there is not one album in existence that better on CD than on vinyl is there?

look, you can't say vinyl sound is not a thing, because even within vinyl sound is a thing!

when 2 diff pressings of the same tune have a comparative relative oomph factor of 100x, guess which one the CD sounds more like...

still like buying new albums on vinyl but the diff in sound quality is never as superior on vinyl as i might hope - e.g. random access memories never sounded as good as an album with that much of an analogue fetish should have done. most modern albums prob sound best on cd really... other times, cds can highlight that sound quality or great fidelity/detail/whatever isnt all that important for a lot of releases, esp big pop stuff. vinyl is basically best for music recorded before around 1999. though saying that, some lo fi music like grime etc benefits weirdly from vinyl as it gives its sonic crudeness/rawness something a little warmer.

also, the prices of new vinyl are appalling!

Not really, that's what vinyl cost in 1963 in comparative terms.

I prefer a room littered with vinyl to a room littered with CDs. when I kick over a stack of CDs, I swear; several of them break. They can't be put back together. I can kick an LP in its sleeve across the room and I'll maybe bend the corner, no big deal. New vinyl I buy will be playable forever; most of the CDs will become unplayable because of my hobby of kicking over stacks of CDs and taking penalty kicks at the stereo with them. I know the ref from school so I get to take a lot of penalty kicks. I still buy CDs because I just buy music, period, it's a thing I do, but I prefer buying vinyl because it complains less when I mistreat it and is more fun to play with and handle and dote over and apologize to. Sorry for kicking you across the room I was hoping to break another CD case with you. I will kick Fleetwood Mac next time.

Longer albums definitely seem to the main case for the usefulness of CDs, but the purely digital formats sort of blow that out of the water. Like there was that Flaming Lips 6-hour song that came out last year. CD is digital anyways, so you may as well just ditch the plastic and get some lossless files or something.

anybody changed their mind on this one way or another?

i still don't prefer vinyl to cd but I got a Skevono cheap player mostly cos I decided I wanted to play some of the records I acquired for collection purposes (not to sell, just to have cos of nice design).

i'm no audiophile, and I'm mostly digital listening these days.

Vinyl looks better framed on the wall.
CDs easier to rip.

most of my vinyl is just for "hey cool fun, I have this and if I ever see this band again 20 years from now when the pandemic ends, it'd be neat to get autographed". i play them now and then though.

A lot of things sound better on vinyl. I would favour CDs for music with a very dynamic range or a lot of high frequencies (virtually all classical music or electroacoustic music), or that was created digitally in the first place.

Xp I prefer a room littered with vinyl to a room littered with CDs. when I kick over a stack of CDs, I swear; several of them break. They can't be put back together. I can kick an LP in its sleeve across the room and I'll maybe bend the corner, no big deal.

Yeah, CDs were actually pretty great- compact and portable, great sound, easy to jump from track to track. The problem with CDs imo was those plastic jewel cases. They're unnecessarily bulky. They're fragile and always break. CDs would be a lot more desirable to collectors now if they'd been packaged in mini paper LP sleeves like those posh Japanese reissues. There's a reason those ugly CD storage booklets were such a hit.

Countless records are better on CD. There are albums with lots of high end detail in the mix. There are albums that were sequenced with the CD format in mind etc

that was created digitally in the first place.

Exactly

The remastered CD of New Tradionalists by Devo sounds way better than the original vinyl, which was made from a compromised master tape.

my post in this thread from 2013 still stands up.
sorry, i get the emotional connection and all that, but i have no love for vinyl.

Yeah lots of stuff sounds better on vinyl, and there are still some excellent vinyl masters and pressenings like the recent-ish INA GRM reissues on Editions Mego. But for the most part new vinyl is the naked emperor in the room.

The smart collectors are buying up CDs while they're "junk" imo.

I broke so many cds that before the legit digital explosion I rebought the same album as much as three times

I've owned thousands of CDs and never broke one. What are you doing with them?

Nuh uh, i ain't tellin YOU, cop!

Twice in my life I have felt the giddy terror of bending a CD in one hand until the edges touch, then waiting for the splintering sound before it explodes into shards. But they crack at the hub way too easily.

As an artifact, no.

