Half-Speed Masters - are they worth double dipping?

@ 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.