Half-Speed Masters - are they worth double dipping?

@mahler123

I have a pretty extensive music collection. About 4000 vinyl records, about 75% of which are in NM condition and about 5000 CDs dating back from about 1984 forwards. My system is high-end and all of the music plays through a set of Genesis III’s with dual Genesis 12" subs. I have good hearing. My "religion" is sound quality, not media format. I suspect that is true for many if not most of the posters here.

The arguments against CDs when compared to the vinyl version have nothing to do with 1’s and 0’s and "holes". People like myself would often buy a CD copy of something they already had on vinyl, especially early on, because the promise of CDs was superior sound quality and no surface noise or warps. So I have been able to compare many albums in these two formats -- on quality gear.

An aside; I had migrated from vinyl to CD’s decades ago and it wasn’t until about 2010, when the vinyl revival was just getting going that I decided to buy a few records just for the hell of it. My wife wondered why, and so did I. I usually bought about 8-10 CDs a month prior. I had no plans of returning to vinyl when I decided to compare a CD and original vinyl pressing side by side just to see if I could discern much of a difference between the formats. I had a REGA Planet CD player and a SOTA Star Sapphire turntable with a Clearaudio Veritas cartridge running through a Musical Fidelity phone preamp. I got the levels matched and played a track off the CD (Daft Punk, Random Access Memories) which was/is an exceptional sounding recording. The CD track sounded fantastic, as usual. Then I dropped the needle on the vinyl track. What I heard in seconds was overwhelming and profound. More real, more visceral, more 3D, more everything. It brought me to tears. I had never realized what I’d lost. I changed on that day back to buying 100% vinyl, and I have never looked back. I’ve since upgraded my analog chain and things only improved from there. I cannot imagine going back. Was that a religious experience?

As so many have already mentioned on this thread, whether it be CD or vinyl, the end product is the result of a chain of steps, and if any of those steps along the way were botched, the end product ALWAYS reflected that in the sound quality.

So here are a few thoughts from someone who has done a lot of listening to both formats:

• Since the early 2000’s CD sound quality has improved massively over what you could get prior. This is not an absolute rule, but is mostly true.
• Most CD’s, primarily because of the way they’re mastered and not because of the medium, are overly compressed, and when compared to an original vinyl version of the same, sound worse to my ears. In many cases, MUCH worse.
• The quality control problems inherent with vinyl records has never been resolved, except for the occasional release where everything in the chain was done right, or because of a special process like "one step" recordings, or limited editions pressed on special vinyl compounds. CD’s almost never suffer from QC problems on scale.
• Half speed masters are not, just by virtue of being cut that way, guaranteed to sound better than the original pressing. They sometimes do and often do not. I have hundreds of them.
• Regarding 45rpm cuts of a record-- if all in the chain was done right, will sound better than 33rpm records, IF the original recording has the air and dynamics. Many do, and many do not. I personally almost never find the bump in SQ worth it when listening to albums as I prefer listening to an album in its original sequence. I’m not listening for qualitative differences, I’m listening for the overall musical experience. Good gear is necessary, but listening is not about the gear, at least for me it isn’t.
• A great sounding CD is still a beautiful thing, but when I hear a great sounding vinyl LP, to my ears, it just sounds significantly better. More "there", more organic, more musical. So playing a record vs a CD is just a more satisfying experience for me personally. I have friends that choose convenience over sound quality and are satisfied. I have other friends that simply can’t hear any difference and that may be because they just don’t really care that much.
• Vinyl is more work to deal with for some-- but not for me. If it’s more work, it’s work that I love, so I enjoy every second.
• The LP format in a better artifact than a CD, by miles, for me. I love the artwork, the inserts, the whole process of spinning a disc on a good turntable -- it’s just a fuller more satisfying experience.
• It does not matter what the technical virtues of one medium over another are, in the end for me, it’s how the music feels, and vinyl just kills CDs in this regard most of the time.
• Vinyl is for sure, a bigger commitment than digital, but it’s worth it to me. WAY WORTH IT.

So it’s not about woo-woo religion or anything like that for me (a science guy BTW), it’s about sound and feeling. It’s not about what I think I know or want to believe, it’s about experience, and I have a lot.

We all have limited time on this earth and some of us get to choose how we spend some or all of it. I have lived on both sides of this digital vs vinyl divide for quite a while. I continue to choose vinyl, and I have zero regrets. To each, his own.

@ mahler123

"Vinyl adoration is a religion.  Like all religions its worshippers are impervious to reason."

Sadly, it seems that you have exhausted the facts of your assertion (that CDs have, in practice, a higher DR than LPs) and retreated to ridicule. 

This generally happens only when logical arguments fail.

I hope all readers of this have the same reaction that I do.

Yet the question remains, are Half-Speed Masters worth the extra cost? 

Yes, most of mine are worth the extra cost, and no, some are still low SQ (because of what happened upstream).

I have no opinion about half speed masters.

With contemporary recordings vinyl is a bit of a crapshoot. I would say over 50% of the time the vinyl is about the same as CD and just very slightly better than streaming. 10% of the time it is worse. The magic lies in the 15-25% of recordings that are clearly better. The fact that the music was digitally mastered is different from how the vinyl is mastered. And old vinyl is almost always better than streaming.

And while the assertion the vinyl has a lower possible dynamic range than streaming is true, the simple fact is many LPs do in reality have more realized dynamic range and sound better.

This guy does an amazing job measuring the dynamic range of a bunch of different media and you can see how widely it can vary between different releases of the same album. One interesting takeaway is how much less compressed most Atmos mixes are. My personal experience is that finding and streaming the Dolby Atmos version from Tidal over Roon is often quite a bit better than the normal version. That is particularly odd given that Roon doesn’t support Atmos so some conversion is occurring.

https://magicvinyldigital.net/

One final note, I was a true believer that vinyl couldn’t be better than streaming three years ago, but hearing other people’s vinyl setups and then building my own convinced me that some minority of the time vinyl was clearly better. The frustration is with all the recordings that sound exactly the same as streaming. Just as an example, forget about buying a Taylor Swift album on vinyl, it is a waste of money. But get Billie Eilish or Lorde’s first albums and the vinyl is a revelation. Side one of the recent vinyl reissue of Kronos Quartet "Black Angels" album is startlingly better than streaming. Of course, all of these differences do require a certain level of system to hear.

I just compared my MFSL of Grateful Dead's American Beauty with the 24bit/192kHz version on Qobuz.  Cartridge is a Benz Ruby 2 in an Eminent Technology ET-2 linear-tracking tonearm; streaming via my Bluesound Node 130 upgraded with the Teddy Pardo linear power supply.  I carefully matched the volume with the smartphone BluOS app while playing both sources simultaneously and switching from one to the other

The most noteable (and only significant) difference I heard is the higher bass levels on the LP, which is consistent with what I've heard on the '80s MFSL LPs using various playback setups. 

Tangentially, this says something for the quality of the Node 130's streamer and DAC that it can match the sound quality of a $7000 (in 1990s prices) analog rig.  (BTW, the Ruby 2 is one I've recently acquired from a collector/dealer of high-end cartridges, and it has less than 100 hrs. play.)

I plan to do more comparisons, perhaps with my MFSL LP of Karajan conducting La Mer and Bolero (which is the later EMI/Angel version, not his beloved 1964 DGG recordings).

Lots of good posts since I last visited. I am not going get into never ending ‘format’ debate as there are too many variables when you start to compare the two.

IMHO, it should be all about how a piece of music invokes emotions when you press play and/or when the needle touches the grooves.

@sokogear thanks for the tip on tru-lift.