Can I Have My Money Back?

I definitely get (even though I don't agree) how someone can like legacy vinyl better than a CD. That's because you're getting a true analog experience all the way through the signal chain.

HOWEVER, as your correspondend Down Under notes, most current releases are digitally sourced. So, when you play them, what you're listening to is essentially a downgraded version of the digital file. The same file you can listen to on the CD (without clips and pops and degradation over repeated plays).

BUT, BUT I hear you say, the vinyl STILL sounds better. How can that be, when the only difference (other than the aforementioned clips and pops, plus IGD and coloration by the cartridge) would be the mastering, which essentially is just the EQ.

So are you saying that you like the way vinyl is mastered and that's why it's better than CDs? You're saying you like the summed bass?

Anyway, I won't go on any longer. Yeah, I get that I'm trolling a little bit, but here's the thing: I myself buy a fair amount of old vinyl off of Discogs, but I absolutely won't buy any newly manufactured LPs. What on Earth is the point of listening to a digital file on a vinyl disc? I don't get it.(Sure it's great to have cover art that's bigger than a thimble; that's the one valid point you make.)

I was in a record store a few months ago looking at a record when the owner chimed in, "Good record! That one's digital." So I replied, "If I wanted digital I'd buy the CD" and I walked out.

I know I'm being wound up,but your Australian correspondent is being silly. Would he/she/you make a categorical judgment of vinyl sound on one turntable/cartridge combination?

I’m not sure I agree with everything mentioned by Niall. The price of new LPs is ridiculous in Australia sometimes .For instance the new one step MFSL LPs are $aus300.00 but if you hunt around the second hand record shops in Sydney you can pick up reasonably priced LPs .
I have both CDs and LPs and a good turntable and CD player . I think the sound of CDs is okay to very good - particularity those pressed since the early 2000s. The sound of LPs is better but negativity about the sound of CDs is hard to understand - especially given the disparity in the prices . I just bought the new Bill Laswell CD and it sounds great AND was about a third of the price of the LP.
Each to their own but how about a more balanced approach to CDs.
Thanks if you read this.

Either you simply prefer the euphonic distortions introduced during the LP production process or your CD playback setup sucks.

sometimes staggeringly expensive. As many of the best Audiophile vinyl producers are located in the US, with import duties, VAT and other charges the may easily double in price. However, it is important to take into account sales taxes that are usually not advertised on US websites or stores, but are included in the sales price in the rest of the world. For example: the most recent Joe Henderson Tone Poet release ("State Of The Tenor" volume 1 is selling on Amazon (US) for $27 versus the equivalent of $40 in the UK (minus VAT this is $33.20). The cost of shipping the album from the US to the UK is about $12, but there is no additional cost if you are a Brit and pay for Amazon prime. With more expensive releases - such as the Mofi One Step albums - the price differential is about $75 (if you can find the product anywhere in Europe) - $50 of which is import duties/retailer profit.
I have never understood why Music Matters, Mofi and Analogue Productions do not send stampers to Pallas and print up European versions of their products, which would sell in big quantities, at reasonable prices (e.g. the Blue Note 80 series - Optimal, and the Sony Legacy products - Record Industry). Music Matters, in particular, have only been selling online directly to US and Canadian customers. The sales of the Tone Poet (and now Verve Series) in Europe (and ?Australia) may wake AP, in particular, to a large untapped market.

I think CD playback is very good now. DACs onboard players are much improved, and even affordable external DACs make a huge difference. Only took 35 years to get it right. And yet...the digitally sourced Blue Note 75th anniversary LPs sound better than the CDs. Better mastering probably, but it starts with a stylus tracing a groove and that makes all the difference. I recently picked up a copy of Grant Green Live at the Lighthouse, pressed in 73. I've had the CD for years. Man, does the LP sound better. You just get a sense of space and atmosphere that digital sound, even in hi-rez, rarely achieves. So, CDs don't suck, but vinyl still rules.

