Yay, VINYL!!!

[Tim Arnold]

That’s cool Daryl. I have a little vinyl left, mostly 45s. I just had to comment on the Samantha Fish album. Great young blues player from Kansas City. I like watching her YouTube videos.

[Daryl Jones]

Yeah, she’s awesome! We get to hear/see her live this summer at the Edmonton Blues Fest International. She’s on just before Colin James for the final day. Colin is another favorite of mine for a long time now. Jimmy Vaughn and Powder Blues Band are also appearing but I can’t spend all 3 days there.
I have a huge box of LPs stored in my den, but some of them I don’t dare play anymore. They are the survivors (?) of my younger, much wilder days in the late 60’s and the 70’s. Some I wish I had taken better care of, but living in the “Animal House” (long before the movie) for a few years with 3 other 18-20 year olds when I was single took their toll on the playability of some of my treasures. Two that give me pains are Iron Butterfly “Live” and Steppenwolf’s “Monster”. Such a crime really.

[Tim Arnold]

I just love Samantha’s version of The Stones “Wild Horses” on YouTube. I envy you getting to see her and the others live. It will be awesome I’m sure. My old collection of 60s and 70s LPs got destroyed in a fire. I had them stored in my brother’s garage. He barrowed them to a friend of his and his friend’s meth lab blew up and burned his house down. It was actually kind of funny but sad I lost my albums. One was a Styx Grand Illusion LP that was autographed by the entire band. Oh well, shit happens. The kid kicked his habit and is doing quite well now. Such is life. I just bought a Dr. Hook “Belly Up” LP and have the Orange and Why? LPs ordered. I may start collecting some more.

[Daryl Jones]

LPs are a disease haha. But it could be worse: GUITARS! Ask me how I know Bwahahahaha

[Tim Arnold]

Yeah if I start buying LPs again they are coming from the thrift shops. Lol. I’m buying the Twins LPs more or less for the artwork. I’ll probably never play them on my cheap turntable. I’m fine with the sound of the CDs.

[David Herrick]

I never really thought of myself as a vinyl aficionado until the late 80’s. At that time I was frequently visiting record stores and flipping through the albums in search of cool obscure stuff from the 60’s, and I became distressed that seemingly every month another row of records was replaced by CD’s.

CD’s were born with three strikes against them with regard to in-store browsing: they were too small for the titles to be read easily, they couldn’t be quickly finger-flipped in the way that could be done with a row of vertical LP’s, and almost everything available was new releases from new groups.

It annoyed me that you couldn’t watch a CD go round and round, as you can with an LP. You just inserted an offering to the gods into a slot and prayed for music. You also couldn’t be creative and play it at the wrong speed, or backwards. And for a long time you couldn’t record your own stuff onto one, which was a staple activity for me with a tape recorder and cassette. So I had no use for them.

I didn’t buy my first CD until 2003, when both LP’s and cassettes had gone extinct. I’ve bought a few more of them out of necessity since then, but fortunately I had already collected most of what I wanted before the dark times began.

And now, yes, vinyl is a format to be cherished. It’s a much more tactile experience: removing it from the sleeve, placing it on the turntable, positioning the tone arm, flipping it over, etc.

[Daryl Jones]

I started buying CD’s as soon as records got scarce, early 80’s. But thankfully I never got rid of the turntable or my LP’s

[Darryl Boyd]

Hi Daryl.

Great name!

I still have a couple of hundred or so vinyl records, got rid of most of them some years ago.

I have a Technics SL1200GR turntable which gets used several times a week, so still enjoy the experience.

[Daryl Jones]

I have a Yamaha YPD6 direct drive that I’ve had for 45 years or so. Sole remaining component of my old Yamaha system that I started building in the 70’s. I had an NS 610-II amp and a DSP system that ran 8 boxes (2 front, 2 rear, 2 surround, center and sub). Mains were Mission 727s and the others were B&W, all in a mobile home when we were first married. Yeah, the walls moved! I run NAD components now with Monitor Audio GS20 towers, kind of old school now but still sounds killer! Certainly fills the living room with all the music vibes I ever need.

