CD vs LP

Whenarewethere · Guru

CD vs LP

Buzz Lightbulb · Guru

When CDs first came out they were considered indestructible. A friend of a friend completely replaced his record collection with CDs and then etched his name on the back of each one. Beautiful.

Whenarewethere · Guru

When I bought the CD player. The sales person was jumping up & down on a CD. I am not interested, here is the money I just want to pay for it & go. It was my lunch break & I really had to get back to work.

Craig1 · Guru

1st saw cd's at Melbourne Exhibition Building, yep jump on them , screw your dirty heel into them, wow then play, all good. But they soon dumbed down the quality, you cannot have a lifetime item sir!

Whenarewethere · Guru

Some stylus information here:

https://sumikophonocartridges.com/what-is-a-phono-cartridge/

https://www.jico-stylus.com/2019/07/elementor-9582/

I bought an elliptical stylus N91ED. Very happy with it so far. They have a life of 100 - 200 hours, so that works out to roughly a $1 per LP.

I think I have the tracking set up as best as possible. Getting the anti-skate force right was probably the most difficult bit. The tracking force I have set to 1 gram.

Bought it from JICO which is sent from Japan. I will see how this stylus goes & maybe next time order a SAS (super analogue stylus). They supposedly sound better, a longer life of 500 hours, but about the same LP amortised cost!

Craig1 · Guru

The first juke box I saw was sixpence a play, or three for a shilling, in 1955/56, so at a$1 a play probably cheaper.

Corndoggy · Senior Member

I once worked with a guy who was the biggest tight arse miserable bugger ever been put on the planet. Would steal the sandwich out of your mouth before you could bite down on it. Tight with money, you got no idea. I nearly dropped dead one day when he told us he he brought a new addition to his sound system. If I remember correctly it was a new set of speakers, and he parted with around $25,000. I told him if he could hear the difference between them and a $2000 pair he was kidding himself. He certainly didn't hear they salesman saying "I've got a real live one here boys". Still he never spent a cent on much else. Even when it was his shout.

86GTS · Guru

Nothing like the sound quality of vinyl. Luckily I saved all of mine from the early 60's through till its demise.
Vinyl has become trendy & very expensive in the past five or so years. I have around 300 albums. smile

Corndoggy · Senior Member

Vinyl's in the cupboard, CDs are in there too, turntable is under the stairs, with the pre amp needed for my amp that I used, cd player was my DVD player, not used now for anything. Use an ipod filled with music. Mostly with ear phones or in the car. Good enough for me.

Cupie · Guru

All wasted for me with the state my ears are in, though I am sometimes amazed at the range of sounds on the rare occasion when I put on a pair of earphones & listen to one of my crappy hand me down sound systems.

I never listen to music but have a collection of CDs & a few Vinyls plus a box of Tapes.

dorian · Guru

I remembered this old thread after reading this:

Audiophiles Can't Differentiate Audio Signals Sent Through Copper, Banana, and Mud in Blind Test:

https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/01/audiophiles-fail-copper-banana-mud-blind-test/

Stop pretending and save your money.

Ineedabiggerboat · Senior Member

Straight out of The Betoota Advocate

dorian · Guru

A former boss wouldn't drink any beer other than craft beers because he reckoned they tasted so much better. One day his wife served him a regular beer and afterwards asked him whether he realised what he'd being drinking. When he admitted that he couldn't tell them apart, she slapped his head and bought regular beers from then on.

To paraphrase that old adage, there's no audiophool like an old audiophool, or audiophools and their money are soon parted. For some reason, even when we're affected by inevitable presbycusis, some of us still believe we can hear the nuances in the recordings of a concert pianist, even better than a newborn child.

-- Edited by dorian on Thursday 5th of February 2026 03:08:50 PM

Corndoggy · Senior Member

I will admit I can tell a difference between different speakers. That difference I will put down to personal preference on the difference. Could I tell the difference between a cd and a vinyl record? Other than a click or hiss that could be on a vinyl disc, probably not. Would I spend thousands of dollars on equipment if I had to replace what I have now, no I wouldn't. Just about all the music l listen to now is from my car, my phone with headphones or my 5th gen ipod with headphones. If l'm home alone i could put on a DVD, crank up the amp and listen to it through the home theatre system.

Are We Lost · Guru

Other than the imperfections from needle on groove I don't think I could ever tell the difference.

