h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've bought a small & handy Numark record-player and it's brilliant to handle these old Beatle-albums again. Especially the ones with advices on which grammophone-needle to use and to use Emitex-stuff to clean the records...
And A Hard Day's Night still sounds brilliant as a stereo LP; much better than the tinny CD-sound!

Bawimeko,the problem with digital its perfect ,with Lp's,the crackle adds to the glamour of the sound,if you understand what i'm meaning??

I do...esp. my old (first! bought it in 1978!) blue 1967-1970-album; I know every hiss and crackle!
On the other hand...the CD sound to harsh/tinny; LP's really do have a warmer sound, less extreme left-right separation (so Revolver on LP sounds better than the CD-version).

Digital is not perfect because it is not pure. Its hard to explain but basically vinyls are read by the needle vibrating off the grooves and forming the sound (you can actually hear the music without speakers if you stand close)

CDs are broken down into code and written on the disc and then the CD player reads this code and develops it back into waves, like the grooves, and plays it. However because a) there is code in between and b) there is not enough room to put in the entire wave - meaning that there are small, regular parts of songs missed out and guessed by the player - the song is not quite true.

Personally I cannot hear this difference but some people, tend to be musicians, claim they do. However it is a fact that it is an existing fault of CDs which is why vinyls are better...and yes the crackling of them does lend a certain warming ambience

Digital is perfect you could burn a song 100s of times without it faltering.And how does your p.c work?? yes digital programming,digital if your on cable broadband.

digital is flawed, by definition, however it is always improving and personally I don't like the crackling sound. Guess I don't get all nostalgic about it.

Digital is flawed,as it makes things perfect.but i like the crackles

It doesn't make things perfect, as Tony2Times pointed out, it turns analogue, the "wave sound" you hear on vinyl, and turns it into a sequence of 1's and 0's, taking samples at specific moments in time. It doesn't convert everything hence the "tinny" sound.

No i know that,but its the best thing we have invented yet.

True, it is

Im glad we agree on something

Soon the japanese will be marketing CD's that use ultraviolet lasers, then it'll sound awesome

Thats beyond me No doubt Cds will come extinct in a few years.Replaced by something smaller

They said that about Mini-Discs and it didn't happen. I think CDs will be around for a fair few years yet, its just the type of CDs will change: ie from the silver discs we have now to blue-ray and the one mentioned a few posts above. Still though, it won't be perfect because its not the real sound, its an estimation of said sound.

Probably, like microchips you can stick in your ears

Well, I'm going to climb on my soap-box on this one...the Beatle-cd's all sound terrible...they HAVE made decent remasters and are collectors items in their own right; Mobile Fidelity remasters made in the mid-'80s of the albums..especially an album like Abbey Road (that was recorded in 16 tracks) is rumoured to sound much better than the dusty one that's on general release. I'm sure the Beatles catalogue gets a decent remix/remastering some time (just like the Beach Boys or The Band), but we'll have to wait a few years...

Yes, but then I'm not very musically inclined so I don't really notice things like that unfortunately