I am buying my first one later this week, and was wondering how many of you guys are into Vinyl?

i found a Dual CS 5000 with a Ortofon catridge on craigslist locally for 300$. I am planning on buying a NAD P2i phono preamp..

Anyhow, i am pretty excited about trying the vinyl thing out, to see if it is something i want to get serious about or not.

Hi dakkon,

I have one that I almost never use, despite keeping my relatively huge collection of vinyl around, mostly for nostalgic purposes. I can pull out an LP album jacket and tell you where and when I bought it in my youth. I've replaced much of the vinyl with CDs except for long out-of-print albums that aren't available on CD.

Dual turntables are decent, but I'd replace the Ortofon cartridge with a Shure M97he or a Grado cartridge. Back when I was editor in chief of hi-fi magazines in Canada during the vinyl era, the Ortofon cartridges never did very well in our tracking tests. They'd mistrack and distort on heavily modulated (loud) grooves. The Shure cartridges are much better trackers and have smoother and more linear frequency responses than the Ortofons. The Grado cartridges are also generally excellent, very close in performance to the Shures.

Regards,
Alan

I didn't know that about the Shure cartridges. I used to have a Technics turntable with a Shure cartridge, because of the high ratings back around 1975. I wish I still had my 300 disk vinyl collection. I took very good care of them, but had bad financial problems in my first marriage and sold them all.

Thanks for the tip alan.

I have another question for you, many of the "people on the internet" have said that their vinyl records sound "WAY" better than the same song from a CD.


I would like to hear your thoughts on this, if you don't mind.

Alex

<grabs popcorn>

in my mind, this favoritism for vinyl has most of the time been a thing belonging to "purists".

at the time, i used to take excellent care of my vinyl discs, and invariably, after a few playings, i would hear faint or weak clicks and other kinds of noise floating all around my music room: on the sides and in the back. also the noise level was always distracting, specially when listening at realistic levels.

when CD's came out, i did not wait long before jumping in, and the sound was very good; better, in fact, than the black discs.

my turntable was of very good quality, with a Shure V15 Type IV.

it was great in some ways, but not up to the lovel of CD's.

YMMV.

J.B. a large part of what drove my question was that on the turn table forums, there are people who started out with CD's, that are not of the "vinyl generation" if you will. These are the people who are saying that the vinyl records sound better than their CD's.

The only possible bias that i can think of, would be a wanting to validate their turntable purchase which is entirely possible. However, i found it interesting that the digital cohort (which i am part of) is now becoming fond of vinyl, there have been several articles written discussing the growing popularity of vinyl.

So, i figure for 500$ or so, between the turntable and preamp, i would give it a try. If i decide it's not for me, i should be able to sell the turntable+preamp for about 400$, the turntable has fully depreciated, not much of a loss there.

On a side note, since a lot of us are DIY oriented type of people... I haven't seen many treads like this on other stereo/HT forums.... Jump to around page 8, that is when the photos start showing up.

http://www.vinylengine.com/turntable_forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=9098 s

i agree with you that there can be a multitude of reasons for the resurgence of vinyl, but i think that the thing needs so much special care that not many will adopt it for long periods of time.

that special care also applies to proper placing of the turntable, isolating it from any vibration, a HPF, special equipment to clean the disc, etc... lots of TLC. (Tender Loving Care).

people often buy 2 CD's, the second one as a spare, "just in case"; that would almost be a must when buying vinyl.

wouldn't that be in the same line of thinking as tube amps vs. transistorized amps?

I don't know, hence my question