Vinyl or wait for the new stuff??

a guy could wait til hell freezes ovrfor the new formats to proliferate. in the meantime, a guy can have a load of fun assembling a decent LP playback system and acquire a mountain of black vinyl. i have around 7k of them and still buy nearly weekly, and sometimes more (too) often).
meanwhile, conventional cd and the LP format will satisfy the need for music and quality playback.
the immediacy and solidity are readily detectable. the spaciousness and solidity with LP is quite reassuring and changing cartridges shows you the different strengths of these devices. a lot more fun than changing d/a convertors. i have about 9 carts mounted and ready to swap.
.......regards.....tr

My response has a historical turn to it, because I think the question is the product of its time.

Vinyl was brutally attacked and discredited with lies by the CD's promoters when they needed market share to survive. The CD was only just good enough at that point to replace the vinyl LP for many listeners who had poor-quality turntables. Ironically, the Linn Sondek had only just come onto the market and started to convince a small number that the problems of music reproduction should be addressed at the source. We were not source-oriented before this.

The Linn was expensive. Cheap CD players replaced background noise with distortion in the highs and loose rhythm but these failings were of an order we were not used to. This unfamiliarity was enough to allow many to believe the hype and dump the LP for CD. However the attention that was paid to the source had the result of opening ears to the CD's problems and consequently CD media and playback have improved. Again ironically, if the CD had not appeared the way it did, it might have failed on the market and something with higher sampling rates and longer words, something genuinely competitive with vinyl, might have appeared five years later and convinced many more listeners the LP was dead. Recycling was not then in vogue, so much vinyl which might have been useful for raincoats would have wound up in landfill.

Vinyl and the CD have thus helped each other. The CD was introduced when digital technology was only borderline, barely ready as a music medium. Vinyl has preserved some wonderful music and served as a reference, showing us the promoters were lying. Perfect sound forever, for Pete's sake !

Vinyl and the CD complement each other. One gives more natural music, the other gives us performances we can't get on vinyl. CD is also more convenient to use, and that's good. I think it only makes sense to get into high-end vinyl if you already have a lot of records and you know you want to hear them. However, if you are not satisfied with your CD system and you have bought it using your ears ; if you have looked into room treatment, cables, power supply and component synergy ; if you have heard vinyl do it so much better that you know that's what you want ; then you are condemned to spend a lot of money on a turntable setup and a record collection.

But no reproduction system is perfect and you could instead rest where you are and concentrate on finding software you want to listen to. When there's a critical mass of good software available in another format, you can make the move. In the meantime, if you need to spend more money on music, you could, if you don't already do it, support live music in two ways : go to concerts, and subsidize young musicians to study and purchase instruments.

tobias, while i tink there's much merit in what ewe say, there's a major glitch - the linn sondek was awailable for 12 years prior to the introduction of the 1st commercially awailable cd-player. and, *many* less expensive players would smoke the cd-players, not yust the linn.

and, as far as being "condemned" to spend a lot of money if ya wanna listen to winyl, i disagree - a prudent shopper can get a way-musical winyl rig for ~$1k - yust ask bigo, from a recent thread in the analog section of these forums... his rig will smoke most any cd-rig at *any* price, imo... getting a nice winyl rig will condemn ewe only to listening to *music*, & wishing yer favorite cd-releases could be found on winyl! ;~)

doug s.

Fun to read your reaction, Doug S. ; I have to say it was a bit of a chore reading through the spelling quirks but I understand it helps not to take all this too seriously.

No commercial CD player for 12 years after the Linn, you say ? I don't know. When I was selling in Canada in1974-5, we hadn't heard of the Linn yet. The Ariston RD-11 was the best we had ( and it was miles ahead of the rest and cost an astronomical $ 800 ).

Hi-fi was last on my hobby list in the early 80's but surely there was a commercial CD player by 1984 or earlier ?

My point is still pertinent in any case--the Linn being costly, relatively few people had heard it and could compare it to the new CD medium. It took time for Linn-type technology to influence the industry enough for people to try to duplicate the essential points for less money than the LP12. There just wasn't enough lead time for the LP playback revolution to establish itself firmly enough to counter the CD lie campaign.

That doesn't mean there's no point in finding out, by listening, if vinyl is what you really want. I wanted to point out that the CD's premature ascendancy in the market was what kept vinyl an interesting listening experience in comparison. Vinyl can undoubtedly be surpassed, and perhaps will be in the next technological cycle. Right now, it has something the other medium doesn't. The other medium knows this and is still trying to reach its full potential.

hi tobias,

cd-players became commercially awailable in 1984. i double-czeched the linn website to werify its introduction of the lp12 in 1972. there were plenty of excellent-sounding, reasonable-priced turntables around at this time - both prior to, & after the intro of the lp12. the venerable ar-xa (correct model #?) is *still* a respectable piece, tweeks awailable to this day allow this humble 'table to perform up there w/the best of 'em.

i guess, bottom line is i must disagreee w/the point yure making. imo, good turntable technology was entrenched even *before* the linn intro, and the audiophile end of the audio industry was *extremely* cognizant of the lp's superiority over the cd, when cd was 1st introduced in 1984. in fact, most audiophiles know it's only been in the last couple years that cd-playback has been able to even approach winyl as an ultimate software playback medium. cd overwhelmed winyl not cuz no one was aware of winyl's superiority, but cuz cd was aimed at the mass-market, & the audiphiles were yust overrun by the sheer number of folks who tink the latest-n-greatest is what's adwertized in rags like stereo-review, and sold in stores like circuit-city. ;~)

i *do* agree that the cd's "premature ascendency" is what's kept winyl around as a wiable playback medium, tho - there *are* enuff folks out there that are interested in the quality of the *sound*, regardless of what the mass-media sez! :>) i'm sure winyl *can* be surpassed by another "technological cycle". but, i'm not sure when this may occur - certainly i don't see it happening anytime soon. there's no incentive for the music industry to push a higher-resolution digital format for audio, as the masses tink redbook cd is as good as it gets, awreddy. the sacd/dvd-audio wars will be fought more over the multimedia/surround-sound mass-market, & audiophile-quality audio-only software will be yust an afterthought. yust my opinion, of course!

regards, doug s.