As it happened, yesterday I tried to find which of my several hundred LPs bought in Canada in the early-70s had price stickers still on them. A quick search found three and there may be others. The dates shown below are approximate.

Obviously, price stickers typically are on the record shrink-wrap and usually get discarded before playing the record.

1. "Doctor Zhivago" soundtrack probably bought in 1972(?) cost $0.99.
2. "Mary Poppins" soundtrack bought sometime between 1975 and 1980 cost $1.99.
3. "Johnny Cash at San Quentin" bought probably sometime between 1975 and 1980 (could be the early 80s) cost $3.99. This was one of the more expensive records.

According to Statistics Canada,

- $100 in 1972 is worth $608.93 today
- $100 in 1977 is worth $390.83 today

So, the inflation-adjusted price of Doctor Zhivago is about $6 today and that of Mary Poppins and Johnny Cash are about $8 and $16, respectively.

If the Johnny Cash LP was bought later, the inflation-adjusted price would be even less.

The LP records are FAR MORE expensive today than those inflation-adjusted prices. The prices are twice at least and usually a lot more.

It there was a way to upload photographs of the jacket covers, I would have.

Ironically, LP releases often have wider dynamic range than their pure digital counterparts.

He may have been trying to save the manufacturer some embarrassment. There certainly is a huge difference in DACs these days. I do have some CDs that are not great, but I have many that are just like my good and bad vinyl.

I wish you had kept your tt until you tried the CD player.

I'm surprised how much anti-vinyl gobbledegook your article has stirred up! On a site dedicated to vinyl.

I agree that most records sound better, which is why I collect them. There is another benefit to collecting records. Their value generally goes up while CDs value generally goes down, over time. And of course, digital files free from media only have value at the time of first purchase.

So take heart, should you decide to sell your vinyl collection you will get a better return than if you choose to sell a similar CD collection.

This discussion was boring 30 years ago. Many of the responses here are right on the border of Troll Town and a few merit gentle rebukes:

One can't choose three examples and then say they are PURELY (capitals his) random and not selective. You selected them!

If a post ends with "period", "end of story" etc. it means someone not in command of his facts has attempted a pre-emptive strike against any possible criticism or challenge.

This silliness about euphonic distortions/colorations really needs to be put to bed. All formats have their measurable and audible advantages and disadvantages.

And to those misguided souls whose lives are somehow enhanced by logging on and telling us we're idiots for liking records, why don't you go find something that makes you happy rather than raining on everyone else's parade?

The prices are the prices, but as a consumer you do have some leverage. Get friendly with a U.S. retailer and have him or her set aside new titles until you have a large enough purchase to make the shipping cost worthwhile. I was party to such an arrangement a few years back and it worked quite well.

We are spoiled to live in a time where we can argue over shades of excellence in sound reproduction. Both vinyl and CD's/digital can be awesome, with the right setup and listening environment. I listen mostly to vinyl, but CD's can be good too.

From my first music experiences with a crystal radio at age 7, it's been a long and rewarding journey to get here. Let's Enjoy!

Happy Listening All.

I was playing and collecting LPs from when I was a little kid to June, 2019. Obviously, I got something out of it. Right now, having other priorities, I don't have any LPs or LP playback gear, probably won't in the future. But there's aspects of record collection that I understand, having worked for so many years in LP/CD stores.

In terms of access to LPs, my peak years were from the mid 1980s, as CDs first appeared and I was working at Tower Records in Berkeley to 1999, when I left Berkeley. Back in the mid 1980s, Tower's Classical Annex had tons of cut-out imports. Harmonia Mundi was clearing out its inventory, so was Qualiton, Tower was picking up lots of imports by other means, and I could buy them for $1 a pop. Got over 50 Fonit Cetra issues of Furtwängler that way. Had an AR XA with a Grace 707 tonearm, Dynaco 70 and PAS 3 electronics from a used/vintage audio store on University Avenue and Small Mission bookshelf speakers.

