Originally Posted by Matt
Excellent thread! I've just fallen in love with Vinyl recently (hence the item on the last Podcast), and am already building quite a collection:
Dave Matthews Band - Before These Crowded Streets
Ben Folds Five - Self-Titled, Whatever and Ever Amen, Reinhold Messner
Radiohead - In Rainbows, OK Computer
Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
James Taylor - Sweet Baby James, Mud Slide Slim, Never Die Young, That's Why I'm Here
Billy Joel - 52nd Street
Red Hot Chili Peppers - By the Way
Fleetwood Mac - Self-Titled
Wilco - A Ghost is Born
Huey Lewis & the News - Sports
Chicago - GH and 2 other double-LPs
Robbers on High Street - Tree City (signed!)
Ben Folds - Ben Folds Live
Emily Haines - Knives Don't Have Your Back
I picked up an Ion USB turntable for cheap - works for the time being. There's an old Symphonic Console in my basement that I'm working on restoring.
As for why vinyl sounds better than CDs/mp3's - here's a VERY brief once-over:
Sound is an analog wave. (Remember from physics in high school?). Picture it like a rope held between two people, and one of them snaps it. A vinyl record has a perfect reproduction of that wave, grooved into the record, which the needle rubs over and outputs that sound wave. A digital recording has to take snapshots of that sound wave, and on a CD, that is 44Khz, or 44,100 shots per second of the sound wave. Sounds like a ton, and it is, BUT - what if a snare drum hits JUST in the middle of two of those samples - the digital recording won't accurately reproduce the true sound and you've got distortion. Plus, many CD's released now are victims of the "loudness war" (wikipedia it), so the levels are turned up so high, there's no "depth" to the sound, no little nuances to listen for, no sonic range or dynamics. With a vinyl, you're looking at a pure representation of the original recording, most of the time.
That's a quick once-over and I'm sure it contains technical inaccuracies but that's the basic gist of it.
Bottom line: I love vinyl. I can't wait until DMB releases their entire catalog on it.
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