CD Got Absolutely Crushed By Vinyl


No comparison, CD always sounds so cold and gritty. Vinyl is so much warmer, smoother and has better imaging and much greater depth of sound. It’s like watching the world go by through a dirty window pane when listening to a CD. Put the same LP on the turntable and Voila! Everything takes on more vibrancy, fullness and texture. 
128x128sleepwalker65
@sleepwalker65,

I know you have not caught up to digital streaming so I will spare you the tech talk. Your shortsightedness and ignorance is clearly evident when you say, 

“digital has a long way to go before it can fully integrate into traditional systems with both a recording (archiving) and playback (streaming) function in one product that can stand alone or optionally interface to a PC”. 

BTW, you no longer need to rely on run of the mill consumer laptop or PC to enjoy state of the art digital streaming. You can look into Aurender, Innunos, Lumin, and Antipodes brands to start your journey into the world of digital streaming....until you do you would never know or understand how far digital streaming has come.
@lalitk 

Your shortsightedness and ignorance is clearly evident when you say, ..... BTW.... until you do you would never know or understand how far digital streaming has come. 




I may be impatient, but not shortsighted. I’ve been watching for something so obvious it’s painful that the industry hasn’t delivered on yet: an unencumbered way to take one’s existing (and possibly massive) media collection of all kinds (LPs, CDs, SACDs, tapes...) and archive it to 2xDSD or 4xDSD on a media server running on a PC or Mac or NAS elsewhere in the home. This is simply not possible without dragging in a PC and connecting up USB cables and an ADC in addition to the DAC / network streaming device required to listen to it. Internet radio and Roon are not enough. Give me the ease of use of a tape deck, albeit with the ability to title each track and group into albums. I don’t think that exists, or maybe I’m looking in all the wrong places. 

@mikelavigne OTOH maybe you need to find yourself better digital playback if you are open minded enough to consider it?


You raise a good point, but digital has a long way to go before it can fully integrate into traditional systems with both a recording (archiving) and playback (streaming) function in one product that can stand alone or optionally interface to a PC. The variants of DSD have the performance potential, but have not reached a level of consumer-friendliness to go mainstream. That’s not to say that the mainstream even cares, but the products need to be more operator-friendly from an interface and functionality perspective.

@sleepwalker65, if you check out my system page....

http://systems.audiogon.com/systems/615

......you can see that i have been open minded and have found myself ’better digital playback’, which I’ve compared with my vinyl and RTR tape and found it comes quite close and is not humbled by the analog.

of course, we all have our own viewpoints on what ’better digital playback’ might be and my view is just my own. maybe you have investigated what ’better digital playback’ which can come close to vinyl and could share that information with us?

my only point was to say that digital playback certainly exists that approaches the musical performance satisfaction of vinyl, but depending on the vinyl it might cost a pretty penny to acquire.

and I do have 7+ terabytes of dsd files, 1xdsd, 2xdsd, and 4xdsd, and assure you it’s very mainstream these days with most dacs. I listen to it often.

have a great day and we likely agree more than we disagree.

You guys do know that you can't compare CD vs Vinyl on the same system setup don't you?

Michael Green

@sleepwalker65,

Just like your vinyl which requires a external phono stage.....Digital streaming needs a streamer device and a DAC. You can go with one box solutions from NADAC or Bricasti that can stream and provide internal DA Conversion. And yes, you can create your own ‘playlist’ with each track. No need to run up a USB cable here....all you need is Ethernet cable from you router and analog RCA or XLR to your pre or integrated. One box typically don’t have internal storage so you would need a external NAS to store your ripped files.

Or you can buy Aurender N100C which comes with internal 2-4TB storage and an outboard DAC.

Plenty of choices for a great digital setup that can be just as satisfying as your vinyl setup as long as you’re willing to explore and keep an open mind.