On 17/01/17 17:04, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
charles wrote:
I kept my turntable but there's a rubber band in it that has
metamorphosed into something rather sticky.

Unless it's something very rare I'd say a spare shouldn't be too hard to
find. Got one for my Thorens easily. Ebay might be worth a look.

Ebay is a surprisingly good source for stuff like that: I got a belt for
a 1970s Super 8 projector.

On 17/01/17 16:25, whisky-dave wrote:

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...

Yes and we all should spend at least £50 for a decent bottle of wine in a resturant as with most it depends on the price and what you want.
Most of my MP3s are ACC or MP3 at 192KHz or higher.

Where do you get them? Amazon were ****e when I tried...

And it's not about £50. I can get the CD from HMV or Amazon for the
usual price and ripping is free.

All I was saying is by now, we should be able to buy 44.4kHz lossless
DRM free media.

44.4kHz was a compromise between quality and play time. It was a very
good compromise, but we might as well go a little better now there's no
reason not to.

"Tim Watts" wrote in message
...
On 17/01/17 16:25, whisky-dave wrote:

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...

44.4kHz was a compromise between quality and play time. It was a very good
compromise, but we might as well go a little better now there's no reason
not to.

I think that 44.1 was chosen to be sufficiently good that only dogs and bats
would notice the limitations.

It is generally accepted that human hearing is 20-20,000 Hz
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range and many other sources) and
diminishes with age.

Nyquist's sampling rate says that to represent an analogue sine wave of
frequency f, you need a sampling rate of at least 2f.

So for 20 kHz, you need to sample at 40 k samples/sec. Allowing for
low-pass anti-aliasing filters that are not perfect, 44.1 or 48 k
samples/sec are sufficient. The exact values of 44.1 and 48 are for
compatibility with other systems (I forget the details, but I think they are
related to using PAL and NTSC video recorders with a few samples per picture
line for mastering early digital recordings).

So what would be the advantage of increasing the sampling rate? What would
the benefit be of being able to reproduce audio frequencies beyond about 20
kHz?

Maybe there is a need to increase the sampling depth to greater than 16 bits
(ie -32K to +32K), though I think subjective tests have shown that there is
no perceived advantage, as the signal to noise ratio is already so great
that it exceeds that of analogue amplifiers that would reproduce the sound.

On Tue, 17 Jan 2017 13:39:11 +0000, dennis@home wrote:

On 17/01/2017 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.

Not worth it when you can just download an MP3.
I consider it just a legal to do so as recording the record.
Neither will get you into trouble.

Assuming the MP3 is available. I have some vinyls I want to 'rip' where a
CD or MP3 is not available.

Are they rubbish - or isn't the medium selective enough for the cheap
mechanical features to matter?

Rubbish, but probably better than the old SP25s people had.

I liked my SP25...



--
My posts are my copyright and if @diy_forums or Home Owners' Hub
wish to copy them they can pay me £1 a message.
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK: http://www.mirrorservice.org
*lightning surge protection* - a w_tom conductor

On Tue, 17 Jan 2017 14:22:54 +0000, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

In article ,
charles wrote:
In article . com,
dennis@home wrote:
On 17/01/2017 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.

Not worth it when you can just download an MP3. I consider it just a
legal to do so as recording the record. Neither will get you into
trouble.

is my entire LP collection available on MP3? even if it were, it would
cost me quite a lot to duplicate music that I already have.

I'm surprised by the number of folk who have got rid of their record
playing equipment, but kept all their LPs. My niece's hubby is one such.
Given how much space LPs take to store. He was apparently getting one of
these USB turntables for Xmas so he could digitize his LP collection.
I did say he could come here and do it properly. ;-)

I kept my TD160 and I have a few vinyls to do, when I get round to it...


--
My posts are my copyright and if @diy_forums or Home Owners' Hub
wish to copy them they can pay me £1 a message.
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK: http://www.mirrorservice.org
*lightning surge protection* - a w_tom conductor

In article ,
NY wrote:
44.4kHz was a compromise between quality and play time. It was a very
good compromise, but we might as well go a little better now there's
no reason not to.

