Looking for a good turntable

You said "A Cd is what? 320 Kbps?"

100% wrong.

You said "Different formats have better quality, flac, mp4s are better but digital is already starting with a compressed signal."

100% wrong. FLAC is not a "starting with a compressed signal" in fidelity at all. Neither is CD. Not all digital is compressed.

You said "Vinyl is a lossless medium.", implying digital is not.

First of all, vinyl is not lossless. Its dynamic range is far below that of CD and struggles to reproduce the entire range of human hearing. Second, for all ranges of human hearing up to the threshold of pain, CD, WAV, FLAC, ALAC and other formats are truly lossless, for the reasons I described.

As I said, "It ain't ignorance causes so much trouble; it's folks knowing so much that just ain't so." That is the only problem I have in this thread.

You said "A Cd is what? 320 Kbps?"

100% wrong.

You said "Different formats have better quality, flac, mp4s are better but digital is already starting with a compressed signal."

100% wrong. FLAC is not a "starting with a compressed signal" in fidelity at all. Neither is CD. Not all digital is compressed.

You said "Vinyl is a lossless medium.", implying digital is not.

First of all, vinyl is not lossless. Its dynamic range is far below that of CD and struggles to reproduce the entire range of human hearing. Second, for all ranges of human hearing up to the threshold of pain, CD, WAV, FLAC, ALAC and other formats are truly lossless, for the reasons I described.

As I said, "It ain't ignorance causes so much trouble; it's folks knowing so much that just ain't so." That is the only problem I have in this thread.



Yeah, I've noticed you act like a condescending know-it-all to just about everyone who dares come here with a comment or question. I won't take it personally.

Anyway, Cd's are an approximation of the original sound, if you're ripping music into a FLAC file it's still only a digital approximation of the source. The digital music files you listen to are all compressed. MP3s are lossy, FLACs are lossless. Either way, again, they still can only attempt to replicate the source. A lossless FLAC file made from a crappy source will still sound crappy. Screw it, my head hurts, your points are so convoluted it's hard to tell what you're even arguing anymore. I'l just cut and paste take it from here. I'd say read it but you already know everything so there's not much point to it.


"A digital recording takes snapshots of the analog signal at a certain rate (for CDs it is 44,100 times per second) and measures each snapshot with a certain accuracy (for CDs it is 16-bit, which means the value must be one of 65,536 possible values).

This means that, by definition, a digital recording is not capturing the complete sound wave. It is approximating it with a series of steps. Some sounds that have very quick transitions, such as a drum beat or a trumpet's tone, will be distorted because they change too quickly for the sample rate.

In your home stereo the CD or DVD player takes this digital recording and converts it to an analog signal, which is fed to your amplifier. The amplifier then raises the voltage of the signal to a level powerful enough to drive your speaker.

A vinyl record has a groove carved into it that mirrors the original sound's waveform. This means that no information is lost. The output of a record player is analog. It can be fed directly to your amplifier with no conversion.

This means that the waveforms from a vinyl recording can be much more accurate, and that can be heard in the richness of the sound. But there is a downside, any specks of dust or damage to the disc can be heard as noise or static. During quiet spots in songs this noise may be heard over the music. Digital recordings don't degrade over time, and if the digital recording contains silence, then there will be no noise.

From the graph you can see that CD quality audio does not do a very good job of replicating the original signal. The main ways to improve the quality of a digital recording are to increase the sampling rate and to increase the accuracy of the sampling."

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question487.htm

Someone needs to go read up on Nyquist-Shannon. Sigh.

This has gone way off the tracks.

All I'm really saying is when somebody asks which turntable to buy, he's probably looking for information on turntables.

I agree. And probably not needing to be told about Ortofon cartridges. Or other things that affect the great vinyl sound quality! In any case, OP is long gone from here.


The cartridge is a huge part of the crappy, inferior sound you get from your turntable. It's very relevant to the question. But you're right, he's long gone. Seems sombody hijacked his thread with a bunch of digital talk.

I'm guessing you must have had one of those Crosley turntables that look like a suitcase. Those do sound really bad.

This has gone way off the tracks.

All I'm really saying is when somebody asks which turntable to buy, he's probably looking for information on turntables.

I agree. And probably not needing to be told about Ortofon cartridges. Or other things that affect the great vinyl sound quality! In any case, OP is long gone from here.


