folkfreakFunny you should mention vinyl, I also love to listen to it now and then especially on old stuff like Beatles ect which kills the digital of the same thing, which tends to be cold and very pin-pong from left to right, and no bass or body to the vocals like vinyl does.
Having said all that spinning vinyl has turned out to be so much more rewarding these last few days
So I knuckled down to find out why I preferred it with old stuff over digital , besides all the clicks and pops, was the channel separation. So I concentrated on the channel separation of vinyl, and at best it’s 30-40db at 1khz, above and below that, it worse almost mono in the bass, digital is over 100db separation across the audio band 20hz -20khz in most cases
So what I did was make a switchable network circuit to bleed the left into right and visa versa on the output of my cd player to blend the channel separation from 100db down to 30db and instantly you could hear those old Beatles, Beach Boys, ect come to life.
Almost gone was the exaggerated ping-pong effect, the bass was richer because it was "mono’ized" and the voices had more body because the of the richer bass, the only down side was the image wasn’t as spread across the room, which is also understandable, because of the "mono’isation". But all this and still no clicks pops and surface noise, it’s a winner.
This CD/digital "vinyl mimicking" circuit with far more complexity would be even closer to vinyl, if below 1khz the 30db it would follow the vinyl’s worsening channel separation in the bass and treble.
Cheers George