For sound quality, convenience, durability, space (re: small apartments), affordability (re: modern LP reissues), re: not having pops/warp/dust, not having to stop in the middle and turn it over... Most any album can be better on CD.

was pretty ardently pro-CD until recently, still feel a well-mastered CD on an okay or better system thru a decent CD player is pretty unbeatable

a couple of years ago decided I wanted to listen to my old LPs again so have been on a journey of trying to get them sounding as good as vinyl aficionados claim is possible

admittedly a lot of my vinyl gear is the spoils of being an accomplished rat scavenger at flea markets etc, but I reckon I've only just got to the point where I feel it's even close

my tentative conclusion is that you'd need to spend a whole lot more money getting a decent vinyl system together than a CD system of similar quality? like, maybe a $5k dynavector cart would blow my fkn socks off, but I'm unlikely to ever find out

all that said I really enjoy the hobbyist aspects of vinyl - crate-digging, cleaning, having the occasional market stall - plus trying new TTs and carts

there are a few albums and 12"s that do sound incontrovertibly better to me on wax - but is that simply because the CD masters sucked?

apropos of nothing, since I started listening with a critical ear for SQ and comparing formats, I'm noticing that a lot of imperfections are actually baked into the source recording and some records are gonna sound a bit rough on any format (not just low fi punk records or whatever)

I've owned thousands of CDs and never broke one. What are you doing with them?

― Gerald McBoing-Boing,

Seconding this ^^^ I also have thousands of them and can't understand how you can break them unless you're incredibly clumsy.

I'm agnostic on jewel cases, but one advantage of them is that you can completely replace the case if it cracks, breaks etc.

This is the only CD that's ever fully broken on me. Not unusual for this design. I ripped it in about 2005 but I can't find the files...

https://img.discogs.com/gSWK7TqWXpgxMu48NbZCWymqc60=/fit-in/600x528/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-648-1197113402.jpeg.jpg

o yah those are infamous for actually breaking

All the metal case CR albums would eventually crack the CD because the case center was made of stronger stuff than the plastic

since I started listening with a critical ear for SQ and comparing formats, I'm noticing that a lot of imperfections are actually baked into the source recording

In the early days of the format there was some standard text on just about all CDs that passively aggressively reminded the consumer of this.

Nice thing about CDs these days if you have a computer and an optical drive is you can get high end digital to analog conversion from prosumer audio interfaces not costing much more than £100.

see also: Dragonfly

Nice thing about CDs these days if you have a computer and an optical drive is you can get high end digital to analog conversion from prosumer audio interfaces not costing much more than £100.

Oh, this is def what I do with CDs (or decent digital files, which I mostly put in a similar category). But I just use a Pro-Ject Essentials II turntable for home listening. It cost much much less than $5k and sounds v good to me. A lot of folk, jazz, and old rock is very satisfying with the vinyl warmth imo. I really like Band of Gypsys in that format, for example. Some recent LPs that sound good to me are Sarah Louise's Field Guide, Battle Trance's Blade of Love (I have it in HQ digital and LP and sometimes enjoy the warmth of the LP), Sonoluminescence Trio + 1 - Live at the Record Centre.

I think Swan's The Seer is better digital, it's just entirely too long for vinyl, and changing the records is a pain.

very otm, I can't stand it when long tracks are split on vinyl

A lot of it depends on how good your vinyl setup (which requires TT, cartridge, and phonostage) v your CD player.

I have 3 Todd Rundgren albums which definitely do not sound very good on vinyl: A Wizard, A True Star, Initiation, and the first Utopia album. all of them are around an hour long (Initiation is 67 minutes long, surely one of the longest single LPs ever?) and you can definitely hear the degradation, particularly as you get towards the center of the record. CD versions of all these sound pretty good though.

(Initiation is 67 minutes long, surely one of the longest single LPs ever?

!!!! single album? I had no idea that was even possible, that's 20 mins over the recommended max, crazy

i bet it sounds like shit!

Initiation has that 30+ minute song on it, no?

"A Treatise On Cosmic Fire" 36:00

Wow.

I bet if you just grazed the surface with a fingernail you'd make a skippable scratch.

admittedly it's so strange that the poor sound quality isn't as noticeable. its more of an issue on Side 2 of AWATS, particularly "Is It My Name?" and "Just One Victory". its amusing how Todd's response to this was "yeah you've just gotta turn the volume up some"

ha, yeah making mixtapes with AWATS was funny because you had to turn the input level wayyyyy up

I'm actually kinda surprised that AWATS hasn't come out in some deluxe 2x LP configuration considering how iconic an album it is

amusingly Initiation is actually a minute longer than Todd (his prior LP), which was a double

XPS Isn't there a late vinyl-era Cure album with a notice like that re: length and mastering volume?

