[Audio Empire]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2011 11:18:28 -0800, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article ):

"Scott" wrote in message

.
We can find many explanations that are strictly due to
sound quality and have nothing to do with nostolgia or
rituals. The large body of better mastered LPs is a very
good and common reason for such a preference along with
the now well documented euphonic distortions that can
lead to a more convincing sense of spaciousness, richness
and realism.

There is no such thing as a "large body of better-mastered LPs", compared to
the huge number of well-mastered CDs that continue to be produced.

Volume-wise, you're probably correct, but today's newly remastered and newly
pressed vinyl from people like Classic Records et al, are generally of older
titles that had a reputation for sounding great back in the day. These
include jazz titles from Verve, Blue Note, and Riverside, (the last two
largely recorded by Rudy Van Gelder), and classic titles from RCA Victor,
Mercury, British Decca, Vox Turnabout, and Everest among others. Just about
every vinyl title that ended up on somebody's "to die for" list is available
again on really high quality pressings. Often these are DMM mastered and
pressed on 180 or 200 gram virgin vinyl, some are cut at 45 RPM, and some are
even single-sided. All are much better than the original pressings from the
original label's manufacturing facilities. And where the same title is also
available on CD, the vinyl USUALLY sounds better. There are exceptions, of
course. JVC's XRCDs are marvelous and give us a peek at how CDs OUGHT to
sound, but rarely do. Unfortunately, XRCDs are expensive (more than
$30/title) and limited in US distribution. They sound good because they are
carefully made. I'm not sure that I buy the importance of all the steps that
JVC says they use in producing these discs (things like a rubidium master
word clock sync'd to all the digital mastering steps), but the very fact that
they take the time to do it right at all stages of mastering and production
is evident in the final product. and it's a very rare thing these days. I've
noticed (as have others) that the JVC XRCD Red Book releases of the old RCA
Living Stereo titles actually sound MUCH superior to BMGs own SACD
remasterings of these same titles!

*Nothing* relating to current LP production is *large* compared to the tens
of thousands of new digital titles that are produced every year. It is all a
tiny niche.

That's pretty irrelevant to the point here, isn't it Arny? Looks to me that
you have pulled up that old argument confusing quantity with quality. The
purpose of this exercise is to discuss the shortcomings of commercially
available CDs which make them APPEAR to be a medium that is inferior to LP,
SACD, DVD-A and high-resolution downloads, when in fact, it's purely the
execution of those CDs, and not the medium itself which is responsible for
these phenomenon.

Please study up the number of new digital titles produced say last year or
the year before, and compare that to the number of new LP titles produced
the same year. Provide us with actual numbers from independent sources so
that we can see this purported "large number" for ourselves.

I don't think that's relevant at all to the point. I'm sure nobody here is
trying to say that LP in any way competes in the marketplace with CD
production. No one with any sense of the market at all would make such an
irresponsible assertion. I suspect that you misunderstood Scott's intended
meaning.

Since you have said that your main system has no digital player attached to
it, how can you claim to speak authoritatively about how digital releases
sound?

Has Scott, in fact, said that? I must have missed it somewhere.