Of course much of the music released on vinyl in the past was never transferred to another format due to the reasons you noted. My point there was more tongue in cheek.
Nice backpedal, but whatever.
BASS & TREBLE: Nope, nothing suggests vinyl cannot meet and exceed either extreme as compared to any digital format. Lets first talk bass. Bass on vinyl is summed below 50hz, so what? That level of frequency bass is no longer stereo anyways so summing it in the mastering process works well and is a none issue. Vinyl LP's can and have produced base to 20hz. which is all more than enough to any human's hearing.
A more serious observer would merely note two things here.
First, digital is
not bandwidth-limited to 20Hz but extends down to DC. For people who enjoy organ music, the difference is material. Vinyl is almost always steeply filtered at somewhere between 20 and 40Hz by the phono preamp's rumble filter.
Second, there is a tradeoff between playing time and bass extension on LP's. Yes, it is certainly possible to get very deep bass on vinyl - but the grooves have to be very widely spaced. And even then, the needle may well jump out of them!
Here, for instance, is a picture of the grooves containing the cannon shots on the infamous (because it combines insipid playing with tremendous deep bass, I guess) Kunzel/CinnPops 1812 on Telarc:
Treble: Vinyl LP's have been made to show high frequencies going above 30Khz.
In practice, real existing vinyl systems have a top end of somewhere between maybe 8-12kHz. And it gets slightly worse every time one plays the record. Something about dragging a rock through semi-solidified oil, I guess.
And it gets much worse so if one's not fanatical about TT setup and record cleaning, but the degradation occurs even if one is fanatical about maintaining the equipment and media.
Obviously, a playback system with no physical contact (be it optical - which we still have to deal with for SAVD and DVD-A - or magnetic in the case of the modern music server holding losslessly-compressed files) will be superior over time in terms of degradation.
DYNAMIC RANGE: Ahhhh yes, dynamic range the biggest selling feature of digital. SO FREAKING WHAT?
That is the kind of answer that separates someone seeking high-fidelity reproduction from a retro fetishist.
*** I have many LP's that are near as quiet as my CD's.
"near as quiet" = inferior.
Thank you for at least acknowledging one facet of simple reality.
Not "discrete
-slash-multichannel, discrete multichannel. There is a material difference between the two.
Multichannel could include matrixed formats like quad or Dolby Pro Logic. Discrete multichannel is just that - separate channels, entirely autonomous from one another.
The enduring crime of vinyl is that it crippled stereo. Stereo was supposed to be a
three channel medium, with a hard center. But that couldn't be cut into vinyl, so the industry hacked it down to 2-channel.
"It's about the music." YES IT IS! and my point is that the quality vinyl rig will let you just listen to the music and maybe cause your jaw to drop.[/quote]
You're making it about the gear, not the music.
That tells me all anyone needs to know about your level of intellectual rigor.
To a trained listener Hi-rez digital sounds better than CD.
That's often true. However, that's generally because mixes intended for hi-rez media tend to be higher-fidelity (less compression, mostly). They are not, however, above the capability of Red Book.
(I also suspect the many, many members of the Boston Audio Society who participated in Meyer and Moran's tests have at least the level of listener training that you do.)
You will likely find most if given a proper audition will prefer vinyl over most any digital choice.
If you seriously believe that, I can only include that you need better loudspeakers, or better placement thereof.
