If You Are Serious About Listening To Vinyl

I’m not sure which ‘nuisance’ of vinyl reproduction is being referred to here. There are so many acknowledged shortcomings that I wouldn’t know where to start. 

Just on a factual point, the Line-In on Amp is no different from any other. The analog still has to be digitised, at 16/44.1. There’s no Analog direct path available. 

You are correct ...there is always a conversation process of a sort even back in the early days when AV components came with a Phono input. However, Sonos speakers with Line-in are designed to reproduce music with near CD quality. That process removes some of the warmth associated with Vinyl. Carrying turntable signals the old fashioned way to wired speakers (as in the pass) preserves the vinyl experience.

I realize that in the age of digital downloads, bluetooth and wifi an appreciation of vinyl has been loss. Those who never experienced vinyl (present company excepted) unfortunately have no reference point as to how vinyl recordings were really meant to sound.

As an example...Those who have never driven a manual shift vehicle (as they are a thing of the past for the most part) will never know the exhilaration of shifting the gears and lisrtening to the rev of the engine to know the exact time to shift and advance the power transfer to the rear wheels. That was driving! 😎

I sure don’t miss my LPs, they were great fun when there was no choice but the cleaning and lubricating got old quickly but without that the sound degraded after far too few plays. All the adjustments needed with cartridge changes and just to make sure nothing slipped out of line got old too.

I was never one to go after fancy cables, I tried a nice selection from the military post exchange and discovered I couldn’t hear the difference in any of the good quality ones. I did find that going cheap, while not impacting the sound to my ears, would allow in outside interference. Several of the cables that came in my equipment boxes were happy to treat me to whatever the local MARS radio station was broadcasting.

Been too long since I looked at turntables but I’d shop for something similar to my antique Technics SL-1200, lots of cast aluminum for vibration resistance, stable DC direct drive and a precisely adjustable tone-arm.

I tried a variety of cartridges and stylus shapes but since I had a number of CD-4 records I usually left my Audio-Technica cartridge loaded rather than readjusting. The extended HF response and stylus contour didn’t make an audible difference to my ears and it was reasonably flat across the 20-20k band.

The whole audio path, from stylus to the amp’s input seemed to have little impact on the sound I heard once I got to a reasonable quality level. The turntable’s speed stability was a major factor for me, I can’t deal with wow and flutter, they grate on my nerves. Where the higher end turntable really showed an improvement was in resisting audio feedback, at low levels about anything is good enough but when you are playing at maximum (non-ear damage) volume levels it really becomes an issue. Even my 1200 had issues if I left the cover on, without it there was never an issue. Oh. and it had to be on a rock solid base too, the feet would absorb some vibration but were limited.

Where I saw the biggest impact was amplifier power and speaker efficiency. My Klipsch were happy with 60 Watts but  really shown with 600. My Acoustic Research were nice background speakers with 60 Watts but pushed sounded pretty flat as the amp ran out of power, at 600 they were impressive and I think better than the Klipsch at all but the lowest frequencies. Since I could easily exchange cables I tried a variety and found no audible difference that couldn’t be attributed to cable size. My final choice was a generic stranded 10 GA pure soft copper cable at a few cents per foot.

While I wouldn’t go back, other than to visit my old gear at the kid’s house, I wouldn’t advise against it for folks that are serious about it. For folks that aren’t serious, about anything is good enough as without proper care the LPs will soon degrade to the point quality gear doesn’t matter.

Speaking of worn LPs, do you know anyone that is actually looking at the grooves of the used LPs that they are so happy to buy and display? I’ve discreetly peaked at a few and they look pretty worn. It would be interesting to play them into a spectrum analyzer and see just how badly the wear is impacting the sound, I’m not willing to upset friends so I smile and nod a lot.

I replaced a Linn LP12 / Ittok / Ortofon MC with a Meridian 206 Delta-Sigma (with aftermarket clock mod) 30 years ago. The Linn and all the records were subsequently sold as a bundle. I really can’t understand why anyone would go through the hassle of vinyl these days, other than for the tactile and visual experience. The media’s acoustic shortcomings are legion and well documented.

Old records will surely be worn. New records will have been digitally recorded. A turntable connected through Sonos will have its carefully preserved analog signal (courtesy of ‘audiophile’ cables) chopped up into 16bit 44.1kHz samples and passed through a reconstruction filter. If there really are digital ‘nasties’ there’s no evading them.

I don’t miss records. It was a big pain to properly set up everything. If you want the ultimate quality, you need to tinker with cartridge alignment -- for each record and after stylus replacement. Unless you are using a linear tracking arm, pivoted arm alignment is optimal at only two points on the record surface. Distortion is higher at all other points. “Wow” was built into most records because they were not perfectly flat or the spindle hole was not perfectly centered. Warp consequences can be minimized if the arm bearing is in the plane of the record -- impossible with most turntables. In any case warps cyclically destroy the cartridge alignment that you worked so hard to achieve.

I think that some users prefer the relative lack of compression of older records compared to the draconian compression typical of modern commercial distribution. Usually, there was a high frequency peak with LP’s due to cartridge response and tracking distortion. If this is suddenly taken away the music will seem dull and uninteresting for a while. There was one cartridge that had an uncharacteristically flat response. Many people felt that it was dull, but if you plotted it’s frequency response it simply made one line on the chart disappear while other cartridges had all sorts of dips and peaks.

All of this nonsense, except draconian compression goes away with digital distribution.

The irony is that vinyl has a dynamic range equivalent to only about 11-12 bits. Today’s 24 bit streamed content ought to have all the room it needs. 

The one thing vinyl has over any other media is, was, and probably always will be, is the packaging, IMO.  Every album with the front cover album art that was distinct and unique to that album only, and typically became an iconic symbol of the band/artist.  You didn’t quite get the same feeling from 8-track, cassette tapes, or even CDs just because the packaging was significantly smaller.  You certainly don’t get that today with online digital media.

I have fond memories of getting LPs as gifts for birthday or christmas, or saving up my allowance to go to the record store.  Flipping through all the different albums.  Yes, you can do that with other physical media, but the packaging just never had the same wow factor.  The reason I have kept all my old LPs is not because I ever really have a desire to play a record, I don’t even own a turntable, it’s because of the packaging.

I liked this idea when I first read about it, to try to replicate the ‘tactile’ feel of a music collection using Sonos or similar:

https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/articles/sonos-spotify-vinyl-emulator

https://www.reddit.com/r/vinylemulator/

Solid post @AjTrek1!
I still remember the days of flipping through my dad's vinyl collection and putting on some of his classic tunes on our old speaker system. It, of course, had everything from LP to tape players in that massive hunk of plastic.

As @craigski mentions that there are two things I miss about modern streaming. Flipping through albums and listening to them from start to finish was excellent. Some albums have made sure to make it a “journey” through albums, and that is something I feel the resurrection of Vinly might help bring back. I must admit, though, I keep looking at vinyl because of the cool album art and special editions you can buy, like the one from Linkin Park that they released a short while ago. But I think I will stick with digital media for now. Going into the Vinyl/Audiophile hobby is just something I don’t have the money for 😅

That is correct, so I will be sticking with streaming for now. I know for some services, though, you lose some song details because of the compression. However, that, of course, depends on the service.