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CD's or Vinyl


BlackSabbath73

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I suggest you find somewhere to listen to some vinyl records first and make your own judgment about the differences. I handed down all my vinyl and an expensive turntable to my son, because using records is a very high-maintenance enterprise.

You need to take really good care of vinyl or it just isn't worthwhile. Older records in pristine condition are really hard to come by. You also trade away the ease of programming, skipping tracks, etc. that you have with CDs.

If you've never heard a record, you probably want to determine if you're audiophile enough to give vinyl due diligence.

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An analog recording is an image of sound as a whole. Digital is made up of bits and tiny sections with the corresponding gaps. Technicly, analog should sound better than digital since everything is there. The huge advantage of digital is that sound won't decay no matter how much you play it. Oh and a good CD player is much cheaper than a good turntable, amp and speakers. I love them both but as a visual experience, ther's nothing like vinyl records :D

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If I were you, I'd do it, if for no other eason, just to experience it. Go to a farmer's market, plop down 20, 30 bucks for a turntable, get a few records, and have at it. It'd be senseless to sink a bunch of money into it, only to find out later you'd rather not deal with it. Just see if you can get a stereo that has an 8-track with it, too! You haven't lived until you've heard War Pigs fade out and change to the next track, then fade back in. :laughing:

17, huh? Consider yourself fortunate. We 'old folks' sunk thousands of dollars into record, then sunk thousand of dollars converting to cd.

Oh, and welcome to Songfacts. I'm jr. The men's room in the third door down. The lock's broke, so you have to hold the door shut with your foot.

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take from someone who owned up to 5000 pieces of vinyl at one point - half of which now have been replaced by cds. i'd shy away from the vinyl unless you're quite interested in select and niche genres that have yet to see their day in digital sunlight.

overall...almost everything sounds (or should sound) better on cd. there ARE exceptions which i'll leave up to others to discuss. technology today is simply good enough and if utilized correctly, will keep you from needing a turn-table. i keep mine for the thousands of b-sides, extended versions and full-recordings that have been forgotten by the populus.

a separate point: i'm always irked by those who argue that analog recordings are inferior. in and of themselves, they are NOT inferior any more than black-and-white film is inferior to color. (and i speak in the aggregate here - gernalities boys...just generalities!) those black-and-white film makers knew what they were doing...they understood their medium and they honed their craft accordingly. they chose specific lighting, textiles, makeup, etc. to achieve to results they desired. this arguement can be made for analog (both old and new) recordings. indeed...i've heard many analog recordings that far surpass many DDD's in sound quality.

ultimately, it's a mixed bag. some analog (vinyl or cd) sounds better on cd...some sounds worse...and some sounds about the same. oh yeah...and i should add that "to each his own"...everybody's ear is tuned a bit differently. go with what you like. one man's trash is another man's treasure.

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I was cleaning out my parents attic and they said i could keep whatever i found, and i found hundreds of old vinyls. Most of the records are of bands I've never heard of, but they have some beatles, zeppelin, elvis, doors, dylan, tull and even some floyd. I have all these bands' cds, and and will probably end up buying a turntable just to experience it and expose my self to the other music my parents likes. Anyways, thanks for the advice

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I am a nostalgic... I still love vinyl. yesterday we were looking for old vinyls in a shop, my husband and I... we must buy a new turntable and also an amplifier, but it´s worth it. The cds are remixed, almost all of them. I love the old sound, wchich is very good when it´s heard in good equipments. I still love the sound of the needle on the track... I know, cd sounds better... I have plenty of cds... But I still keep 500 vinyls from my 5000 collection, and I love them. I just replace the very scratched ones...

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Vinyl is great, but it's so difficult to play in the car...