I think that 44.1 was chosen to be sufficiently good that only dogs and
bats would notice the limitations.

It is generally accepted that human hearing is 20-20,000 Hz
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range and many other sources) and
diminishes with age.

For those who go on about how good FM radio is they should note it doesn't
go anywhere near 20 kHz. ;-)

--
*A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.*

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

In article ,
Huge wrote:
On 2017-01-17, Chris Bartram wrote:
On 17/01/17 17:04, Huge wrote:
On 2017-01-17, Clive George wrote:
On 17/01/2017 15:38, Tim Watts wrote:

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.

I dunno - IME people who can be arsed with vinyl also tend to be
arsed about getting a decent amp/turntable/speakers.

[FX]Waves


I reckon the market is split: people who will go out and buy a
half-decent turntable etc (or better), and the ones doing it for
fashion..

I'm still using the turntable I bought 40 years ago.

Likewise. A Thorens TD150. But nearer 50 years ago here.

--
*I see you've set aside this special time to humiliate yourself in public

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
NY wrote:
44.4kHz was a compromise between quality and play time. It was a very
good compromise, but we might as well go a little better now there's
no reason not to.

I think that 44.1 was chosen to be sufficiently good that only dogs and
bats would notice the limitations.

It is generally accepted that human hearing is 20-20,000 Hz
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range and many other sources) and
diminishes with age.

For those who go on about how good FM radio is they should note it doesn't
go anywhere near 20 kHz. ;-)

Yebut Dave, we can't hear 20kHz
I doubt my Garrard 86sb ever produced 20kHz.

On Tuesday, 17 January 2017 12:41:49 UTC, 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

lo-fi.

- or isn't the medium selective enough for the cheap
mechanical features to matter?

vinyl & mp3 are more than good enough to notice. Unless you record at 64k anyway.

Plastic decks are always better avoided IME. You can almost get away with it with enough care, but not really.


NT

On Tuesday, 17 January 2017 13:11:47 UTC, 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

why use low bit rates

and cartridges in cheap decks will almost certainly be ceramic.

Everyone knows the grotty ceramics of the 60s. By the 80s ceramic pickup technology had matured, and one could get something ceramic to rival most hifi pickups for a few australian peanuts. Few would ever admit it, but it wasn't hard to fool people on that point.


NT

On Tuesday, 17 January 2017 13:17:29 UTC, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article 6,
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 - or isn't the medium selective enough for the cheap
mechanical features to matter?

I suppose if you make billions of them the price comes down. But the
precision a decent turntable, arm and cartridge were made to in the good
ol' days suggests otherwise. A replacement stylus for my Ortofon cart.
costs more than one of these USB turntables. ;-)
Also, it was never simple making a good sounding RIAA preamp. Let alone
one which does that for a USB input.

I remember the LM381 making a pretty good job of it.


NT

On Tuesday, 17 January 2017 17:07:24 UTC, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
charles wrote:
I kept my turntable but there's a rubber band in it that has
metamorphosed into something rather sticky.

Unless it's something very rare I'd say a spare shouldn't be too hard to
find. Got one for my Thorens easily. Ebay might be worth a look.

if you can't find one designed for the model, one of same dimensions should work. And if you have a real oddity, just make a belt. It does work.


NT

On Tue, 17 Jan 2017 20:38:08 +0000, NY wrote:

"Tim Watts" wrote in message
...
On 17/01/17 16:25, whisky-dave wrote:

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...

44.4kHz was a compromise between quality and play time. It was a very
good compromise, but we might as well go a little better now there's no
reason not to.

I think that 44.1 was chosen to be sufficiently good that only dogs and
bats would notice the limitations.

It is generally accepted that human hearing is 20-20,000 Hz
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range and many other sources) and
diminishes with age.

Nyquist's sampling rate says that to represent an analogue sine wave of
frequency f, you need a sampling rate of at least 2f.

