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Im a vinyl snob...


Chicago_Pete

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Pete,

Your thread title very accurately describes a good friend of mine.
A year or so ago he took the plunge back into vinyl after a 10 year hiatus from having a turntable.

He got (what I think is) a pretty good table, a VPI Scout, can't remember the cartridge.

The rest of his system:
Classe CDP...
Copland 301 tube pre...
Bryston 4B...
KEF 107s... these were originally my speaker that I sold to him a number of years ago.

This is a fairly decent system, but, to my ears I can not take listening to it for any length of time.
I am not sure what is cause, but it very fatiguing to me.

My friend has let to get up and listen to my system, I am very interested to get his impressions compared to
how he hears his system.

As per your title, my friend will always points out to anyone and everyone how vinyl sounds so much better
than any digital playback.
I have heard some outstanding vinyl playback... but just because there is a TT in his system does not
automatically mean superior sound...

as my snobby friend believes. [^o)]

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For the life of me, I don't understand the vinyl resurgence. I guess I'm just lucky to have defective hearing, or to have never had a high-end record playing set-up. CD's sound fine to me. I started selling all my LP's after I bought my first CD player in '84, and have never looked back. I only have a few hundred left and will probably have them to the end because either nobody else wants them, or I can't find replacements on CD, or else they're just weren't that good in the first place!

Oh, how I loathed the snap, crackle and pop of vinyl! Good riddance, I say!!

Having said the above, I have no desire to ignite a flame war over the vinyl/digital divide. If every other audiophile on the planet swears allegience to the wonders of vinyl records, more power to them I say! I just don't get it though. Not for me.

Once you hear a good vinyl system, you'll get it. Or maybe not, to each his own.

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Hey Pete,

"Bryston 4B . . Problem identified."

I am not a Bryston hater, but the 4B is where I would 1st point my finger.

My last non klipsch system consisted of:

Musical Fidelity CDP...
Modwight Pre...
Bryston 14B...
PMC OB1 speakers.

It took me a while and $$$ to dial that rig into what turned out to be a very nice sounding system.
Some NOS tubes for the SWL 9.0, Cardas Golden Ref ICs, Black Sands PCs.
It wasn't until I logged several 100 hours on the Mod Preamp that the system sounded very good.

Initially I was bothered by a lot of sibilance, but once the caps in Dan's great preamp had time
to properly burn in it was all good.

Bryston makes some great amps, but not for everybody's system and / or ear.

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As to the "flame war", may I paraphrase Billy Joel? "I didn't start the fire!" See below:

Really wish someone could prove me wrong but to me, a decent vinyl rig will smoke a CD player.

OK, I may have fanned the flames a bit, but as Dave said, the underbrush does need cleared occasionally.

Now, where'd I put that flame thrower? Oh yes...

My vinyl confession: I came of audiophile age in the mid seventies, and I had typical systems for a kid in those days: Advent speakers, Pioneer components. Perhaps the best turntable I ever owned was a Pioneer PL17D (or was it 117D?). At least it was the heaviest and tweakiest. I did own a Sony and a Luxman after that, but they were both tangential trackers and rather on the plastic-y, flimsy side. Long story short --I never spent serious money on a turntable, or more than $150 on a cartridge.

So I concede, that compared to the over-built vinyl-spinning alters of today, I have never had a serious record playing rig. But in those days of Stereo Review and Audio magazines, what I had was getting pretty darned good write-ups, so who knew? And by that time, rumblings (pardon the pun) of something better were already being circulated. So I was primed for the bliss digital would bring. And the rest, as they say, is history.

My take on the actual sound of CD? Sure, I have many crappy sounding ones. But I also have many that sound wonderful, so I have to attribute the bad sound of some to something other than the CD itself. Either the original recording or the transfer to CD...who knows? My peeve is why do so many new music releases on CD sound so bad? Of course, thats a whole 'nother can of worms. So in closing, my fellow Americans, let me just boil the cabbage down to this little comparison list:

LP = noisey / wear with use / limited dynamics / audible distortions / short playing times / inconvenient / need lots of TLC / fragile / nice for pics and reading!

