Wet afternoon so I decided to take the opportunity to lift the platter off the turntable, clean the bearing and drop in a little fresh oil. Whilst doing so was playing Ry Cooder/A F Toure on CD which was great. But once the TT was back together on went Norah Jones on vinyl - game over:guitar:
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Happy to buy your used cd’s off you 
. But yeah, fettling stuff is best use of a cold rainy day. 
Problem with that is that if I replace all my CDs with vinyl I’ll need a house extension😀
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I like vinyl as a change from digital. I’d never (rarely) listen to music if my collection was 100% vinyl.
I could give up digital entirely.
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This is why pre-amps have multiple inputs 
so i guess you are not interested by modern music or contemporary classical or jazz or alternative or in general all new albums being actually produced ?
Personally, if i could, i would stick with only vinyl too. But unfortunately perhaps 5% of contemporary albums i am listening is produced on vinyl.
Like most on here I grew up when vinyl and tape (cassette or RTR) were the only way to get music. I am now in my 50’s and still have vinyl as my main source and probably 90% of what I play is on that format. I have CD’s from when vinyl went through its wilderness years but will always be attached to vinyl
I have teenage kids and they used to pull my leg about vinyl as they download but now they see the draw as you get the lyrics on the sleeve, pictures etc. It has even got to the point one has a cheap TT in her bedroom.
I don’t stream as the internet in my area is just not good enough and constantly goes down so I really don’t see that as an option for me. I get up at 5am and travel to London for work and normally get home around 7pm and always put vinyl on to unwind when talking to wife/kids about their days etc. I fear if I put a CD playlist on the HDX or streamed I would fall asleep, vinyl makes me get up every 20 mins or so and has probably saved me from getting divorced !
Each to their own and I can see the attraction of other formats but I have instructions in my will to set my TT up at my funeral complete with a play list. Not sure if the is healthy or not really …
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Interesting comment that - I have no trouble buying new music on vinyl. There are quite a few times when that is actually the only physical format available. This is very genre-dependent, naturally.
In truth I haven’t bought much new music recently but there’s been other reasons for that.
I still buy new music and am happy that artists I like seem to release on vinyl. So here I am in my sixties buying the likes of London Grammar and Emily Barker.
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which genre of music do you listen to? for myself it’s contemporary jazz . The vast majority is only on cd or hirez.
It is quite varied, but I do prefer my jazz old.
For most popular styles I find vinyl releases to be almost the default medium.
For me it took a NDX2 with a XPS-DR before I felt like digital could be as satisfying as vinyl. My vinyl rig still sounds better, but at least digital is now very close. I am now listening to more contemporary recordings of jazz and classical via Roon (Qobuz and hi-res file based).
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For me it was Hugo that made digital so natural sounding that took digital from being simply different to being distinctly better, or for a Linn toting diehard vinyl friend to admit that digital could be as good. Since changing to Dave he freely admits digital is better.
BUT mastering is all-important. The so-called ‘loudness war’ in particular resulted in decimation (and worse) of dynamic range on many a CD, effectively castrating the medium as actually in it is capable of wider range than LP (and streaming from one’s own stored digital file can beat CD).
With the best mastering on a good system (here for digital the DAC is all-important) digital beats vinyl because it has fewer compromises. And that is absolutely the case where the original is digitally recorded in the first place, and in my view then a preference for vinyl is for reasons other than sound quality. Of course if mastered differently, e.g. with the digital release artificially compressed, then vinyl can out-perform digital, despite its limitations.
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I could never get to love vinyl. Fist memories are of vinyl. I had my own kiddies records from the age of 3 and my own turntable. First album was the soundtrack to Return of the Jedi.
But as all the other vinyl in the house was horrid C&W and others (honestly, we’re talking Kenny Rogers and The Greatest Hits of Leonard Nimoy here), tape it was on a lovely Akai deck. Three turntables in the house but the lone tape deck won.
After years of exposure to a maxed out LP12 at work I still just could not fall for it. I suppose if I had a large home, I might be inclined to get copies of my favourite albums from pre digital days on vinyl for the fun of it. I’d probably still listen to the digital copies though. And honestly, I cannot afford more than one top quality source.
I suspect it must be kind of like why some people just get turned off by the sound of one speaker over another. It’s quite personal and you just instinctively like what you like and the rest doesn’t do it for you. You don’t know why, it just does or it doesn’t.
I understand the appeal though and not all of it is purely aural. When I had a Laserdisc collection, DVD came along and supplanted it. But it was not the same. There was a ritual about movie night with the giant silver discs. The huge gatefold sleeves with big artwork. The giant player and big platter. You knew it was special. Oddly enough there is talk of resurrecting the form factor, if not the format, for 12" 8K Blue Ray.
So yeah, I may not like how vinyl sounds but the tactile experience is extremely appealing.
I disagree on both points. It doesn’t follow my experience, and that of many others I know. I prefer digital if the recording or mastering is digital, but a full on well-mastered AAA vinyl is hands down better sounding to me. Granted, my analog front end is 150% the cost of my digital, but I just don’t think one can make such blanket statements like that.
As you said much of it depends on mastering too. I do have some recordings both in 24/96 FLAC and AAA mastered vinyl (e.g. Tone Poet Blue Note reissues and DG Classics reissues). They are from the exact same mastering session. The vinyl beats the digital hands down, but they were analog to begin with.
In general, I think digital recordings or mastering are best left in the digital domain. I mostly don’t get the point of releasing digital recordings on vinyl, and I am disappointed when analog recordings are remastered for vinyl in the digital domain. Full analog recording and mastering sounds better to me on vinyl than when transferred to digital. Every time.
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i could’t have said it better !
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Talking of poor recordings I must try my copy of “Bring me the Head of Yuri Gagarin” again, that’s the worst recording I own and it’s been hardly worth the effort on most setups I’ve had, except possibly for “In The Egg”, not tried it for a few years now. My current rig seems to get the music out past some pretty poor recordings but this one would be a miracle.
I agree in concept, but the issue is that many times you don’t have access to the hi-res digital master, and then the comparison is between CD-quality digital and vinyl that may (emphasis on “may”) have been pressed from a higher-res master using a very good DAC, which muddies things quite a bit.
I do agree that if you have access to the digital masters and a good digital source, vinyl is in theory pointless in those cases.