Recommendations for a jazz record which demonstrates vinyl superiority over digital


I have not bought a vinyl record since CDs came out, but have been exposed to numerous claims that vinyl is better.  I suspect jazz may be best placed to deliver on these claims, so I am looking for your recommendations.

I must confess that I do not like trad jazz much.  Also I was about to fork out A$145 for Miles Davis "Kind of Blue" but bought the CD for A$12 to see what the music was like.  I have kept the change!

I love the jazz in the movie Babylon, which features local Oz girl Margo Robbie (the film, not the jazz).

So what should I buy?

128x128richardbrand

@coltrane1 

No worries, I never for a moment took it as an insult!

As the great, and recently late, British actress Maggie Smith said, "I have never insulted anyone, I simply describe them accurately".

@richardbrand, being a fan of Classical you may relate to Wes Montgomery records from the 60’s. All of his stuff with producer Creed Taylor was done with string arrangements. Wes received criticism for abandoning his pure jazz roots, but these records were very popular with non jazz listeners and sold by the thousands. 
 

https://youtu.be/5GFkqoZSB-A?si=Khelg8vpPgH9XlUS

Coltrane, You wrote, "But as bebop became dominant the majority of listeners were forever lost. I don’t mind, because bebop was a natural step for new jazz. Personally, bebop was a statement by certain musicians who felt disrespected. So they created a music that many couldn’t play. Still, the advancement of the music suffered among the masses."

Yes, it's difficult to play bebop well, or any other style of jazz, for that matter, because of the need to improvise.  But why was it then, if jazz suffered among the masses due to bebop, that Miles Davis, Gillespie, here I will add Gerry Mulligan and Thelonius Monk, and your namesake Coltrane, sold more albums among them than most any jazz instrumentalists before or since?  I just don't agree that bebop alienated listeners; rather, it made jazz musicians and those who listened to their music "cool cats". It was in fashion, then it went out of fashion, like many other cultural phenomena, except for a few diehards like me and many thousands of others who pay high prices for the LPs in that genre.  Bebop probably faded on the national scene, because it became repetitious, difficult though it might be. Bebop lived right through and beyond Elvis's peak. It might be more accurate to say the Beatles took over in popularity from everything else musical in the late 60s. On the other hand, I am never caught listening to Vaughn Williams.

There's a vocalise that describes the life and times of bebop, called "Boplicity".

I cannot imagine the "open air" approach to buliding a plinth for a 301 would be efficacious, for me at least, because what you want to suppress in a 301 is vibration and motor noise. For that it seems to me you need mass. That’s just my opinion.

So I quite agree with your choice to fill the space in the hollow plinth. But in your first post where you described what you are building, it seemed at first reading that you plan to interpose springs between the chassis of the 301 and the solid plinth you are making with MDF. It think that would not be good, to put it mildly. I'd mate the chassis to the plinth as firmly and as completely as possible. As for the choice of MDF, I never want it near the sound producing elements because my bias is it sounds muffled, or it adds a muffled coloration. But again, just my opinion.

@lewm

I could absolutely guarantee to find you some Vaughan Williams you would like, just because he wrote such an immense variety!  You's have to listen more than once, though.

The open-air plinths are usually based on slate or some such.  Slates are a bit like graphite, very directional with vastly different properties depending on where they are quarried.

My existing SME plinth includes springs and foam damping, though nowhere near as springy and undamped as a Linn.  If I raise my internal plinth, the springs and damping will disengage.  Each layer will start with constrained layer damping between it and the next layer.  When the springs are disengaged, I will rely on three IsoAccoustics OREA Bordeaux pucks to ameliorate vibration coming up through my Sydney sandstone blocks.

Sydney sandstone is quite soft and porous with about 4% cavity.  There's plenty of it.  It is up to 600 feet thick and started to be deposited before dinosaurs walked this planet.  Enough has washed away to form the up-side down Blue Mountains and to drift thousands of kilometers north to form the world's biggest sand island, K'gari once known as Fraser Island, which is almost 100 miles long.

I am very open to suggestions, and have a gut feeling that the Garrard is valued because of its resonances!