CD = quiet / durable / wide dynamics (available, at least) / no audible distortion / long playing times / convenient / minimal feeding and cleaning / rugged / lousy for pictures and reading. / jewel boxes suck!

Now lets just "piss on the fire, call in the dogs, and head it on back to bowlegs".

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If CDs make your day, have at it.

Lets move on to something less controversial.

A Mac will smoke any PC. Big Smile

Sure, why not. A Mac is a PC. It's allowed to live by Microsoft as long as it does nothing better than Windows. You word process with Word, photo process with Photoshop, calculate in Excel, draw with... well, it's all the same. Doesn't do preemptive multitasking, way bloated, slow, problematic when dealing with the rest of the world.

I hate them both. Microcomputer evolution was explosive until Microsoft, through exquisite manipulation of the corporate market, established a monopoly based on pseudo-obsolescence of hardware and software. All microcomputers capable of competing were stamped out, but the Mac was allowed to live because Microsoft needed at least one "competitor" to avoid being broken up. There is a lot more to it than that...enough for a good book. Microsoft has driven Intel, and they know it. The more bloated the OS code, the faster the processor required, so our junkyards are loaded with cast off computers that are ten times or more faster than needed for 95% of the populations, but due to Microsoft constantly dropping support for perfectly adequate (though archaic) OS had to be replaced...just to be able to run the OS!

1978, Odessa, Texas. I am in the Permian Basin Microcomputer club and we are entering basic programs into Altair's 1 byte at time and watching the output on a teletypewriter. Biorythm and Star Trek are about as complex as they get, but we are consumed.

1988, National University of Singapore. I'm running a 286, 12mhz processor with 4mb RAM, 80mb HDD. Amongst other things, I am running WordPerfect, AutoCad, SuperCalc, Harvard Project, and using BITNET, the immediate precursor to the Web. I am using Software Carousel which allowed for task switching pretty much as Windows does, for all practical purposes. It takes about 30 seconds to boot, and shuts off at the power switch without a problem. I can take the drive out and plug it into a different machine and it boots up happily. Response of all the software I am using, including AutoCAD, is the roughly 10,000 times slower that it should be given that I am now running 3ghz processors.

That's my office computer. In the production room, we have an Amiga 2000, 68030 Motorola processor, 12mb RAM. We can load 400 frames of an animation into it and it will run at 30fps flawlessly...something the Dell T7400 workstation I am using as an Avid editor today cannot do. It preemptively multitasks such that an "hourglass" is something that only occurs during moments of 100% processor use. Multiple drive accesss, help screens, etc all run as independent tasks so you don't constantly hear "doink, doink, doink" trying to do things.

By the early 90's at ARCO Technology Transfer Group, me and a bunch of other geeks and nerds were designing virtual reality environments we expected to dominate training and entertainment by the end of the decade. Unfortunately, geeks and nerds are nothing but food for monopolists. By the end of the decade only Apple and Microsoft remained, and neither were or have become capable of what we were accomplishing with ease back then.

I've learned to live with it, and make my living now under the Microsoft boot. It's easy...the most advance simulations Windows can handle are child's play compared to what we were doing back then. VR is farther off now than it was 15 years ago.

And the Mac is no help whatsoever.

So there. [6]

Dave

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I owned PCs for years, going back to when IBM was still making computers for the masses. I lived and hated them up till about ten years ago when I got smart and stopped listening to the masses and looked at the strange little computer from an independently minded company named Apple. Suddenly, I knew how to use my computer. I knew how to use iPhoto and iTunes and iDVD and all of their great and easy to use programs. Suddenly, my computer was no longer crashing, and I wasn't being bombarded with pop ups when surfing the net. Suddenly friends and family were buying Apples too, so impressed they were with its easy to use OS and self explanatory style. The real test came when I bought an Apple for my parents. It seemed that they had just learned to operate the VCR, and they were getting better at turning on the PC, so how would this challenge them? How many phone calls would I have to endure from these old cranky people? Well, it couldn't have gone smoother. The PC was good for a phone call a week from them (and not the good kind), the Mac is and has been very easy for them to adopt to and understand in ways they never did the PC. Comparing Mac with Windows is comparing Apples to oranges. I love my Mac and anybody who has ill to say, probably has never used a Mac. For the 90% of people who want a computer to surf the net, crop photos and act as a music server... well it just doesn't get any better. For the tech savvy geeks who wish to crack the NSAs mainframe, well maybe a hotrodded Mac is in order. [:D]

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Glad you like it, Jim. I just said I don't use OS's, I use software and once inside the software it's all the same. I assure you if an Apple could do anything more than a PC at the same price, I'd buy at least 200 of them immediately and put them to work as training computers.