So for 20 kHz, you need to sample at 40 k samples/sec. Allowing for
low-pass anti-aliasing filters that are not perfect, 44.1 or 48 k
samples/sec are sufficient. The exact values of 44.1 and 48 are for
compatibility with other systems (I forget the details, but I think they
are related to using PAL and NTSC video recorders with a few samples per
picture line for mastering early digital recordings).

So what would be the advantage of increasing the sampling rate? What
would the benefit be of being able to reproduce audio frequencies beyond
about 20 kHz?

Maybe there is a need to increase the sampling depth to greater than 16
bits (ie -32K to +32K), though I think subjective tests have shown that
there is no perceived advantage, as the signal to noise ratio is already
so great that it exceeds that of analogue amplifiers that would
reproduce the sound.

For presentational purposes, the CDDA standard exceeds requirements for
Hi-Fi reproduction of published musical performances by a more than ample
margin as anyone who has read "Monty" Montgomery's very fine article on
"24/192 Music Downloads ...and why they make no sense" linked to he

https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

could have told you.

For the more sceptical of us that are, however, interested enough to
learn more about 'digital audio', there is a very nice "Digital Show &
Tell" video on this page: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml which
demonstrates the whole analogue to digital to analogue processes in a
straight forward no-nonsense and entertaining manner[1] which, at the
very least, should leave the most sceptical of us questioning any of
their preconceived notions that the "More is Better" claim for SACD has
any validity in fact (Hint: for the purposes of final reproduction, it
has absolutely none).

[1] For anyone with the slightest interest in digital audio, this video
is well worth the 23 minutes and 52 seconds of the time required to watch
it right through to its conclusion.

--
Johnny B Good

On 17/01/17 19:53, Roger Hayter wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 17/01/17 13:51, Andy Burns wrote:
Dave Plowman wrote:

DerbyBorn wrote:

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

Neighbours had to send back two, to get a third working one, I haven't
heard the results.

it was never simple making a good sounding RIAA preamp.

Do that in software on the PC.

still got to do a proper input buffer-with-gain stage though.

As I vaguely understood it, it was necessary to do the correction in the
first stage for noise reasons. BICBW, and that might only have been a
practical limitation at the time.

well if you do it at too high a level, you may end up clipping before
filtering.

IN general the input stage boosted form a nominal 2mV or so at 50K ohm
impedance, to a corrected few hundred mV. You could have put the RIAA
filter after that, but why bother? Wrap it as feedback on the input
stage so the output of that is neat and normalised with respect to
volume and frequency response.

It was just the neatest way to do it.

There was only a 65dB S/N ratio on a typical pickup anyway, due to
thermal noise in the wires. You could generally design carefully for a
couple more dB of front end noise at the worst.

Hardly CD quality.




--
"In our post-modern world, climate science is not powerful because it is
true: it is true because it is powerful."

Lucas Bergkamp

On 17/01/17 20:38, NY wrote:
"Tim Watts" wrote in message
...
On 17/01/17 16:25, whisky-dave wrote:

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...

44.4kHz was a compromise between quality and play time. It was a very
good compromise, but we might as well go a little better now there's
no reason not to.

I think that 44.1 was chosen to be sufficiently good that only dogs and
bats would notice the limitations.

It is generally accepted that human hearing is 20-20,000 Hz
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range and many other sources) and
diminishes with age.


Th response of a stereo FM tuner is not that good. 16Khz at best, maybe
18...

Nyquist's sampling rate says that to represent an analogue sine wave of
frequency f, you need a sampling rate of at least 2f.

So for 20 kHz, you need to sample at 40 k samples/sec. Allowing for
low-pass anti-aliasing filters that are not perfect, 44.1 or 48 k
samples/sec are sufficient. The exact values of 44.1 and 48 are for
compatibility with other systems (I forget the details, but I think they
are related to using PAL and NTSC video recorders with a few samples per
picture line for mastering early digital recordings).

So what would be the advantage of increasing the sampling rate? What
would the benefit be of being able to reproduce audio frequencies beyond
about 20 kHz?