So let me add this, being that I have a degree in Electronics. Analog is not better than digital. Analog is susceptible to noise while digital is not as there is nothing touching the CD as it spins around madly waiting to be probed. Do you get more sound from Analog? Absolutely not. If you understand the fundamentals of digital, you will find that it is capable of running speeds well above the normal hearing range. The biggest problem here is that when many record companies transferred the music onto a CD platform, they lost some of the original integrity of the music that was originally recorded. This is due to the fact they transferred from old tape and reel do a digital platform which won't transfer perfectly. This is mainly because analog is a grouping of sounds at one time while digital breaks everything down bit by bit. If two sounds somehow blend together excessively, you may lose one of them when transferring from analog to digital. It's the same concept of VHS vs. DVD. Watch a movie on VHS and then watch it on DVD and tell me that the DVD is not 10x clearer than the VHS version (movies within the past 25 years).

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You´re absolutely right, addict. I can´t deny that what you say is true. Yet I love my vinyl collection... and I know I must get me those albums on cd... but I got other things to do, so I tell myself that vinyl is not so bad (it´s not sooo bad...)

It´s also true that it´s hard to listen to vinyls in the car, mainly if you´re driving, coz then you can´t turn the LP, keep your hands on the wheel... :bow: :bow:

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I haven't had a working turntable for 10 years now but I still have all my records, and on occasion I buy second-hand albums even though I have nothing to play them on. I will get another turntable soon (I have asked Santa for one), but cannot decide between moving coil or magnet. I used to have MC turntables in the past, but my current amp will only support MM, so do I get another amp as well?

Anybody thinking of buying records for the first time, prepare to be disapointed at first, but stick with it as having something tangible in your hand is ultimately rewarding. Don't store them on top of each other or near a radiator, and remember to clean dust off the needle. Happy days.

Regards

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Vynyls are cheaper to buy. I have a ton from my dad, but I have Roxy Music on vynil, because I wouldnt spend 15-20 bucks on a cd that i dont know if i will like.

Daniel our young friend, I hate to disagree with you, but the last time I went to a store that was selling The Beatles on vinyl, they were $25 - $45 for single album sets. That's 2 - 3 times the price of CD's. Vinyl has started to become a collectible item and the demand is going up for quality records. Kind of sad... How much do you think those 8-tracks are worth?

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Addict and Daniel are right both. Vinyls have become a collector´s piece, that´s true. Some are really expensive, like Beatles, coz Beatles were never bargain stuff... they never accepted to lower prices for their records. It depends on what vinyls or what cds you want to buy... Beatles cds are also very expensive and there are no low-price items.

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Analog is not better than digital.

This really is a subjective opinion. It depends on what you're in the mood for. Yeah, my records pop and hiss, but the sound IS "warmer" dammit, whatever that means. It may just be nostalgia, or it may be that there are EXTRA sounds in an analog recording that get filtered out when the signal is processed digitally. And yeah, that computer and/or computer geek doing the editing sees those extra sounds as extraneous, but maybe Miles wanted that trumpet squeak in there. Anyway, I still listen to more CDs than vinyl albums, but a CD is a terribly inferior medium -- they scratch and break easily, they're made on the cheap, and people handle them as if they were frisbees; hence, they get scratched and chipped etc... At least with records we KNEW not to put our fingers on them or scratch them up. When CDs came out, they told us they were "indestructable" (I still recall the Phillips commercial where the guy smears a CD with honey and - gasp - it still plays!). Bulls**t. CDs skip more than records do. You can say "digital is better" all you want, but the truth is we've moved to a technology that is more convenient, but not necessarily better. Cell phones, digital television, DVD's -- are these things really "better" than what came before? They're more convenient, yes, but the quality is not improved, and in many cases it's worsened.

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Digital is not better than analog. You can't compare a VHS which runs slow as hell with a DVD that spins so fast. Just like you can't compare a record with a CD. A more fair comparison would be with a studio reel to reel recorder which goes faster and is of much better quality. As I mentioned before, is cheaper to make digital media and equipment. Analog media and equipment for the end user does not give it justice. Digital is simply much more convenient and more easily mass produced.

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