Neomania

[jeremyp]

Vinyl is a good example where I think practicality and quality compete.  Music from CDs and the like is often the poor relation in this respect, as it lacks the extremes of tone, which isn't so true of vinyl.

While it is true that vinyl theoretically has better quality output than digital, for most practical purposes, this is not the case. You need very good audio equipment to notice and even then, many of us here are old enough that we can't hear the extreme ends of the frequency range.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Seriously ?vinyl is better than CD?

Did you not hear the crackle with vinyl? Even on the new ones?

And those bits that sounded like a DJ messing with the turntables?

Then you had tapes, which spooled out all over the place...... usually your favourite one.

I much prefer cd's

Wasn't there meant to be a mini cd that was going to replace them all?

Not heard anymore about that.

Streaming has to be the way to go, even cd's can jump.

With vinyl the systems on which they were played on were instrumental. That is had their own characteristics like an extra musical instrument. Also it changed over time. I guess it gave each playing a 'performance' quality.


 

[jeremyp]

Seriously ?vinyl is better than CD?

Did you not hear the crackle with vinyl? Even on the new ones?

Do you understand the meaning of the word "theoretical"?

A vinyl record consists of a groove with a near perfect encoding of the sound. The Problem is that it is an analogue encoding which means that a bit of dirt that falls into the groove cannot be distinguished from the proper sound. However, it is theoretically possible to extract almost the exact sound that was encoded.

A CD is a long string of numbers that sample the sound at discrete intervals. This means that all the information between two samples is lost and the actual sample can only be between 0 and about 65000. That gives a dynamic range of about 90dB. A CD represents a sound which is a smooth continuous wave by a series of points (only 65000 values). Fortunately, the human ear is quite a shoddy piece of work and it can't really tell the difference.

I much prefer cd's

And I much prefer mp3s because I can put those on my phone.

[Rhiannon]

You can download CDs to iTunes and then transfer to iPod or phone from there. As my phone doesn't have a huge amount of memory I also use Spotify.