Maybe there is a need to increase the sampling depth to greater than 16
bits (ie -32K to +32K), though I think subjective tests have shown that
there is no perceived advantage, as the signal to noise ratio is already
so great that it exceeds that of analogue amplifiers that would
reproduce the sound.

Nope. The problem with digital MP3 is not the sample rate, its the
digital compression that is applied.

Its not lossless.


--
"In our post-modern world, climate science is not powerful because it is
true: it is true because it is powerful."

Lucas Bergkamp

On Tue, 17 Jan 2017 17:04:10 +0000, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

In article ,
charles wrote:
I kept my turntable but there's a rubber band in it that has
metamorphosed into something rather sticky.

Unless it's something very rare I'd say a spare shouldn't be too hard to
find. Got one for my Thorens easily. Ebay might be worth a look.

I bought a spare drive belt for mine (a TD125MK1) a decade or so back
just in case. The last time I checked, a few years ago now, I couldn't
tell whether it was the new belt in the plastic bag or the old one since
I can't remember for sure whether or not I actually swapped the new one
onto the deck! The original had been still in such good condition that I
think I may have decided to hang onto the new belt as an 'unused
spare'. :-)

Obviously, Thorens chose their 'rubber' compound wisely since even after
more than two decades, there was no sign whatsoever of deterioration in
the drive belt (unlike the drive belt used by Philips in their solenoid
controlled data cassette deck drives which had become a gloopy sticky
mess in little more than a couple of decades).

--
Johnny B Good

On Tue, 17 Jan 2017 20:03:05 +0000, Chris Bartram wrote:

On 17/01/17 16:54, RobertL wrote:
On Tuesday, January 17, 2017 at 12:41:49 PM UTC, 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 - or isn't the medium selective enough for the cheap
mechanical features to matter?

I suspect they are rubbish, but I have wonderedthe same thing. I have a
lot of LPs that i've not heard since I was young (1970s) and I also
have the original GL75 turntable I used to play them on. My plan (one
day) is to connect up the GL75 to a PC and make CDs of the vinyl. I
actually want all the pops and crackles because I am so familiar with
them and they will be part of the nostalgic experience.

Daft I know.

Robert



I can kind of see that, but I don't miss the pops/scratches. Any vinyl I
care about I've rebought on CD: CDs are pretty cheap now, compared to
the 80s.

That's all fine and dandy, provided they hadn't been 'weaponised' for
use in "The Loudness War" campaigns that were (and still are?) being
conducted by "The Pop Industry". Many a good recording suffered the
effects of the extreme levels of compression made possible by DSP when
remastered for re-release on CD. :-(

--
Johnny B Good

On 17/01/2017 15:38, 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.


Which I think is to miss the point. Not everyone listens to music for a
pristine digital rendition. For some it's an experience that's actually
enhanced if you have something tactile, tangible and full of associations.

Some people get that, lots don't.

--
Cheers, Rob

On 18/01/2017 02:46, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Tue, 17 Jan 2017 20:03:05 +0000, Chris Bartram wrote:

On 17/01/17 16:54, RobertL wrote:
On Tuesday, January 17, 2017 at 12:41:49 PM UTC, 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 - or isn't the medium selective enough for the cheap
mechanical features to matter?

I suspect they are rubbish, but I have wonderedthe same thing. I have a
lot of LPs that i've not heard since I was young (1970s) and I also
have the original GL75 turntable I used to play them on. My plan (one
day) is to connect up the GL75 to a PC and make CDs of the vinyl. I
actually want all the pops and crackles because I am so familiar with
them and they will be part of the nostalgic experience.

Daft I know.

Robert



I can kind of see that, but I don't miss the pops/scratches. Any vinyl I
care about I've rebought on CD: CDs are pretty cheap now, compared to
the 80s.

That's all fine and dandy, provided they hadn't been 'weaponised' for
use in "The Loudness War" campaigns that were (and still are?) being
conducted by "The Pop Industry". Many a good recording suffered the
effects of the extreme levels of compression made possible by DSP when
remastered for re-release on CD. :-(


Yes, good point. I've bought a bunch of CDs to replace/supplement vinyl,
and been very disappointed. The worst a set of Hendrix re-releases on CD.

