Quote:
I agree with tfabris when he says garbage in, garbage out just not what is garbage!
I understand what you mean about how good an LP sounds when it's well mastered and played back on a good system. Recordings engineered for an LP are going to sound better when played back from an LP. I don't think that part of it is garbage at all.
I know that we disagree on whether CDs are garbage or not. That's fine, we can just agree to disagree on that point. But that's not exactly why I suggested buying the CDs in my old post above.
Instead, I think what I meant in my old post above was:
Trying to make a homemade digital "capture" of an analog LP isn't going to sound better than a professionally mastered CD. Your home capturing equipment just won't be up to that task.
Anything you sample off of an LP might sound a bit more "LP-like" than a CD would, but it's not going to sound better in ways you're going to like.
Instead, what the home capturing equipment is going to do is take that LP sound and do all of the things to it that you dislike about digital CD recordings in the first place. But it won't have the benefit of having done it with the original multitrack mix tapes, and it won't have the benefit of the expensive high quality equipment to have done it with. Instead, it's going to be your consumer record player going through god-knows-what analog stages into a cheap consumer-grade DAC, and the levels will be all wrong, etc., etc., so what you get is simply a muffled digital sample of the LP.
Sure you can do it, and there are software and hardware packages out there that let you do it, including some new packages where it's all self-contained and you just plug your ipod into a plug on the turntable and it's all automatic. But I really don't think that's going to make your audiophile ear happy. The things that make you prefer LPs in the first place will all be ruined by the low-grade equipment involved. And the things you specifically dislike about CDs will be magnified.
In fact, even if high quality studio equipment is used to take an LP master and convert it to digital, it still doesn't sound right. This is the way that they made the very first CDs to hit the market. They just took the (what used to be great-sounding) LP masters and sampled them. Sure they used high quality equipment to do the job, but audiophiles still complained. The recordings sounded harsh and/or muffled. Only after they started mastering specifically for CD did they start to sound good.
In other words, if you want the LP sound, I think you're going to have to be content with sitting in your living room with the real LP.
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