many soundtracks started being released on vinyl - both old titles being re-mastered, and new soundtracks I hadn't heard yet. I'm a huge fan of soundtrack music so I purchased a few, finding myself thrilled by the experience. First, people producing new vinyl had understood that their physical appeal as collectable objects was important. So the packaging, aesthetics, artwork, liner notes, creativity with the vinyl colors etc, were just off the charts. As a fan, as objects to hold and admire the aesthetics, it was a thrill.
The next thing was the sound. I hadn't bought new vinyl for I didn't know how long, but putting on a record that hadn't been through my teenage mill of ill-use and abuse was really something. Just beautifully quiet, and the sound quality was fantastic on many of these albums! I was luxuriating both in the physical aspect of the record, and the sound.
Which inspired ever more purchases, expanding beyond soundtracks. And as my vinyl album numbers grew, being the inveterate audiophile, this inspired the thought "Ok, it's clear I care about vinyl now - time to look in to upgrading my vinyl rig!"
I'm no electrical engineer and hence I don't know where the point of diminishing returns occurs, and how steep, when it comes to turntables/cartridges/phono stages. And I frankly assume it's always probably well below whatever I've ended up paying
But I ended up with a second hand purchase of a Transrotor Fat Bob S turntable, with an expensive Benz Micro cartridge thrown in to the deal, all barely used but well below 1/2 retail. I can't of course vouch at all for any of the technical claims that may be made for big-arsed turntables, 55 lbs of aluminum, magnetic drive or all that. But I can say that simply as a beautiful, cool looking piece of equipment, that thing rocks! It looks so much the "precision German engineered" object it is, and it just "feels" of super high quality in every detail.
But the sound for me was a revelation. Now, when I use such a term it's within the context of purely subjective impression. But if the question from the OP is to be answered, it will by it's very nature include the subjective reasons as those are part of the reasons people have for enjoying vinyl. That acknowledged....
My previous turntable played records with a sound that had a slight burnish over everything, just a bit of "noise" or "burr" over everything, similar to what you get when a record has been played really often and not taken care of. And complex passages seemed to add this noise up to become a bit more confused. I'm talking subtle, but a distinct slightly crispy character, and record noise/hiss was usually audible.
The first thing that struck me when I played records on my new Turntable/cartridge/phono stage was how quiet records now sounded, that background "hiss" seemed reduced not only on new albums but my older albums. The other thing was how clear, detailed and clean good recordings sounded! I'd never heard this from vinyl playback before, and never realized how closely it could approach digital in that respect. There was a sort of "limitless" sense of resolution in the sense that the sound was so clean and *every* detail in a mix seemed completely clean and separate no matter how dense the mix became. And I could hear in to the most subtle nuance, the tiniest reverb trails seemed to just trail off unimpeded until they disappeared in to a very quiet background. This no longer to my ears sounded "nostalgic" but simply "amazing sound quality!"
It had me revisiting album after album. I remember an "Air" album I bought on vinyl and I put on a song I've listened to a billion times via my digital source. A woman's voice came on as a background vocal and...it sounded so human! I was like "hold on, I've heard this part a million times and I never remember that background vocal sounding so real. Am I forgetting something?" I cued up the digital version and compared and sure enough, there was this obvious difference where the digital version vocal sounded sort of flat, canned, glassy, hardened...a 'recording.'
Where the vinyl version the voice seemed softened, rounded, dimensional and sort of popped free of the mix in a way that just sounded more like a real person had entered the mix, rather than a digitized sample.
Not every comparison to digital favored the turntable sound, but I was continually surprised at how often it held up, and how often I found myself preferring the vinyl version. And constantly surprised at how great the sound was from the turntable with so many records.
A member wrote on this thread:
"Let's be honest, on it's best day, with the worlds best vinyl gear and the best pressed LP, if the same master was recorded to a RedBook digital CD, the CD would cream the LP in every measurable and audible area of sound quality.."
And I would take issue with that claim.
If we are talking strictly about the technical potential for accuracy, no question, we all know even cheap (but good) digital beats a vinyl/turntable.
(Though it's been acknowledge vinyl has the potential for more accuracy than digital
*in the sense* that you may end up with a crappier digital master on a CD where the vinyl got the superior master, allowing the vinyl version to actually be more accurate).
BUT...that claim includes that CD would "cream" the LP in the area of
sound quality. Now we are in the area of qualitative, not quantitative, of how it sounds to us. We have to be careful about leveraging our personal perceptions into objective-sounding claims. And I think the claim like CD sound quality "creams" vinyl skirts in to this divide.
My experience comparing the best digital masters I have with the comparable vinyl does not align with the claim the digital "creams" the vinyl in sound quality. It's one thing to point to all the kludges necessary to get sound on to and off a record - it's a miracle it sounds good at all! It's another to to talk about large differences in sound quality. Because as we know, our perception can be fairly insensitive to various types of distortion, and even digital compression takes advantage of this. The reduced file size and the amount of sound "thrown away" by various compression schemes may lead to the intuition it will sound obviously worse.