Friday music did a 2lp reissue of Wizard

well I'll be damned, there is

I wonder how it sounds. I don't really wanna pay $30 to find out

Side 1 of E2-E4 is 31 minutes and the whole thing is continuous. I'm sure there are records that are quite a bit longer but not too many that are supposed to somewhat full frequency range and dynamic. Never heard an original but an old Spalax reissue doesn't sound too bad.

The Cure’s Disintegration has a note saying it was mixed to be played loud, but that was on all formats. The OG vinyl does indeed sound shit though - well mostly Fascination St is a mess of inner groove distortion at the end of side 1, side 2 is just about bearable. And that’s with two songs lopped off the track listing! I can only think that after their previous 2LP the record company baulked at following it up with another (esp as they were legendarily unimpressed upon hearing the record.

In fact if we are talking original pressings then in my experience Head On The Door, KM3 and Disintegration all sounded way better on CD. I’m sure the reissues are an improvement tho.

what length does a side have to be before inner groove distortion becomes noticeable? I've only really noticed it on those Todd LPs. though I've heard that they deliberately put quieter/less dynamic songs at the end of a side to mitigate this.

I dunno, I always thought about 24 minutes was proper max LP side length. In my experience older LPs with shorter sides often better sustain surface damage, as the grooves are cut deeper (?)

I've got a copy of Arvo Part's Miserere on vinyl and side one is 34:44 - it sounds pretty terrible, weird that ECM would even bother with this in 1991 when CDs were pretty established.

Vinyl On Demand has done flawless pressings of 32-34 minute LP sides fwiw, but it requires fairly rigorous quality control

Nature Tapes by Lemon Demon

Definitely different turntables and - more significantly - different stylus profiles can have a huge effect on how they handle imperfect vinyl - I’m using a Technics EPC-310MC at the moment and it is brilliant at digging detail out of records I thought were pretty played-out - but can be very unforgiving of scratches. I have a second TT with a moderately good AT stylus that gets used for cheap and cheerful dollar bin purchases.

So anyway totally agree that it’s hard to have an objective POV about the quality of a pressing.

Having said that I’ve had non-fill (“ripping” sound) in a bunch of contemporary pressings and only one or two vintage LPs, and that’s totally a QC issue.

This is a gross thing to say but I don’t think paper inner sleeves are great for vinyl, often they are glued in with static and can abrade the surface during shipping. On the rare occasions that I’ve bought contemporary records that are stored in a plastic inner they are always in much better condition.

It’s pretty hard to strongly advocate for more plastic use, but then again it’s pretty hard to defend vinyl fandom on environmental grounds anyway.

people on discogs often post reviews like maniacs.

i imagine a warehouse at amazon filled with returned vinyl because people thought it was a bad pressing.

Amazon does ship their vinyl pretty carelessly sometimes. I've heard a few horror stories. luckily I've been fine with the few I've gotten from there but it's weird, you either get it in a really thin cardboard package that could easily blow away or a gigantic box that makes you think you accidentally ordered a table saw

agreed re: the plastic inner sleeves....those thin white paper ones with the hole for the label are probably fine, but the thicker & glossier ones do seem to scuff up the records - nothing that should affect playback, but still, you can get like 300 plastic inner sleeves for the cost of one new record so you might as well. if nothing else they seem to be good at keeping the static away.

just got an 80s vertigo cd of ride the lightning in the mail, it’s kickin ass alright

I should say I have the most recent CD of kill em all and that sounds great too!

ha yeh I would have to say re the og thread premise that the burden of proof is very much on vinyl to sound better than the CD, rather than the other way round

hey TSF - I upgraded to the 95ML on your recommendation. you were right. IGD is pretty much completely gone. first LP I tested it on was Tormato by Yes because the final track on Side A ("Release, Release") had it particularly bad. now I don't even notice it. the record also sounds more crisp - no pops or clicks (though I can't remember how noisy it was before? I mean this is a $1.99 Goodwill record, otoh it's Tormato so who knows how much the original owner played it). almost kicking myself for not getting this sooner. thanks for the recommendation!!

also was very nice that I already had a perfectly aligned AT cart that came with the turntable, just pop it in and go

alright, just gave this the ultimate test: Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star (as you know he's getting polled right now). it's a 56 minute LP with some pretty loud & crazy stuff going on at the end of both sides, so it kind of sounds like garbage on vinyl. with this stylus it's pretty much as good as the CD, none of the blowouts & sharp sibilance that it had before. easily the best "upgrade" I've ever made to my system.

hey great it worked out for you, frogbs. enjoy the listening!