Anybody still listen to LPs?

Yes indeed and I was lucky to get some minty ones from ebay recently.There is no comparison to CD sound,especially on strings.

I do!  I have hundreds of them and have never had any intention of spending thousands on buying replacement CDs.  I have a record cleaning machine, so clicks and plops are no problem except for a few old damaged items.  And as far as sound quality goes, I have a few recordings both on vinyl and CD, and in most cases the vinyl gives the better sound.  That is using top-flight equipment for both media.

For the first time in eons I played the vinyl Shostakovich 8, LSO and Previn, this morning. Considered a demo-class record in its day and nearly 40 years later it still bowls me over. I'm not the biggest Previn fan but he excels here and the LSO's playing is incredible. Check out the trumpet solo in the scherzo.

At the same time, the achilles heel of vinyl is underlined. I took this lp to a hi-fi shop in Toronto back in the mid-70s to audition some Dahlquist speakers I was considering. The clown in the shop managed to drop cigarette ash on it, leaving a nice dozen-cycle click towards the end of the final movement.

Ok, Kees. I have uploaded it on Vimeo now (with the van Beinum movement complete!). Does it still give problems?

http://vimeo.com/10780200

Rolf

Of course, a lot of the music on LPs has been digitally recorded and/or mixed and/or mastered, so however good the LP sounds (and, for the avoidance of doubt, I do not doubt that vinyl sounds different to CD) you're often still listening to the end result of an otherwise wholly or partly digital process.

When you play an LP you're moving a diamond (very hard) across vinyl (pretty soft).  And there has to some pressure, to make the diamond contact the groove surface, or you wouldn't hear anything - applying something very hard to something pretty soft, under pressure, causes wear.   

You're also moving it very fast, so you get high air pressure waves ahead of the moving stylus, which can worsen any microscopic cracks in the surface (and there will be some, no matter how good the pressing) - and that 'worsening' will increase with each playing.

Add in dust trapped in the groove (no matter how well you've cleaned it first), and the damage will increase, because the dust particles will get dragged round by the stylus (causing wear), or else driven into the vinyl (creating damage that the air pressure wave may worsen).

Whilst a well-adjusted turntable set-up will minimize damage, some will inevitably occur.

That said, wear in a good set-up can certainly be negligible, and you'll be able to play a record many, many times.

And the fact that the wear is gradual - unnoticeably so between individual playings - means you 'acclimatize' to it - ie, the record doesn't sound the same after 100 playings, but you simply don't realise that because it sounds essentially the same as the last time you played it, and you probably won't notice the wear until it's quite significant.

Re. vinyl wear, a few other contributors come to mind.

There was always the 'inside grooves' issue. Ideally, the stylus is supposed to track at a constant angle to the groove. That's relatively easy to set up on the vertical plane - although record warps will throw it out - but horizontally it's a different matter. You have a tone arm pivoting across circles of decreasing diameter, so maintaining a constant angle is impossible. Tone arm manufacturers minimized inaccuracies by kinking their products in ingenious ways, but couldn't eliminate it. Old timers will recall non-pivoting tone arms that moved along a bar but these, while eliminating stylus angle variations, had their own issues and never caught on.

So when we set up our tone arms we essentially chose a compromise angle, knowing that by the time the stylus made it to the inner grooves, things were getting out of whack. On a 20 minute lp side, that didn't matter as much. But once you started pushing 30 mins. and particularly if there was some ffff stuff at the end, your chances of distortion were high and that often meant the stylus was bouncing around in the groove, causing rapid wear.

For the past 30 years I've used an SME arm and Shure V15 111 tracking between 1 and 1.25 grams. Nevertheless I can detect some wear on some records probably, as spiderjohn says, a result of dust. Fluff collecting on the stylus also causes mistracking and damage, a problem that all the zerostating and stylus cleaning in the world won't totally eliminate.

My lp's over 40 years of age, which were played on a variety of turntables using dubious tonearms, certainly show wear.

Grade of vinyl made a difference. My old CFP records haven't stood up so well, neither have North American Seraphim nor Canadian Decca. As for those old Saga records made, I think, of pulverised telephones, they started out terrible and got rapidly worse.

Then there was the problem of deteriorating record sleeves. And if you've ever played records that have been stored in humid, tropical conditions you'll have experienced a whole new realm of issues - fungus growth, etc., etc..

No, cd sound is not always an improvement over the analogue originals - though I still maintain that's more of an engineering problem than something inherent in the medium - but I don't miss the hassles of lp playing.