Sunday, May 24, 2009

Turntable Nirvana

No DirectQ this weekend as I've been listening to a lot of my old records following a recent turntable upgrade.

I love the sound of vinyl records, and have been gradually assembling a setup that will allow me to hear them at their best. If you go to certain "audiophile" sources, you'll hear a lot of rubbish about how the vinyl sound is all about "warmth", "bloom", "softness", and so forth. Likewise, there are those who in all seriousness believe that the minute you put the needle down you'll hear a great big CRACKLE CRACKLE CRACKLE and will have jumps and stuck needles to contend with forever more. All nonsense.

The vinyl listening experience is about dynamics, about precise attack and release of notes, and these are factors which CD just cannot replicate, owing to signal quantization at the lower volume levels (where most of the critical information above 10KHz lives). The difference is that vinyl sounds like it is going to make you genuinely boogie.

While I have what could be considered a fairly high-end setup, this is something that even the cheapest plastic turntable can do. Spending the extra money is worth it though, and will get you sound quality that CD just cannot touch.

As for the frequency response, the graph below shows a frequency analysis for a recently release remastered CD (the red line) and the same track copied from vinyl (the green line) in my current setup:



Notice the almost total lack of difference. The CD is a little louder (at the expense of compressed dynamics), but otherwise they are virtually identical. The vinyl has more energy in the midrange and lower treble, the CD has more energy in the upper treble.

While getting to this stage I've realised that the critical thing is to go for source compnents that are as neutral as possible. Frequency adjustments should come from the amplifier and speakers (preferable the speakers only) but keeping the source as close to neutral as you can will result in a much better end result every time.

Meanwhile, back to DirectQ...

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