[Dave Johnston]

There’s nothing better sounding than a great vinyl pressing. Some would argue Reel to Reel but I don’t want to spend that kind of money nor do I have the patience. Unfortunately not all vinyl is equal. As a result I end up listening to either vinyl, CDs or cassettes about evenly except when I’m lazy and then it’s CDs or digital. I have narrowed my vinyl collection down to about 300 lps and buy a new lp maybe once a month. CDs I listen to primarily for Classical and and other music where the vinyl isn’t great quality (those are the lps I am currently weeding out of my collection. I listen to cassettes for just about every genre except classical. Many cassettes sound really warm and full others sound like tin. Have a lot of blues on cassette and most of it is excellent. If you are an audiofile that needs the very best sound, cassettes will not impress you for their dynamic range but some have the same warmth as reel to reel.

[Dave Johnston]

Just listened to Wild Horses. Very nice cover for a slow blues tune. That lady has quite a voice….caught a little Janis Joplin influence there.

[Daryl Jones]

You have more LP’s left than I do, I got rid of all my cassettes.
Samantha can be pretty edgy, but she can howl for sure. I get a kick out of hearing her play the cigarbox guitar and the way she works Southern Blues magic out of it. She has a lot of influence from Joe Bonamassa and when she gets really bluesy, I can hear a bit of SRV come out of that SG even though Stevie was a Strat guy.
I don’t own a single Fender or Gibson; I’m a pretty solid PRS fan. Almost bought a Tele a couple years back but I don’t like the necks on them and they are weightier than I like; but they sound great through an EVH 5150 or a Fender Reverb amp. I find Les Paul’s and SG’s are too heavy, all Gibson’s actually. PRS (electrics) are light, the necks are fast and comfortable in my hands and they play like butter.

[Tim Arnold]

I hadn’t listened to Samantha in quite a while so when I seen your picture I had to revisit some of her YouTube videos. Yeah, she sings from the heart and can really play the guitar. “Dead Flowers”, “I Put A Spell On You” and “War Pigs” are really good too. I like Joe Bonamassa too, especially teamed up with Beth Hart on vocals. He has a few incredible videos on YouTube with Jimmy Barnes too. Check out “Stone Cold In Love With You”. That old boy has some pipes on him.https://youtu.be/D99LZg18OWg

[Jung Roe]

Hi Daryl

I’ve really come to appreciate vinyl lately ever since the Orange Vinyl. I got a new record player just so I can play Orange, and I went back and dug up many of the old precious vinyl’s from the Roe family collection I could find. My first vinyl, Walt Disney’s 3 Little Pigs I got when I was a wee little lad, my dad’s Ludwig Van Beethoven Symphony No 9 performed by the Berlin Philharmonic and conducted by legendary Herbert Von Karajan, pressed in 1964 that my dad has had since then, that I own now and listen to feeling what my dad must have felt all for all those years. Now I am giddy with joy awaiting MLT’s “WHY!” album in vinyl. WHY? is as magnificent as the 9th Symphony for me!

My latest vinyl addition today is a new used Beach Boys Concert (probably 1963/64 performance) album vinyl I was gifted by a friend. It’s a Capital reissue, but from the very faded album sleeve, it looks very vintage.

Has anyone seen the movie Equilibrium? Imagine a future dystopian emotionless world where music and art is banned because it causes emotions that is deemed a bad influence to the social order in society, and one day someone discovers an old vinyl of Beethoven’s 9th symphony and he listens to music for the very first time, and realizes this amazing beauty the living world has never experienced before!

https://youtu.be/_b3_-pPzDVk

[Daryl Jones]

Glad you are returning to the “pressed” fold Jung!
Equilibrium sounds frightening!

[Len Upton]

Ah yes, the virtues of vinyl. The size and physicality of the 12-inch disc. The cover, and frequently the artwork. Its very human scale, in an age of miniaturization. And I think you have to admire the technology, the very grooviness of it, which began in the 1920’s, and progressed over the decades to such precision. Essentially a heat press, cranking out records by the millions, with hardly ever a bad run. (There was a YouTube video here on the chat line a short while ago illustrating the process). RCA advertised their process as micro groove, and they weren’t kidding.

Vinyl is alive and well here with me, along with (lots of homemade) cassettes, and a number of cd’s. Not looking for, or adding anything particular these days, except sometimes serendipitously, and usually jazz. At the moment though, I seem to have misplaced my copy of Exile On Main Street.

One thing about jazz fans is that, unlike rock and rollers, they usually handle their records with kid gloves. So even at garage or estate sales, it’s quite common to find vintage vinyl in good to excellent condition. My most recent acquisition is a Gerry Mulligan Quartet, “What Is There To Say?” from 1959. Yes, there is surface noise, but almost no ticks or pops.

