What they say about vinyl being more tangible , of more substance, relates not only to the musical quality.
Back in the day, buying a new vinyl record meant more than just the presentation of a new recording.
It was something that you held in your hands, something that was a source of interest, of information, and stimulation, more than just the pretty woman on the cover.
Playing a vinyl record involved unpacking, placing it on turntable and placing cartridge needle in the groove, and in 20 minutes you did it all over again.
The 60's, 70's and 80's were also when music broke fresh ground, the time was ripe for a brand new sound , and a plethora of songwriters and musicians wrote groundbreaking new forms of music and song. Its no coincidence the golden age of songwriting happened along with the golden age of vinyl.
I've been listening to vinyl for nearly 50 years now - these days its not my main source of music.
I listen to music while I'm working and its simply easier to turn the computer on and listen to a whole album or leave the music on shuffle.
And its true that digital audio is very good these days, there's still a lot of bad digital around, but when its good its very good.
I actually believe good digital is more accurate than vinyl, and with a good recording, which is the actual quality determining factor of any source, digital can be closer to the recording than vinyl.
Vinyl has a lot of potential for coloration, mostly on playback in our systems , whereas digital software and hardware is very constant and uniform.
BUT, there is something about vinyl, its totally immersive , and its seems to be far easier to sink into the music listening to vinyl than digital.
Vinyl washes over you, it makes you forget what you were doing, and the 20 minutes goes far quicker than you thought.
Being a tube guy, I naturally think the only way to listen to vinyl is through a tube preamp, with a tube phono stage.
There's good technical reasons for this , vinyl playback through a cartridge tip is feedback free, its a perfectly physical process , that converts magnetic movement into electrical signals.
The resulting frequency response is far from linear , and massive amounts of EQ are needed to get it back to flat.
Combine this with the fact that the signal from the cartridge will be as low as half of a thousandth of a volt for a moving coil cartridge and 5 thousandths of a volt for moving magnet.
To get it up to typical line stage input levels we need to amplify it by at least 5000 times, not an easy task.
Well it is an easier task if you use lots of feedback , which simplifies a lot of problems.
Feedback can be very useful, and it can be the devil, the amount of feedback that is typically used in a solid state phono stage chokes all the life and soul out of vinyl playback.
Its very hard to build a solid state phono stage without a lot of feedback , it can be done, but the royalty of phono stages is the zero feedback tube phono stage.
There are compromises , when you are using tubes for gains of between 5000 and 10000 you are also amplifying the noise floor, so its hard to get a tube phono stage dead quiet.
However it is possible to get them quieter than the noise floor of a vinyl record , so its really not a big issue.
The massive EQ required of a phono stage is always almost done with large amounts of negative feedback with solid state devices , but can be done with zero feedback with tubes.
Feedback with vinyl is bad m'k , something so expressive and free, just doesn't deserve to be castrated and chained.
Vinyl can be beautiful, impressive, strong, expansive and simply great fun.
A good bottle of red or a fine craft beer, give me vinyl!
In other blogs I will explain virtues and compromises of the 300+ tube phono circuits I have designed and built (in conjunction with Kevin Covi)
One of my turntables , the mighty Micro Seiki RX-5000
