After years, I finally bought a turntable. I'm going to start buying my favorite albums of all time, but I wanted to know what the lesson thought are albums that sound much better on vinyl than on cd, mp3, etc.

Thanks.

the instruemnts being played are much more defined and you hear the subtle sounds that one wouldn't be able to pick it up on other mediums.

>the instruemnts being played are much more defined

This isn't necessarily characteristic of any particular medium....

>and you
>hear the subtle sounds that one wouldn't be able to pick it up
>on other mediums.

You might be talking about dynamic range here, or the absence of CD-level compression. You're familiar with the loudness wars? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

you don't hear "new" sounds that you didn't hear before.
the sounds you have always heard just take on a new quality.

for example-- the remaster of "billie jean" makes the bass sound crisper,
but on the vinyl, it sounds rounder. and it sounds more like a bass.


i think. the differences i hear may be psychological.
i don't know if i could tell the difference between a vinyl copy and a CD copy in a double blind study.

but that's how it feels to me.


also, some CD's either never got remastered or had a shitty
transfer over to digital. so on some CD's, you can hear hiss
and other things that you don't hear on the vinyl.
which means that the limitations of vinyl make the album sound better
than they would on CD. (kinda like how Sanford and Son looks better
on Standard Definition TV than on High Defintion CD.)
i mean, 60's motown sounds flat and compressed on CDs,
but they pop when they come out of a turntable.

then again, some CD remasters sound incredible.
the remaster of "let it bleed" sounds better than the vinyl...
and the effort that went into the remaster reveals how great of a job
the original engineers did. the CD is capable of revealing sonic qualities
that may have been hidden in the original vinyl pressing.


^^ bear in mind, some of that may all be in my head.
sonics isn't even why ppl dig vinyl.

ppl dig vinyl because it turns the listening experience into a ritual.
you can see the record spinning, and you can see the needle,
and you can see the grooves on the record.

when the record is playing, you can follow along the liner notes and get lost
in the cover art (CD liner notes are like reading the dictionary,
but vinyl covers are big enough to feel and get lost in).

it's also fun to browse through record shops (again, the cover art is
cool to get lost in... whereas browsing for CD's is tedious.)
and it's fun to take a chance on an album in the dollar bin and find something great.

see... that's something that MP3s can't give you.
the joy of discovery.

you can't really browse for mp3s. so whatever you find
was based either on a recommendation or familiarity with the artist.
vinyl, on the other hand... you can discover a band most ppl forgot about
and get spun in an entirely new direction for your musical appreciation journey.
part of the thrill is finding something that resonates with you in a sea of junk.
something you would have never have thought to look for in an MP3 search.

that's why i love vinyl.
i think some vinyl sounds better to me, but that could be
fetishism for the medium.

it's more the act of listening to and discovering vinyl that i love.



and now, i regret selling my albums.
i may buy a turntable this weekend and start my collection over again.






>the instruemnts being played are much more defined and you
>hear the subtle sounds that one wouldn't be able to pick it up
>on other mediums.

>^^ bear in mind, some of that may all be in my head.
>sonics isn't even why ppl dig vinyl.

Yes to everything you said about sound. It's really a question of warmth and (as you suggest) distance, to my ears, which I chalk up to issues of a) mastering/remastering and b) compression when we're comparing to cds/mp3s/digital formats. I do think that this quality can help you to notice things you didn't notice before, because it draws your attention in...

but so do good speakers... and if nothing else, most folks who are buying turntables right now are also investing in *slightly* better speakers than the $20 headphones or the $30 computer speakers they've been listening on for most of their lives.

And *that* change is crucial. I got a turntable a few years ago, and a set of real (still cheap, but real-ish) bookshelf speakers and a sub, with a real-ish amp. Nothing fancy, but enough to really make a difference in the total package of the sound.

Willie Nelson's voice never sounded so present. Elton's classic records felt whole, total, everything in their right place, where as on some of the newer remasters they sometimes feel disjointed sonically, texturally.

Don't get me started on Sly's Riot and Fresh...

>ppl dig vinyl because it turns the listening experience into a
>ritual.
>you can see the record spinning, and you can see the needle,
>and you can see the grooves on the record.

