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Return of the Vinyl Album
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Apr 16, 2007 07:34 PM
from the vinylly dept.
from the vinylly dept.
bulled writes "NPR ran a story this morning about the comeback of vinyl. It seems that sales of new vinyl records are up about 10%; sales will approach a million this year (as against half a billion for CDs). NPR mentioned the popularity of a turntable with a USB interface — they didn't specify the brand; could be this one, or this — and speculated on other possible reasons for the resurgence. They mentioned sound quality and lack of DRM as possible causes. Sound quality can and will be debated, but DRM rates a resounding 'Duh.'"
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Not surprising. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not surprising. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Not surprising. (Score:5, Funny)
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Digital Vinyl (Score:5, Interesting)
While you may think I'm joking I note that a 30-40Kb/sec stream is more than suficient to store audio at near CD quality in real time. You can send 30-40Kb/sec over a telephone which has a small fraction of the bandwidth of a record. Thus I can actually encode about 8 simultaneous stereo streams
since audio records last about 40 minutes, 8 streams gives me 320 minutes of near CD quality music which is longer than an audio encoded CD can provide. Next up VCD on Vinyl
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Digital Vinyl DRM (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Digital Vinyl DRM (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Digital Vinyl (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, that's been done [wikipedia.org] twenty five years ago.
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Digital Vinyl data capacity blows CDs out of water (Score:5, Interesting)
When you said near CD-quality, you weren't thinking of 8 track tapes were you?
Let's try the math again. First many digital radio stations use ABBAcast or something like it for near-CD quality at 33 to 40Kbs. Even if it's not CD quality it's certainly higher quality that anything that came off the vinyl in the first place. But let's ignore that and incorrectly assume we need 128kb/sec and see how the math comes out.
Audio modems don't actually use the full spectrum of the phone. last I looked they used about 3Khz. Now a vinyl record has a lot of bandwidth. the main limit on the bandwidth is the needles voltage/amplitude response falls off. That's why you equalize them. (which is why your stereo has a different input jack for phono than for tapes) You can only equalize then so far and get a decent sounding thing but you could push this much further if you went to a an analog coding scheme other than amplitude modulation. (hey that's what modems do! how about that).
So just to have some numbers lets make some up that are not completely crazy. Lets say we could push audio signal recovery out to 30Khz. So that gives us ten 3khz wide modem channels. And since the record is stereo that gives 20 total channels.
20*56kb/sec = 1060 kb/sec
1060kb/sec
Hey! that's what I claimed to begin with. I claimed I could fit about 8 cd quality channels (and here we mean 128Kb/sec) on a Vinyl record.
But wait! that's actually a gross underestimate. What determines the bits per second on a modem. it's a combination of two things, bandwidth and signal to noise. A vinyl record has enormously better signal to noise than a telephone. So the number of bits pers second my vinyl can support is vastly higher than the phone.
the shannon capacity scales as:
Bandwidth * log_2 (1 + SNR)
(where SNR is the singal to noise ratio in power)
to if I had 128 times better SNR on a record then that's about 8 times more bits per second.
So you see my Digital Vinyl smokes your CD.
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Re:Digital Vinyl data capacity blows CDs out of wa (Score:4, Insightful)
Lets compare this with a cd which is much much smaller than a record and can hold 700 MB per side (a two-sided one would hold ~1.4GB). Not quite up to the theoretical maximum that you claim your record could get, however consider the size, or the fact that a DVD, which is the same dimensions as the CD, and uses similar technology as it can hold up to 4.7GB on a single layer disc. This is far more data than the record can hold, and requires less sensitive electronics, and much less processing power to decode.
Looks like my "CD" beats your record after all.
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Re:Digital Vinyl data capacity blows CDs out of wa (Score:5, Funny)
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Sorry, but I'm going to have to call bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
Well I can't find shit on anything called ABBAcast. To me it sounds like you confused ABBA, an old Swedish pop band, with Abacast, a radio streaming service. Of course, Abacast doesn't have their own codec, they use WMA, AAC, and MP3. Well 30-40k WMA is NOT CD quality, not even close, never mind MP3. The good codecs, like AAC and Vorbis do a decent job at 128k, it sounds as good as CD for most music on lower end gear (like portable players) but still not even close. You are talking in the range of 256k with most codecs to get something that is reliably as good as CD on good gear.