--
Cheers, Rob

On 17/01/2017 22:46, Huge wrote:
On 2017-01-17, Chris Bartram wrote:
On 17/01/17 17:04, Huge wrote:
On 2017-01-17, Clive George wrote:
On 17/01/2017 15:38, Tim Watts wrote:

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.

I dunno - IME people who can be arsed with vinyl also tend to be arsed
about getting a decent amp/turntable/speakers.

[FX]Waves


I reckon the market is split: people who will go out and buy a
half-decent turntable etc (or better), and the ones doing it for fashion..

I'm still using the turntable I bought 40 years ago.

Good point. I would be, if I used one.

On 18/01/2017 02:46, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Tue, 17 Jan 2017 20:03:05 +0000, Chris Bartram wrote:

On 17/01/17 16:54, RobertL wrote:
On Tuesday, January 17, 2017 at 12:41:49 PM UTC, 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 - or isn't the medium selective enough for the cheap
mechanical features to matter?

I suspect they are rubbish, but I have wonderedthe same thing. I have a
lot of LPs that i've not heard since I was young (1970s) and I also
have the original GL75 turntable I used to play them on. My plan (one
day) is to connect up the GL75 to a PC and make CDs of the vinyl. I
actually want all the pops and crackles because I am so familiar with
them and they will be part of the nostalgic experience.

Daft I know.

Robert



I can kind of see that, but I don't miss the pops/scratches. Any vinyl I
care about I've rebought on CD: CDs are pretty cheap now, compared to
the 80s.

That's all fine and dandy, provided they hadn't been 'weaponised' for
use in "The Loudness War" campaigns that were (and still are?) being
conducted by "The Pop Industry". Many a good recording suffered the
effects of the extreme levels of compression made possible by DSP when
remastered for re-release on CD. :-(

I've never noticed that, but I have noticed just how bad Metallica's
"Death Magnetic" sounds because of it: I only listened to it once, it's
that bad.

On Tuesday, January 17, 2017 at 1:11:47 PM UTC, 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.

low bit rate (128kb/s) is the default setting for Microsoft but it can sound like a kicking a dustbin on some music. 192 or 256 sounds a lot better if you have the memory space.

On 18/01/2017 02:20, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Nope. The problem with digital MP3 is not the sample rate, its the
digital compression that is applied.

Its not lossless.



Well people don't knowwhat MP3 stands for.
Its MPEG layer 3 audio.
It was always lossy and designed to fit videos onto CDs and DVDs not for
hifi.
They soon dropped it when bluray arrived and went for master audio which
is uncompressed.

On 18/01/2017 01:55, Johnny B Good wrote:

For the more sceptical of us that are, however, interested enough to
learn more about 'digital audio', there is a very nice "Digital Show &
Tell" video on this page: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml which
demonstrates the whole analogue to digital to analogue processes in a
straight forward no-nonsense and entertaining manner[1] which, at the
very least, should leave the most sceptical of us questioning any of
their preconceived notions that the "More is Better" claim for SACD has
any validity in fact (Hint: for the purposes of final reproduction, it
has absolutely none).

[1] For anyone with the slightest interest in digital audio, this video
is well worth the 23 minutes and 52 seconds of the time required to watch
it right through to its conclusion.

I'd read the first article some time ago, but watched the "show and
tell" last night: well worth the time.

On 18/01/2017 00:47, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Huge wrote:
On 2017-01-17, Chris Bartram wrote:
On 17/01/17 17:04, Huge wrote:
On 2017-01-17, Clive George wrote:
On 17/01/2017 15:38, Tim Watts wrote:

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.

I dunno - IME people who can be arsed with vinyl also tend to be
arsed about getting a decent amp/turntable/speakers.

[FX]Waves

I reckon the market is split: people who will go out and buy a
half-decent turntable etc (or better), and the ones doing it for
fashion..

