On Tuesday, 17 January 2017 16:30:34 UTC, Bill Taylor wrote:
On Tue, 17 Jan 2017 15:38:18 +0000, Tim Watts
wrote:

On 17/01/17 13:11, Adrian Caspersz wrote:
On 17/01/17 12:41, DerbyBorn wrote:
at one time with turntables we used to study specifications looking at
Wow
and Flutter, Rumble and other characterisitics.

You can now buy a turntable for about £50 to output to a MP3 file.

Are they rubbish

Vinyl surface noises sounds horrible when compressed at low bit rates
and cartridges in cheap decks will almost certainly be ceramic.

The MP3 result will be lifeless if there was any life in the original
studio performance.

That might not matter ...


It makes me laugh when I see the vinyl record hipster stores - because
half the people buying vinyl probably have a POS toy turntable with a
cheap ceramic cartridge, unbalanced turntable with all the wow and
flutter possible, unbalanced arm and rubbish pre-amp.

A cheap CD player would be 100 times better, not to mention having to
keep vinyl super clean.

I grew up listening to vinyl and a good record on a decent middle of the
road Gerrard turntable with a very decent but simple amp and again, a
pair of middle but decent speakers, did sound good.

I could easily hear the difference between a ceramic and magnetic
cartridge too.

But it was also a PITA to keep the records clean and having to flip the
record and all that malarky.

Now we have a race to the bottom with **** earphones, and compressed to
buggery MP3s.


Personally - I buy CDs and rip (carefully with software that retries
errors rather than skips), then encode lossless, plus a second max
bitrate MP3 for and devices that cannot handle lossless.

Where we should be right now is being able to buy digital lossless media
at better than 44kHz sampling...

You can now if you want to waste your money.

http://www.hdtracks.co.uk/

https://www.highresaudio.com/en

Hyperion and Linn will sell you high res lossess fliles direct. No
doubt there are lots more and no doubt mainly selling to the same sort
of people who think vinyl can't be bettered.

You do have to be careful; some of the claimed hi-res tracks look
suspiciously like CDs with a doubled sample rate.

If they are remastered they aren't original are they.
Which make the originals worth more than a MP3 or even AIFF

Which is why I haven't dumped my vinyl.
I've got clear and coloured vinyl of some tracks too they do seem to crackle more as I remember.
I haven't dumped my CDs either.