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Author Topic: Vinyl records  (Read 1959 times)

Weaver

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Vinyl records
« on: May 22, 2019, 02:28:27 AM »

It’s interesting to look decades ahead. One day DSL and metallic paths will be long-forgotten, totally obsolete and people will fondly or otherwise remember all the problems, maintenance, the tweaking and the vast body of lore, knowledge, expertise associated with dsl, lines and modems.

Like vinyl records, with noise scratches, warps, off-centring and problems with cartridge alignment and arm geometry, all that knowledge will be irrelevant and possibly lost. I used to know all about different types of arm and cartridge. I set up an arm with alignment geometry kits to try and minimise the max geometric angular alignment error across the record. Put damping fluid in the arm. Had an RIAA eq input on an integrated amp. All that went when CD arrived, and vinyl was forgotten. I unlike others have, no fondness for vinyl. I hated it back in the 70s, it was a nightmare as keeping records clean was horrible plus there was the nightmare of records arriving damaged in the first place. I should perhaps have shelled out a small fortune for a Keith Monks machine’.  But the moment I heard about digital audio, I couldn’t wait for the first CD players.
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Ronski

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Re: Vinyl records
« Reply #1 on: May 22, 2019, 06:19:17 AM »

You obviously haven't heard, vinyl is making a comeback, some shops even have vinyl sections. I believe CD sales are declining and record sales increasing.
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Weaver

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Re: Vinyl records
« Reply #2 on: May 22, 2019, 06:36:52 AM »

I just discussed analog audio as an example because the forgetting of the lore is a true phenomenon for some people at least. I doubt that dsl will persist in any location but of course there may be a long tail. However my central concern is that we forget.

I believe that there was a danger of this a while ago at NASA where expertise from the 1960s related to moon-capable rocketry was in danger of being lost. I heard some story about bringing in retired engineers to capture their knowledge.

Another example was the Y2K initiative, in which I participated. I heard that ancient COBOL mainframe programmers were brought back to fix very old code. Some mainframe lore and culture will have been or will soon be forgotten.
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: Vinyl records
« Reply #3 on: May 22, 2019, 08:24:03 AM »

I have a different take on this.  I don’t think anything will be, or even can be, forgotten any more, owing to digital storage.   And storage capability seems to be expanding faster than knowledge, if that makes sense?

I’m not sure that’s a good thing.   My worry is there might come a time where future generations are unable to understand the concept of the word “forgotten” in its current form.   Effectively “recorded history” might be restarted.    Things that missed the boat of digital storage, such as Apollo and other big historical events, good and bad, might come to be treated as if they had simply never happened.
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jelv

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Re: Vinyl records
« Reply #4 on: May 22, 2019, 09:16:43 AM »

Vinyl: How many on here have collections of old LPs? We were surprised recently by a chat on Bargain Hunt with someone dealing in old records and how some of the more obscure bands can be worth something. One example he gave was Gentle Giant, Acquiring The Taste which we have a copy of the original vinyl LP.
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: Vinyl records
« Reply #5 on: May 22, 2019, 10:30:59 AM »

I still have all my LPs.  Most have been supplemented by corresponding CDs that are ripped to my media server for the undeniable convenience, but I still play Vinyl once in a blue moon.  Often, the reason I do so is to convince sceptics that Vinyl really does sound nicer.  I connect a stand-alone CD player to the same analogue Amp as the turntable so I can get both CD and Vinyl copies of the same recording playing in unison, then switch between them for direct comparison.   As often as not, the sceptics are convinced.  :)

I'm not so sure about the more modern habit, of USB-connected turntables.   Surely that just creates the worst of both worlds - you get the clicks and pops inherent to vinyl, as well as the ever-so-slightly inferior sound quality inherent to digital?
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vic0239

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Re: Vinyl records
« Reply #6 on: May 22, 2019, 10:37:25 AM »

Vinyl: How many on here have collections of old LPs? We were surprised recently by a chat on Bargain Hunt with someone dealing in old records and how some of the more obscure bands can be worth something. One example he gave was Gentle Giant, Acquiring The Taste which we have a copy of the original vinyl LP.
I have quite a few LPs (100+) dating back from the 1960s. I have phases of interest when I select a few and play them on my 1974 Linn Sondek LP12 deck and SME tone arm which is still going strong albeit has had a new digital motor and updated Ortofon cartridge. I still have the original Shure V15 though. I’ve bought a few new releases on vinyl recently and also a few “vintage” pressings. Trouble with LPs is the constant toing and froing to change sides!
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Weaver

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Re: Vinyl records
« Reply #7 on: May 22, 2019, 12:35:36 PM »

My focus was on the loss of knowledge of the most personal and practical kind, of minutiae. Thousands of human languages are being lost and they will never have been adequately captured.

