[Sonnova]

My little group of audio nuts has been at it again. At a recent get together,
one of our older group members brought up an interesting point. He opined
that since CD replaced vinyl as his major program source, he finds that he is
more uneasy about the sound of his system and is less satisfied listening to
it. This has brought on a spate of equipment upgrading, but he says that he
has never been able to recreate the feeling of real music playing in real
space with digital that he got from vinyl. His final "upgrade" was to go down
into the basement and haul his old Empire 698 Troubadour turntable/arm/Sure
V-15 out of storage and and hook it up. The first record he played (so he
asserts) instantly brought back the sense of excitement and realism that he
has been missing in his system since retiring his record playing apparatus.

Others then chimed in (there are variably 6 to 10 of us in this group, 7 were
at this meeting, including me). Several said that they had been harboring
similar thoughts. One said that he no longer had a turntable setup but had
thought seriously about buying a new one for some time. He said that he was
encouraged by this discussion to move that project to the front burner.
Several others agreed that they had long nursed a niggling suspicion that
they no longer enjoyed listening to music with the passion and enthusiasm
that had once characterized their involvement in the audio hobby. A few,
myself included, said that they had never "abandoned" vinyl and listened to a
mix of digital and analog sources on a regular basis. I mentioned that I had
some records that were so much better than their CD counterparts, that it
wasn't even a contest. The Mercury recording of Stravinky's "Firebird" by
Antal Dorati and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra comes to mind here. The
single-sided, multi-disc, virgin vinyl, 45-RPM pressing of this recording by
Classic records sounds so much better, so much more real than does the SACD
reissue (or the previous CD re-mastering supervised by the recording's
original producer Wilma Cozert Fine) that its hard to believe that both
versions come from the same master tape! On the other hand, I have digital
recordings (both commercial and ones that I have made myself) that are so
startlingly real as to raise goosebumps. I also have both vinyl and CD
recordings that are simply atrocious. I have found, however, that I have a
much higher percentage of LPs that sound unlistenably terrible than I do of
CDs. Mostly, CDs range from lackluster and mundane sounding to truly great
rather than awful to transcendently religious listening experiences which
characterizes the gamut of LPs.

So, What I'd like to do is get opinions from this board. Have any of you
noticed that you don't enjoy listening to your audio system today as much as
you did in vinyl days? If you fall into this category, do you have any
theories as to why? If you have happily left LP behind with no regrets, I'd
like to hear your opinions as to why you think many people still get more
enjoyment from LP than CD and why you do not. Please, let's avoid the obvious
remarks about about surface noise, limited dynamic range, wow-and-flutter (as
obviously vinyl-philes seem to be able to listen around those and don't find
them annoying).

Let the games begin!