Also you seem to have no understanding of the problems of encoding to a broadband format.
For one, you can't stack your channels right on top of each other. You'll find that you have all kinds of problems. Look at any real broadband system, and you'll find out they've built in space between channels for just that reason. For example TV channels are specified at 6MHz each. Within that 6MHz is a video, colour, and audio carrier. Channel 2 is from 54-60MHz. However, the video carrier is at 55.25MHz, the colour at 58.83MHz and the audio at 59.75MHz. Channel 3 is then from 60-66MHz. You might notice that means there's nothing in the lower edge of the range and you'd be right. The reason is that you don't want the channels bleeding in to each other. You need to leave space if the system is to work.
Next, you've got the problem of assuming that two stereo channels can be used separately. Errr, no. In any analogue system, two adjacent channels will have some amount of crosstalk. That is to say a signal on one channel will bleed over to the other to some degree. You'll notice that most stereo amplifiers specify this amount. Well, with records, it's pretty high due to the way that the stereo signal is recorded. It's horizontal needle deflection, not two discrete tracks. Not a big deal for stereo audio, it's highly correlated anyhow and we don't need a ton of separation to hear stereo, however it'll fuck with your encoding real bad.
Then of course we get to things like error correction, assumptions that the SNR is equal with regards to frequency (it's not) and so on. I'm not going to go in to all the problems in detail since it ought to be apparent at this point that you didn't think this through.
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Not surprising-Art for spaces sake. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Not surprising. (Score:4, Insightful)
My favorite rock album of all time, The Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream, is an example of an album mastered properly for CD. Instead of compressing the hell out of the music, the quiet parts of the songs are left to be...well...*quiet*. When I was a young whipper snapper, the local pizza joint had Siamese Dream in their jukebox. The jukebox would compress the sound on the fly in order to make the volume of the tracks from different albums the same. We noticed that the compression took a couple of seconds to catch up and adjust the volume.
Knowing this, we would play the song Silverfuck whenever we went there. Silverfuck is almost nine minutes long and in the middle, has a long section that is very quiet and almost "trance-like". During this section the jukebox would compensate and raise the volume the track to about three or four times normal, but even with the compression the song was still fairly quiet.
When the song would break back into the loud chorus, everyone who wasn't ready for it would get a shock of their life as the volume would be the roof for a couple of seconds.
After doing that a few times, they ended up taking that CD out.
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Re:Not surprising. (Score:5, Informative)
I started wondering about this a few months ago when I was transferring some of my ancient cassettes to digital with my ancient, but quality, tape deck. I was astonished to discover that two of my cassettes -- Sammy Hagar's Unboxed and AC/DC's Who Made Who -- sounded better than every CD in my collection. And in the latter case, we're talking about a 21-year old cassette that has had tons of play and sat in the car through ski trips and Summers in Texas. And here's the layman's version of what I figured out:
The more high frequencies you have interacting with each other, the more little squiggles you get in your waveform that are way beyond the range of human hearing. The squiggles come from the fact that the high-frequency sounds are out of phase with each other, and constantly shifting in phase relative to each other. Now although those little squiggles in the waveform are beyond what you or I can hear, our ears aren't looking for those squiggles -- they're looking for the harmonics that comprised those squiggles. But PCM encoding doesn't do that; it's trying to capture the actual waveform. Since those squiggles are well beyond the sample rate of a CD, they're fucking messed up. Sharp points get sheared off, the tiny squiggles disappear, and the sound wave that ends up being recorded gets aliased across a range of different frequencies.
When played back, instead of responding to a set of pure harmonic frequencies, our ears pick up a random assortment of frequencies near the originals. The crash cymbal goes "TSHHHH" instead of "TSSSS."
Now the standard objection to this argument so far goes something like this: Yeah, well man, vinyl and cassettes don't respond well much above, like, 18kHz!
There's two flaws with that objection.
First, an analog deck's frequency response may not go beyond 18kHz, but what happens is that those higher frequencies just fade beyond the noise threshold. They do not get mucked about with. And if you mix together multiple frequencies at 18kHz and below, record them, and play them back, you can deconstruct the result into the original waveforms pretty cleanly, because an analog recording device doesn't have quants that can go out of phase.