I’m pleased to hear about the much-loved LP12. I had an SME Mk III arm on my Thorens TD160S turntable, which lived on two concrete blocks on a three-inch thick wall shelf bolted to three brick walls - on the long side and on the ends, between a chimney breast and side wall. The shelf was strong enough for me to lie on it. Built by my father after an earlier crappy turntable sitting on a wooden blanket box aka microphone plus resonator destroyed my first pair of speakers’ crossovers with bass acoustic feedback. Bless him, father understood the task, and them some, went totally over the top and built the Humber Bridge, but certainly achieved the desideratum.
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pxr5

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Re: Vinyl records
« Reply #8 on: May 22, 2019, 03:01:17 PM »

I've just emptied my bookcase of hundreds of DVDs and Blu-rays. To be replaced with my Vinyl LPs that were stored away in 1997. Of course I had to get a new turntable so a treat to myself of a Rega Planer RP1 and a Yamaha Amp. Very nice.
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: Vinyl records
« Reply #9 on: May 22, 2019, 08:30:31 PM »

My own turntable is also a Rega, a Planar 2 vintage circa 1990, with Creek 4040 amplifier and Mission 761 speakers.    That’s all decidedly “budget” by standards posted, and I am envious of the systems others have described, but I remain satisfied with that kit and have never felt the need to improve upon it.

Whilst  I rarely (not never) use the original Rega/Creek configuration, the 30 year old Mission speakers remain in full time employment as front Left and Right in my home cinema surround system with modern digital AV amplifier.  They sound vastly, vastly, vastly, superior to the silly little miniature speakers that came with the system.   I simply do without a front centre speaker, rather than try to find one to match the Missions. :)
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Weaver

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Re: Vinyl records
« Reply #10 on: May 22, 2019, 11:29:30 PM »

Will we mourn our forgetting of metallic path lore though? Or will we laugh and curse the outages, crosstalk, RFI and SNRM variations? Will there be nothing interesting to talk about when we are all on reliable dull FTTP. No equivalent discussion group for electricity users; well who knows - could talk about wiring and generators, lightning, wild weather and brownouts.

There still will be problems with crappy ISPs and problems ‘out there’ on the wider internet, issues relating to the core internet itself and relating to major service and content providers.
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: Vinyl records
« Reply #11 on: May 22, 2019, 11:43:40 PM »

My own prediction...?

Elimination of full metalic path effectively necessitates VoIP.   Just as CDs in certain ways can never be as good as Vinyl, VoIP in other ways can never be as good as POTS, especially as regards latency.    As with CDs vs Vinyl, we’ll be assured by the marketeers that it is simply impossible for average human beings to detect the detriment of VoIP vs POTS.

But if it transpires, as with CD vs Vinyl, that many human beings deviate from average and find VoIP unpleasant, they won’t be able to simply restock and rejuvenate old appuratus, as the metalic path will have been irredeemably lost. :(
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Weaver

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Re: Vinyl records
« Reply #12 on: May 23, 2019, 01:11:00 AM »

It might be VoIP in its own VLAN or other L2 ring-fenced channel straight into a telco. Or it might be actual internet VoIP but with effective pervasive QoS which really does ring-fence the bandwidth at L3.

It will be absolutely horrible otherwise and the public won’t put up with it, not after they have been used to phones that ‘just work’. The voice-channel at L2 route will be something to keep telcos relevant maybe, a differentiation between IPs. Or else there will be a panic to get QoS put into more core routers.

I wonder if people might get interested in having separate IP routing with dual L3 virtual pipes everywhere right across the guts of the internet, with one pipe of a pair being QoS-high entrance only. Separately visible in the routing tables. Would that make sense? (No. :-) )
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Bowdon

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Re: Vinyl records
« Reply #13 on: May 23, 2019, 01:31:16 PM »

I can understand why vinyl is making a comeback because the analogue style music with his crispy crackling sounds actually gives it life and feeling.

The good or bad side of digital, depending on your point of view, is the music is very clear. I don't think it transmits the musical instruments or voices of the singers in their pure form because it cleans up the audio, and I think that takes away some of the emotive side, for me anyways.

I agree with 7LM that most things will be archived. Youtube is a good example of that. I can go to youtube and find music videos of songs I'd heard in the 80s for free. Or even old tv programmes. I like old British comedies and sometimes I'll find a title that looks good but I'm not sure how it will play so I type it in to youtube and 9 times out of 10 someone as uploaded either an episode or a trailer for it. Some programmes I've only found on youtube as I don't think they have made the demand to get printed on a dvd to sell.
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Weaver

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Re: Vinyl records
« Reply #14 on: May 23, 2019, 03:07:45 PM »

The thing about vinyl is that it is not ‘hi fi’ according to the true ‘Quad’ definition, but rather it is attractive sound rather than accurate. The microphony creates feedback and added reverb which is very pleasant. The same can be said albeit to a far far less extent for valve amps, which suffer benefit from microphony and also can, in the case of non-hifi models, exhibit pleasing third and fifth harmonic distortion and have soft clipping. My wife has a guitar amp that has one real valve in it because of the attractive sound. Of course true high fidelity audio needs to be accurate, not containing added sugar and MSG. For pop music, the ‘accuracy’ thing is arguably largely meaningless as the studio recording is an artificial created construct shaped by the engineer. So I can very much appreciate the motivation.
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