Do you have an LP Player / Turntable?

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Most likely some of you have a turntable / LP Player. I was wondering who, if it's still used and if some of us have any rare/interesting LP Records. So share!

I recently got a Dual CS 701. With a wooden base. It's said to be the quietest ever made, but I don't always believe what I hear. Fact is that one of my relatives, who's a lover of LP players, is jealous now.

For me the most interesting part is that it once belonged to my dad, who bought the thing in '74 or so. As a young boy, I was enchanted by the delicate mechanics and sound.
I don't have many records (yet!) Only a copy of Gershwin's Porgy & Bess and a jazz-record featuring various famous artists. Sad thing is that I don't have an amplifier with a phono-input. I'll have to buy a pre-amplifier so I can use the aux-input.

Here's a pic of a similar LP Player:

 

Ah, yes. I owned one of those back in the late 1970's as well. This one, I think, if I remember right:

http://dual-reference.com/tables/1225.htm

Now, I have this one, which I have plugged into my PC:



MoN - A good source for a phono pre-amp, or so I have read on audio forums:

http://www.needledoctor.com/

 

I've lost track of my turntable, but I do still have some of my old records in the garage somewhere. I don't know how "rare" these rate in the LP record world (I suppose they are all somewhat rare these days), but here are a few of mine:
-Queen - The Game
-Ozzy Osbourne - Diary of a Madman
-Scorpions - Blackout
-AC/DC - For Those About to Rock; Back in Black
-Kiss (several actually, including Gene and Paul's solo Albums, Creatures of the Night, Dynasty, Destroyer, Rock and Roll Over

I know that I have a bunch more, but those are the ones that immediately pop to mind. I got way into hard rock/metal when I was in third grade, which explains the rock theme. Shortly after collecting these everyone started getting cassette tapes. From there on out it was all about tapes and the Sony Walkman.

 

Yes, a Denon DP200 with USB. Allowed me to rip my precious collection of vinyls to enjoy on my comp, but nothing beats listening to the vinyls. Analog recording just sounds... better, it has that perticular sound, it's hard to describe, but other vinyl enthusiasts know what I mean.

 

I have a lot of 80s vinyl, but I wish I had more stuff from the 1970s and 60s. A few prized vinyl records:

Missing Persons - Spring Session M
Def Leppard - Pyromania
John Lennon - Double Fantasy
The English Beat - Special Beat Service
Asia - Asia
The Cars - Candy O
Eric Johnson - Tones
CS Angels - Chasing Shadows
The Police - Ghost In The Machine
John Cougar Mellencamp - Scarecrow
Heart - Heart

Just a few of my favorites....

 

I think you would love my mom's vinyl collection. She has hundreds -- mostly from the 60s and 70s. Nearly everything Beatles, Stones, Bowie, Lennon, Journey, Elton John, the Police, the Pretenders, the Cars, Elvis Costello... and the list goes on and on and on. Hell, even if you don't like the music, the record covers alone are interesting enough to provide hours of entertainment. The chemicals of the day sure did inspire creativity.... musical and otherwise.

 

That's all great stuff. My wish list for vinyl would be Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Yardbirds, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, BB King, Albert King, Freddie King, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull. I have some Beatles (the Blue Box set) and a few by The Stones.

I have a lot by the Cars, Elvis Costello, The Police, U2, The Pretenders, etc; mostly what was popular in the 1980s.

 

Those are some good aspirations. A lot of great music represented there.

My dad always had plenty of Hendrix, Zep, and he loved Jefferson Airplane.

Thinking a bit more about my mom's stuff, I guess it's probably more accurate to say that she had a lot of 60s, 70s, and early 80s, as a lot of the bands I mentioned started in the late 70s, but blossomed in in the early 80s (e.g. Journey, the Cars). Some other great bands/artists that I grew up listening to were Supertramp, Boston, Janis Joplin, Cream, Electric Light Orchestra... and I could seriously just go on and on....

I have to give my parents a lot of credit for their musical taste. I guess it wasn't such a stretch for me to "progress" into enjoying heavier music, but I always maintained a love for the musical roots I had been raised on.

 

A Technics SL-1200 MkII



As for the rarity, I have some records that could be considered rare (private pressings, limited editions etc.), however my experience tells me that everything can be found in a logical price sooner or later. All that is needed is patience and a little bit of luck.

Sorry to disappoint you but, unless one of these is some special limited edition, they are not rare at all.

