It's more than a little ironic; Linn Products, based in Glasgow, Scotland, burst onto the audiophile scene in the early 1970s with its LP-12 turntable. The LP-12 has never gone out of production and earlier this year it received a bunch of performance-enhancing upgrades.
When the CD was introduced in the early 1980s, Linn was a massive digital basher. The company spearheaded an anti-CD movement in the audiophile community. It wasn't just Linn; a sizable percentage of audiophiles worldwide didn't buy CD players through most of the 1980s.
A Linn DS hi-fi system
(Credit: Linn Products)Linn introduced CD players at the close of that decade, while it continued to make turntables, electronics, and speakers. Now, they're calling it quits.
Quoting from Linn's Web site, here's the straight scoop, "At Linn we have always been wholly committed to making systems that push the boundaries and deliver the highest possible audio performance. When we launched our first digital stream player, the flagship Klimax DS, we did so only once we had proven comprehensively that it outperformed the iconic Sondek CD12, our former reference digital source, in every way."
Linn's LP-12 turntable, introduced in 1972, is still in production.
(Credit: Linn Products)The press release continues, "This development saw Linn DS far exceed what was possible with traditional CD playing technology, both in terms of its audio performance and the convenience. Linn DS is now firmly established as the future of music and the only way to get the very best from your CD collection and enjoy downloads of the highest possible quality."
Linn may be out of the CD player business, but it has a full line of 24-bit/192 kHz sampling Digital Stream players.
More irony, Linn's record label will continue to release music on CD and SACD as well as LP and high-resolution downloads.
When the CD was introduced in 1982, everyone thought the LP's days were numbered, but it's still here. Now it's starting to look like the LP might outlast the CD.
(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)
Of course "record stores" are also on the endangered species list; here in NYC, Tower, Virgin, and Sam Goody are long-gone, but J & R Music World in lower Manhattan is the last remaining full-size outfit. Smaller shops are hanging in there, too.
You can still buy CDs and LPs online, and vinyl's selection is getting better and better. So if you're a music lover, what should you buy, CD or LP? First, it depends on whether you can get the music you want on vinyl.
Sound quality issues aren't black and white. CD wins in terms of noise-free listening, though clean records, played on a decent turntable can sound amazingly quiet. But even then, there will be occasional clicks and pops. That's a deal breaker for some, but if you've never heard records played on a decent turntable, you don't know how quiet records can be.
LPs can sound warmer, fuller, and more natural than CDs, and way better than low-bit MP3 and AAC variants. LP sound seems to engage listeners in a very different way than digital recordings do. It's not that digital sounds bad, but vinyl is more fun to listen to. Music on LP seems more immediate and realistic than digital. Oh, and it's worth noting that most people who use vinyl actually listen to music, while digital listeners rarely do. Digital makes do as background sound. That's just the way it is. If you can't see yourself ever really listening to music--without talking, reading, working on the computer, etc--sure, CDs and MP3s are perfectly fine.
... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog
(Credit:
Denon)
When it comes to turntables, I prefer them in their natural, all-analog state.
That's just me. Mixing digits and grooves is a hot topic of late. My pal Chris Chiarella over at Home Entertainment magazine seemed to really like Denon's new DP-200USB turntable ($250). I reviewed another USB turntable last year and thought it was too much work to use.
I'm no expert in this area, but this Denon seems like a better way to go. First, you don't need a computer nearby to do the analog-to-digital thing. Chiarella just connected the turntable's analog cables to his receiver's phono input, after switching the turntable's internal Phono EQ to Off (so the Denon will work even if your receiver is phono-input challenged).
The DP-200USB's best feature is its front-panel USB port. The system's internal MP3 encoder converts analog signals to digital files. A blinking red light confirms that grooves are being digitized. Denon claims 30 LPs fit on a 1GB drive.
... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog
(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)
Vinyl is back, big time, but the fact is most folks, probably close to 99 percent of the under 40-set, haven't heard records.
For them, music is about portability and vinyl is a stay-at-home deal. Vinyl has more of a hands-on work ethic: you've got to cue the tonearm, lower the "needle," and when the side's over, turn it over or play another LP. Digital requires almost nothing from you; no wonder it's dominated the music scene for the last couple of decades.
Me, I'm having something of a vinyl fling right now. I've always owned a turntable, but there were times I played only CDs for months on end. I guess I didn't want to deal with the extra work of playing vinyl. Sad, but true.
As for LP vs. CD comparisons, I didn't do any. Trust me, you don't have to be a golden-eared audiophile to notice the two formats sound very different. Records are "warmer" and sound more like the sound of real instruments and voices; CDs almost always make them more detailed and brighter-sounding than they are in real life.
... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blogCNET poll
What, you don't have a turntable? What's wrong with you?
When the CD was unveiled to the world in 1982 with the "Perfect Sound Forever" motto, everyone assumed the LP's days were numbered. Well, nearly three decades later, vinyl's hanging in there and the CD's future looks uncertain.
Vinyl appeals to oldsters who still covet their LP collections, and kids who are just now getting into the groove. To some vinyl sounds better, more musical than digital, and some just dig the more physical connection to the music vinyl provides.
(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)
David with his Teac recorder.
Most audiophiles are 40+.
True, there's a small sprinkling of twentysomethings and thirtysomethings who love gear, but are there any teenage audiophiles? They're pretty rare, so when I heard about a 17-year-old with 1,500 LPs and a huge collection of analog tapes I had to talk to him.
David M has it bad.
When he was five, his father had Bose speakers. Maybe they were too big, so his dad tossed them out and little David threw a fit! By the time he was eight or nine he started putting together his own hi-fi.