Blurring into the 1990s, working at The Musical Offering D shop and Cafe, got lots of promo CDs, turned them into LPs and/or other CDs at Amoeba, just around the corner and down the block. Rasputin's too, though usually to buy, as they tended to be a little cheaper than Amoeba. There was Mint Platter, Leopolds, and a half-dozen shops in Oakland, more than than in San Francisco. Doing radio shows meant that my promo machine was in hyperdrive.

Around that time I primarily listen to music via Stax Earspeakers. I was hearing every little bit of surface detritus and pitch variation, thanks to the black backgrounds and absolute speed stability of CDs. I heard things I liked too, particularly when listening over speakers.

About 5 years ago, my system had a Strathclyde 305m Turntable, a SME III arm, Shure 97xE cartridge, Scott 299B integrated and a pair of RBH mini towers. That system did amazing things with LPs, particularly Capitol pressings from the 1950s.

I moved from a big house to a small apartment. My listening habits moved from LPs to CDs to files to streaming. It's most likely going to be primarily streaming from now on. I can easily access recordings now that I would not have been able to hear in the past. I'm losing the desire to own stuff. But if someone is playing a gray-label copy of "Songs For Swingin' Lovers" on gear that costs more than a fully loaded Porsche, I can see the attraction.

Niall, if you'd lived in the U.K. in the 70s and suffered truly awful vinyl, you'd not be so harsh about modern vinyl (or CDs). When you buy modern vinyl you are paying for a perfect luxury product. When you continue to buy vinyl, you are giving the manufacturers carte blanche to raise prices. They have livelihoods to protect, who knows when the fad will end. You are harsh regarding CDs, not all CDs (or CD players) are created equal and, if you have high standards like most audiphiles, it takes much work to get satisfaction. As one who now has hearing loss, your complaints appear trivial.

To me this seems like a post put up on a slow day just to get the kinds of responses we're seeing here!

Seriously, who sells their turntable and LPs without overlapping with the purchase of the CD player and a few disks? That's not reasonable for any audiophile who loves their music and wouldn't be without accessing it even for a week with just a handful of 5 CDs!

Second, yeah, why not tell us which CD player this is?! You can't paint all CD's as "bad" the way this letter did yet not give us some specifics like which player and maybe what CD he's listening to... We all know that many modern CD remasters are highly dynamically compressed and do not represent the best of the technology. Likewise many supposedly "audiophile" CD players especially some that have crazy stuff appended like tube outputs and such have issues.

Finally, this is 2020. Surely this writer must have listened to CD-quality digital for years even if not purchased his own standalone CD player, right? If digital overall sounds that bad all these years (including all the YouTube/Spotify/website streams), would he not at least be approaching this with some caution? Again, why sell off the turntable and want to re-buy all his albums?

Forget feeling guilty that you're potentially trolling this post by leaving a response! This letter itself is troll material for the audiophile community.

As one who likes both LPs and CDs even though I believe it's inappropriate to label LPs as "high res" or even capable of "high fidelity" compared to good digital in the 21st Century, there's still no point arguing for extreme positions like this supposed letter from Australia. All formats can coexist in our listening rooms.

I buy most of my lps at the salvation armani $1 and cds too $2

I really should let discretion be the better part of valor, but my sense of fair play compels me to point out the following:

My learned correspondent claimed that LPs have but one technical advantage and that said advantage is merely a form of distortion. I replied by pointing out a couple other advantages. That's the point at which an open-minded person says, "I see your point but I continue to disagree and I believe I have valid reasons for doing so. Happy Listening!" Alas, we live in a world in which open-mindedness is seen as weakness, and people log into websites for the perverse pleasure of telling others they can't possibly know what they know. I imagine somewhere in the world there's an online wine forum in which someone is saying, "you're an idiot to like that wine; I don't need to taste it -- I proved on my slide rule and my abacus that it's terrible!"

Lastly, on this forum I recently recommended three newer LPs which I felt would be widely enjoyed for both musical and sonic reasons. The response, including a handful of personal messages, was both kind and gratifying. With that in mind, I'm going to recommend a 43-year-old record which has been in ridiculously heavy rotation of late:
Be Bop Deluxe: Live! In the Air Age. The UK Harvest original sounds slightly better, but the US version is on white vinyl and the bonus disc is 12" rather than 7" which is a bit more convenient. Used record shops all seem to have copies for next to nothing. As for the music, it's clever, catchy and it rocks when called upon to do so. Enjoy!

I can barely remember what I had for breakfast. Oh, hang on a second, I just burped. It was granola and coffee.

Anyhow, the recommendations were:

Cosmo Sheldrake / The How How Much Much and I
Steve Harley / Uncovered
Lloyd Cole / Guesswork

As for the white vinyl - I've owned a couple of the US white pressings and they're not the best but they're not bad. And in case such things matter to you I'll add that it looks bitchin' sitting on the turntable. Finally, lead guy Bill Nelson was, and continues to be, a fine and original guitarist.

Also, please accept my apologies for trying to interject civility to the proceedings. I hope you don't report me to the interweb cops. We males have two unfortunate characteristics (three if you count never maturing beyond age 14): 1] we get hung up on the process rather than the result and 2] we see any discussion as a chance to show how much we know and shut the other guy down. Given the foregoing, I'm surprised this forum doesn't descend into the morass (heh heh, he said ass) more often.

...bitchin' sitting on the turntable."

Are you kidding me? TOP PRIORITY! (-:

Nial, you have my sympathies on the high cost of vinyl down under, it's unfortunate. But I can't agree with a blanket statement like "CDs Suck". Yes, many do, but it's not too hard to learn about the best digital masterings of the music you like on a site like the Steve Hoffman Music Forums, or to quickly look up the dynamic range of a particular CD mastering on dr.loudness-war.info.

I have collections of many thousands of vinyl records and CDs as well as SACD and DVD-A purchased over the course of 45 years, and enjoy all formats. While I play much more vinyl than digital, I have invested in great equipment to play either format, including good DACs of various price points in my systems such as a Schiit Gungnir Multibit, Topping D50S, and SMSL Sanskrit 10th. With a quality DAC, well mastered CD, or it's hi-res streaming option from Quobuz or others, along with audiophile software such as Audirvana or JRiver for playback, you can indeed hear digital at a very high caliber, and it doesn't have to cost a fortune.

I will agree that most of the time the vinyl source played on quality gear will best digital, but not every record is a winner and not every pressing is well done, particularly current vinyl production. That for me is far more of a caution than whether or not the vinyl record came via a digital master. I have too many of those that sound really good to knock them all. But I also have others that sound identical to their CD counterparts. If so it usually indicates that the CD doesn't suffer from having it's dynamic range crushed, a good thing!

Do your homework and research before buying, use a hi-res streaming service to preview new releases and reissues before purchasing, who knows, you may be happier with the results then, enjoy!

To me it feels like a calculated decision to position vinyl as the premium product by virtue of its price. Most current buyers will fall for the idea that it's high-end simply *because* it's expensive, even though they will either listen to it on their ~3 LP's-worth of Crosley USB turntable (and drool about aspects of the analog 'sound' that they may have read about but can't possibly be accessing themselves) or, more often, the included download - obviously not including the OP or anyone else here in this observation, before anyone starts...

The fixation with 180g pressings (which are often highly charged with static and covered in dust and other debris, more prone to infill and offer no inherent advantages over thinner vinyl) is also part of this. It's the worst of both worlds at the moment: new vinyl is hideously expensive (in the UK too at least), and definitely not guaranteed to sound better than the CD release, though we know it can, and you never know if you'll have to send it back.

