Anybody still listen to LPs?

Quite so.

It's the music that matters, whatever the medium.

As one who first started my gramophonic listening with 78s I was impressed with my first CD player: no fuss, no surface imperfections (provided of course one didn't get any of those CDs which subsequently became "bronzed" and unplayable). Then I played an LP again, overhauled my turntable, and yes, an early Decca Kingsway Hall recording on LP is unsurpassed in my opinion for its immediacy, presence and stereo imaging. The aforementioned Tchaikovsky 1812 (just issued on CD) was Decca's first stereo issue (could it have been anything else?): I have the current Speakers Corner pressing and the sound still wipes the floor with any current digital orchestral issues.

I sometimes wonder though how many people have actually heard a properly set up turntable system which requires care and occasional maintenance. I recently plugged a £32 supermarket DVD player into my amplification and the difference with a CD player costing 10 times as much was minimal. I would not however expect a BSR autochanger to sound anything like my 40 year old Lenco turntable with a platter weighing 9lbs.

I note Mr Everard has become a convert to valve amplification (I've never used anything else) perhaps he can be converted to LPs next.

As a footnote to SAGA's dreadful pressings (not everything about the LP was wonderful) I once read they used waste/recycled vinyl they got from a nearby Philips record factory. They had some good recordings, should have charged more than 10 bob (or whatever it was - 50p to youngsters) and produced better pressings! 

Agreed. I recall a good set of Brandenburgs by Newstone, an excellent Bartok quartet cycle, Fine Arts Quartet I think, and some interesting oddities like Robert Still's 3rd Symphony, a work I still find haunting.

But the Saga experience was like listening to music during a violent hailstorm.

Playing some lps recently I was reminded of another achilles heel of the medium: the dreaded side break. Outside of the concert hall, who knew what Ein Heldenleben sounded like as a seamless work or the finale of Mahler's second? And towards the end of the lp era some manufacturers, at least in North America, got into the annoying habit of putting last sides of a multi-disc set onto the backs of firsts, second onto second-to-last etc.. It was as if they thought we all owned Garrard record changers on which we stacked all five discs of Die Walkure before becoming sofa-bound for the evening.

Greetings, all, only just discovered the Forum.

I fear there's a 'medium vs. message' thing here, going back years. Like most, I of course played LPs way back when, but by 1980 I was ready for a new medium, in order to hear the message more or less as intended. Just one example will serve, although there were many. Previn's LSO Vaughan Williams 6th symphony on RCA LP was fitted onto one side, but at >30 minutes, the groove was very tightly wound. So there were the inevitable swish, click, pop, cutting lathe rumble, end-of-side distortion, pre-echo, post-echo et al issues that were standard with LPs. One of the commentators above can 'tune these out', but I never could. It didn't seem natural to me that you didn't get all that stuff in the concert hall, but you had to put up with it on LP. Worst of all on that particular LP was the very ending, with VW fading into silence - except that it didn't fade into silence - it faded into hiss and crackle such that it wasn't possible to determine when the music had actually finished! So CD and the lack of background noise was like a veil lifting, and was what sold it to me.

The LP vs CD argument regarding quality is a hiding-to-nothing in itself; there have been superb and awful recordings (not performances - recordings) on both media over the years. Some of the preference for LPs may be down to the equipment used; I used to use the same kind of Thorens/SME/Shure set-up that I'm sure many did, but it's gathering dust in the attic now; has done for many years. There seems to be something almost reverential about using a turntable which is similar to that felt (maybe) when driving a vintage car. I collect old Pentax cameras and enjoy the feel of them - but I wouldn't trade my recent Pentax digital with regard to actually being able to take excellent pictures.

And so it is with music. When you can change the sound that your hi-fi makes just by closing the curtains, discussions about potentially infinitesimally-small aural differences between playback media become irrelevant to me. I still go wth the concept that I want as little as possible getting in the way of the enjoyment of music, and so I listen via my iPod through the aux socket of my dear old Leak amp, driving Leak speakers and a Tannoy sub. Recordings that never made it to CD (or historical live performances off-air) have been digitised and live on the iPod too. At 320kbps and with gapless playback, even all of my CDs have now been consigned to the same attic as the turntable!

;)

Hi Vic

If it's not 'warmth deceiving perception', what do you think it is?  

Terms like 'real', 'profound', 'engaging' and 'visceral' are all very well, but they don't explain what the difference is, or why some people perceive it as "better".

After all, the sound produced by vinyl is heavily distorted, compared to the source from which it was cut (eg, tracing error, pitch/azimuth error, inner groove distortion), and heavily dependent on the hardware used to play it (stylus, tonearm), which means the same vinyl will sound different on different playback systems, so it's not as if vinyl is any more faithful to the source than 'good' digital.

Plus much vinyl was digitally recorded and/or mastered in the first place*, so vinyl is, at 'best', only preserving a digital signal. In reality, it's adding something to the signal that wasn't there to begin with - 'distortion', by any other name

* the Schneiderhan Beethoven VC was recorded as analogue, so this paragraph doesn't apply. That said, the signal on the vinyl will be a distorted version of the signal on the mastering tape.

rgds

Jon

I too re-discovered my LPs when I bought a new turntable (and there are many new ones to choose from). Not every LP has been as good as CDs, but many are. Like many readers I'd like more classical music on LP format. 

Most music lovers use a range of technologies to listen to music - radios (car and otherwise) ; LPs, CDs, SACD, iPods and downloads. Not all new technologies are an advance (DAB for example) but we should keep having the choice. Which makes the decision to ditch the Gramophone a bizarre example of putting all your eggs into one (less good) basket.

I still listen to LPs thank goodness. There is no way I would get rid of any of them in preference to another medium. When CDs arrived I acquired many of the same recordings I had in the new format and though I appreciated their advantage in terms of less surface noise it was never enough to persuade me to discard my LPs. Why can't we just enjoy music in different formats? Embrace change by all means but celebrate the best of the past.