However, they don't and they cost 3 times as much to do the same job. And I can crash one in about 90 seconds.

Dave

Hey, I am getting out of this one...sorry. Forget where I was.

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Mallette:

I can see why you have never processed video. Computers were doing just fine until video, then they were slower than winter changing to summer. They got pretty good with standard NTSC 4 x 3 then High Def MPEG 2 hit and they were very slow. Now AVCHD MPEG 4 hit and they are all slow again---yes, all of them. Next is High Def 1080P 3D (double data again) which will need all the processors you can get. An Altair will die and go to Heaven just thinking about video processing. I wonder how many Macs it would take to process "Fractals".

In the begining there was NASA who invented the perfected the Mouse and the helped start the Internet in 1968

Then there was Xerox who invented the ethernet, graphic user interface, and further perfected the nouse.

Then there was Jobs who took the GUI and the Mouse from Xerox and created Apple/Mac

Then there was Gates who wrote the software to communicate with a printer, bought DOS, kind of copied

Jobs stuff.

IBM was just watching.

Xerox wondered what was going on.

Intel was saying yeah baby---.

CRT's are now in the same status as LPs.

I wish I could get my hands on a cheap 1969 L88 Corvette but it aint gonna happen. Its just like those old LPs, can't stand the noise anymore.

JJK

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OK, I said I was out, and I really am this time. But first, a Parthian Shot:

Jim, all you need for the activities you list is a cast off PC of almost any vintage, or one of th 135.00 Dell refurbs from TigerDirect if you want to get fancy, and Ubuntu Linux for free. Self configures most any common network, soundcard, etc, and is FAR faster booting and operating than Windoze or Frankintosh. Crashes less than either as well. My kids use it (Open Office is free, does more than most people can use, and is completely MS Office compatible) and so do I at home. Unless you are Ansel Adams, GIMP will do more to a photo than any average person needs to and it's free as well. All you Windoze folks NEED an Ubuntu CD (download and burn, free) as when your Windows fails, which it will, you can boot Ubuntu, access your drives, and offload your data. Really. I've down this several times for myself and friends over the past few years and it is a lifesaver. Actually, it will even connect to a network in most cases. Even better.

JJ, a lot of truth. Vector based graphics HATE video, and that means Macs and Wintel both. All of the great blitter and bitmap OS's like Amiga and Atari are history. It would not take a breakthrough to provide such on Wintel or Mac, but Windoze is a monoploy and has no need to innovate and Apple knows not to because they'd get squashed.

Finally, I left out this part of my personally history with computers:

1. 1978 Altair, instant on...but of course no BIOS so you had to input stuff before doing anything.

2. 1980 Sinclair Z-80, a same as Altair, but they soon developed an interface to allow saving and loading code from an audio cassette...pretty slow, but a big move.

3. 1981-84 VIC-20 and Commodore 64: Instant on, and software cartridges such that by the time your hands got to the keyboard from the power switch, you were ready to work, about 3 seconds

4. 1984-95 Amiga, boot time about 15 seconds to GUI, ran full screen anims flicker free. Would run 8 or 10 smaller anims just as flicker free at the same time while doing two or three other things as well. Multiple, simultaneous sound. Probably the finest graphics and video computer ever concieved. The Video Toaster completely revolutionized video production. Babylon 5 was rendered on these at about a 10th the cost of other available devices. A well know movie (whose name I cannot recall) was salvaged from a bad run of film by being processed on them through Art Department Pro which did things no other graphics program could do at that time.

