[Mariusz Uszynski]

Vinyl guys, is quality of the vinyl the same as let's say 30-40 years ago?

[OldNick]

You should always be able to downsample/compress a digital file. If you have a 24/96 or 16/41, whatever, you can downsample/compress to mp3. I've always used dBpoweramp with great success. I use it for converting all my CDs to FLAC files as well.

dBpoweramp here also, first rate software imo.

[OldNick]

Vinyl guys, is quality of the vinyl the same as let's say 30-40 years ago?

It was hit and miss then, still is.

[Chewbacca]

Well maybe.  Quite often, the vinyl transfers are superb.  I do buy digital downloads also and the quality varies mightily, just like it does with vinyl, except for different reasons.  Thing two, a lot of new vinyl is done from digital, so again a variable result.  I've heard supposedly excellent digital beaten up pretty good by vinyl versions, including by the recordings from said vinyl.  Sometimes it's so close that the vinyl expense makes no sense.  IOW, nothing definite on either side of the fence.  Too many variables I think, including the playback equipment in both camps.

Absolutely! I could see how re-recording some music could sound better than the digital that's been "professionally" done.

But I would expect that to be few and far between? Maybe more so for older music which has never been re-remastered from the original tapes? Say for instance a recording from 1950, that they digitized in 1984, with original digital equipment, then they never re-remastered with todays equipment... It's probably VERY easy nowadays to get better recording equipment than the "professional" gear they had back then. But I would expect anything digital post 1990 or so would be better than mostly anything that could be done at a normal home setting?

That makes sense to me. BUT, I'm sure you'd need a fairly decent setup for any of that to be relevant. I digress....

Quite interesting though!

[Mariusz Uszynski]

Quite right.  Often, I want to own the LP.  I don't subscribe to any streaming services either (yet)..

I'm the same way with cds, that the format I chose 30 years ago.I do not subscribe either.

[Chewbacca]

Maybe they already have the records and don’t want to go and buy it a second time in digital form? They could just record what they already own and not pay twice?

Yeah, that makes sense! I forget that streaming services cost money lol! I'm so used to having one or two at all times

I guess I was thinking mainly fidelity. Not, needs for internet access, and subscription services

[Chewbacca]

I'm the same way with cds, that the format I chose 30 years ago.I do not subscribe either.

I actually just switched to streaming from CDs (Foobar) only months ago. I always bought the actual CD, ripped it to FLAC, and that's all that I listened to on my system (for digital). But streaminmg is just SO easy, and everything is there. Plus the quality is really good. In addition, I'd say 75% of the music is a higher bitrate than CD quality nowadays - whether or not you can always tell a difference? ehh, depends.

But vinyl is still my favorite... Just saying goodbye to my buying CD days

But I KNOW I spent more than the $15 a month for Qobuz than buying CDs... so, it helped the bank a little lol. It's just less satisfying that you don't own the nice little jewel case holding your CD anymore.

[OldNick]

Absolutely! I could see how re-recording some music could sound better than the digital that's been "professionally" done.

But I would expect that to be few and far between? Maybe more so for older music which has never been re-remastered from the original tapes? Say for instance a recording from 1950, that they digitized in 1984, with original digital equipment, then they never re-remastered with todays equipment... It's probably VERY easy nowadays to get better recording equipment than the "professional" gear they had back then. But I would expect anything digital post 1990 or so would be better than mostly anything that could be done at a normal home setting?

That makes sense to me. BUT, I'm sure you'd need a fairly decent setup for any of that to be relevant. I digress....

Quite interesting though!

I think your last point is quite relevant.  I didn't start the recording project until I had my turntable systems to the point where I had no further upgrade plans.  Recording that volume of LP's is something where once is enough.

[lazydays]

I'll chime in.  I've recorded my entire LP library of 2500 or so to 24/96 PCM.  There were 2 reasons.  Firstly, I built a DAC and wanted to push it to its limits to see how close I could bring it to analog.  Second was convenience.  Cueing up 6 hours of album music and hitting the button has large appeal, especially when alcohol is in the mix..no catastrophic accidents.  At this point, the DAC performance is so close to my analog options that I could easily live with it.  That said, my turntables and record collection aren't going anywhere, and I still buy LP's, especially when I know the recording is a good one.  Like most things, it's not for everyone, but I've learned a lot about digital in the process, and no longer consider it the evil I once did. 

