How Good Can Vinyl Sound?, Anyone got some sample clips? Options

[sshd]

I do not own a turntable and have never heard the "great vinyl sound" coming from a good turntable handled correctly. I am however sligltly interested in purchasing one, as there are some interesting albums out there unavailable on CD.

Recently I found a small clip on the net: A lossless needledrop of Santana's debut album on the MFSL label. Since I own the CD on same label I had something to compare with: I was very disappointed with the needle drop. There were no pops or clicks, but the sound was dead.

Can anyone provide some sample clips of very good needle drops?

[C.R.Helmrich]

Thanks a lot for the uploads, krabapple! Yes, the lowpass at 22 kHz is obvious. Plus the recordings are from the 60s or 70s. I don't think I will be able to ABX those against 16/44, so I won't

I uploaded a 16/96 recording of a digitally controlled analog synth in this thread. Found this on a CD-R from 2004. It contains a lot of "musical content" above 22 kHz, up to 48 kHz. I might ABX that against the 44-kHz downsampled version soon.

Cheers,

Chris

[krabapple]

Thanks a lot for the uploads, krabapple! Yes, the lowpass at 22 kHz is obvious. Plus the recordings are from the 60s or 70s. I don't think I will be able to ABX those against 16/44, so I won't

I uploaded a 16/96 recording of a digitally controlled analog synth in this thread. Found this on a CD-R from 2004. It contains a lot of "musical content" above 22 kHz, up to 48 kHz. I might ABX that against the 44-kHz downsampled version soon.

Cheers,

Chris

I wouldn't say that the files actually uploaded appear to be lowpassed at 22 -- there is 'content' (background noise, mostly, with the occasional tendril ofhigher-energy content reaching above that). That's why I chose these, versus others I didn't upload which are unmistakably lowpassed (inky black above the cutoff frequency) -- like the Talking Heads DualDiscs.

[C.R.Helmrich]

I wouldn't say that the files actually uploaded appear to be lowpassed at 22 -- there is 'content' (background noise, mostly, with the occasional tendril ofhigher-energy content reaching above that). That's why I chose these, versus others I didn't upload which are unmistakably lowpassed (inky black above the cutoff frequency) -- like the Talking Heads DualDiscs.

True, I guess that's the natural lowpass of the source tapes then, and the stuff above 22 kHz is tape (machine) noise. Except maybe for the Fleetwood Mac excerpt, yes, the snares do reach above the mid 20's kHz. I think this is perfectly mastered, btw. Exploits the full dynamic range, and has just the right amount of level compression.

Going back to the original topic: does anyone have Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here on Vinyl? In Welcome to the Machine, there's a screaming analog synth whose overtones extend far beyond 20 kHz. That'd be a nice song to test the actual bandwidth of an LP (regardless of whether the tones "up there" are harmonic distortion or not).

Chris