The other problem is that the pitches in question don't even have to be close to the Nyquist frequency (half the sample rate -- 22kHz on a CD, which is slightly above most people's range of hearing) if there's more than a few of them. And with rock 'n' roll is that you have tons of high-frequency shit going on. You've got the lead singer's shriek, the crash cymbals, the gate on the snare (and sometimes bass) drum, and the guitar on the fuzzy channel. All of those frequencies mix together, out of phase with each other.
The ultimate result of all of this is that high-frequency joy, those sharp high-frequency peaks in the guitar, the splash of the cymbals, the things that all combine together that made rock become the dominate pop music form for 30 years, disappeared once CDs became the main standard for audio. And rock, outside of the live show, hasn't sounded right ever since.
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Re:Not surprising. (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting argument, but fundamentally flawed.
The simple fact is that neither analog or digital are perfectly accurate, but digital is more accurate even for loud rock music. Many many CDs today are mastered way too high, resulting in severe clipping of the waveform peaks - but that is the fault of ABUSE of the technology, not the technology itself.
Here's a small encapsulation:
Digital recording: you record from your source into an analog-to-digital converter, whereupon the bits are recorded as data. Individual tracks are mixed together, post-processing is done, but the sound quality remains "first generation" throughout. Copies do not result in degradation, so the final CD master contains the sound in as close a form to what the microphone heard as possible, barring any post-processing altering the waveform either by design (echo, reverb, chorusing) or accident (mastering at too high a level, resulting in clipping). If the multitrack original is not processed at all after the recording, then the mixed-down master consists of first-generation tracks mixed together.
Analog recording: you record from your source into a multitrack tape machine, making sure that the azimuth is correctly aligned and that the speed of the machine is constant. In order to get some sort of sound out of those microscopic 24 tracks squeezed onto a two-inch tape, some compression and equalization and noise-reduction has to be done. Oops, we've just compromised the sound signal, haven't we? Not extremely accurate.
Now those tracks have to be mixed down to a 2 track 1/4" master, because vinyl is not multitrack. But in order to do that, we have to make an analog copy from an analog master. Normally this would be a tremendous sonic problem, because when you copy from tape to tape you not only copy the signal, you also copy the noise onto a blank tape with noise of its own, thus effectively squaring the noise. Mix two tracks, get four times the noise, Mix four tracks, get sixteen times the noise. Solution? More noise reduction. That compromises the compromised signal even more. And any analog postproduction, such as adding reverb, requires still another generational loss coupled with artifacts from the analog processing.
Once we get the tape mixed down to two track, which is second generation, it has to be mastered. Cutting that analog tape onto a lacquer blank introduces even more compromise to the audio signal, because unlike a CD, you cannot record the sound wave "as-is" onto vinyl. The highs have to be boosted because otherwise their minute squiggles would be smaller than the width of the cutting stylus and they would be irretrievably lost, while the lows have to be attenuated because otherwise the cutting stylus would cut the groove straight into the adjoining grooves and the record would not play at all. So now we have a minimum of three analog (lossy) generations away from the studio master, and this final generation now introduces an equalization curve just to that the resulting vinyl can be played on its own reproduction equipment.
That lacquer disc now goes for a plating bath, where a negative matrix is pulled, being an exact copy of the lacquer but with its grooves raised instead of sunken. This matrix is then plated to produce a positive mother, which looks exactly like the original lacquer except that the grooves are microscopically larger because it's been plated twice. We are now five generations removed from the studio master - and we still are not finished. The mother is plated yet again to make the stampers, and the stampers are used to press the final record into vinyl - a thermoplastic not particularly known for its dimensional stability. Set the vinyl out in the sun for a few hours and see how accurate the sound is.
So now you have a vinyl record that is seven generations removed from the studio session master. Now it has to go on your turntable, and be subjected the tracking force of the tonearm assembly, as well as whatever sonic compromises come about because
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Flashback (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flashback (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Flashback (Score:5, Insightful)
Others like Mark Farina use cds. Final Scratch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Scratch [wikipedia.org] is still in use as well.
Judging by what was seen at the winter music conference this year, th stand set-up is four decks- two for cds and two for vinyl. Five years ago vinyl was the standard, but times are still changing.
Vinyl is still in common use, esp. for local or regional artists, but of the people I know who actually make their living off of playing music none use vinyl exclusively anymore.
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USB? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So let me get this straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
What am I missing?
Re:So let me get this straight... (Score:5, Funny)
The brick wall, with your forehead. A little more damage to your frontal lobes will do wonders for your audiophile logic.
