The Hardware / Audio / Video Thread.

[mandy_moorehol]

Vinyl degrades over time/when you play it so there is that.

I guess I see hiss, pops and other such aspects of vinyl as a feature, not a bug. I never wore out a cassette tape to any noticable and annoying degree when I was a kid and I guess I don't really have an issue with vinyl degredation either. It just adds to the ambiance and doesn't bother me any more than the sound of the motor of my turntable. I think the amount of use required to wear down a record to the point in which it's noticeably distracting/abrasive while listenting is not very possible for me, but I guess I can understand wanting to avoid the degredation or what dust can do to the sound of vinyl regardless (though it makes more sense in concept than in execution to me).

[mandy_moorehol]

No.

It's an opinion, which is why I used "consider"...though I get why actively decaying media is something that some would want to avoid. It's kind of the point for someone like me. "Perfect" sound (or whatever is closer to it) is quite boring sound to me pesonally. Imperfections in analog media are what give them life and I'd rather appreciate them than avoid them, but it's really a matter of taste. Nothing bad ever happened from my records being used on a turntable a lot and getting dusty and having to clean them, so it's hard for me to imagine that ever changing in my lifetime. I own a lot of records that are older than me and were previously used by others too, so it's not something I can easily have a change of opinion on at this point in my life (unless there's some obvious consequence of not caring about such things that will affect me at some point and cause me to reevaluate this).

Is noticeable degredation even likely to happen in one's lifetime from normal wear or people with such concerns just want to avoid it regardless so they don't have to ever think about the possibility of it happening? Vinyl is flawed in ways other forms of media aren't by creation, so I guess I don't quite get why people would want the sound of vinyl but not degrading further. Unplayed vinyl straight from the factory is already flawed and degraded in a sense compared to what was recorded due to how it's made and it's limitations. I prefer the sound of vinyl over other formats, but it's inferior in a lot of ways (that I don't care about).

[zborgerd]

Thoughts on my earlier question and am I correct in the post above?


Aside from the huge convenience factor of digital that's another big reason why I don't want to do anything but rip them.

You need an external phono preamp if the turntable doesn't have one. Then you can plug it into any consumer line input (CD / AUX, etc).

You can plug it into a soundcard but you'd need to set it to line level (instead of mic) to turn off the 30-40 dB mic preamp on the soundcard.

[zborgerd]

Mandy,

Noise / pops / clicks are not a feature. Digital doesn't have to be physical 16 bit / 44 kHz CDs. Many of us buy FLAC from studio masters 24 bit / 96 kHz or better. But modern DACs are so good that there isn't much of a benefit in vinyl for new material even over CDs. If we are talking old masters with high dynamic range, then there can be a difference. This is where many people are fooled by vinyl that sounds "better", because it hasn't been remastered into an inferior product that was intended for streaming / MP3s.

But if you like vinyl, that's perfectly fine. It is neither better not worse. Just different.

[xelement5x]

My contribution to this thread:



These are some crazy Pioneer speakers that I found at the thrift store. Model was CS-T7000 and these things were like 4 feet tall! Look like they could blow out some windows if they were really cranked up.

[banditwolf]

Find a spec sheet ? I believe you should be fine plugging it into a line input (ie. 'CD' or 'tape'). Either you'll get audio around your usual listening levels (built-in) or you won't.

Edit: Z can confirm whether or not I'm being dumb here but I'm pretty sure I'm correct.

ok, I have the manual so I'll give that a look.

You need an external phono preamp if the turntable doesn't have one. Then you can plug it into any consumer line input (CD / AUX, etc).
You can plug it into a soundcard but you'd need to set it to line level (instead of mic) to turn off the 30-40 dB mic preamp on the soundcard.

Getting more complicated to me. :/

My contribution to this thread:

Spoiler: 

These are some crazy Pioneer speakers that I found at the thrift store. Model was CS-T7000 and these things were like 4 feet tall! Look like they could blow out some windows if they were really cranked up.

WOW
they look impressive. I rarely see anything near that size.

[Gypsy]

WOW
they look impressive. I rarely see anything near that size.