Amen!!

If I have a bottle of Angel's Envy out, I listen to CD's as I value my LP's much more than a CD. I can see the grand idea of storing your music to a hard drive, and makes pretty good back ground noise. Yet if I want to sit down and listen to pure music, it will be analog. Friends drop by, and virtually none wants to hear a CD! Well there is one odd ball in the mix. I've never had a single lady ever want to listen to a CD or even SACD if that matters much. They can hear the difference even better than my old worn out ears can. When they drop by, I simply send them upstairs to pick out something. Now I do have LP's that are sorta off limits to them, and most know this. I tell them that if it has been signed to find another. On the otherhand a CD is good for breaking in an amp or a speaker. You just keep playing it over and over while your out.

I have no problem copying an LP to a hard drive, but I usually can hear a difference if I'm not drunk
gary

[lazydays]

Vinyl guys, is quality of the vinyl the same as let's say 30-40 years ago?

I think it's a little better. Many years ago I used to read the old Audio magazine for their record reviews alone. One of the things they rated was surface quality of an LP. Nobody else has ever done this that I know of. I still monitor surface quality after the first cleaning. I honestly think the older mastering was slightly better (speaking mostly of jazz and classical), but still not always perfect. I also think a lot of CD mastering is a joke (especially a live recording)
gary

[RonP]

I'm just personally a little hung up on - wouldn't the digital recording (cd, qobuz, tidal - whatever) which was generally recorded from the master tapes and then mastered/remastered (or originally recorded and mastered in digital space) be better than a recording of a recording of a recording?

Original music -> master tapes -> vinyl record -> home recorded digital.

Compared to:

Original music -> master tapes -> recorded digital ("professionally" done, with mastering)

Anyone picking up what I'm putting down? lol

I record LPs to 24/192. I like first pressings. The digital masters you mention above usually have been compresses to shit and back. Making your own hi-res digital before some CD producer got his finger in the pie and screwed up the dynamic range, can produce "better" results. Better for me at least with all of the dynamic range.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

It seems beyond their comprehension to just make a flat, clean transfer to digital from an original analog master tape. They almost always try to "improve" it. And that means compression to them. It's basically the exception to the rule to make a digital transfer true to the original release. (I listen to stuff pre-2000s almost exclusively).

I'm 50/50 on HDtracks.
I picked up an Alice in Chains album in hi-res and it's DR was on par with their latest LP offerings. (This release was an absurd priced picture LP)
I grabbed a Boston Album that was DR7. ug. It'll be my last purchase at HD tracks.

One of those exceptions was the recent Tom Petty re-release of Wild Flowers. I bought the 7? LP version + digital download. Whoever did these knew his shit. The MP3s were compressed (DR compressed) but the 24/96 digital files where full dynamic range. I made my own MP3s from the 24/96. The LPs are still unopened.


I'm rambling

[FullRangeMan]

Vinyl guys, is quality of the vinyl the same as let's say 30-40 years ago?

Today vinyl aré made from digital Master or even from a CD.

[lazydays]

Today vinyl aré made from digital Master or even from a CD.

not always
gary

[FullRangeMan]

not always
gary

There is any company recording in analog tape currently?
Those virgin open reel tapes were not cheap and had a shelf life because of loss of magnetic flux.

[Craig B]

I archived my non-classical collection (pop, rock, folk, jazz) because the vast majority of them were nowhere near audiophile quality. Those that were, I kept. The rest I put on disc and sold to save space. Besides audiophile discs, I've kept all my classical and collectible LPs, and those with cover art or packaging that was unique to the LP format (like Thick as a Brick, for example). I'm very happy with the results, especially the convenience it provides, and the fact that playing them no longer risks damage to the physical media.

[orthobiz]

I went through a brief period where I took all my CD's and put them into MP3 format for iPods (remember those?).
I digitized a few records because I was unable at the time to find them in CD format. I made some of that available to close friends and listened to the CD's in my car.

From what I remember:

Deaf School, 2nd Honeymoon and What A Way To End It All and English Boys, great Liverpudlian pop.
Paul Clinch with Choya, Living Like A Rich Man
The Shirts, s/t and Street Light Shine

BTW, at 33 years sober I don't worry about wrecking my records while playing them although I still manage to have the occasional vinyl mishap!