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DRM can be implemented in vinyl (Score:4, Funny)
Vinyl Records Do Have The One Downfall Of... (Score:3, Funny)
It's just that one extra step. (Score:3, Insightful)
All it takes is removing a couple steps to make something extremely attractive to the consumer
Laser Pickups (Score:3, Insightful)
Laser pickups themselves wouldn't wear out like a stylus used to, which used to put the turntable out of commission until a new one was bought. Which was sometimes expensive, especially when the electromagnetic transducer cartridge needed repair/replacement. Those were expensive, especially the really hifi ones. Today, laser pickups would be cheaper than that old precision EM stuff. And they could still be analog, like an original videodisc, with audiophiles fighting over imperceptible differences in the analog/digital converter.
I'd get one. Vinyl sounded so much better at its best than any equivalent priced digital system I've ever heard. But then, I prefer to listen to music that was produced for vinyl's acoustic response. Kids today could get into it, too, though, if it really is a hybrid of phat old analog and cheap new digital.
The obvious solution (Score:5, Interesting)
The last two records I bought on vinyl (the new records by Of Montreal [polyvinylrecords.com] and M. Ward [mergerecords.com]) came with a coupon for one-time download of DRM-free MP3 versions of the album tracks from the label's Web sites. So I get the big cover art and the intangible experience (they're both double albums on vinyl) but I can still play 'em on the computer without sweating over the process of digitizing vinyl.
Fact is, the vinyl version of the Of Montreal record (which is awesome) has a scratch that makes track 3 repeat the same crazy groove over and over, and it sounds intentional and much, much better than the digital version, which now seems weirdly short. And it comes with four bonus tracks, which are included in the download too but not on the CD version. Obviously some small record labels are betting big on vinyl as a way to keep people buying records, and I'm all for it.
Vinyl Makes Music Fun Again (Score:5, Insightful)
At 25 I just inherited my dad's vinyl collection and I've found they make music fun again. When digital distribution of started to catch on I stopped buying CDs, but then it felt like I was just buying filenames. Even when I occasionally bought a CD, I would just rip it to MP3 and put it on my shelf never to bother with it again. Convenient yes, fun not so much.
With vinyl all this convenience goes away. It's fun to go to the record store and sift through 1.00$ bins, or find pressings of newer groups. Then when you get home, you play it. You don't put it into your computer and hit button. You open it up, carefully take the disk out, notice the large liner notes, spin up the table and enjoy. It's more of an event than just rip. burn. play.
Sure it's analog, and there's the occasional distortion, but with a decent cartridge and stylus it's amazing how good new vinyl sounds. Finding spare sleeves to put your favorite albums in then putting the cover them on your wall make for some good excellent wall art too. To me it's similar to why I buy books even when I can get e-books. Life it's just about making everything streamlined and perfect, sometimes you need a little analog grit to keep it interesting.
Of course, I negated myself already by writing about ripping vinyl with 100% Free Software [blogspot.com], but that's more for getting my dads old albums onto CD for him.
Nothing mixes like vinyls (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know how to describe the experience. He started a hard song on the CD player (Funker Vogt I think) then he attacked the turntable. He started with a Depeche Mode vinyls, and I hear you scream at the idea of eletro pop being mixed with Funker Vogt, but what he did was brilliant. He jumped on the EQ and isolated the good baseline so typical of Depeche Mode and gently blended it into the hard stuff, just the baseline. A moment later the vinyl was doing backflips over his head; he wanted to plug in voice sample that was on the other side. It was almost instantaneous, he waved his hand over the EQ, the voice sample played, the vinyl flipped again and we were back with the baseline. We assume that vinyls have poor seek time but, in the hand of an expert, a vinyl will seeks much faster than a CD. The DJ continued his dance, mixing in some elements of trance and goa, building an elecro industrial song out of other songs from a wide repertoire of electronic music. When he left, he was not the resident DJ after all, nothing was the same anymore.
I had discover that mixing was in fact a form of composition but it was all gone. I now pay attention to the work of the DJ. The DJ is an artist an his medium is extremely expressive. A good DJ will keep the dancefloor full but only a greet DJ will coerce people into dehydration and renal failure. When I see a DJ lifting the dusty cover of the turntable, I know that I'm in for a good show. I keep the ear open and I enjoy this rare skill that the CD almost killed.