I'm still using the turntable I bought 40 years ago.

Likewise. A Thorens TD150. But nearer 50 years ago here.

I confess that although I still have my old turntable I don't normally
play vinyl any more. I did fire it up a year or two ago and I had
forgotten just how tetchy about vibrations, earthing and magnetic
shielding the low signal levels of a magnetic pickup actually are.

It took several goes to get the thing going properly without obtrusive
hum and clicks from the CH and boiler were unavoidable. Having to turn
the disk over is surprisingly inconvenient after CDs or digital media.
One 32MB USB memory stick can hold around 50 albums at CD quality (or
many more depending on how much lossy compression you can live with).

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

On 18/01/17 08:49, dennis@home wrote:
On 18/01/2017 02:20, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Nope. The problem with digital MP3 is not the sample rate, its the
digital compression that is applied.

Its not lossless.



Well people don't knowwhat MP3 stands for.
Its MPEG layer 3 audio.
It was always lossy and designed to fit videos onto CDs and DVDs not for
hifi.
They soon dropped it when bluray arrived and went for master audio which
is uncompressed.


It was (and still is) a popular format for so called Video-CDs in China.

And it's OK in that context. It was a huge mistake allowing it to become
the de-facto for plain audio though.

In article ,
wrote:
I suppose if you make billions of them the price comes down. But the
precision a decent turntable, arm and cartridge were made to in the good
ol' days suggests otherwise. A replacement stylus for my Ortofon cart.
costs more than one of these USB turntables. ;-)
Also, it was never simple making a good sounding RIAA preamp. Let alone
one which does that for a USB input.

I remember the LM381 making a pretty good job of it.

Right. You'd not want to see what I ended up with, then. ;-)

--
*Despite the cost of living, have you noticed how it remains so popular?*

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

In article ,
Johnny B Good wrote:
I can kind of see that, but I don't miss the pops/scratches. Any vinyl I
care about I've rebought on CD: CDs are pretty cheap now, compared to
the 80s.

That's all fine and dandy, provided they hadn't been 'weaponised' for
use in "The Loudness War" campaigns that were (and still are?) being
conducted by "The Pop Industry". Many a good recording suffered the
effects of the extreme levels of compression made possible by DSP when
remastered for re-release on CD. :-(

Yes. It's something many choose to ignore. You almost never hear the
master tape as it left the studio. That goes through a different mastering
process for vinyl and CD and maybe even for downloads. And most you hear
via a broadcast has been processed too.

--
*The colder the X-ray table, the more of your body is required on it *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

In article ,
RJH wrote:
Yes, good point. I've bought a bunch of CDs to replace/supplement vinyl,
and been very disappointed. The worst a set of Hendrix re-releases on CD.

When you get to love an LP - including all its quirks - a far better
quality transcription of the source heard much later can often disappoint.

--
*On the other hand, you have different fingers*

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

In article ,
Martin Brown wrote:
Likewise. A Thorens TD150. But nearer 50 years ago here.

I confess that although I still have my old turntable I don't normally
play vinyl any more. I did fire it up a year or two ago and I had
forgotten just how tetchy about vibrations, earthing and magnetic
shielding the low signal levels of a magnetic pickup actually are.

The trick is to fit the pre-amp to the deck and feed out of that at normal
line level.

It took several goes to get the thing going properly without obtrusive
hum and clicks from the CH and boiler were unavoidable. Having to turn
the disk over is surprisingly inconvenient after CDs or digital media.
One 32MB USB memory stick can hold around 50 albums at CD quality (or
many more depending on how much lossy compression you can live with).

When at home I don't mind selecting what I want to listen to off the shelf.

--
*Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

In article ,
Huge wrote:
On 2017-01-18, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Huge wrote:
On 2017-01-17, Chris Bartram wrote:
On 17/01/17 17:04, Huge wrote:
On 2017-01-17, Clive George wrote:
On 17/01/2017 15:38, Tim Watts wrote:

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.

