Thanks, Marian - are these flaws of surface noise as intrusive as 50 years and more ago?
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If you play them a lot, it’s probably going to be the same, since I don’t think the material has changed at all since the heyday. I’m not buying new records myself, and the ones my son buys are basically collectibles and stay virtually untouched. I digitized one or two for fun, but it seems it takes more time than I’m willing to spend. When played for the first time, they sound incredibly clean to me, but I bet that’s due to my age rather than any technological advance.
The words ‘Cecil’, ‘Watts’, ‘Dustbug’ and ‘Disc Preener’ spring to mind. Anyone else?
No vinyl today is generally very poor quality finished when you receive it , comes covered in gunk and stuck on white paper dots and had some with some cutting issues. Only a few I have bought since I started to buy them again have been any good and didn’t need a very good wet clean before playing. I’ve stopped buying as they are silly expensive for what ends up being a pain in the arse, I have 30+ year old records that are in far better state than these out of the sleeve.
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I’ve not bought vinyl since the 80’s, it’s sad to see QC go downhill on something else.
Is there regulation on materials used or can manufacturers cobble together anything that works?
If records are being received warped and how you describe, there’s a problem with the printing and or storage / shipping.
I’d liked to think record stores have the means to report this upstream, though likely to their supplier.
I don’t use vinyl but it saddens me, through my vinyl years in the 70’s and 80’s I never saw this, vinyl was always pristine when removing from the sleeve. And flat.
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Although, if panels can fall off aircraft, why should the QC on vinyl surprise me
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There are all just rushed out I think. There are limited factories to produce them, the big labels clog them up with their constant reissues of old stuff so the smaller labels struggle. It can take ages to get them out for smaller bands, hence on Bandcamp why they are often delays in getting them and only limited runs. This limit of factories then affects the price and the speed of turnover to make deadlines the quality suffers. Warping is quite bad for some and I have had some with odd imprints on them to.
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That would be nice. I myself cannot get Roon ARC to work. So when I am in my car I connect my smartphone with the car’s audio equipment via a cable. And then I look up music in my Qobuz app. Our children (jn their thirties) are not interested in good soundquality. Spotify does it for them. Roon would mean costs. Uh Uh. No no. That is for them no way to go.
1957 was a very good year…
To be fair, sound quality of Spotify is astonishingly high given the fact it is always lossy (as bitrate is very high and OggV being one of most efficient lossy codecs). Did not do mass comparisons but when I did a selection I found it to be on par with Tidal if not better in some cases.
Sound quality for a vast majority of music lovers would not mean any justification for accepting additional costs nor efforts, may it be for Qobuz, Tidal, Hires downloads or roon. I would argue that except from people not deep into hi-fi being familiar with the idea of optimizing/tweaking, quality-wise Spotify would always do the job.
To really convince potential users, both roon and the premium streaming services alike have to focus on other advantages IMHO. Multi-room options would be one aspect, but Spotify and Tidal becoming better and better with this one as well. Which brings browsing experience, music knowledge base, merging local and virtual collections, playlist and suggestion (radio) management, curated content, compatibility with a vast selection of hardware and other convenience and experience aspects into focus.
I have the feeling some of these strong points of roon are not that well-known or broadly advertised. To convince for example classical music lovers, you simply have to show them the composition list function in conjunction with Qobuz and how to find/focus recordings per composition. They would not want to go back to Tidal or Spotify after this experience.
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The new quiet vinyl records, playable at 45 RPM, are handcrafted and mastered with the assumption that people who buy them have very expensive equipment. They no longer have to master these by eliminating bass etc. to avoid needle jumps on your cheap stackable RCA Zephyrsound systems… the least common denominator.
The 45 RPM preference means that the needle doesn’t get close to the center, so those distortions are gone, and the grooves are spacious as is needed for good sound, as opposed to minimizing them to fit the content.
Downside: price and having a 2 side record now take 4 sides. Good exercise though.
I have 176kHz files of the Starker Bach Cello Suites and the 45 rpms from Acoustic Sounds. No contest.
But I listen to it on the Roon more than vinyl. It’s just easier.
I never buy old records. I don’t have an RCA Zephyrsound 
As was said
Those really depend on what you listen to and I know very little of what i listen to or buy does such a thing. Definitely 90% of what is released certainly isn’t cut to 45rpm and what is will be the select stuff rereleased so many times already or classical with its own market.
Spacing is not the reason to go for 45 RPM. At 45, you get 35% more groove length than 33 1/3, so if you want to keep the same spacing, you need to reduce recording time. If you halve the time per record, you can increase the spacing, but then again, you could do the same for 33 1/3 and increase spacing even more.
Apples to oranges. If the vinyl version is better, you can just digitize that at 176.4 kHz (or whatever you’d like) and it will sound the same.
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Spot on. Younger people often live in small apartments and don’t typically have the space or money to indulge in 16 speaker Dolby Atmos home cinemas and the like. Having said that, decent headphones provide far better value for money than speakers, and can be kind to one’s ears if used sensibly.
I am slightly biased, as I have migrated from using speakers to a Smyth Realiser, which for around $4000 emulates a room with up to 24 speakers (including D&D, Genelecs, Quad electrostatics etc.) and provides fully immersive surround. It is equally impressive with 2 speaker stereo - you completely forget you are wearing headphones. So there are niches and niches - for me this particular headphone solution has solved the apartment sound issue and given me years of pleasure without annoying the neighbours.
As an information theorist, I would ask you to prove your theory about zero entropy resulting from such a transfer. Because it’s not possible
The metrics don’t support anything you’re saying. and you’re not giving any that counter them. You’re just expressing how you “feel”, which is fine. You do you
100%. That’s why I have 200 LPs - none pressed before 2013, and 7,000 albums stored digitally on my Nucleus+
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Neither our senses nor our measuring devices are perfect, so you don’t need perfect zero loss. Theory apart, double-blind ABX tests have shown that even trained listeners cannot statistically distinguish between direct playback of an analog recording and playback that went through an A/D/A conversion at 44.1kHz/16bit resolution.
You’re probably talking about measurements, and according to those, even CD quality recordings are superior in every aspect to vinyl, with room to spare. Nothing to do with feelings.
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Absolutely. I use two immersive head-tracking solutions with Roon - at one end of the cost continuum ($4000), I use a Smyth Realiser https://smyth-research.com, which is by far my best hifi investment in 40 years. When travelling, I use APL Virtuoso software ($200 with headtracker) developed by the PsychoAcoustics Lab at a UK University https://apl-hud.com/product/virtuoso/. Both provide a convincing “out of your head” immersive experience, and allow one to listen to high quality virtualised speakers like Genelec, D&D etc. Far better than just buying an amp and headphones as the sound is in front and around you, just as in a real listening room. Give it a try - you will be impressed! Obviously the Smyth Realiser is better, but APL Virtuoso is amazing value for the price, and runs on my Macbook Air like a dream.
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If it has nothikng to do with feelings, then you’re free to mention some numbers. One, even. You didn’t so you read some generic articles on this topic.
I prefer to hear what the engineers woprked hard to creat for me. It’s why I only listen to digital for digitally recorded music, and only listen to vinyl’s made in the era of audiophile masters.
These double-blind tests are always flawed. There are a lot of people who just read recounting of these tests and beleive they’re statistically significant, not influenced by the volume trick, etc.
Engineers - who were there - always say that vinyl is better, because they created these recordings and supervised the mastering, etc.
Study Shannon’s work and come back to us with your theory about entropy somehow magically not occurring for this one form of information. (You will fail at this)
BTW, this entire discussion illustrates why people don’t want to be audiophiles