One place vinyl absolutely beats CD's (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's a fashion trend (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When the apocolypse comes, give me a pin, a piece of cardboard, something to use as a spindle, and a steady finger. I'll still be rockin'.
Re:It's a fashion trend (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think so. the abuse a standard CD is subjected to would utterly destroy a record. how many people put a dozen naked Records on top of each other in a care that goe over bumps. 2 bumps and you have yourself a pile of useless plastic. I do the same to CD's and they last about a year with this abuse. Records last a long time now, because those who buy them treat them properly. CD's have finite lifespans because they are small, and versatile and thus often abused.
CD's and Records fail in different ways. A light scratch across the record will render every track with a regular periodic snap/pop or even render it unplayable. A light scratch on a CD may result in a bit of a skip or no data loss. A deep scratch on both results in an unplayable disc. Multiple light scratches on a CD will still often be playable and often without quality loss while the same for a Record renders it unplayable. Repeated play degrades a record, while it doesn't really degrade a CD. And Vinyl is not as mobile.
Also, You can back up a CD. You cannot back up a Record into the same format. Error correction on analog data is not more "robust" it's different. Critical failure on an anologue system is different then on digital. If I introduce random noise to a CD, I can digitally filter it out if I know how. The same type of error on a anologue signal might result in static. cleaning up such a systemic loss is hard on analogue. When the damage is mroe severe the digital may be unrecoverable while the analogue may still cary some of th edata. Digital has a recoverable area/damaged area rate that looks like a inverse log. 0-50% damage = 100% recover 50%+ = 0%. While Anaglogue has a linear decline.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
There's more to them than shock value. Really.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:its hip to own vinyl (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Analogue vs Digital (Score:4, Informative)
At the very least, you should immediately digitize the analog master so that you have the digital first-generation copy "forever".
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Re:Analogue vs Digital (Score:4, Insightful)
If records really want to make a comeback, they'll come up with a nondestructive way to read the disc, like a laser beam. Oops, they did that. It's called a CD.
I agree that high quality analog recordings are a good thing to keep around for posterity, but analog recordings certainly aren't better for home reproduction (they'll get a little worse every time you play them), unless you don't mind having to repurchase albums every so often. You don't need DRM when your recording format expires and can't be reproduced easily at home. There is, after all, no "vinyl burner" on the shelf at Best Buy for $40.
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Re:Analogue vs Digital (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Analogue vs Digital (Score:4, Funny)
Oh I get it! The RIAA wants these to come back so that they can get you to download and pay for a digital copy for your portable media player and have to keep repurchasing your physical medium as well!
This is the "new" "old" DRM. Vinyl, the gift that keeps on giving...to the RIAA.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
[cue surface noise at -38dB]
[needle drop BANG]
skritch...skritch...Yeah, man...POP...Iskritchgree with CLICK you totaskritchly. NothinPOPg like the skritchdelity of vinyl...skritch.
Oh, you meant tape?
[cue tape hiss at -60db]
That's better. But how many machines are going to be around and serviced 50 years from now to play back that carefully stored tape? Lots of rubber idler wheels to dry out and crack, capacitors to leak, parts to become unobtainable, etc. Let's hope that someone
Re:Analogue vs Digital (Score:5, Insightful)
Four basic things contribute to the fidelity of all recording formats:
1. The tolerances of recording equipment. (e.g. How closely the signal produced by a microphone resembles the soundwave that generated that signal.)
2. Generational loss in mastering
3. Manufacturing tolerances that affect playback
4. Tolerances of reproduction equipment.
All formats are limited by #1, and #4 is in the hands of each individual end-user. (i.e. If your stereo sucks, what format you prefer won't matter much.) However, number 2 and 3 are biggies.
Generational loss means that if you want to do anything more than slap a live recording onto a LP with no post-production whatsover, the quality will suck. Nobody masters albums in analogue these days. 99.9% of the vinyl being released was mastered digitally and then dumped back to analogue, so kiss that analogue "magic" goodbye.