I dunno - IME people who can be arsed with vinyl also tend to be
arsed about getting a decent amp/turntable/speakers.

[FX]Waves


I reckon the market is split: people who will go out and buy a
half-decent turntable etc (or better), and the ones doing it for
fashion..

I'm still using the turntable I bought 40 years ago.

Likewise. A Thorens TD150. But nearer 50 years ago here.

Same model.

Brings back memories. I didn't buy it new myself, although it was new.

Came from a deceased estate sale.

A complete Quad II stereo setup including AM tuner, a Garrard 301 with
Decca pickup, and a pair of Tannoy GRF speakers. The Quads. etc in a
cabinet. Included were a near new Revox A77 and the Thorens TD150, SME arm
and Decca cartridge. Those being unused, waiting to be fitted.

All for 300 quid in the late '60s. The estate valuer had got things rather
wrong IMHO.

--
*The more people I meet, the more I like my dog.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

En el artículo , Huge
escribió:

Likewise. A Thorens TD150. But nearer 50 years ago here.

Same model.

Can you still get the cartridges for it?

--
(\_/)
(='.'=) systemd: the Linux version of Windows 10
(")_(")

In article ,
Mike Tomlinson wrote:
En el artículo , Huge
escribió:

Likewise. A Thorens TD150. But nearer 50 years ago here.

Same model.

Can you still get the cartridges for it?

Most cartridges have the same fitting. Different types - moving magnet,
moving coil, ceramic, etc may have different electronics.

Most quality cartridges can have a new stylus fitted. Sometimes a
specialist job.

--
*In some places, C:\ is the root of all directories *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

On Tuesday, 17 January 2017 16:50:56 UTC, Clive George wrote:
Some like the object lijke those ****wits that still by books that dont; have videos in them and can;t be easily searched.

If I wanted a video I'd not buy a book.

When I wanted to know how to do a donut in a car I found it easier to watch a listen to a diagram than have a text explanation.
Why is the early days (enen even now) of medicine do studets watch surgeons when they can read how to do anything from a book. ?

The bandwidth for information
transfer in text can be massively higher than a video.

I doubt that but would need to check if a picture is worth a thopusand words but it does depend what those words are.

On Wednesday, 18 January 2017 12:27:26 UTC, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Mike Tomlinson wrote:
En el artÃ*culo , Huge
escribió:

Likewise. A Thorens TD150. But nearer 50 years ago here.

Same model.

Can you still get the cartridges for it?

Most cartridges have the same fitting. Different types - moving magnet,
moving coil, ceramic, etc may have different electronics.

Most quality cartridges can have a new stylus fitted. Sometimes a
specialist job.

It was an odd question. I only recall 1 deck having a nonstandard fitting, some fashion over sense thing. And there was the occasional 1 hole mounting like the GL75 that required an adaptor.


NT

On Tuesday, 17 January 2017 20:11:32 UTC, Tim Watts wrote:
On 17/01/17 16:25, whisky-dave wrote:

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...

Yes and we all should spend at least £50 for a decent bottle of wine in a resturant as with most it depends on the price and what you want.
Most of my MP3s are ACC or MP3 at 192KHz or higher.

Where do you get them? Amazon were ****e when I tried...

visa torrent years ago some were MP3 some ACC some AIFF some FLACK, when I have the CD I ripped it to ACC or MP3 192k.

Somehow I"ve eneded up with space oddity 8 track was included in one of the downloads.
I have 10 DVD/CDs of syd barratt "HYGIY" I think was the title all FLAC.



And it's not about £50. I can get the CD from HMV or Amazon for the
usual price and ripping is free.

Yep that's what I'd do and have done.
But some like higher quality than others which is why there's a range of most products.


All I was saying is by now, we should be able to buy 44.4kHz lossless
DRM free media.

Isn't that what CDs are.



