Gifts

Lord, back in the day I had a small fortune tied up in stereo Hi Fi eqpmt. I was young and eager then. Now, I don't have the patience for all that. Much easier to throw in a CD.
 
I'll be honest, despite the killer vinyl setup, I've also got an Innuos Zen server/streamer thing in the system and that gives me all my CDs, iTunes purchases and Internet radio at the wave of a mobile phone. So convenient and still high quality, so the CD Player is redundant, as is the tuner, and I never quite get round to using the TT. However, there is something special about pulling out an LP, cueing up, reading the sleeve notes and sitting actively listening to the music. Too much convenience leads to 'consuming' music almost mindlessly (which I'm guilty of most of the time these days, if I listen at all).
 
Thing is - Vinyl is NOT the perfect music source that many hipsters kid themselves it is these days - it definitely has its failings.

Surface noise is the obvious one, which can be partially circumvented by a decent quality cartridge.

The less obvious and less well known one is the inescapable physical restriction that the sound quality is better on the outer, wider, grooves than the inner one. Which is why the advent of CD's meant artists arguing with record companies to have track running order restored to how they wanted it, rather than the imposed status quo of "loud tracks first and ballads in the centre". Vinyl can sound really awfull if you crank the volume up on inner tracks near the label sometimes - reduced treble and bloated bass.

Much of the hard janglies of digital reproduction has been fixed nowadays - i remember some of the first CD's i bought had piano notes and cymbals that sounded like glass breaking, but they do sound much better on newer CD players or modern digital extracts.

A carefull Lossless or 320 mp3 rip from CD actually sounds much better than the 'orrid old stack systems or cassette decks that we had in my youth. I did some comparisons a few years back using a decent cassette deck of recordings to Chrome and Metal tapes and , tbh, even 128Mp3 is far superior.

Thing i hate nowadays is the volume levelling that occurs on streaming services - the tops and lower bass are just squished together and it can sound like the old fashioned "radio mix"
 
Oh yeah, I used to have loads of cassette tapes, in fact I have most of them still. They have obviously degraded over the years and even though I used a high end Teac to make them, tape was pants from the get go. Yes, vinyl also has imperfections, as you say, geometry being less obvious than surface noise. There is probably some starry-eyed adulation of vinyl as a format by the "hipsters" as you call them, who have come into it latterly. Having grown up with it and with a sizeable collection (not massive but enough), I'm glad to be able to extract as much as I can from it, and when you know the tunes so well, and they mean something, or bring back memories, things like surface noise get filtered out by the most highly effective intelligent adaptive neural filter technology known to man: your own brain! And if I should perceive too much snap, crackle and pop I'll just tell myself there's someone near me with a bowl of rice crispies!
 
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