gofar99 Messages: 1903 Registered: May 2010 Location: Southern Arizona
Illuminati (5th Degree)
Hi There is considerable variation in opinion about the quality of vinyl playback. In the 60'S it was thought that a LP exhibited noticeable wear after as few as 7 plays. But back then cartridges often tracked at 7-10 grams or more and except for rather costly studio gear had clunky arms and generally rather mediocre tracking ability. Now there are a number of serious audiophiles that claim that you can have 1000's of plays with no degradation. I am not sure of that, but I have a number of well recorded LPs that are over 50 years old and play just fine with no distortion and insignificant noise in the background. My fridge in the kitchen that is around two corners and 40 feet away makes more noise. Much of this depends though on the quality of the LP itself and what you are playing it on. The quality of LPs was rather good in the 60's and 70's and went into the toilet in the 80's IMO. There has been significant improvement since about 2010.
All that said, I agree that transferring an analog source to digital is likely to cause issues of some sort. At high sampling rates and bit depths it is probably so minimal that only a few really great listeners would be able to tell. I personally find that anything equal to or over 24/192 uncompressed is beyond my ability to tell the difference. You do need to have a good ADC and DAC for that. MP3s in all their glory (and sampling rates) are clearly less musical. They did and to some extent still do have a place in the audio scheme of things where compact files are a major concern and the listening environment is not particularly demanding. Such as in a car or while jogging (I don't recommend that for safety reasons though). When I digitize something I still stick to 24/192 WAV format. Everything can play it and storage is cheap. Even my portable player (a FIIO Hi-Res, AKA MP3 player in some circles) can handle 256 gig of music. That BTW is a huge number of WAV files.
So, if must convert and need to save space use one of the lossless formats. Not MP3. Just my 2 cents.
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