>that's why i love vinyl.
>i think some vinyl sounds better to me, but that could be
>fetishism for the medium.
>
>it's more the act of listening to and discovering vinyl that i
>love.

And yes to all of this. I wish more people would recognize this. A lot of folks write off the recent vinyl resurgence as just hipster consumerism. There's some of that. But I think for a lot of people, it's part of an effort to make music/art count in there lives by giving it some tangibility, something to hold on to (literally). The weight and effort of vinyl make cds feel paltry by comparison, which has much less to do with issues of sound than with listeners' desires.

*plus* vinyl brings history with it. It's great that so much new stuff is being released for vinyl now, but there's a chance of finding anything and everything on vinyl, because pre-CDs, it was released there first. Shitloads of jazz records never got transferred to CD, period. Classical records, too. Not to mention the range of independent recordings, private pressings, etc.

Of course, vice-versa: a lot of stuff never got pressed to vinyl, esp. after the early 90s...

In short, vinyl+speakers do make a difference in sound, but the renewed interest in vinyl is, for some, an almost metaphysical or existential concern: it's about trying to anchor the 0s and 1s in something more present and experiential, less ephemeral.

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~

thanks for all of this, joe. very insightful.

the CD's sound too far away.
like they were recorded from the next room.
or maybe CD's reveal the limitations of how the music was recorded.

Stevie's class period sounds great on vinyl, but the remasters are great for
entirely different reasons.

the vinyl is warmer, the cd remasters are brighter.

i prefer the beatles remasters to the vinyl originals.

"exile on mainstreet" sounds better grimey than clean and remastered.

i'll be back to this post... but make sure you answer reply #1.

it's critical.






>After years, I finally bought a turntable. I'm going to
>start buying my favorite albums of all time, but I wanted to
>know what the lesson thought are albums that sound much better
>on vinyl than on cd, mp3, etc.
>
>Thanks.

I came in to solely to say Exile.

Sounds beautiful and filthy. It just begs to be cranked way up. So good.

Even the ones I bought from Amazon and wherever else.

hear on vinyl, these are some of the main ones I really want on vinyl

(they're available on amazon.com)

(yeah I know this isn't exactly what you were asking but...I have a feeling about these albums giving me "something" on vinyl that would be.......just a hunch)


Traffic - when the eagle flies

Hendrix - Valleys of Neptune

Hendrix - people hell and angels

Fugazi - Steady diet of nothing

Fugazi - end hits

Parliament - Chocolate city

Badu - Worldwide Underground

If you play it a little faster. Think 38 RPM.

Jimi Hendrix: Band of Gypsys
Chicago: VII
Wes Montgomery: A Day in the Life
Sly Stone: Fresh
Miles Davis: Kind of Blue
Prince: Purple Rain
D-Styles: Phantazmagorea

These days with kats recording music in their computer/laptop and mostly doing their own mixing or letting the computer do it sometimes sound cool when it's transferred to another site for download and put onto mp3 but when you get your music pressed on vinyl it needs to be mixed & mastered just for vinyl and the engineer can only master what's there and if the music was poorly mixed especially if the music was compressed for mp3 and not for dynamic range that vinyl will produce during playback (all those flaws will be heard).

And these days I've heard some really poor sounding albums cause it was made for cd not for vinyl and the music was too loud, not loud enough, sounding mono, the bass be over-powering, not clean and sounding thin, and this be mostly from major label artists, not just indie kats.

I will admit that from the early 2000's and back, albums do sound better than cds but these days not so much.

werd.

werd.

werd.

"Albums that don't sound better on vinyl."

According to my calculations this post has the potential for more than 500,000 replies, or more specifically, the number of albums that have ever been released on vinyl. Save for "And Then You Shoot Your Cousin" which just sounds bad on both formats.

and other Miles' CD's sound better than the vinyl because the vinyl makes those LP's more "dense" and the book says those Miles Cd's let's the various instruments sound less "buried" at times.

The book says that "Panthalassa: The Music Of Miles Davis 1969-1974 Reconstruction & Mix Translation By Bill Laswell by Miles Davis" has better mixes than the Miles vinyl lp's and the music comes out better.


The author Paul Tingen could be wrong, but....he sounded pretty convincing in the book.