4. 1986 IBM XT - 10mb HDD About 10 sec. boot time. Most software strarted in a couple of seconds. Of course, we are talking DOS

5. (skipping a couple of DOS iterations as irrelevant)

6. 1995 Pentium 120, boot time about 45 seconds, shutdown about 25 seconds (except when it crashed, which was most of the time), video performance awful, power off shutdown almost guaranteed to require a re-install.

7. Current Dell T7400, Dual Xeon processors, 8gb RAM, 2 Terabytes 10k SATA, boot time about 90 seconds, video performance pretty awful, etc. etc.

Note what's happening here? Things keep getting WORSE. I won't even try to calculate the difference in computing power from my XT to a current machine, but we're talking 100's, if not more, times the power. And I guarantee you AutoCAD is not now running hundreds of times faster. At least in 2D, it isn't doing much more either. Guess where all that power is being wasted...

MUSIC TIME! My TT still boots INSTANTLY and never crashes.

Dave

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I think the main problem is ultimately digital *SHOULD* be the best, however; in our day and age of people wanting things cheap and disposable as well as favoring a hot mix rather than accurate one it's hard to find good recordings...esp of vinyl re-presses as it's such a niche market they'd rather cut corners than deliver the best product.

Many people only collect the best vinyl, it's easy to forget how many garbage records were out there.

Another thing too is most of those that were pre-CD born have much reduced high frequency range in their hearing...even if they took really good care not to expose themselves to high dB. It really evens the playing field..

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From Wikipedia: "Steve Jobs and several Apple employees including Jef Raskin visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Xerox Alto. Xerox granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for $1 million in pre-IPO Apple stock. Jobs was immediately convinced that all future computers would use a GUI, and development of a GUI began for the Apple Lisa." Xerox had created a GUI, but didn't know what to do with it, and Apple was happy to take advantage. Jobs foolishly revealed Apples plans to Bill Gates, and Gates began his own GUI with some ideas "borrowed" from Apple. Jobs was smart and made the computer and the software. Gates was smart and convinced IBM that they needed his GUI, but not the rights to the software. IBM reasoned that there was more money in hardware than software, big mistake. Windows is released, and Apple promptly sues for infringing upon Apple copyrights. Microsoft pays Apple to license Mac OS features in Windows 1.0 and all future versions. Two men, two companies. As similar, and different as CDs and LPs.

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Jim, all you need for the activities you list is a cast off PC of almost any vintage, or one of th 135.00 Dell refurbs from TigerDirect if you want to get fancy, and Ubuntu Linux for free.  Self configures most any common network, soundcard, etc, and is FAR faster booting and operating than Windoze or Frankintosh.  Crashes less than either as well.  My kids use it (Open Office is free, does more than most people can use, and is completely MS Office compatible) and so do I at home.   Unless you are Ansel Adams, GIMP will do more to a photo than any average person needs to and it's free as well.  All you Windoze folks NEED an Ubuntu CD (download and burn, free) as when your Windows fails, which it will, you can boot Ubuntu, access your drives, and offload your data.  Really.  I've down this several times for myself and friends over the past few years and it is a lifesaver.  Actually, it will even connect to a network in most cases.  Even better.  

Again Dave, the Mac is much easier for me to use. Nothing is as easy to use day to day. For the music server alone (which many people pay $3k plus for from companies like Olive and Sonoos, etc.), the Mac is a bargain. The ease and simplicity of iTunes cannot be overstated. Less than $1200 buys a laptop, Airport Express (for streaming music wirelessly), wireless internet, photos, video, whatever... and all in less than 10 minutes out of the box. Show me a cheaper and easier way to do all of those things (and many more that I've failed to mention) and I'll eat it! [:D]
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Ok, I am REALLY REALLY REALLY done. If you find an OS easier to use (I find them all identical...but them I've used all of them) and worth 10 times the price, I am all for it. I just don't have money to burn.

I've never used iTunes, as it was DRM'd and I won't have anything to do with DRM. I also learned the hard way not to get involved with proprietary computers of any kind. One guy dies, or the management steals, and you're sunk.

Gimme open source, open architecture. I just wish somebody would give me a decent OS...

Dave

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