There is a bit more difference when listening to MP3 recordings, even at high bitrates, and I used to be able to pick that, particulaly with the complex multi instruments in a classical piece. MP3 definitely gave a more muddy sound. Now a few years down the track and I doubt I would pick that difference. And the treble has been gone from my hearing for years. Nevertheless, I still save recordings in FLAC.

As for speakers, I recently bought a new Klipsch centre speaker for my home system. Klipsch is supposed to be a reasonable brand without step up a level. Cost a few hundred dollars. It has higher power handling capabilities than my 25 year old M5 Mission speaker, which is why I bought it. There is a substantial difference, but it is actually the old Mission speaker sounding better. Really surprising because my Denon AVR has a feature to tune the response curve for each individual speaker to suit room acoustics. Using that feature or manual tuning, even with a sound meter and I still prefer the old one. Even though it is only the centre speaker, it is noticeable with all speakers running. But with cinema, who cares so much.

-- Edited by Are We Lost on Friday 6th of February 2026 01:26:43 PM

dorian · Guru

I was reading another piece from around 2004. A group of 12 buddies were comparing Belken (oxygen free!!) and Monster speaker cables when the test engineer secretly switched the Belken cable for a coat hanger. Nobody could tell the difference, and they all thought the sound was excellent.

dorian · Guru

Audiophiles talk in abstract terms. I'm an engineer, so I prefer physical quantities. I don't understand terms like "muddy" or "crisp" or "warm", but I do understand frequency response and harmonic distortion. It seems to me that most audiophiles have never faced a blind test, so their beliefs have never been challenged.

As for MP3s, I would think that all of today's "music" is recorded on digital master tapes. This means that the best possible reproduction is digital to digital. This process is lossless. Yet there is this crowd that believes that digital sources need to be transcribed onto a sh1tty plastic disc for best appreciation. What's even sillier is that the signal is subject to RIAA equalisation which intentionally introduces distortion during pressing, and reverses this distortion during playback. Then you have the pops and crackles and hiss as the needle jumps up and down, and side to side, in some Flintstone-esque contraption. But after all that, the analogue signal is then digitised and transmitted to digital headphones via Bluetooth.

Ineedabiggerboat · Senior Member

Clearly not a sound engineer. Converting audio to MP3 typically removes roughly 75% to 90% of the data from an uncompressed source like a WAV file or CD. This is a "lossy" process that significantly reduces file size (often to 1/10th of the original) by eliminating data that the human ear generally cannot hear.

Craig1 · Guru

I recently bought an " as new " vinyl australian version of Dirty Deeds done Dirt Cheap. It sounds pretty good to me. Better that the international CD bearing the same name for sure. No Jailbreak on the cd, it offended the Yanks apparently.

Ineedabiggerboat · Senior Member

My wife asked why I speak so softly at home. I said I was afraid Mark Zuckerberg was listening. He laughed. I laughed. Alexa laughed. Siri laughed. Facebook ads suggested a microphone.

dorian · Guru

Ineedabiggerboat wrote:
Clearly not a sound engineer. Converting audio to MP3 typically removes roughly 75% to 90% of the data from an uncompressed source like a WAV file or CD. This is a "lossy" process that significantly reduces file size (often to 1/10th of the original) by eliminating data that the human ear generally cannot hear.

OK, my post was ambiguous. I should have said, "as for digital", and by "lossless" I mean that digital copies are identical, for identical formats. Even so, at bitrates of 256 - 320 kbps, the audio is indistinguishable from WAV in blind tests. It is certainly better than what you get out of a plastic disc, and I've never been able to detect the difference between an MP3 player and a CD. If you purchase music online, it's usually offered as an MP3 download.

Many years ago, when hard drives had capacities of 20GB or so, I backed up my entire CD collection to my HDD. I had a choice of WAV or MP3 formats, but I chose the latter because I couldn't discern any difference. And my hearing was a lot better then. I now have several backups on larger drives.

That said, I confess that when I was young, I was a pretentious specification hunter. If I could go back in time I would smack my young self in the head.

-- Edited by dorian on Friday 6th of February 2026 06:58:20 PM

dorian · Guru

Craig1 wrote:
I recently bought an " as new " vinyl australian version of Dirty Deeds done Dirt Cheap. It sounds pretty good to me. Better that the international CD bearing the same name for sure. No Jailbreak on the cd, it offended the Yanks apparently.

It's the placebo effect of the clicks, pops, hiss and crackles.