i hate CD's!

[b-diddy]

so i just bought this:



first off, i intend on scratching off the faggity pink writing.

but what else do i need. i realize i'll need speakers, but can i use the speakers off my cd player (for the time being)? do i need to get a reciever?--the turntable is the only thing i'll have hooked up to the speakers.

i get the record player in 3-7 days. i want to be ready. so what do i need outside of records? theres a small record shop close to home that sells tons of classic records for dirt cheep (probably slightly worn out) that i intend to raid.

all this is coming from my piece of shit stereo breaking. plus i fucking hate cd's. they scratch. they get lost easily. they sound like shit.

i've been planning this move for a while now. its finally 'go-time'.

[Hermy]

I own about 200 pieces of vinyl and run mine directly off my Sony player with a set of Bose speakers. Not sure how many watts the machine puts out, but its louder than I need.

If you treat a record as well as you treat a CD you'll be fine. They, despite reputation, are relatively hearty and I have 1 record with any serious issue in my whole collection (skip in the middle of "Machine Gun" on the Hendrix/Guy joint "Band of Gypsies"), where as my CDs are all fucked. That and you can roll doobies on album covers real easy.

[b-diddy]

i'm well aware.

im a little confused by your speaker thing, though. how do you run it directly off your sony?

[Hermy]

I have speaker outputs on the back of my unit. Just plug em right in. Its a few years old, not sure if you can get a similiar piece.

[b-diddy]

im hoping i can just plug mine right in too. i guess i'll probably just have to wait and see. thanks.

[Hermy]

I'm presuming from the looks of that one that it won't be the case, mine has a bit more body to it to house the amp. But an old amp can be had mighty cheap.

[Matt]

i've heard that good recordings on vinyl can sound much better than CD recordings. can anyone confirm this? or is that a you-need-high-end-equipment-and-need-to-be-a-snooty-audiophile thing?

[b-diddy]

this is probably more than you want to know, but its good reading.

about records vs other:

Two points:

first: All recorded music is sampled. For a CD the sample rate is determined by how many bits fit in a second — in other words how many little reflective angles can bounce that laser in a second as the disc spins. For a record, it’s how many molecules of vinyl go by the needle in a second — and the size of the needle tip is probably the bigger limitation. For a cassette, it’s how many bits of magnetically alignable carbon can go by the head in a second. How many separate indistinguisable values are determined by the sample rate. In other words, if you could only get one “value” in a second, then you couldn’t distinguish much at all. Get LOTS of values, and you can represent a lot of sonic variation. So the fact that the music is digital or analog is not really the point. The sample rate is the thing that really determines the dynamic and tonal range that you can represent with a recording, and then next is the degree to which you can ACCURATELY obtain the original audio information and put it in some medium, to be later reinterpreted. “Analog” sources like records and whatnot get a fairly high sample rate, but are subject to a certain degree of variation and aging behaviors because of the nature of the medium.

The other point that Bob appears to make (in his classic obtuse style) is that today’s music is compressed and normalized intensely in production. This is absolutely true. The studio is really TRYING to reduce the dynamic range of the recording — so that people listening to music in “normal” environments that are somewhat noisy such as their car can hear everything. They effectively have a signal-to-noise ratio problem. In a car or in many other “normal” environments the noise level is really quite high. Low signals are lost in the noise.

This is not the best way to appreciate the true original music.
Apart from BEING THERE, the best way is to find a VERY quiet spot, get VERY high quality reproduction equipment, and sit on a VERY comfortable couch and float away! This is what “audiophiles” love to do.

But the fact is, if you look at the % of the market that fits in that category…it’s not that many. Most people are trying to listen to something on their way to pick up the kids or on their way downtown to meet their friends on the subway. Also the really good audio equipment is not accessable to the average Joe (try $20,000 for an amplifier and speaker set up). So the recordings are trying to cater to the vast majority of people listening in the most common environments. I don’t like it, but I can understand it.

What I would REALLY like, is if the industry (or the whore if you will) would put two copies of the songs on the next generation media. The unproduced version — as the artist intends, and the produced version — for when you’re in your car or whatever. I know that some of my favorite older reproductions honestly suck to listen to in the car, because I can’t hear a lot of it. But when I’m at home it’s great — much better and more rivetting to have the dynamics intact.