I'd love to see the vinyl revival escalated to the point where higher volumes enable much lower prices (and vice versa) *AND* quality control is uniformly high, so we can be reasonably sure that any LP sounds at least as good as the CD, and isn't covered in crap before it's even been played - but also the odd duff one would be less of a disaster. I'd love to be able to go and get a whole bunch of new records for the current price of a single one - who wouldn't? Gross profit margins might be lower at these prices but net profits could be higher in absolute terms and the whole thing would feel much more vibrant and real again.

The fact that no record companies are shooting for this model could of course just mean I'm wrong about some key aspect of the equation. They usually follow the money pretty successfully, after all.

If so I can content myself with the knowledge that I've been kicked out of better places. In any case, I just want to say "thanks" for all the fun and illuminating posts one finds on this forum. It's evident from the tone and content that many of you still subscribe to the antiquated notion that being a gentleman counts for something. And on the internet no less. Obviously there are exceptions but they typically stand out like a backwards baseball cap at the opera so there's no need to be specific. What I'd like to know is what you believe are the essential qualities and skills which make a gentleman. I don't mean to leave the ladies out (that would be ungentlemanly) but let's face it, the audiophile world is pretty male-oriented.

I'll get the ball rolling:

- You should be able to play a musical instrument (playing it well is not essential).
- You should own and be able to use a few tools. This is not the same as being a tool.
- You should be able to tie a tie and, ideally, a bow tie.
- You should never pass up an opportunity to hold open a door, pull back a chair, etc. for a lady.
- You should never insist upon having the last word; that's usually the one which leaves a bitter taste.
- You should be able to operate a manual transmission, even if you choose not to own a vehicle so equipped.
- You should have a minimum of one scar and a good story to go with it, even if that story must be invented.

Those are mine - how about you? And don't say "never hijack a thread" - I've heard that one...

That's all for now; I plan to go on internet hiaitus for a time but I'll probably check back and see if anyone has any good additions.

All the best.

...Andy Hernandez.

I love jewel boxes, and in fact to this day if I buy a CD and it comes in a digipak, or even a box set with envelopes or trays, the first thing I do is transfer them to actual jewel boxes.

They were designed wonderfully, and they are fragile, as they were specifically designed so that the box would break to protect the disc inside from stresses that might damage it.

Store yours however you like, but all of mine are in jewel boxes and will continue to be (I do the same with my Blu-rays, extracting them from the scratch-inducing cardboard used on many releases today and placing them into Amaray Blu-ray cases.)

This letter is also commenting on the exorbitant cost of vinyl LPs here in Australia. It's rare to find a new release priced in the $30s, luckily, it's usually an artist or band from the very good local music scene. LPs are regularly priced at over $45, and up to $70 for something like the new Dylan album. Good quality used LPs are $20 to $50 as well, gone are the days when I could pick up a quality second-hand LP for under $10.
It's all a part of what we call the 'Australia Tax', everything sold here has an additional markup that makes the cost of living extremely high.

Yes, vinyl is expensive here in Lockdown city. I have 3000 albums which I sincerely hope will fund my nursing home stay one day. What drives me mad about modern vinyl is not knowing its origin. Remember when CDs had the ADD codes printed on the case- why not AAA for modern vinyl? I write this as I listen to Samantha Craine's Under Branch & Thorn & Tree (AAA) - worth every cent of A$70.

I read the article and I wonder how sick people behave, desperate, confused, weird...

You only need one excellent joyful record and a really great affordable turntable kit.
That is cheaper than a CD player (what is that actually? ;-) ) and can create a wonderful cultural personal life.

Just remember the Grammophon scenes in the midst of a desert, a jungle, ... they have only one record and that is playing for party, chilling, while being attacked by warriors, while a tsunami is going on, whatever and the listener enjoys listening without end, regardless of him or her be likely to survive the next 30 minutes of the movie.

What you call CDs I do buy too, sometimes, but that is like a filled flash drive to me, a medium to copy the data off it to a drive and an archive. But listening? That I do with analog radio or my turntable and so it’ll remain.

Have a wonderful time, beautiful people.

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When I beat a difficult level in geometry dash, I feel like I've conquered the world!