I'm slowly working my way through some vinyls I got recently. Many are not that impressive, whether it be the latest remaster of The Beatles Sgt Pepper with it's slightly compressed sound stage and noisey vinyl or even KISS's Walmart exclusive Orange vinyl of Destroyer which is just plain awful in not only dynamics but sounds like an 128 MP3.
Other vinyls have been good with minimal noise or other sound quality issues but never really stand out as memorable. Pink Floyd's 2016 remaster of "Wish You Were Here" was good.
However, last night my mind was finally blown. With the new, all analog production of
Red Hot Chili Peppers "Unlimited Love" double LP I struck gold. It was clean with no persistent background noise, the subtleties in the instruments and the production value was all there. It's what I was hoping for on a good vinyl. The album is dreadfully boring as a listen but the experience was there and it was great.
I'm sure most audiophiles have music they listen to for the sake of listening to it for the sonic pleasure it brings while the rest of their music is the actual music they like listening to whether it be in the car or the background somewhere. "Unlimited Love" falls into the former for me.
On a whim, I just wanted something with a little more energy and dynamics and unwrapped Nine Inch Nails "Pretty Hate Machine" remastered from 2010. When removing the record from the sleeve it was confetti'd with paper dust/shards and took way too long to clean. Once all the debris was visually removed I took a chance and played it. It literally sounded like the HD Audio version and it was incredible. The bass was amazing, the highs were tingly, the mids were marvelous, there is nothing negative to say about that release. Side A that is. When I went through the hoops to clean side B it was a noisey mess and there were too many quiet passages on that side to make it listenable. It sounded way different. But side A was an eye opener as to what's still possible with the format. A more aggressive cleaning on side B may of helped but I have a life beyond scrubbing records for a single listen.
After the last couple weeks, my wife and I are mostly disappointed with vinyl in not only it's lack of dynamics on many titles but the excruciating effort cleaning them to make them listenable. Sometimes we get lucky with good disc's like last night but most evenings we inevitably switch to the 24/96 library and just marvel at that instead. The Elton John SACD's are a revelation whenever you doubt your system.
I've got a good 80 more LP's to listen to but chances of us buying more are slim. The artwork, photos, packaging etc are very nice but way too expensive for the potentially bad listening experience it can be. I haven't given up yet.
