Anybody still listen to LPs?

I find that LPs have a warmth, richness and depth of sound that is simply not present on CDs.  The latter have a cold synthetic sound that is nothing like the experience of hearing music live.  I do not rule out the possibility that the digital technology may one day surpass the sound of LPs but they are still a long way off.

I hope you managed to sell them rather than dump them! I suspect I would have trouble getting anything for my collection. As a buyer and seller of CDs on the TradeMe auction site, I notice Classical music doesn't sell very well (but maybe it sells better in UK than it does in NZ). It would be even harder to sell on LP. Many of the performances I have on LP would also no longer be acceptable to me. My tastes started changing the moment I first heard Harnoncourt and his Concentus Musicus group.

I only started listening to them last year! They were pretty much on the way out when I got into to music, so I'd never really thought about collecting them until I heard some at a friend's house and realised that they sounded how I'd always wanted my CD player to.

Since then I've built up quite a collection, although I still think that CDs have a few advantages when it comes to the big stuff, and I've invested far too much time and money to stop listening to them now.

It's a shame that there are so few new classical releases on vinyl, especially as other genres have seen something of a renaissance recently. I certainly intend to carry on buying what I can find. For all the limitations, there is something that just sounds right when I hear a good record.

Incidentally, I've finally found a CD player that comes close to sounding as good!

Yes, thank goodness I have my old but still very efficient Panasonic SL18 up and turning again. Some LP's do sound more "full" in body than their CD counterparts, but this very particularly in respect of older recordings first made on LP which have since been transferred to CD versions. Fricsay's 1953 Pathetique with the Berlin Philharmonic was rightly described as a milestone of the gramophone; but listening to the CD Archipel transfer one would have been forgiven for thinking it was a milestone of the biscuit tin. I have numerous LP's whose CD transfers I have found to be either restrictive in their CD transfer as to be frustrating, or "digitalised" into a squeaky clean ambience for each and every section of the orchestra that may make the new version sound more like a "real" orchestra, but that loses in the process the pith and excitement that made the original recording, despite its limitations, perhaps a classic. On my Mac I use a recording application called Audio Hijack, and for a friend and fellow music lover of my own ripening age I sometimes transfer classic old LP performances into my computer, then burn them to CD. They are MUCH preferrable, often, to the commercial transfers, albeit perhaps even with the odd ticks and all. As for playing LP's, to give just one example: Beecham's mono LP version of Berlioz's Fantastique Sympony was unforgettable, a classic. Two years later in 1961 he made another recording, in stereo: good, but not great like the mono one. And it is the stereo that has been reissued on EMI Great Recordings of the Century. Well, the great Beecham recording of that symphony, as I say, was his previous mono one—and I thus transferred it into my computer and dubbed it to CD. Beats the EMI CD hands down. 

Oh, I remember all the horrors you mention, tagalie. I would also like to add I never put on an LP unless I could sit down and listen. Those styli were so expensive! Because I'm the only one in the household who enjoys Classical music, this has always meant I needed to have the house to myself. That doesn't really happen these days. I might have the main house to myself when my husband goes out for a few hours, but I never know when his sister (88) might interrupt me. Switching off a CD in mid-note (which I often find myself having to do) is one thing; doing it to an LP is quite another! It would certainly be interesting to compare some of the LPs that I also have on CD, but on my set-up it would be difficult. The Quad 33-303 is much much older than CDs, which need a setting of about 4 on the 33 control unit as against one of 6 for LPs.

I do remember Gramophone critics complaining constantly about the sound quality of the early CDs, but gradually these complaints faded out and I even saw comments to the effect that the CD sounded better than the LP version. Alas, I don't subscribe to Gramophone any more; it's no longer affordable, despite the fact that the pound is now worth about NZ$2.11 whereas in the days when I subscribed it was more like NZ$3.

I very, very rarely listen to vinyl any more (despite having a turntable set up, and LPs to hand).  I very rarely listen to CDs any more (ditto CD player and CDs).

For better or worse (and I'm reluctant to get into an inevitably subjective 'argument' about what sounds better) the vast majority (~85%) of my music is now digital, and streamed from a server via a Squeezebox* to my hi-fi.  

* http://www.logitechsqueezebox.com/products/squeezebox-duet.html (no connection except as a happy user)

I'd actually quite like to be a die-hard vinyl junkie, treasuring my collection of low stamper number  Decca 'ED1' SXL or Mercury Living Presence LPs.

But it's just a fact that I can listen to a far, far wider range of music via a digital source than I could ever afford to using vinyl, and, to be frank, I am not sure I can personally discriminate sufficiently* between the quality of analogue (ie,vinyl) and digital (be it CD, high-bitrate mp3 or lossless, like flac) for it to affect my enjoyment. I also can't take vinyl on train journeys or to the office.

* this is an important qualifying term!  There may well be a difference, but the difference may not crucial.

For me, ultimately, it's the music that matters, not the medium.

Spider