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?

[Cavaille]

Despite my having registered and logged in, these downloads do not work for me.
The filenames are listed but they are not links. Am I missing something here?

However, one thing I can say without playing them is that all the years you've listed for those records are post-1979.

The problem here is that between approx 1975 and 1979, the vast majority of record cutting plants installed digital "cutting delays" in-line between the analogue open-reel tape recorders and the cutting lathe. From what I've been told by an ex-engineer, these were originally 12-bit and 32KHz, and they added an audio delay to the tape output of several seconds. Later models (in the 80s) used higher bit depths and sample rates.
...

So basically, all of the records you've listed have been mastered from a digital source, negating most of the potential advantages of vinyl.

Yes, it´s true. I´ve deleted them since I needed the space here for other files - but that didn´t work out. Still, I find your comment interesting. During mastering (and even on the finished tracks) I´ve observed frequencies over 16, 22 or 24 kHz. Let´s take the track "Music" for example by Madonna: one (presumably analogue) synthesizer used in the production produces "ghost frequencies" and therefore a very recognizable pattern when viewed with spectrum analysis. One part of this spectrum can be found at 17 kHz, the next part at 34 kHz (still visible) and another part at ca. 51 kHz (which was lost after downsampling from 192 kHz to 96). The same case with "The Empire strikes back" where some parts of the orchestra reached up to 35 kHz.

Especially the latter part could be because of distortions. There have to be some distortions, because percussion or transients with high frequency content always reach up to the end of the available spectrum and I can´t imagine that percussion reaches up that high all the time. For sure, all of this is very interesting but I wasn´t very fascinated by that. Since vinyl is an inferior source compared to CD (at least to me) I only wanted it to sound pristine without caring so much for frequencies beyond 20-25 kHz.