Which reminds me: One of my main music sources over the long term has been the public library. Way back in the day for vinyl, and more recently, for cd’s. Recently I noticed in the catalogue, a Charlie Watts Big Band which I must check out. Charlie’s passion, when he wasn’t being dragged around by the Strolling Bones, was jazz. Unlike long ago Club 27 member Brian Jones, Charlie managed to live to a ripe old age, as are his surviving band mates. Remarkable!

One thing about used vinyl is that it’s now available all over the place, from a dollar or two, to quite substantial money for new and/or vintage pressings. Recently, at a collectors show, I happened to see a copy of Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Rolling Stones brief foray into psychedelia. This is the one with the 3D picture cover, which I’ve had since the album was first released. The vendor was asking $135. What other treasures might I have that I should be aware of? Should I contact my insurance agent?😀

What’s On The Table is always a lot of fun, and there are a number of old farts who are well acquainted with the albums Mona and Lisa come up with, and who are likewise happy and amused at their enthusiasm. Sometimes we get a glimpse at their other albums on a side shelf, and think yeah, those are good ones, too! Play those! Anyway, they’re keeping the tradition going. It doesn’t look like vinyl is going away anytime soon.

[Daryl Jones]

You are so right Len, it will stay alive; at least as long as there are like minded people such as we around. Sadly, I am located a long way away from any distributors or outlets for pre-owned or new vinyl copies, other than Amazon of course.
I tend to avoid cities like the plague, I’m a rocker at heart, but I am a “country boy” by birth and my own lifestyle preferences. I only go to Edmonton or Calgary out of necessity or event location reasons. Well, there is my occasional trip into my favorite Long & McQuade store for a new/used guitar or amp should my bank account and herself indulge me…😂

[David]

Hey guys, I’m glad your having a discussion of vinyl. You’re just the right group to address a question I’ve had for a while. As a kid I listened to vinyl because CDs didn’t arrive until I was in my 20s. Audiophiles, many of you will remember, disparaged the sound of CDs when they first came out as being harsh. The claim was that because the recording process was analog (tapes), the digitization of sound for the CDs led to a loss of sonic info, whereas the analog vinyl preserved everything that was on the tapes. Since then, recording in most places has gone digital all the way through, so the sound is digitized when first captured and stays digital when encoded on a CD or streamed online.

Here’s my question: If a vinyl record from the 1960s is superior to a CD made from the same tapes because of that analog-to-digital conversion, what about a vinyl record made today from a digital source? Does anyone find that, for instance, the Orange vinyl sounds different from the Orange CD? How so?

Thanks!

[David Herrick]

Hey, David.

I can only address this question theoretically, as I don’t have a sharp ear and have never been able to tell any difference in sound quality between analog and digital.

https://ledgernote.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/analog-signals-versus-digital-signals.png

The above link shows the difference between analog and digital signals. The greater the digital sampling rate of an analog signal, the closer an approximation you get to the “true” sound. What’s lost at a low sampling rate is the briefer sounds and the higher-frequency overtones of notes. But the human ear only has a finite ability to resolve such details, so the difference would be imperceptible at a high enough sampling rate.

Going from a digital source to an analog product, the same principle would hold: as long as the sampling rate during recording is fast enough, the ear wouldn’t be able to tell that it’s secretly a digital signal being encoded into the vinyl. And I would think that the final product would have to be converted to analog anyway, as the stylus can’t instantaneously jump from one part of the groove to another on a rotating disk.

[Daryl Jones]

That’s a pretty good explanation David. The inadequacies of the human auditory capability leaves much to be desired in many ways. I remember when CDs first became the main go to and my stereo shop buddy (read: salesman 😂) had a display set up with an oscilloscope for comparison basis of the two media of CD and LP formats. It was an invitational customer appreciation night and I was fortunate to be one of Tim’s rather good customers.

