Posted on 08/29/2015 1:06:53 AM PDT by WhiskeyX
Oh, OK. No matter, figured JG didn’t do it all by himself.
Fine products, you can be proud of your father’s achievements. Back when I was a starving student I had one of the more affordable moving iron cartridges - very nice.
Don’t use headphones, but I hear (no pun intended) the Grados are highly regarded.
There are laser turntables for vynal. My hearing has gone too much for me to bother with it all. I buy CDs then rip them to the highest quality I can.
I have noticed though, that older CDs like Dark Side of the Moon, which is the first CD I ever bought, really need to be brought into a sound editing program to adjust levels though. Same with all my ols Police CDs. They sound like crap unless I pre-process them a little in Audacity first before converting to mp3.
Has anyone ever experienced degradation of their music CDs from just aging ?
Yeah, I've had a couple die on me. My copy of Monty Python's The Last Rip-Off (or somesuch) only lasted a few years. Looking at it, you can see something's not quite right.
I don't remember that one. I had an Advent 201. Worked well for years but eventually the rubber belts gave out. I wasn't finding much to listen to by then so it wasn't a big deal.
I know what you mean. Our family had a business which accumulated thousands of 78RPM records from hundreds of estate auctions. They filled up a building from floor to ceiling in crates and boxes. They were all lost when the family member died and a probate court ordered an auction sale of everything in the contested estate. The probate court’s auctioneer was in a hurry to finish the auction and would sell dozens of boxes and crates of these 78RPM records at a time on a single bid of twenty-five cents or 2-bits.
All told, over time I’ve tried to move away from mp3 into FLAC (lossless), because of better quality. Most mp3 players have a peak quality level (I think it is 128 kbps), so won’t give you better sound quality from a better file.
You don't have to spend megabucks on a phono stage to get a good result, the filters aren't that complicated, but some effort is of course necessary. I wouldn't call it compression, either, it's 'equalization' - and with all the other issues involved with the mechanical-to-electrical conversion the adherence to the RIAA curve is a rather minor point. Not sure what that graphic represents exactly, but it certainly looks well below the standard even mainstream integrated amps achieved in the '80s.
Cassettes sound much better than CDs.
Oh yeah, I remember the various record cleaning gizmos. At one point we had a three sided yellow pump bottle of record cleaning fluid with one edge covered in velvet. You’d spritz some cleaner onto the record then turn the bottle on edge and wipe it clean. That was forever ago and I was just a kid but I’ve recently gotten back into vinyl. The cool thing is that you can buy the absolute top of the line turntables and receivers from back in the day for relatively little money on eBay. I bought a fantastic Yamaha rig a few years ago in brushed aluminum and have accumulated a hundred or so LPs to play on it. The nostalgia factor is huge.
I suppose when it comes to brute power the LP is out-gunned by digital. Not even considering mechanical feedback if the record player is in the same room as the speakers if you're blasting out 120+ dB... (the Dies Irae onset of Verdi's Requiem can still be shocking though to the unexpecting via LP, so I guess it's a matter of perspective). Transients like a hard-struck cymbal are absolutely on the same level with what I listen with, though. Subjectively at least, and I stop worrying at that point :-).
And when all's said and done, I'd rather listen to Jasha Heifetz on a cheap transistor radio with iffy reception than to André Rieu on a $100k high end stereo system.
2. Off-center records can result in unpleasant “wow” sound.
Or the needle will drop off the edge.
My sister picked up the first release of Rolling Stones “Some girls” album back in the day.
It was a manufactures defect as the stylus would literally drop off the edge for most of the first song.
She returned it and it was replaced with album art that was completely different and the original art hasn’t been seen since.
Wow, very cool. Big hats off to your dad. I took a critical listening course in college and we were required to buy a pair of Grado headphones. The prof considered them to be the best and most accurate.
And finish with Polk Audio towers.
Near as I can tell, that's a good as it gets. I can even hear the original tape hiss from the original tape studio recordings of the old stuff.
Modern Music ping list.
Maggies are pretty unique. If you’ve got the room and the system for them, they pull off a disappearing act that few other speakers can. Overall system synergy becomes critical. There are a lot of perfectly good preamps, power amps, interconnects, speaker cables and CD players that will sound just dreadful if they’re combined poorly and especially so with the larger Magnepans. Hence my original choices of speaker cables and interconnects.
Hard to get a good demo of the Mageplanars, though. It’s really too much trouble for most dealers and most end users (that’s you and me) to take the time, trouble and dollars to get it all right. But man oh man. If you do take the trouble, the reward is jaw-dropping realism and musicality. Properly set up and driven, nothing in their price range approaches the coherency, focus and soundstaging that these speakers will deliver. They are absolutely electrifying, and about as far from ‘hi-fi’ as one could get. And nothing else even close to their price range will utterly disappear as these will when all else is right.
I think that the lack of pinpoint detail and imaging - that is, images too large or out of proportion - that some mention is more of a function of something amiss in the upstream components than the speakers themselves. Case in point - Loreena McKennit singing ‘Dante’s Prayer’ on her ‘Book of Secrets’ album is in perfect proportion as portrayed by my former system. There was no sense of a five foot wide pair of lips (Mick Jagger would be another matter, though). The cello on that piece sounds like its size, as does the piano and they’re right there in the room with you. And the proportional relationship of McKennit’s voice and the accompanying instruments don’t change as the volume is raised and lowered - only your listening perspective does.
The ‘trouble’ with Magnepans is that they WILL let you hear what’s wrong elsewhere. For example, you’ll discover why Monster cable sucks and why Cardas doesn’t. You’ll hear the true noise floor of your system and you’ll be blown away when you eliminate the source of such noise - by direct-connecting your CD player to your power amp with balanced cables. You’ll be able to hear which CD players (and CDs) sound the least ‘digital’ and which ones sound like cardboard cutouts of the music.
Hope this helps.
Ah, but the metallic backing on the OEM CDs degrades as well, and then the physical pits and lands cannot be read correctly anymore, either. Read an article years ago where they left an OEM CD exposed to direct sunlight for some time and it was unplayable afterwards. The gist was that the corrosion of the backlayer was a significant limiting factor for CDs.
Sound was VERY, VERY analog-like using CDRs burned direct from the raw studio master tapes by a highly acclaimed mastering engineer friend.
The Kalista transport is THE most stunningly beautiful piece of audio ever created and photos can't do it justice.
That's me in the mirror reflection...
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Eh, most people didn't have hundreds of albums back then. You had some albums that you listened to a whole lot. Even with cassette copies, MAYBE 100-200 albums (100 cassettes).
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