Kassem, we hear, considers "the post-World War II years the apex of sonic fidelity. To illustrate his point, Kassem played an Analogue Productions version of a 1950 recording by Duke Ellington. Although it had been recorded in mono, the sound emanating from Kassem’s speakers was powerfully real, down to the woody texture of the saxophone reeds on 'Mood Indigo.' Kassem, practically shouting over the music, leaned down inches from my face. 'You play me a record from the last 20 years,' he exhorted, with some expletives, 'that sounds this good.''
I don't know if I'd order new old records. Many people do, but I'm averse to acquiring new possessions. But I'm motivated to play the LPs I already own, many of which were my father's and from the 1950s.
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Good for Mr. Kassem! LPs have made a comeback and for the last two years outsold CDs because they appeal to us, the size, the sound quality, the album covers and sleeves. I’m really glad to see this. The music industry is so stupid that they are presently chasing, and Spotify is promoting, AI created “music” with even less soul than the formulaic dreck they’ve been churning out for a decade and a half.
Any relation to America’s Top Forty Countdown host, Casey Kassem?
I have a huge (classical) LP collection but find that you can't play it through digital systems and get any advantage.
I suspect you need vacuum tubes. I suspect the screen grid is the secret.
Also playing records wears out the records - the highs distort first.
Digital audio, it sounds…tinny to me but vinyl sounds like Hell. The article mentions special vinyl reduces ‘surface noise’, I guess an artifact from the needle in contact with the record. That’s it! That’s what I hear. It’s as if these audio kooks are tricked because there’s extra noise that blends in with the music and they proclaim it superior…
Former Boston mayor Tom “Mumbles” Menino used the expression “that really frosts my nose.”
I can understand how that mixed metaphor is supposed to register someone’s upset. But “[w]e got stuff coming that’s going to frost some people’s cookies”?
Is frosting somebody’s cookies a pleasurable thing? The article really doesn’t say who’s cookies and how or why they’re being frosted.
Now that’s the type of story the NYT should do!
I love the NYTese: "he exhorted, with some expletives."
My hearing isn't good enough to really tell the difference (I suspect that is the same with most people) and I don't want to invest in the speakers and other stuff (as Althouse previously mentioned) to gain that tiny "better" difference (even if I could hear it) when I have these little ear buds and music sounds just fine with them. Vinyl has always had a niche market since everything went digital, and probably will for a while.
I treasure my mono recordings from the Big Bands to the Beatles. I curate VG+ vinyl for my collection though my acquiring has tapered off in my 70's. I have vinyl theme days. Byrd's Day where I play all of the Byrd's albums in mono from 1964-66. Or, when storms move down the river I'll put on Benny Goodman and Helen Forrest for the background sound. My 1950's Sinatra collection, with attendant Playboy magazine record reviews, are truly cherished. Anything the Beatles did prior to the White album and mixed in mono is vastly superior to the stereo mixes. They would spends days on the mono mix and mere hours on the stereo mix. So yeah, mono it is. The NYT got this one right. No arguments here.
As another fossil with a wall of vinyl, I nod. Without expletives. Too early for that.
I recommend the relatively inexpensive ultrasonic cleaners now available. They work wonders, with a properly mounted stylus on your turntable, I hear the grooves with a dark, silent background I could only dream of in my 'yout'.
Or, my ears are shot after fifty years sitting in front of the trumpets. One of these...
"Any relation to America’s Top Forty Countdown host, Casey Kassem?"
My first thought, too. He's not.
Although, maybe the muses like certain names better than others.
That array of Revox tape decks lined up under the church windows gives me a genuine rush of fifty year old audio lust. I wanted one of those so bad. I was so broke them.
There are people who will pay $20,000 per meter for speaker cables and believe that they can hear the difference. (See, e.g., Nordost Odin 2 Supreme Reference). More power to them, or as P.T. Barnum often said, "there's a sucker born every minute".
I wish I had my mother's albums from the 50s. She also LOVED Joe Cocker's albums.
Glad to see you're "averse to acquiring new possessions", Ann. Same here!
It's all a trade off. CDs and streaming have made music much more accessible, but the digital compression takes out the high and low ranges.
Decade ago I house sat for a dude who had a vast vinyl and CD collection with a pricey audio setup. During the week, I played Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here on both record and compact disc. Brought home how much we lost with digital.