 

I used to have a turntable for converting old LPs to CD, but it broke down. By then I had converted most of the stuff I had that wasn't available on CD anyway though.

@MoN, you may want to consider a simple mixer for integrating your turntable. They still make them with phono inputs due to DJs using them for 'scratching' or whatever.

People often claim that analog recordings have a 'warm' sound as opposed to the 'cold' sound of digital recordings. I never really agreed, but to each his or her own. Regardless, a CD copy of an LP should sound the same as an LP - it's just a digital copy of an analog recording. The digital 'cold' comes from recordings that are made and mixed and mastered digitally. (Or more precisely, from not using the old technology that made analog recordings 'warm.') Anyway, playing CD copies of your LPs will save your LPs from the ravages of Father Time.

 

Nah, no apologies and no disappointment. I started this thread with a bunch of old records in my garage, and that's still what I still have.

 

But a CD copy of an LP will copy all the audio data of the LP. It's just a 0s and 1s version of it. The data is digitized, not digitally remixed or remastered or even re-recorded, technically. It's just converted to a format that a CD player can read and play back.

 

No it doesn't copy the audio data, what actually happens is that you let the LP play and you record the tracks with a recording software. At least that is what it happens when you use the "traditional" way of converting (connecting the line-out of the amplifier with the line-in of the audio card). I'm not sure if the USB turntables work the same way but I bet that they do.

 

That's exactly what I'm talking about. You play the LP, and the same signal that is generated for playback on your stereo is sent to the audio in jacks on your breakout box or whatever you're recording it into, so the signal should be identical. There is no upconversion or downconversion whatsoever, assuming you're recording to a lossless format like .wav or .aif (and I don't know why anyone would record any other way). End result is you get the same audio data your LP normally generates for playback on your stereo. I'm sure it's not the same as what the record companies have in their archives, but it's the same as what you're used to listening to at home.

Digital audio is made to sound 'cold' in the studio, where the music is recorded dgitally, and mixed and mastered in a digital domain. Your favorite bands from the seventies that pressed their albums onto LPs for distribution didn't record this way, they recorded using analog equipment. That's where the sound difference lies, not in whether you play it back on a CD or not.

A CD copy of an LP that you make at home will have all the pops and scratches and hiss that your LP has (assuming you don't clean it up).


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That I did not know. So theoretically, the audio you record as I described above would remain 'identical' until you burned it to CD? I know that the app I use for that stuff doesn't truncate any frequencies during 32 bit recording. It has no automated processes like that - it would kind of defeat the purpose of lossless audio to apply a frequency sweep right off the bat.

 

No, you don't get the same audio data, what happens it's exactly what dmc says about frequencies and harmonics. Do you remember the double tape decks? When you 've copied an original tape, you could still hear in the copy what you've heard in the original tape but the sound quality has been lower. The same thing is happening when you copy an LP to a CD.

 

But audio tapes are an entirely different technology. The recordings you make with them are not digital copies, they're analog transfers with all the attendant limitations.

I suppose I will have to yield to the notion that there are inherant frequency truncations in CD burning, but can you guys offer any citation for that? The closest thing I can find is this from Wikipedia about the CD standard sample rate of 44.1 kHz, but it doesn't seem to support that notion too well, unless you mean specifically frequencies outside the range of human hearing. That seems to be what informed the choice of 44.1 kHz for CD audio.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz.

(Interesting about the low-pass filtering though ... I didn't know that either.)

At any rate, how would we know for sure that old analog recordings for LPs included frequencies outside the range of human hearing, and that they impacted the perceived audio significantly?

 

Gaear - Because the sound is sampled from the spectrum of full audio that goes into an analog recording, and it means that not all the audio data is present in a digital recording using the 1980 standard. The newer SACD disks have much higher quality sound, similar to a vinyl disk. The issue is if it is really noticeable, as you point out, to the human hearing in blind testing. And you are correct when you pointed out that much of the final result is in how well a digital recording is mixed and finally mastered.

The Beatles new remasters are a case in point. To my ears, at least, they sound more like the older vinyl Beatle's recordings that were well-known for their warmth and overall smoothness in tone. The original CD mixes were harsh, and seemed even a bit distorted, which was blamed, at the time, on the new technology bringing out the imperfections of the older analog recordings, which was complete bull in the opinion of a lot of listeners. The new remasters have more of that old Beatles sound, at least IMO. Although some have challenged that they are really not all that different from the CDs in the 1980s.