All Things Vinyl

[Vyn]

Savatage for all! Well, except me, I don't have any.

Maybe Ghost in the Ruins will get a treatment in the near future.

[Charger]

Today the limited edition (300 copies) Picture Disc from METAL CHURCH arrived!




I think this I'll keep in the plastic.

[Jack the Stripper]

Got my official Metallica vinyl club year 2 haul in during the week. Sadly it looks like the vinyl club will be put on hold for year 3 or worse completely scrapped due to pressing plants lagging far behind vinyl demand.



Also got “The Number of the Beast/Beast Over Hammersmith 40th anniversary vinyl set in before Christmas.

[Charger]

Got my official Metallica vinyl club year 2 haul in during the week. Sadly it looks like the vinyl club will be put on hold for year 3 or worse completely scrapped due to pressing plants lagging far behind vinyl demand.

That seems to be a global problem now...lots of bands have been forced to put vinyls on back orders because of that. I guess vinyl is making a bigger comeback than anyone could have predicted.

[Vyn]

This was posted last week on YouTube. The man's name is Michael Fremer, and he has a decades-long reputation as being a "vinyl elitist". He writes gear (and sometimes music) reviews, and in this video he gives a tour of his listening room where he does all of his reviewing.

His playback system is insane! But I'd love to hear what Lord of This World sounds like on it...

[Jack the Stripper]

He has a 70,000 turntable and a prototype of a 300,000 turntable

 

Quite a long video so will finish watching it over the weekend.

[Vyn]

Husband: "Check out my new record player!"

Wife: "That's nice dear, but why do we suddenly have a second mortgage on the house?"

Husband: "uh..."

[Charger]

That's pretty sick!

I am however wondering what is the difference between a 1000$ turntable and a 70000$ turntable? Parts just made out of unobtanium? I cannot believe that the tech could possibly be that much different that you'd get 70 times better sound out of it...I don't think it's even possible. So to me that kind of "hifi-ism" just doesn't make sense. You're just telling everyone "Hey I'm so freaking rich I can buy a 70k turntable!"

I can believe that a 1000$ turntable can be 5 times better than a 200$ turntable but I think that's where it ends...but then again I'm not a hifi expert or anything...

[Zzzptm]

10 mins in and I'm fascinated with the guy, and respect for his wiring setup on the house.

I get the feeling that he has an application process for selecting records to play on his turntables.

[Vyn]

There is definitely diminishing returns with that kind of audio gear. I've never heard a $70,000 turntable, much less a $300,000 one, so I can't really say anything about them other than, "damn, that's a lot of cash for a record player!"

Michael Fremer operates in a world where people do drop that kind of money on turntables. A six-foot length of speaker wire for $20,000? Yep. I have no doubt that some of that desire to own those kinds of things stems from what you mentioned Charger: Hey I'm so freaking rich. Some of it has to be psychological, too. If it costs that much, it must really be awesome! And there probably is a measurable difference in terms of specs, but would it be enough to actually make a difference when listening to it? I don't know. Folks who claim to be audiophiles think so, and audiophiles with deep pockets back that up by spending the big bucks on that kind of thing.

If I was a billionaire, I might consider buying something like that. While stretched out on a couch, getting a massage on my private jet on my way to have lunch in Paris. But since my days in reality consist of driving myself back and forth to work everyday, I'm pretty sure I won't ever have to worry about it

[Jack the Stripper]

Yeah I wonder how much difference a 70k turntable would make over the actual hifi system, speakers, cabling, spacing setup and acoustics of the room. Not much I woulda thought, especially to my already music damaged hearing.

[Zzzptm]

There's a definite difference between a portable turntable kids use for the 45s that come with story books or Disney-released LPs and the *good* turntable in the living room where mom and dad listen to modern jazz records and prog-rock.

I remember in the 70s, as stereo equipment got more sophisticated, how it wasn't just a matter of upgrading one part or another. It was *all parts*, or you were always left wondering if that one component you didn't improve on is still holding your ears back. Marketing pressure, essentially. Reality was that if you didn't buy the cheapest stuff and had a decent set of speakers, you had it all right. I had a setup with 4 speakers, nicely positioned, subwoofer, good quality gear, and if I had the ground wire on the turntable just so, I had no turntable hum and it sounded great to me.

But if a breeze budged that ground wire, UGH the hum would be back and I'd have frustrating hours trying to get rid of it again! Rather than try and spend more money on a fancy turntable, I got a USB one to do vinyl ripping and then converted my listening to MP3s. No more hum! And, honestly, it still sounds great to me when I'm playing it back in the office or in the car or on the plane.

[Vyn]

I do know that no amount of gear will overcome the acoustic signature of the room, loudspeaker placement, etc. And to Z's point about gear synergy, that's absolutely critical.

So if a person bought the $70,000 turntable, they'd better have a few hundred thousand left over to buy the loudspeakers, amplification/preamplification, interconnects, and room treatment that will take advantage of the specs of that turntable.

They say that the generally accepted range of human hearing is 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. Some folks may go a tiny bit above or below. They also say that a person's hearing is at its best around the time they are eight years old, and it deteriorates thereafter. An average person, who has not suffered hearing damage, can expect to have a range that tops out at about 14,000 Hz by the time they are 50. Add in hearing damage, and there could be gaps in the range itself.

Ao as Jack mentioned about his hearing, even if everything was perfect about the stereo setup, that $70,000 turntable might not sound any better than a Technics 1200. My hearing is munged up some, and I have tinnitus in my left ear. I can tell the difference between good sound and not so good sound, to a point. The aural difference that super expensive gear provides would, I'm sure, be completely lost on me. Assuming it even does so in the first place.

[Zzzptm]

I can for sure tell when my laptop is using its internal speaker vs my soundbar/woofer.

I remember a while back there was some guy saying that one needed to go over the edge of a CD with a green marker or, even better, one of the SPECIAL green markers he was making for just such a purpose... he would swear up and down that CDs sounded so much better after getting their outer rim all greened up.

Yeah, that's not how it really works, but the dude believed what he wanted to believe and refused to have his views challenged with objective testing.

Back to return on investment, I have to ask how much a $360,000 turntable purchase cost is for the gear itself and how much is for the elitism that goes with a sticker price like that?

And to listen to Animalympics on it? Ohhhhhhhhhhh kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay...

[Vyn]

I can only imagine that a significant percentage of the cost is simply the "elite" markup. There is so much snake oil in the "audiophile" market that selling a turntable for multi-hundreds of thousands of dollars, when it probably should sell for about $5,000, doesn't seem like much of a stretch.

I hadn't heard of the green-marker trick, but I had a guy in a record shop trying to convince another customer to freeze their CDs because it kept the "data etchings" (his words) from getting fuzzy.

I didn't say anything, and from what I could tell the customer didn't seem convinced. Sadly, there are enough people out there who would be convinced that it keeps the charlatans in business.