I've always thought the phrase "that really frosts my cookies" referred to something objectionable.
On some songs, I can really hear the difference between LP and CD/digital. Doris Day's "Betwiched bothered and bewildered" and "Secret Love" are two. But mostly, I cant tell the difference. I think my ears aren't that sensitive.
As for getting new LP's - forget it. I've gone from cassette tapes and LPs to CDs' to digital. I'm not forking out anymore money for the same songs on a different format. Hilarious, that years ago, Libraries were giving away all their LPs.
The record industry is like AIPAC they know how to bribe congress to get their way. Most of these songs should be free of copyright, and Youtube/Google shouldn't be a monopoly. Too bad our congressmen wont tell us how much we'd have to bribe them to pass laws benifiting the other 330 million Americans.
The sound that you prefer is not necessarily that which is most accurately reproduced. Some people prefer the coloration that the flaws in analog equipment may add to the sound.
I had an audiophile college friend in the 1970s, with a collection in his tiny dorm room of 3000+ of his "favorite" albums - he had most of his collection at home. He spent a lot of his time recording vinyl albums on his reel-to-reel tape system, so he could use those tapes as masters for cassette production, which were for listening, without damaging the albums. Yeah, audiophiles go to great lengths to support their hobby.
Is frosting somebody’s cookies a pleasurable thing? The article really doesn’t say who’s cookies and how or why they’re being frosted.
I see it as a version of "icing the cake" as in completing something or perfecting it. It's not clear though.
My hearing isn't good enough to really tell the difference (I suspect that is the same with most people) and I don't want to invest in the speakers and other stuff...
Because my TV was already hooked up to a sound bar, no other equipment was required when I brought the turntable home. It connected to the sound bar via Bluetooth and voila, great room-filling sound. In fact, that combo (turntable + soundbar) actually astonished me with better reproduction than I've ever had through any stereo system. To the other point about tubes being required, I also have a 1962 Philco console stereo with a turntable, and IMO the Samsung soundbar with sub-woofer provides better all-around sound with vinyl compared to the tube amp.
Digital playback has really improved. DACs on current players and streamers are really good. I still prefer vinyl. One advantage to vinyl is that some of the original masters--the Rudy Van Gelder Blue Notes or the Beatles all tube chain early releases--often sound better than the currently available CDs or streaming files.
Yep, I can remember as a kid in the 70s and early 80s how neighbors were so proud of their huge record collection, expensive stereo system and huge speakers. Woofers and Tweeters. Peeps would have LPs to listen at home, Cassete tapes for the walkman, and Track 8's for the car.
I stream and play vinyl. Steaming is fantastic and introduces you to music new to you. Sound quality can be superb. Vinyl is more tactile and demands you listen to it. Playing old records brings back memories clearer and sharper than digital. You can ignore streaming. If I had a large library,I would use Ann's amazon link and buy a hummingguru cleaner and spend $500+ on a modern turntable and cartridge. Sit back and enjoy. Otherwise sell your records now while market is hot
"I also have a 1962 Philco console stereo with a turntable" I doubt those are very full frequency speakers, and the turntable is almost certainly a ceramic cartridge, standard playback and not hi-fi. Glad you're getting satisfaction from the turntable/soundbar combo, though. Speaker technology is really impressive these days.
Ultrasonic cleaners are terrific, but for under a hundred bucks you can buy a Spin Clean. I use one with a vacuum record cleaner and even pretty cruddy records are very playable. Almost any record that you buy used, especially anything more than 30 years old or so, benefits from cleaning. I was surprised at the amount of stuff that gets pulled out of old records, alot of it because people smoked around them.
Of course digital recording is far more faithful to the original, what analog does is apply a layer of filtering that many people find pleasing. It's like a movie shot on film, or a movie recorded on video. The film version is often more pleasing to the eye, but not a more accurate representation of the subject. But film might be a more accurate representation of our perception of events, if it is properly tweaked.
I have sometimes listened to non-remastered versions of songs, and they sound like vinyl to me, and usually the music was produced to sound good on vinyl and to respect its limitations. But the idea that vinyl more accurately reproduces the sounds that were actually made by the musicians with their instruments? That's fantasy.
tcrosse said...