"You've thrown away tons of the music!" But they don't, because they are "distorting" in the sense of "throwing away part of" the original signal in a way that our ears are not sensitive too. So a much smaller file size can sound surprisingly similar - if not indistinguishable - from a larger uncompressed file.
I think this lesson has to be remembered when moving from a critique of the technical kludges involved in vinyl to the perception of sound quality. Yes it's one technical kludge after another to get music on to and off vinyl. And yet...the end sonic result can be surprisingly excellent sound. It's been engineered as best possible, with clever solutions to the challenges along the way, to sound good to our ears, and can can largely succeed. The best vinyl can sound very much like good digital.
For instance a while back the Talk Talk album Color Of Spring was remastered and there has been a CD and a Vinyl release from that new remaster. This is a stellar sounding album that I (and I know many audiophiles) have used as demo material, not to mention loving the album.
Playing the digital version I hear incredible detail, richness, spaciousness, precision etc. Playing the vinyl I hear all those attributes. In fact they sound incredibly similar - there are no details that I can hear that have gone missing between the vinyl and digital version, and no loss of any other sonic quality. They both sound absolutely spectacular. Except I slightly prefer the vinyl as it seems to have a tiny bit more "texture, air, presence" that makes the vocals and instruments seem even more believable to me. Distortions of a sort? Sure. BIG distortions? No. Subtle. But ones that have a somewhat more than subtle effect on my preference for one over the other. I now use the vinyl to demo my system over the digital. And it is a dead quiet background - people always think at first it must have been a CD because the sound comes out of nowhere. And the vinyl gets all the sonic raves as the CD ever did.
So I respectfully can not agree with the claim that all other things equal a redbook CD would "cream" a vinyl pressing in sound quality. I've experienced this to not be the case. Someone may indeed hear some sonic difference leading him prefer the sound quality of the CD. But the idea that it is a difference in the order of being "one wiping the floor with another" I believe would be an exaggeration, and a subjective call in any case.
So back to why I'm liking vinyl. While some instances can show very little differences between a vinyl and CD from the same master, generally it's my experience they tend to sound different, and the various ways vinyl often strikes me as sounding richer, chunkier, warmer, more organic, with a leading edge presence that is somehow at once exciting yet relaxed. It seems to fulfill many checkmarks in the boxes of what I'm looking for in terms of sound quality.
And I've gotten very heavily in to all sorts of music that has never been released digitally, in particular LIbrary/Production music from the likes of KPM, Bruton Music etc - vinyl recorded in the heyday of analog reproduction, but by nature rare. These albums sound utterly glorious on my system, producing among my favorite listening experiences both sonically and musically. As have many other albums.
My sense is that what I now get from vinyl is all the subtle forms of distortion that I seem to like - built up from all the technical kludges, re-EQ, and the equipment it's played on - but with a
reduction of the distortions that I don't like - less background hiss, removal of that "burr" of distortion for a rich clean sound. The subjective result of this balance is utterly seductive to my ears.
To finish off this Moby Dick of a post:
I'm not a vinyl snob in the sense of only listening to vinyl, declaring it "superior" etc. I still listen to plenty of digital music and enjoy it. In fact, I can enjoy music streaming through my iphone speakers! But....
I get now why many audiophiles have been in a froth over vinyl for many years. On a really good system it really can sound "better" if it ticks the boxes of one's
personal perception and criteria for "good sound." The problem comes when audiophiles move from
"I like it better" to making up bogus technical arguments for the "technical superiority" of vinyl - e.g. all the "
digital doesn't capture the entire sound waveform like vinyl does" mythology. And people getting newly in to vinyl, including many young people, are susceptible to this as well. They may like the sound of vinyl and then just swallow and repeat the bad explanations for "vinyl being superior." (Or they may have just swallowed that claim because they've heard it, even before buying their first record).
But my enthusiasm for vinyl/turntables these days is mirrored by the reasons many others give for getting in to it.
It cured my music ADD for one thing. When I put on a record I inevitably listen to a whole side, if not the whole album, and I no longer have that fidgety experience listening. Listening is more of a special, concentrated experience vs sampling music or having it on in the background.
It adds a physical connection to the music I own in a way digital just doesn't reproduce for me. I'm absolutely giddy when a new album I ordered shows up at my door, in a way that is entirely absent when just downloading a file, or flicking through Tidal. Albums are often so beautiful that, nicely stored, they have become part of our decor.
I thoroughly enjoy owning and interacting with my turntable. To me it's an object of physical beauty and fine engineering. It gives playing music the type of aesthetic and tactile pleasure over digital that owning a great analog watch gives over a cheap (but more accurate) digital watch.
Plus, as someone who has always wanted to support musicians (I've been one, many of my friends are struggling musicians), I like the fact that buying the vinyl version of an album means more money goes to the artist than if I'd streamed it.
So there's my own answer to the OP....my subsequent replies will be shorter!....and it's a pleasure to meet you all!
Cheers,
MattHooper.