|
|
|
|
Audiophile Label Technical Staff
On 8 Jul 2004 16:06:31 -0700, (Sam Byrams)
wrote:
Stewart Pinkerton (CD Ass Kisser)
Better than being a vinyl apologist who has to resort to name-calling
in lieu of a substantive argument................
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.
And this affects CDs made from new master tapes, exactly how?
You want 35 year old master tapes of Hendrix or would you prefer new
masters of Hilary Duff and Britney Spears?
Musically, or technically? :-)
BTW, *vinyl* from the '70s and '80s was also of extremely poor quality
- aside from audiphile labels like Sheffield, of course.
Jimi, Jim and Janis-to say
nothing of Frank, Dean, Sammy, Julie London, Marilyn Monroe, Peggy
Lee-they are not recording anymore because they're dead. (MM never did
record per se-it's all film dubs you hear on XM 73.)
But most of those you mention are artists of the '50s and '60s - so
their old master tapes are better than any available vinyl.
5. Finally, although vinyl is good for a finite number of plays, its
shelf life is effectively infinite if properly stored.
IOW, vinyl is degraded every time it is played, whereas CD is totally
unaffected.
Vinyl is good for several dozen good plays with negligible wear.
Agreed, with good-quality replay gear. However, where do you find
albums from the '70s that have been played only a couple of times on
high-quality decks?
Several hundred are feasible with properly set up tables and
cartridges.
Um, that's getting a lot more arguable.
If you want to go over a riff for guitar practice, copy it
to a repeatable medium.
If you want to preserve your vinyl at all, transcribe it to digital!
CDs are not
affected by playing but they are probably good only for 50 years at
the most.
Your evidence for this is what, exactly?
Your evidence they don't is???
They haven't degraded yet - my 1983 'Love Over Gold' is *still* one of
my best-sounding CDs, and the hundred or so pre '85 CDs I have are all
in *perfect* condition. The basic materials used in CD manufacture are
even less likely to deteriorate with age than vinyl - plus they have
the advantage that, so long as they don't degrade so much that bits
are dropped, they will sound *exactly* the same as a brand new item,
even if they've been played 1,000 times on a cheap Magnavox. Try that
with vinyl!
In 30 years bring me that 1985 disc,
we'll check it out. I have 1955 vinyl I _know_ sounds great.
Actually, it's just your *opinion* that it sounds great. Besides, most
tape masters from the '50s and '60s are still in good condition, and
have been digitally transcribed to preserve them indefinitely, so you
can still obtain a master which is *vastly* superior to vinyl.
Many early CDs are apparently now unplayable, especially in
their outer tracks.
A well-known problem affecting a tiny number of CDs from one factory,
but gleefully pounced upon by vinyl apologists.
That was a hell of a tiny run.
It got a lot of publicity, but it was only applicable to the output
from *one* pressing plant, and the problem was totally solved. Of
course, vinyl apologists love to trot it out, while happily ignoring
the vast load of *vinyl* trash that was spewed out in the '70s and
'80s.
The record industry would have been better served by an analog
optical format, and probably audiophiles as well.
Bull****. Laserdiscs were crap compared to CD.
We wouldn't have this downloading bull**** if the labels hadn't made
it all too convenient in the first place. With albums, you need to go
to some bother to digitize them. CD's are consumo-friendly to rip.
What the hell has that to do with sound quality? Besides, grow up and
smell the coffee - the market has moved on. In ten years or so, you
may look back on CD as the Golden Age of mass-market sound quality, if
everyone keeps downloading MP3s at 96kbs...........................
--
Stewart Pinkerton | Music is Art - Audio is Engineering
|