The sound that you prefer is not necessarily that which is most accurately reproduced. Some people prefer the coloration that the flaws in analog equipment may add to the sound.
Was going to say this exact thing. I still have my old (1980) stereo plus a couple pair of older Advent speakers and my old turntable and maybe 50-100 of my old (and some recently acquired) LPs. I like listening to them occasionally because of the "warm" sound LPs have. But that's mostly for nostalgia. CDs, in fact, got a bad rap early on because record companies initially just copied the original masters onto CD. Trouble was, those masters were created for the dominant media of the time -- LPs -- with all its attendant limitations and CDs revealed all of those.
No surprise LPs are outselling CDs: physical media is on the decline and that leaves the nostalgia factor in favor of LPs.
I thought about getting rid of most of my CDs because I mostly stream anymore anyway. However....I pulled out my old Brothers In Arms (Dire Straits) CD a while ago and listened to Money For Nothing and was able to hear the long-since-edited-out verse for the first time in years. Unless you actually own the physical recording, the powers that be will happily censor anything they find. . .. problematic.
I just can't listen to anything pre-1960s. the recordings are too bad.
“Kassem, we hear, considers "the post-World War II years the apex of sonic fidelity.”
Pshaw. The 1900s were the apex of audio technology. Vinyl is garbage. I only listen to original Edison cylinders—now that’s how music should sound!
So they put an album like "Fragile" out as a two disc 45 RPM record and you have to get up three times to flip the record to listen to the whole thing.........and it costs you $150. Plus the manufacturing process is horrible for the environment (lots of fossil fuels involved).
That sounds like an awful experience.
"Former Boston mayor Tom “Mumbles” Menino used the expression “that really frosts my nose.”"
Incorrect......he used to said "fries my nose".
I did something wrong to screw up the italics. . . . .I wish we could post-edit these things.
Woodstock, I browsed the Nordost site for amusement. I was variously amused, but especially by their bragging about using FEP insulation everywhere.
I mean, FEP is one of today's bogeymen. Its a PFA, a "forever chemical". Oops
Good needles make good listening.
I nearly have it all, a digital player/streamer, CDs, LPs, and am looking for a cassette player since I have some artists only in that format (and never transferred to something else). I ripped my 700 or so CDs into my Bluesound digital player into the FLAC format.
I recently splurged and got a Dual CS529 turntable to revive my relatively small LP collection, to which I'm adding very selectively. I slowly and sporadically add to my digitial library, but one thing I've noticed is that it's harder to remember the new artists I like when I'm sitting around and just want to play something. Part of it is age, but I realized that LPs present such a big visual impact, and the physical act of handling that object helps blaze it into my memory, like a Steve Martin bluegrass album I bought.
On audio quality, so much depends on the production effort that went into that particular property. One of the first artists whose LPs I replaced with CDs was Paul Simon. This was in the early CD days and the labels were quickly cashing in on the craze. Those early Simon CDs have *dismal* audio reproduction, even by the standards of the day. They did a better job later.
Same thing with vinyl, it depends. I picked up a Reader's Digest collection "The Great Band Era," 1936-45, and the quality runs from listening from behind a closed door to "Wow, that's--that's really good!" Sometimes when listening to my middle-of-the-road bookshelf speakers I'm astonished at how realistic a recording can sound. That depends on the speakers too obviously. My JBLs love middle-tone saxaphones.
I believe the original expression was "frosts my ass". "Cookies" may refer to other, even more sensitive, anatomy.
Sixties speakers aren't high fidelity by today's standards. Funny though, today's guitarists often search for ElectroVoice SRO 12's for that fat midrange punch.
PM, long ago I worked in the chip Fab QA industry. One device used a precise diamond point as a sensor. We had a he'll of a time sourcing them; none of the audiophile stylii had the shape and surface finish we needed. (I spent a lot of time looking at them in an electron microscope.)
Until one day we were pointed to an old man in florida. He was hand making them with a secret process, and was willing to make our shape. Oh my god they were beautiful. He wouldn't reveal his secret, so we basically bought a lifetime supply.
Pshaw. The 1900s were the apex of audio technology. Vinyl is garbage. I only listen to original Edison cylinders—now that’s how music should sound!
I have several Edison cylinders, and hope to listen to them somehow at some point. One is a political speech, I'd love to hear what he was saying way back when! I think a New York politician.
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