Like a lot of audiophiles David doesn't think he's one. He said, "I've always loved music, and as I've bought better equipment I found I liked the music more. It cycled from there." He's read audiophile magazines like Stereophile since he was in the eighth grade. David sounds like an audiophile to me.
He's totally into it, "I'm all audio, all the time...I thought I was done when I had a Sansui receiver and JBL 4311 speakers, but I'm still on the upgrade path." He now regularly records concerts at his high school and of his friends' bands. I've listened to some of David's recordings and he's good. But David has yet to turn any of his friends into audiophiles; even most of his musician buddies aren't into sound quality. He said, "They don't care. Some of them have already lost some of their hearing." Yikes!
He has one friend with a decent turntable and a collection of records handed down from his parents, but that guy's no audiophile. David set up his ex-girlfriend with a nice hi-fi, and she's getting into vinyl and tape.
He's not turned on by much new music, or anything that's played on commercial radio stations. He likes folk music and obscure '70s pop, a bit of classical, some jazz. David says he's open to trying anything.
... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blogTo hear digital audio it has to be converted to analog. The chip that does that is called a digital-to-analog converter, and there's one in your iPod, computer, and CD, DVD, and Blu-ray players.
Thing is, the quality of the conversion has everything to do with the sound quality you hear. That's why audiophiles pay big bucks for the best ones, and Chord Electronics, a British high-end stalwart has just released the QBD76, which contains a real contender for world's best digital-to-analog converter (DAC) chip.
Chord Electronics are used in top studios, including Skywalker Sound, Abbey Road, Sony, Quad, Dolby Labs, Decca Records, EMI Japan, Ray Charles Productions, and many others.
QBD76
(Credit: Chord Electronics)Instead of simply using an off-the-shelf DAC chip in the QBD76, Chord designed its own using Xilinx field programmable gate arrays. That gambit affords Chord engineers a staggering 1,250,000 logic gates in its DAC, compared with 30,000 logic gates found in mass-market and even some high-end DACs. As a result, Chord claims the QBD76 is capable of resolving 40 decibels more data than competitors using the best standard chips.
That means you should hear a lot more detail and sonic information with the QBD76 in your system--think of it as high-resolution for your ears. The QBD76 has two coax, two AES, and two optical digital inputs, plus one USB, and one Bluetooth A2DP input.
U.S. retail is $6,495 with an introductory special price of $5,995 until November 30. The QBD76's U.S. importer is Bluebird Music.
Natural sound as we hear it in "real life" is pure analog, but recorded sound is, with few exceptions, chopped up into digital bits. So other than live music concerts pretty much every note you hear is digital. Whether you're listening to an iPod, the internet, TV, CDs, DVDs, or the radio, they're all digital in one way or another. We have as a species evolved over the eons to hear analog sound, and it's only over the past 25 years that digital has taken over. And it hasn't been very pretty. The only currently available analog exception is vinyl, but only those hip enough to seek it out have any idea what music is supposed to sound like. I have thousands of LPs, but my job as a home theater reviewer sometimes cuts me off from my turntable for weeks or even months. I start to accept digital as the norm, and it sounds fine.
When I get a chance to hear vinyl after long bouts with zeros and ones analog always surprises me. It just sounds better--nicer--and more, well, musical. You folks who love music and have never experienced vinyl, you literally don't know what you're missing. No one's saying analog's perfect, there are distortions, scratches, noise, and dirt that dig-o-philes never deal with. It's just that digital seems to miss the natural warmth that analog seems to capture so well. Maybe we're "designed" for analog and digital is just too unnatural to fully enjoy.
And it's not just the hardcore audiophiles who think analog trumps digital, some major and indie record labels are joining the fray. Matador's Patrick Amory sounds like a true believer to me, "For many of us, and certainly for many of our artists, the vinyl is the true version of the release...The size and presence of the artwork, the division into sides, the better sound quality, above all the involvement and work the listener has to put in, all make it the format of choice for people who really care about music." I pulled that quote from Eliot Van Buskirk's excellent Wired commentary, Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD's Coffin.
And decent turntables are cheap enough, I found this groovy Audio Technica AT-PL50 turntable that comes with a built-in phono preamp for $75 at JR.com. What are you waiting for?
Analog rules!
(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)Are you under the mistaken impression they don't make records anymore? Or maybe you think only nerdy audiophiles are into vinyl, or just a handful of baby boomers are reliving their youth spinning dusty old platters? Groove on over to Circuit City and sample their tasty vinyl selection. The Beastie Boys new one, "The Mix Up" is there, Interpol's "Our Love To Admire," Ryan Adams' "Easy Tiger," Boxer's "The National," and the Shins "Wincing The Night Away" are all available. Circuit City also stocks oodles of golden oldies from the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and 2Pac. Prices are pretty good, I see a lot of great LPs going for $11.99 or $12.99.
Mann records on a late 1960s Ampex 2-inch eight-track reel-to-reel machine, and edits the old fashioned way--with a razor blade--slicing and dicing the analog tapes to perfect the label's music. Daptone's "crunchy," in-your-face sound also comes from Mann's prized Radio Shack microphones. It's minimalist to the max, but its got the magic.
He must be doing something right, Amy Winehouse cut her smash "Back to Black" CD at Daptone. In the midst of the MTV tour Sugermann points to the studio couch and proudly announces, "Amy Winehouse farted in that cushion after eating a burrito." Well, alright!
Daptone's analog allegiance isn't merely aesthetic--the label has sold more than 30,000 7-inch singles to date--that's more than most of their better selling CDs. In a world where almost all music is synthetic and colorless, I'm glad Daptone is here, keeping it real.
My favorite Daptone band, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, sound like a great soul outfit from the bygone era, but they're here now. They're set to release "100 Days, 100 nights" on September 25.
Sharon Jones' new release
(Credit: Daptone Records)