Now you have to understand that “Harold’s Stereo” was the high end audio store in Edmonton during the day and what my friend’s boss was doing was to impress people with his stratospheric price point Denon stereo amplification pairing (pre-amp and 200w power amp) and turntable. The CD player was also a Denon so it was far from cheap too. There was a 16 oz ball peen hammer sitting om the top of the CD player. So I asked Tim about it. He smiled and picked up the hammer, turned and hit the top of the CD player with it! Not a full force blow but definitely hard enough to bust the carpal bones in your hand. No skip, no jump on the playback, nada. He offered me the hammer…I politely declined. Now just the tone arm on the record player was $1500 (sans cartridge)so the player was no bargain store issue by any means! The entire system was over $50k including two massive speakers that I can’t even recall the name of. They were approximately 2′ x 6′ and had no visible drivers at all, just a metallic mesh screen and a black anodized framework and a small connection panel in the lower rear. All I know is they sounded killer no matter where you stood in the 4000 sq/ft showroom, including directly beside them about 10′ away. That in itself was scary. Hearing that kind of sound playback with no moving drivers or voice coils…no actual cabinet, just that funky see-through screen!
Long story short, they played two of the same recordings (Lorena McKennitt’s Mask and Mirror) on each of the CD and turntable and you could watch the sound waves and reproduction peaks and valleys on the green scope screen to compare. The scope also provided a printout so that you could see side by side the differences. The vinyl recording was vastly superior to the CD on both high and low frequency response, even if most human ears could not readily notice the difference without a visual comparison. Whatever the whole thing boiled down to, it had the desired effect, Tim sold 4 of those monster systems that week, one that evening I was there.
For my own personal experience, I thought the CD was a tad sharper and brighter but where the record shone through was the bass and mid response, and the vocals were more “moist” and real. And it may have been the 3 or 4 glasses of champagne Tim plied us all with too. Whatever transpired, I was determined to keep my turntable and I walked out with a new CD player (but not the Denon) I’m a tad crazy, but not stupid enough to start divorce proceedings, since my Yamaha 1100 had suffered a catastrophic transport drive failure; which was the real reason I was there in the first place.

[Len Upton]

Hi Daryl. Your description of the high-end sales demonstration was tres amusant and the presence of wine there quite appropriate, and also analogous to the analogue versus digital debate. At some point it becomes subjective. When it comes to the analogue/digital debate, I’m agnostic and/or ambivalent. If I run across an old jazz record in pretty condition, that’s as good as its ever going to get. I’m not about to go on a deep search for its cd reissue. Of course, we all want to hear what’s there, but there are a whole lot of factors between the recording process, and our ears, including your event experience, and your budget.

One of those items that is both first and last in the equation, and that is speakers. In fact, they’re kinda critical. 😄 long time ago, before cds, I needed a pair of speakers. Due to space constraints they needed to be compact, ie. But I like bass, so there was a challenge. At the time, and even today, I think one of the best songs to test speakers is the Gypsy Queen, which follows Black Magic Woman on Santana’s Abraxis album. Beautiful bottom end, great guitar, and lots of Latino percussion. Wants to be played pretty loud. Eventually I found some economical speakers, (the brand is now lost to history), which worked well until they didn’t. Pushed them too much, and too often.

The comparison with wine is quite applicable. There’s a lot of wine out there, and most of it is pretty good. But you have to drink some of it to know what you like. Just not too much, too often.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by  Rudolf Wagner.

[Len Upton]

What’s with all of this gobbledeegook. I tried to delete it and it wouldn’t delete.

[David Herrick]

Hey, Len.

I think you can clear out the gobbledygook by clicking on the “Aa” icon at the bottom of your message when you’re in editing mode.

[Len Upton]

Thanks David. To my knowledge, I wasn’t in editing mode, except I tend to make a lot of typos, which I go back and fix at the end.

[David Herrick]

Well, that may not be it, but once I accidentally clicked on “Aa” (“show formatting”) while I was typing, and all that garbage appeared. Clicking on it again presumably would remove the formatting.

[Daryl Jones]

That happened to me a while ago too. Hasn’t done it since. But I don’t recall hitting that button to start it either….

[David]

Hi Daryl, sorry I’m a little late getting back to the conversation. I loved your story of hanging out in the stereo shop. It definitely brought back memories when, after high school and before college I finally had a full-time job and a few bucks to spend. So of course I went stereo shopping!

The speakers you describe are almost certainly electrostatic speakers, possibly Magnepans. Electrostatics have a charged film that vibrates between two screens as they pull or repel the screen. Because the film is so light weight, they do great with high frequencies. But they don’t push much air, so you’ll see them paired with subwoofers a lot. It’s also why electrostatics tend to be quite large.

Back then, a lot of cymbals in recordings sounded to me like hissing. It wasn’t until I got some electrostatic/woofer hybrid speakers that I thought I could actually hear the metalic sound of cymbals as they were supposed to sound. Now my hearing is so lousy I doubt I could hear the difference anymore.

[Daryl Jones]

Cool info David. I still speak with Tim often so I’ll ask him about them.