The manufacturing tolerances of LP's are also a huge issue. When was the last time you picked up a micrometer made out of vinyl? It's not exactly the most ideal material for making something that has to have hyper accurate spatial dimensions. It's easy to scratch, and has a large coefficient of thermal expansion. Just play it back at a different temperature than it was cut at and you're already pretty badly off. The tolerances of a pressed vinyl disk are also larger than you might think, and have the effect of greatly reducing the practical information capacity. (i.e. In theory, analogue recordings contain infinite infomation. If you could record a waveform with even just very very large precision in vinyl, digital media would be useless because you could pack much more data into an analogue pressing. Digital media dominates today. Guess why? The precision of vinyl sucks dingo balls.) Everything that can go wrong with vinyl will have a direct impact on the sound. The lowly CD, by comparison, has built in parity information that allow any decent CD-reader to extract bit-perfect copies that would be identical to the master.
That being said, many CD recordings do suck, but that's the fault of mixing engineers who want to push it to 11 instead of mastering at an appropriate volume that won't clip the waveform. If a recording is mangled in this manner it's going to sound like crap no matter what you record it on.
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Re:Analogue vs Digital (Score:4, Interesting)
You're being fooled by distortion. Your vinyl isn't even close to as accurate as your CDs.
Your CDs have slightly fucked up high frequencies that *may*, if you have golden ears, make the recording sound somewhat harsher than a live performance and screw up your soundstage a bit. They also have a signal-to-noise ratio of >100dB, huge dynamic range, high-voltage output (for minimal noise after the D/A conversion stage), and they don't require equalization from your components.
Your vinyl has a signal-to-noise ratio of 50dB if you're lucky, low-voltage output that virtually guarantees that some level of 60Hz hum will get into the signal, a shitload of equalization by your record player, and very low dynamic range. You only have any highs at all (and the soundstage they bring) if your needle and record are both perfect. The reason you think your vinyl sounds better is precisely because of these traits. You hear them as "mellow," "warm," and "not harsh." Maybe you like to be protected in a bubble from what your recordings actually sound like, and that's fine, but what you're hearing is not better or more accurate sound... it's precisely the opposite.
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Re:Copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It shouldn't even be a crime.
It's an obsolete social mechanism that causes more than enough harm to offset any socially redeeming qualities it has.
This imbalance between harm and benefit becomes greater as our technological capacities increase.
If you make any long term plans around copyright continuing to exist, you're a fool, because it's not going to.
Re:Wow.... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:There's no debate (Score:5, Insightful)
Now the interesting part. It seems that humans don't really care about sound fidelity. They care about things sounding good, which is actually not the same thing. The vinyl records introduce a whole range of coloring distortions into the audio. This is made far worse by the noise reduction circuitry and lousy, thermally varient amplifiers (I'm talking to you, tube-amp owners). This radically changes the way the sound comes out (go ahead, compare the waveforms using an oscope). It also makes them softer, warmer, and generally more pleasant. The real world has a lot of harsh edges, ringing tones, and crackles that really don't sound too pleasing.
So, in conclusion, vinyl is crap for reproducing audio. It's good for making sounds pleasing to humans (except for the horrible scratching sound, of course). Ever wonder why the totaly voice-synth'd Britney Spears albums sell so many?. It's the same reason that people like vinyl records.
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Re:There's no debate (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely right. As usual when someone posts something really smart that bucks the CW my mod points are taking a tropical vacation.
Sadly, CDs are not great either, for different reasons. Where vinyl introduces the uncontrollable variables you talk about (thermal variations, electrical noise affecting the very-low-voltage signal, never-ideal disc and needle quality, dust) CDs, because of their low sampling frequency (which should have been 96kHz from the start), mangle the waveforms at high frequencies. Still, CDs come a lot closer to delivering accurate reproduction in any form of real-world use. For starters, you just can't always keep dust away from your needle...
As for amps, it has always amazed me that people *love* the ones that introduce distortion and claim the accurate ones are "cold" and "technical." It's not the amp's job to be warm and emotional; it's the musician's. I run away from any component that advertises "warm" or "musical" sound; those are code words for distortion.
My own setup consists of various digital sources playing through a big Class D amp into speakers with poly cone woofer/midrange and planar tweeters. Everyone complains the sound is too cold. But it's dead-accurate with test signals and I can actually hear the detail in my recordings, not just "warmth" that may make me feel good but isn't there.
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Re:There's no debate (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on what CD you're talking about. The Loudness War [wikipedia.org] has adversely affected CD quality for a decade now. The LP version of the latest Chili Peppers album doesn't have anywhere near the amount of clipping that the CD version has. It has a higher dynamic range.. this isn't "feels warmer" this is "measurably different wave forms".
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