"Mark D. Zacharias" wrote in message ...
This one has been beaten to death. Vinyl is so flawed and inconsistent a
medium that it doesn't even belong in the same discussion as properly
implemented CD technology.

CDs are flawed as well in several other ways.

Not to say that some records may not sound "better" than a given CD release,
but the reasons include using heavily EQ'd vinyl masters for the CD release,
natural variations in cartridge / tonearm combinations AND SETUPS of same.
The discussion goes on and on, and has been addressed in many threads in the
past.
By all means listen to your albums and enjoy them, but a CD release using
the same original master, not EQ'd for vinyl, and properly produced for no
clipping etc, simply isn't even in the same class.
Our ears are analog however,
So are our voices, our musical instruments, and all our other senses.


so the frequency response problems, ringing
effects, harmonic distortion etc can be quite pleasing on a given record,
and some people prefer it, and the nostalgia, as well as just preferring to
state a contrary opinion when the subject comes up.

A few things that your eval does not mention:

1. The vinyl was usually mastered from 2 track mixdown on tapes that
were recently recorded and not very old. The CD may have been mastered
ten, twenty, fifty years later. Some vintages of tape have not aged
well-particularly from the mid-70s to the mid-80s.

2. The vinyl was mastered by people that in most cases knew what they
were doing on a technology that was at or close to its zenith. The CD
may have been mastered by people that did not understand the CD
process very well, on bad-sounding ADCs, or people that were simply
inept or unconcerned.

3.Albums recorded in the "vinyl era" were engineered, produced, mixed
down and mastered by people who understood the record-making process
quite well and made a lot of decisions on the basis of what they
figured would work well and not well on the finished vinyl product.
It's like printing Ansel Adams photos via offset litho-Adams
understood his films and papers intimately and you are reproducing
them in a different medium. Inherently, something is lost.

4. In some cases, the material is only available on vinyl, or the
available CD is made from-believe it or not-playing the extant vinyl.

5. Finally, although vinyl is good for a finite number of plays, its
shelf life is effectively infinite if properly stored. CDs are not
affected by playing but they are probably good only for 50 years at
the most. Many early CDs are apparently now unplayable, especially in
their outer tracks.

The record industry would have been better served by an analog
optical format, and probably audiophiles as well.

__________________________________________________ _________________

Putting MM on the dime would serve a lot of purposes. It would
displace the devious FDR, send a signal to the Islamist world, make
the currency more attractive, and be a thorn in the ass to the Kennedy
Family, to name four good ones.