Now I just listen to the vinyl whenever possible.

Paul

[jsaliga]

I record LPs to 24/192. I like first pressings. The digital masters you mention above usually have been compresses to shit and back. Making your own hi-res digital before some CD producer got his finger in the pie and screwed up the dynamic range, can produce "better" results. Better for me at least with all of the dynamic range.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

It seems beyond their comprehension to just make a flat, clean transfer to digital from an original analog master tape. They almost always try to "improve" it. And that means compression to them. It's basically the exception to the rule to make a digital transfer true to the original release. (I listen to stuff pre-2000s almost exclusively).

I'm 50/50 on HDtracks.
I picked up an Alice in Chains album in hi-res and it's DR was on par with their latest LP offerings. (This release was an absurd priced picture LP)
I grabbed a Boston Album that was DR7. ug. It'll be my last purchase at HD tracks.

One of those exceptions was the recent Tom Petty re-release of Wild Flowers. I bought the 7? LP version + digital download. Whoever did these knew his shit. The MP3s were compressed (DR compressed) but the 24/96 digital files where full dynamic range. I made my own MP3s from the 24/96. The LPs are still unopened.


I'm rambling

Not rambling.  Makes perfect sense to me.  In fact, I have been recording vinyl to high resolution digital audio for over 10 years and have done hundreds of albums.  For me the attraction of vinyl has always been better mastering, and I have been willing to deal with the shortcomings of vinyl to get  it.  But I prefer the convenience and durability of digital media files.  I use a PC as a source with J-River Media Center and output audio over USB 3.0 to a DAC and an Arturia AudioFuse Studio recording interface.  I also have an interface that can record DXD 24bit/352.8 or DSD 128.



What you see above are some examples that are all sourced from vinyl.  My workflow is to make an initial capture at the sampling rate that I want: 90% of my recordings are 24bit/192KHz.  I consider it mostly overkill to go higher than that.  The frequency response of my phono cartridge/phono preamp combo is about 60KHz.  The Nyquist frequency of a 192KHz sampling rate is 96KHz, so my analogue rig is well below that.  In short, I can capture all of the signal my analog system can produce with a lot of headroom to spare by recording to 24bit/192KHz.  Once I get the raw capture made in Adobe Audition I run the files through Click Repair, a vinyl restoration tool that can remove most vinyl imperfections (pops, clicks).  Anything that Click Repair can't deal with I have to fix by hand.  It can be a very labor intensive process, but I invest the time because I am very, very sensitive to vinyl imperfections.  With that out of the way I consider any post-capture and cleanup processing that may be needed.  I would say that 99% of the time I leave things as they are, but there are some very rare occasions where I apply some very limited parametric EQ or amplitude adjustments to fix issues with cutting levels on the original vinyl.  When the captures are ready I cut them up into tracks, convert them to FLAC, and then add ID tags and cover art.  I have a flat bed scanner that can scan an album cover in one pass up to 1,200 dpi into Adobe Photoshop.  So I try to do what I would consider to be a professional quality production and I would put any capture I have made up against anything you can download off of HDTracks.

--Jerome

[jsaliga]

Today vinyl aré made from digital Master or even from a CD.

No reputable mastering studio in the world would cut vinyl from a CD source and try to pass it off as an audiophile record.  As for digital masters, yes, that is done by some mastering studios.  But it helps to understand exactly what they are doing, how they are doing it, and why.  Abbey Road Studios, for example, uses a Half-Speed Mastering process that takes the original master tape and then converts that to a digital file inside a mastering workstation.

Mastering Engineer Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios explains it much better than I ever could.  See the links below.

https://youtu.be/rc2LA9kC-4U

https://youtu.be/AjjgPVipuXc

I know some of the purists will not accept this and that is their choice.  But I don't have a problem with it and own roughly eighty 180g LPs that were half-speed mastered at Abbey Road.

--Jerome

[Letitroll98]

I don't know why people transfer vinyl to digital, but I'm sure glad they do.  Everytime my brother transfers a bunch of his albums I get a pile of new records, yea.  You might understand why I've never asked him why.

[gene9p]

I used to copy them to my cassette deck..its been in storage in my closet for over 20 years..an old Pioneer from the early 70's that you could turn Dolby off or on..Dolby was just invented back when this player was made.