Is a vinyl rig only worth it for oldies?

I don't see how anybody with a serious interest in the music of TODAY can tell someone they should be doing vinyl rather than digital. Maybe if the recommendation comes with an interest free loan it might go over better. Pay more for a more problematic format to play recordings that are mostly digitally mastered to start with. Makes sense to me.

Maybe if digital never happened and the world was still geared around analog technology I would feel differently.

Vinyl is a niche technology today. One with some nice things about but a niche nonetheless. There are many vintage vinyl recordings worth hearing on a good vinyl rig. That the worl today revolves around digital technology and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future is an irrefutable part of the value proposition.

I admire Atamasphere's products and his steadfast willingness to realize his visions but that does not change reality as a whole. Vinyl may sound better sometimes. That is about the extent of it. When the recording is digital to start with, all the vinyl in the world will not make it into something from years gone by that it is not.

Mapman, very well said and true.
Regards,

Mapman,
It is feasable that a digitally mastered recording could sound better through an analogue medium than digital because playing back via digital in the case of CD adds another A/D & D/A conversion, and if played back via computer/dac at least 1 other D/A conversion - each conversion being an inaccurate reconstruction of the recording or file preceding it.
The "value proposition" for analogue and digital are quite different. The value proposition for digital is providing a portable transportable medium for music.
The "value proposition" for analogue is to provide an accurate medium for transporting and playing back music.
Digital is simply an approximation of analogue via fundamentally flawed mathematics, no more no less, with the added advantage of easy transportablility or transferrability.
I hope you dont expect MacDonalds burgers to provide you with a healthy diet.

Lets review red book CD for a second. At 44.1 K HZ you get 44 data points to define a 1K HZ wave that is about a foot long. Not exactly high res. At 10K HZ there are 4 data points, yes 4 to define a 360 degree wave. 4 points works for a square?

With the 16 bit sampling size there are just over 65,xxx steps to cover the whole dynamic range. If you want to cover 100 db you need 100,000 steps. So CD is just under 1 db that way?

So you are hoping to hear the hall sound? Not really, maybe a hint, but not really

Think about the complex wave forms that music produces with steep wave fronts, what are the chances that CD captures it right. Its all in the so so odds.

Just like Las Vages has the odds to take your money. Red book has the odds to steal your music resolution.

Then there are the steep filters reqired with CD - "brick wall filters" because the sampling rate is so low. That hurts too.

CD is a "lossy format". Its a fact. It just is. Give it up.

Higher res digital? Well 96K sampling does not improve that much on 44.1. 192K is more interesting but the math is only a little over 4x better than CD. Still not so good.

Going from 16bit to 24 bit is a big jump. 16 bit having just over 65K steps while 24bit jumps to 16.7 million steps. Now that is a move.

Digital needs to improve the sampling rate which I am certain can be done except for the recording companies which are woried about copy rights. So digital is stagnet.

I got back into vinyl nine or ten years ago because I could see that digital progress would be slow for the above reason.

What I discovered is that LP was even better than I thought.

Look 10 years ago I had my old Dennon Dp52F and a Shure V
MR, I think I got that right. I hooked it up to my old conrad johnson PF1 pre amp and it was a little better than my big rig CD player. I decided to upgrade and never looked back. Yes I went big with a VPI Aries 2 and a ZYX Fuji 100 but it blew me away even though I had a lot to learn about set up.

What I have now is big bucks and it is even better. And I will admit that I could likely find a TT, arm, cart set up at half the price that might be just about as good.

I will take the best $4K TT arm cart against any red book CD at any price. So stuff the give me a loan thing. With digital its all about the money with small gains. Do the math.

I hope the mods let this post.

TD

Td,

What kind of music do you listen to? Is it current or "oldies"?

Are you recommending vinyl for current music?