Pretty average from the looks of it. But I mean, getting them at a thrift store is winning.

[Lord of Pirates]

You need an external phono preamp if the turntable doesn't have one. Then you can plug it into any consumer line input (CD / AUX, etc).

You can plug it into a soundcard but you'd need to set it to line level (instead of mic) to turn off the 30-40 dB mic preamp on the soundcard.

There's no harm in plugging a phono level output into a line input though, right?

My contribution to this thread:



These are some crazy Pioneer speakers that I found at the thrift store. Model was CS-T7000 and these things were like 4 feet tall! Look like they could blow out some windows if they were really cranked up.

The drivers look to be in pretty nice shape.

[zborgerd]

There's no harm in plugging a phono level output into a line input though, right?

No, because the level is not the same and vinyl uses RIAA EQ to compress the bass and expand the treble to fit it all into the wax. When it passes through the preamp, it essentially reverses the procedure, flattening the higher frequencies and expanding the lower frequencies that are normally less intelligible to the human ear.

Essentially, when people claim that vinyl is "lossless", they are either lying or don't understand how audio works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

In a simple scenario, imagine if you took a few bandpass filters (high pass and low pass) and made a crossover. You would attenuate the higher frequencies and amplify the lower frequencies. That's what happens on a standard phono preamp. You can see that the crossover occurs at about 1 kHz. It's really a bit more complex than that but that gives you a basic idea. There are actually three filters.

So vinyl gets away with adding noise (through heavy amplification) to the lower frequencies that are primarily "felt" frequencies (BASS, BASS, BASS!), and reduces noise in the mid-range and higher "heard" frequencies. In some ways it's actually the opposite of the psychoacoustic models that are used in lossy digital formats, like MP3, where frequencies close to 20 kHz are tossed since many people can't really hear about 15-17 kHz as they age.

A lot of music was actually mastered for vinyl before the move to digital, so that is why we saw a lot of remasters starting in the '90s. It was necessary to master for vinyl because it had to take advantage of the inherent changes that are made to the music during the RIAA EQ compression phase. We could go into more "loudness war" discussion, but that is a whole other issue.

The biggest fallacy in the "vinyl is superior" argument is that it's highly unlikely that most recordings are made strictly analog, so there is no such thing as "pure" analog recording and there hasn't been for 30 years. So if you are buying something on vinyl and expecting "superiority", one would be wrong. Analog instruments, recorded and sampled in the digital realm, mastered in a digital form in 24/192, and then released either digitally or converted back to analog for vinyl. That's music today and has been for a long time.

And here is the kicker. Unless someone is playing that vinyl on a receiver that's 30 years old, tube powered, all analog, it goes through YET ANOTHER ADC on the phono / line input because nobody in their right mind would make an analog receiver today, and hasn't for over 25-30 years. Maybe an analog amp. Maybe a really expensive analog EQ. But analog inputs go through an ADC (analog to digital converter) to the DSP (digital signal processor) in the receiver that handles the equalization and processing to write the DIGITAL audio back out to the DAC (digital to analog converter) for playback to the analog realm so that we can hear it.

So, in a nutshell, digital audio is more "pure" than analog audio because it's not been screwed around with much once it gets through the analog to digital recording phase, where vinyl has typically gone through half a dozen conversions by the time it hits your ears UNLESS you are playing back albums from 40 years ago on equipment from 40 years ago. The rest is just snake oil.

The digital audio that I play on my system has gone through 2 - maybe 3 conversions from the time it was mastered. If I'm playing audio ripped from CD, it obviously had to be dithered and down converted to 16 bit. Then the 16 bit audio is piped to the DAC which (may) even convert it back to 24 bit via floating point to suit the native 24 bit DAC's conversion. If I'm playing native 24 bit files, then no other conversion is required beyond possible samplerate conversion. It's a 24 bit master being played to a 24 bit DAC. For a variety of reasons, many DACs are still only 24 bit / 96 kHz because of the limitations of the old USB audio standards and hardware manufacturers have been reluctant to transition because Microsoft was too lazy to incorporate native USB 2.0 audio class into Windows until recently.

[Best1989]

Vinyl is cool tho.