CD vs. Vinyl

I think it is pretty obvious to anyone who is not deaf that the spring drive Victrola was and still is the pinnacle of audio quality.

For starters, stereo is just a gimmick. Worse, electrons are not natural sound vibrations and never ever will be. So any system that uses the modern A to E or E to A (Analog to Electron or Electron to Analog) converter approach can't possibly ever sound correct.

There are several $100,000 systems here on Audiogon and none of them can hold a candle to a good 1920 Victrola (where mechanical vibrations are used directly from the vinyl to make sound - a completely natural and lossless approach).

Shadorne I've got one of those together with a pile of steel needles and shellacs of Amos & Andy and Princeton fight songs. I assure you the Victrola is over-rated outside of Antiques Road Show.

LOL Shadorne, nice post. Mapman, you say one thing I find a bit strange - "When digital is done well, transients and microdynamics are more challenging for amps to reproduce accurately. When all this works well though the overall dynamics of the resulting sound is more vivid and lifelike than vinyl in general, IMHO". Exactly what do you mean by "the overall dynamics of the resulting sound?" If you are speaking of dynamics in the musical sense, as in soft to loud, I would have to strongly disagree - vinyl has so much more dynamic range than CD. This is easily proven by comparing the same recording in both formats, say with a Mahler symphony where there are dynamic extremes in close proximity.

I would also very strongly disagree that digital is more life-like - it is very much the other way around IMO, due in part to the dynamics issue I just mentioned, as well as the resolution of instrumental and vocal timbre. Vinyl also almost always creates a better soundstage than CD, again directly comparing the same recording in the two formats. Yet another reason for me is that many engineers will edit out ambient noise when they digitally process the recordings - I think they think it makes the recording sound cleaner. This is a biggie for me as far as the sound being more lifelike. In some of the orchestral recordings from the "golden age," you get a real sense of the original recording space from the vinyl, and this is very largely lost in a digitally re-mastered version.

Learsfool,

I believe in many cases where digital does not sound as good as vinyl, a big part part of the problem (alongside jitter) is that the amp's transient response is not fast and accurate enough to handle the digitally produced signals transients accurately whereas this is less of a problem with vinyl sources.

I can get all the dynamics I can handle in my setup with either digital or good vinyl these days but this has not always been the case. Getting the digital dynamics and transients to sound right has been the bigger and more costly challenge for me.

Vinyl surface noise when present then is the biggest thing that gives away the nature of the source to me. Live music does not have surface noise.

What makes this difference? YOU. You and your alone personal response to the music you are hearing. Don't matter to you what my stereo sounds like...and nothing anyone tells you is going to change this fact.

I too often wonder about the "color" of reproduced sounds, especially in relation to colorblind persons. wonderful.