One was good, the other three were horrible - lots of hisses and pops.
Surface noise and dynamic range were killers to LPs. You could knock out a lot of the surface noise with proper care. Use of a Discwasher, antistatic mats and lined sleeves went a long way. Quality pressings and vertical storage could minimize warpage. Proper tracking force, arm geometry, antiskating, etc and of course high quality equipment. Most people didn't do any of this, of course. Dynamic range was always a limitation. This is where CDs should have shined, and properly mastered new ones do. The early CDs sounded bright and harsh because of two major factors, the recording engineers didn't understand how to master without RIAA equalization which was nescessary on LPs nut not on CDs. A lot of early CDs were simply direct transfers from compressed and equalized analog masters. The other reason they sounded bad was that the DACs in the players themselves were not exactly ready for prime time. What the LP/analog format is capable of is I guess best (or most easily/accessibly) illustrated by Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" from the "Face Value" album. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Air_Tonight I believe that was an analog master, but I'm open to correction. It was an eye-opener on a good system. Dire Strait's "Brothers in Arms" was the first DDD album. It was RIAA equalized as I recall for the LP version but the CD was the first to really push the medium's dynamic range to its full potential. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_in_Arms_(album) Awesome, if you like that sort of stuff. The perennial problem with CDs is that even if you correct for the DAC capability issues, the jitter artifacts, stc., some people will still say that they don't sound as good as (good) LPs because the sampling rate is too low. Analog doesn't have a sampling rate issue, of course. Does what you get in dynamic range and freedom from noise offset perceived sampling rate harshness even after jitter and DAC bandwidth issues have been corrected? I don't know, but that's what the analog vs digital debate is all about. There is no question that digital is more convenient. But there are a whole lot of people listening to MP3s out there that can't imagine what music can sound like in either an ideal digital OR analog form.
************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
