Metal Reviews

Dude, why bother? Do you have piles of vinyl around at the moment? A foolish man buys a wallet with his last coin!

Fortunately for me it's not my last coin... The man who buys a wallet with his last coin should have bought a wallet sooner.

I like how that's the second time I've asked if you currently have any vinyl, and the second time you've avoided the question.

Well, there are two answers to that.

Firstly, the plan would be to start buying albums in the future on vinyl instead of CD. I'm wondering if this is a worthwhile enterprise.

But secondly now you come to mention it, somewhere in some obscure cupboard my dad has stacks of old jazz records on vinyl including what I guess to be some rare ones which probably aren't around on CD. They haven't been seen in 15 years so they could all be fucked up, mind. If I bought a record player he'd probably let me take or at least borrow them because his doesn't work any more. My grandparents also have loads of classical vinyl they don't want any more, and that would certainly lend an air of class to the house.

Thinking about that second point... this puts a whole new spin on things.

"spin", lol!

Exactly. If you have several thousand dollars to spend vinyl can sound really good. If you are talking about getting the cheapest thing you can find at a garage sale or at radioshack(?) then don't even bother.

The vinyl is going to determine the quality just as much as the equipment.

Please read the wikipedia article on vinyl records. Their shortfalls are massive, numerous and devastating to sound quality. Their advantage is a bump in the high-bass due to "tracking" and a more colorful (not for the betterment of accuracy) and more midrange heavy sound.

If you want warmth, get a high quality equalizer or some good DSPs. There is one for winamp called Audioburst Power FX, which is well worth your money for it's tone controls and decompression technology. I've tried every winamp DSP and this one is the real deal. DFX and Enhancer are great too, but take YEARS to learn how to use properly (unless you happen to be an engineer that knows how everything is supposed to sound to begin with). Trust me.

A good record player setup is gonna cost at least 500 bucks for the cartridge, add a couple thousand dollars for a quality pre-amp and several more thousand for a class A amp and you have an expensive experiment. That is assuming you have quality loudspeakers to use with it. If not, add another 1500 for some serwin vegas. This is not considering the actual turntable, tone-arm, cost of the records themselves, cables (which are cheap), and cleaning supplies.

Hm, maybe if I become extremely rich, then.

Solution for the space & feng shui

http://www.pyottdesign.com/linos/index.html

wowsers how cool. And because it's smaller, it must be cheaper, right?

that is fucking cool.

Eh this is like saying a good CD player set-up costs 5,000$ when only extreme audiophiles need that.

I wouldn't say that. A good CD player is very easy to find. A Panasonic CD player with HDCD support is cheap. I had one at one time and it was extremely good.

Vinyl is just a lot more delicate in its reproduction and digital is very flexible in its own right.

I'd say a thousand buys gets you at 99.9% quality with CD if going with separate components. a 500 dollar AB class amp, 300 dollar D/A oversampling converter and a 200 dollar CD/DVD player will sound incredible.

I think the ratio is somewhere like 1 to 10 in terms of cost for different "classes" of audio between Vinyl and Digital. Just my opinion. The best CD player in the world might cost you about 2k dollars, but to even approach that level in vinyl is gonna require those insane 20k dollar cartridges.

That might be true (although when you get to higher end audio people tend to disagree a lot and people should probably just listen for themselves) but in my experience you don't need to spend 500$ on a cartridge or thousands of dollars on an amp and pre-amp to get vinyl to sound great.

Definitely get a record player. I rly want one myself. Bottom line is, vinyl is much more of a collector's item than CD's are. Also, I feel like playing vinyl is its own unique experience, while playing CD's isn't really different from MP3's. Ideally, I want to download most of my music and buy my faves/bands i want to support on vinyl. It can get pricy, but record players can also be found for cheap on Craigslist and they've always sounded great in my experience.

For the record, me and my suite at uni just got a record player, receiver, speakers, and a cabinet for $100 off Craigslist. Sound quality probably isn't amazing, but it's still fucking awesome. Used records can be had for $2-5 as well, especially if you like stuff other than metal.

theres other stuff besides metal?

There's even other types of metal than thrash!

Yes! It is called 'Opeth metal'.

I find records highly annoying. They skip, crackle, gather dust, scratch, take up too much space and you have to turn them. Good riddance.

funny joke