Frail and Bedazzled


I just set up my vinyl rig and I must say I didn't expect it to best my digital setup by this margin. My 2-3 best SACDs through my digital rig may compete but damn...I am having a personal vinyl resurgence. Merry Christmas all.
troutki50
@troutki50  Congrats on your discoveries!  Please let us know what your system make-up is.  I have a lot invested into both my analog and my digital set-ups and can honestly say that the analog side is better, but my digital side is also amazing, so I would say that my enjoyment of analog is only about 10-20% more than digital.  Digital is great for streaming and exploring new music, and for listening all day when you don't want to mess with flipping records.  I use digital streaming to find records that I want to own.  
One other thing, and this is not meant to dampen your enthusiasm, but you should be very careful about what you buy on vinyl if you want to get the highest level of enjoyment from it.  
I have bought a lot of new vinyl that really doesn't sound that good.  The best stuff is on proven labels that care about the source material and are transparent about the total chain of production.  If a reissue doesn't have this info on the hype sticker or in the liner notes it's a pretty obvious sign that the vinyl issue might not be that great.  
When I first started getting seriously back into vinyl (about 12 years ago) I just bought records assuming that they were better than the original pressings.  I accumulated a lot of records that I didn't enjoy.  Now I do the research very carefully before I buy, and this has made a huge difference.  
Happy listening!
Peter
@snackeyp   My experiences are similar to yours and I use digital the same as you - mainly exploring for new material and when I have the music on in the background, more or less. I can't however quantify how much more I enjoy the vinyl over digital.  The presentation is just so entirely different - with vinyl the music flows so freely like comparing pushing water through a 1-inch pipe (digital) to a free-flowing river (analog). 
@three_easy  I used to feel that way in comparing, but recently got a game changer of a DAC.  Since then the digital realm sounds nearly as good as analog.  I often forget that I'm listening to digital when I'm using it.  But, yes, I can hear the superiority of vinyl in my system as well, just not as much as I used to.
Digital is more accurate. Vinyl is prone to distortions that we actually like. There is always a small amount of feedback that occurs with a turntable unless you have it in another room. The feed back is delayed slightly which creates a slight echo given a sense of space which is pleasing. This is just one example. Analog is also prone to more harmonic distortion some forms of which are pleasing. 
It is all about what you like to listen to. Accuracy is meaningless in the end. Whether I prefer the vinyl or digital copy of an album depends more on the mastering than anything. To say one always sounds better than the other is rather short sighted. Remember 90% or better of modern recordings are digital. Once you are in numbers it is much harder to corrupt the music but with analog every single step adds distortion. It is why we love Direct to Disc recordings so much. Four or five steps are eliminated. If you are disappointed with digital get a Vacuum Tube DAC such as the Audio Research DAC 9. It will make digital files sound more analog.
I'm in a similar circumstance in which my vinyl rig is way more invested in than my digital rig and the sound reflects that. 
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