And yes folks, super-compressed formats such as MP3 are generally lossy. That means that if you run the math on the CD data to produce the mp3, then run the math on the mp3 to try to get back to the CD data, you can’t get 100% match. You lose information. It’s a really good mathmatical compromise, but you still lose. CD data is “lossless” meaning that it’s an accurate representation — AT THE SAMPLE RATE of the CD (44khz), it’s not encoded in any way, it’s truly just a direct map of the original wave intensity at the point in time that the sample was taken. Higher quality audio can be obtained from using more bits per sample (24 or 32 instead of 16 for example), or by increasing the sample rate. Either way you increase the bits per second that can be used to capture the original audio.

about compression:

There are two kinds of compression to consider, and I do think both were hinted at.

When you compress audio dynamically (there is a difference between dynamic compression and storage compression) you are taking out the dynamic range of the audio. You basically make the quiet stuff quieter and the loud stuff either just as loud or even back it off a little bit (the latter is strictly called limiting not compressing, but most compressors are compressors/limiters built into one). This makes it so that when you are in your car you can hear the “quiet parts” about as well as the loud parts. But it does take something out of the feeling of the music. This dynamic compression is something you can blame either on the studio or on your own stereo, depending on if your stereo attempts any of it — in addition to anything the studio may have done.

Storage compression is something else. Storage compression is when you try to take the original PCM data (bits) that is on a CD and convert somehow mathmatically so that it fits in less space. CD’s can hold like 500 MB of data, which is really a lot. Typical songs are normally about 30-50 MB worth each. FLAC’s, OGG’s, MP3’s, WMA’s, whatever IPOD’s use, and other formats are nothing other than somebody running some math on the original data (30-50MB) and trying to make it smaller.

There are various ways of doing that, some of them involve “compromise”. Some formats, such as FLAC are considered lossless, meaning that if you take the CD data, math it to put out FLAC, then take the FLAC data and de-math it, you get the exact same CD data back out. Others, such as WMA, are called lossy, meaning that once you math the CD data to get the WMA version, you can never go back. They had to compromise mathmatically when they decided how to re-arrange the bits. And you can hear it because the resulting sound has imposed static and other audible artifacts, especially at lower bitrates such as 96 or the “std” 128.

To understand how storage compression works, I can give you an example that is mathmatically simple. Take this: 00000111. It takes 8 letters or whatever to write it down. But what if I did it this way: 0X51X3. Now I have reduced it to only 6 letters. There is actually an image compression format (PNG) that works exactly like that. Instead of recording 100 reds it records “red”,”100″. Works well for non-photographic images. As you can see this is not lossy — I can get back to the original easily. Obviously this is a very simple scheme. You have to get more complicated when you deal with photographic images or music, and sometimes they compromise. Have you ever seen a low-quality jpg image on the net? Sometimes this is because you can see the algorithm has compromised somehow, and when it gets reinterpreted back out to display on your screen, it isn’t the same as the original. If you want to test this, go get “the gimp” and install it. It’s like photoshop but free. You can save images in many formats, some of them lossy and some lossless. BMP would be lossless. You can copy the same image and save it as many times BMP as you want. But if you use JPG instead, each time you open the last saved image and save it again (after changing it slightly so it actually resaves) it will get worse. Each time you save it you lose something. The jpg compression algorithm is lossy — and so are lots of the algorithms used to put lots of music on your IPOD.

Note that you always have to de-math a storage compressed format in order to play it, since the audio hardware that ends up sending the signal out to your speakers (meaning the DAC) eventually has to have it in the regular uncompressed CD type format.

Although there is some real discussion to be had about media, artistry, and etc. It’s my opinion that the original comment was directed at two things: dynamic compression and storage compression. The result of both is that when the end listener ends up finally consuming the music that the artist put down, it’s a lot different than what it *really* sounded like to begin with.

[Fool]

Where is this from b? Its very interesting.

[b-diddy]

i bought it off amazon. from my research, its a pretty good one for the price.

i'll let you know how much i spend when its all said and done. i just purchased the pre-amp off amazon. i'm expecting that means i'll have to buy an amp, and possibly a reciever and speakers. think i might go do some research at the record store.