The cartridge is a huge part of the crappy, inferior sound you get from your turntable. It's very relevant to the question. But you're right, he's long gone. Seems sombody hijacked his thread with a bunch of digital talk.

I'm guessing you must have had one of those Crosley turntables that look like a suitcase. Those do sound really bad.

My, you are presumptive! Kumar is a reformed audiophool, who no doubt spent quite a bit on cartridges, including Ortofons. You really need to stop making a fool of yourself...

Oh Lordy, I can't believe what I just read. That graph actually tried to explain sampling by showing a jaggy stair step representation. Guess that's what happens when you use "How stuff works" as a source. :D


I repeat:

"It ain't ignorance causes so much trouble; it's folks knowing so much that just ain't so."

- Josh Billings, Humorist

By the way, did you actually watch the video I linked to above? Monty works for Xiph, the creators of the FLAC codec, and he gives you actual experimental proof that analog signals put through a band limited ADC-DAC chain come out exactly the same when measured via oscilloscope. Not "compressed", not an "approximation", but exactly the same. This experimental data is congruent with the predictions (and subsequent proof) of the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, which is the basis for all digital audio sampling.

Watch the video. It will keep you from embarrassing yourself more. Condescending or not, I'm right.

By the way, Sony was brought to court for false claims and lost because they used the same kind of BS stair step graph on that page. The reason for the loss? Stair step graphs are not an accurate depiction of digital sampling. The ruling banned Sony from using stair step graphs in the advertising of hires audio.

http://www.kirkville.com/sonys-web-content-claiming-high-resolution-music-sounds-better-than-cds-banned-in-uk-for-false-claims/

Someone needs to go read up on Nyquist-Shannon. Sigh.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem

In the field of digital signal processing, the sampling theorem is a fundamental bridge between continuous-time signals (often called "analog signals") and discrete-time signals (often called "digital signals"). It establishes a sufficient condition for a sample rate that permits a discrete sequence of samples to capture all the information from a continuous-time signal of finite bandwidth.

. . .

The sampling theorem introduces the concept of a sample rate that is sufficient for perfect fidelity for the class of functions that are bandlimited to a given bandwidth, such that no actual information is lost in the sampling process. It expresses the sufficient sample rate in terms of the bandwidth for the class of functions. The theorem also leads to a formula for perfectly reconstructing the original continuous-time function from the samples.

Emphasis mine.

Yup

Kumar is a reformed audiophool, who no doubt spent quite a bit on cartridges, including Ortofons. You really need to stop making a fool of yourself...
Lol; my preference was Dynavector. MC with MM level output signals. Brilliant performer.
But I can empathise with the man. I too had misunderstood digital to be the series of jaggy steps that can only approximate the analog signal as more steps are involved, but never perfectly approximate it because there is no end to the steps that can be added. Folks here guided me out of that state of ignorance with some patience. Coming to the discussion with an empty cup of a mind helped though.
PS: if the long gone OP ever returns, here is something from my archive of links from an earlier life: https://www.stereophile.com/content/entry-level-23
Sometimes, Stereophile gets it right; the 10X5 worked very well on my Rega TT. But never exceeded the quality from an equivalent quality SACD/CD, even from 180g vinyl. And now I get the same quality from Apple Music streamed at 256 Kbps, if the album being streamed is well mastered.

This thread contains a good refresher as to why digital audio has surpassed vinyl, but never answered the original question. I've found myself searching for why the $100 turntable's sound quality is so much worse than streaming the same track. Is a $350+ turntable required to get reasonable sound from vinyl?

I've had Sonos for many years, somehow found myself wanting to get into vinyl as a hobby and recapture some nostalgia to enjoying music. Can someone chime in and explain what is required to play decent quality vinyl through Sonos? I've tried both a Ion Max LP and a Audio-Technica LP60, both have very poor sound quality compared to streaming. I realize these are the low end of turntables and want to know what features are needed to get better sound. Is this because of the poor built-in amplifier? Or the needle/cartridge? Or the weight and alignment of the cartridge? Do I need a mechanical turntable with phono only, sent to an external pre-amp to send to the line level input of my Sonos Connect to get decent sound quality? Are there pre-amps that are better suited to the input resistance+impedance of the Sonos Connect?