Vinyl versus CD

[spam]

Originally posted by picanin
Spam all that I can infer from the above is that you have never listened to decent quality vinyl on a decent turntable. Your argument flies in the face of opinions from people involved in the audiophile industry. Even people involved in making the most esoteric digital equipment - CD players and offboards DAC's costing thousands of pounds - strive to get the same quality and realism from their products which can be obtained via turntable.

Spam the reason why the market has seen so much investment is simple. Most people used inferior turntables to play back vinyl and so were not getting the quality. SA in particular had the worst quality vinyl in the world to make things worse. The music companies adopted D for its ease of use as well as for the greater profits that were to be made. It costs far less to produce CD than to press vinyl. A guy listening to music on a substandard turntable from companies like Kenwood, Teac, Pioneer etc would have thought that CD sounded better because he was using inferior equipment. As such he was an easy target for the marketting of CD. I do agree though that in order for you to hear decent sound from a turntable you do need to buy a decent deck. And nothing that comes from a Japanese company is up to the job. The best turntables in the world come primarily from UK, US and a few European companies. Spam if ever you are down this way I will organise a demo at my local dealers for you to hear exactly what can be achieved with vinyl. And maybe then you will also understand why the vinyl market is once again growing.

Not at all....
Scientifically, CD's are superior, so is the retrieval system. You state that vinyl has been proven to be better but your results are unscientific...they are the subjective views of a number of people, all with different hearing properties, probably listening in different environments on different systems with little or no chance of repeatability. Technically speaking with repeatable benchmarks and standards the digital signal is far better...purely because it will not suffer from analogue imperfections, that is why everything is moving over to digital as things like S/N ratio, noise, interference. Sadly I think the argument is similar to the old one that arose with the advent of the transistor...the old guard swore blind that valve sound was better....to their ears maybe....but technlogically not.
The next point I have to make is that you are basing your comparison on equipment that costs the price of a car. Yes anybody that has money to throw around can get excellent results from vinyl, whereas Joe Bloggs can spend a few hundred and get excellent sound. Should you compare top of the range digital equipment then you will not tell the difference.