44.4kHz was a compromise between quality and play time. It was a very
good compromise, but we might as well go a little better now there's no
reason not to.

for that you'd need the music industry to produce at that quality.
But teh music industry never really cared about that they cared about their profit margins I know because someone I knew (manager level) at vivendi(SP) asked me how the music was being got as they;d seen sales drop and wanted to find a way of stopping on-line copying, I said you can;t you're only option is either better quality CDs that people will want to buy (include posters and artwaork that won;t be easy to copy cheaply or start selling MP3s yuorseves at a cheap enough price that people won't bother searching for it for free.

On Wed, 18 Jan 2017 02:20:52 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:
On 17/01/17 20:38, NY wrote:

It is generally accepted that human hearing is 20-20,000 Hz
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range and many other
sources) and
diminishes with age.

Th response of a stereo FM tuner is not that good. 16Khz at best,
maybe
18...

I thought it cut off at 15kHz: the pilot tone is 19kHz.

--
Max Demian

On Tuesday, 17 January 2017 20:38:11 UTC, NY wrote:
"Tim Watts" wrote in message
...
On 17/01/17 16:25, whisky-dave wrote:

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...

44.4kHz was a compromise between quality and play time. It was a very good
compromise, but we might as well go a little better now there's no reason
not to.

I think that 44.1 was chosen to be sufficiently good that only dogs and bats
would notice the limitations.

I doubt that I thought it was do do with what ADCs could do at the time.
PCs were 44.1KHz macs were 48KHz internally.


It is generally accepted that human hearing is 20-20,000 Hz
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range and many other sources) and
diminishes with age.

The problem there is if you had an instrument playing at 20Hz and one at 1KHz at equal amplitude the bandwidth is defined by half power so yuo wouldn;t hear the volume at the same level of 20Hz, 1K and 20K only the 1KHz would be at the correct power level delivered to the speakers.

and as you say, as you get older your hearing drops off especailly at the higher end so what you need to do in order to listen to the instruments at the level the artist originally played them at is to turn up the treble or extend the freqency range to ~22kHz, so 20K is no longer at -3db but at the same level as 1KHz is.


Nyquist's sampling rate says that to represent an analogue sine wave of
frequency f, you need a sampling rate of at least 2f.

for commercial use 44.1KHz was used pros used 48KHz.


So for 20 kHz, you need to sample at 40 k samples/sec. Allowing for
low-pass anti-aliasing filters that are not perfect, 44.1 or 48 k
samples/sec are sufficient. The exact values of 44.1 and 48 are for
compatibility with other systems (I forget the details, but I think they are
related to using PAL and NTSC video recorders with a few samples per picture
line for mastering early digital recordings).

So what would be the advantage of increasing the sampling rate? What would
the benefit be of being able to reproduce audio frequencies beyond about 20
kHz?

It's for mixing purposes I thought.


Maybe there is a need to increase the sampling depth to greater than 16 bits
(ie -32K to +32K),

Most musicians use 24 bits for their loops now.

though I think subjective tests have shown that there is
no perceived advantage,

I can hear the difernce between 16 bit and 24 bit.

Like soem peole can see a better and more gradients of colour especailly women it seems can better distiquish small diffencies in shades of colours.

On 18/01/2017 12:22, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Mike Tomlinson wrote:
En el artículo , Huge
escribió:

Likewise. A Thorens TD150. But nearer 50 years ago here.

Same model.

Can you still get the cartridges for it?

Most cartridges have the same fitting. Different types - moving magnet,
moving coil, ceramic, etc may have different electronics.

Most quality cartridges can have a new stylus fitted. Sometimes a
specialist job.

Mantra Audio http://www.mantra-audio.co.uk/ have a good selection of
styli available if anyone requires one. And cartridges.

--
Max Demian

In article ,
whisky-dave wrote:
I think that 44.1 was chosen to be sufficiently good that only dogs and bats
would notice the limitations.

I doubt that I thought it was do do with what ADCs could do at the time.
PCs were 44.1KHz macs were 48KHz internally.

The CD red book format was based around what a semi-pro video recorder
used for PCM audio could do in those days. Basically, an NTSC U-Matic.
Hence the odd playing length originally.


--
*The colder the X-ray table, the more of your body is required on it *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.