Neil Young's quest for better sounding music

[You Need a Thneed]

If Neil Young wants music to sound better, he should stop singing.

[Shin Pad]

I have a large collection of vinyl albums, mostly 60's and 70's stuff. I like the quality, however, vinyl does take a lot of TLC. You have to clean the record each time you play it, you shouldn't play it more than once a day - the vinyl grooves need to "rebound" after they have been played. If you do play them too often in a short period, they begin to have a lot more crackling, etc.

Having said that, I switched to CD's, a number of years ago, and I'm quite happy with the quality of the CDs. TBQH, to me, they sound just as good as the vinyl, and you don't have any of the crackling, etc., that you might get with some vinyl.

[Yeah_Baby]

Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed

If Neil Young wants music to sound better, he should stop singing.

You're dead to me.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Flames Draft Watcher

Not sure I'd agree with that at all. Are you an engineer or something and know this or are you just speculating?

Quality of the needle is a huge determiner in how well it sounds.

CD quality is limited by a sampling rate from what I know of it. Vinyl is not. This is why the difference from what I know of it. I believe it reproduces the waveform MORE accurately.

I don't find vinyl on a good system to be distorted at all. Maybe really old vinyl that has been heated at some point in the sun or w/e.

You're misunderstanding the term distortion - I'm not talking about distortion in your amplification gear, I'm talking about the extremely subtle distortion of the recorded signal that exists in the medium that leads to the warmth, body, and other subjective qualities that we ascribe to vinyl.

Another term we could use is precision - the vinyl medium is a less precise representation of the sound, but those imprecisions are extremely pleasing to the human ear.

Distortion takes a lot of forms - very subtle compression, rounding, and clipping of waveforms arising from limited bandwidth, harmonic overtones, slight phase shifts, etc.

The needle as you point out is a big contributor in good sound. It's also a big source of these same kinds of losses in precision, but again in ways that sound pleasing. Because you're transferring power across an interface (the rotating LP to the mechanical needle) you can't avoid this. It's not a ton of distortion, but the very tiny amount it adds is noticeable (otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation)