WildBill wrote:"
SQLGeek wrote:WildBill, my parents had a record player with a few records when I was growing up. One of the ones I used to listen to frequently was a 45 of Runaway. I don't remember what was on the B side but I didn't listen to it much. The other record I remember listening to was Gerry Rafferty's City to City.
I've thought about starting a jazz collection of records because there is something to be said for listening to music on a record. They have more "soul" than an MP3 does, if that makes any sense.
According to Wikipedia the B-Side was "Jody". I don't remember every hearing that song.
Many people like the sound of records over digital music. Some prefer tube amplifiers over solid state. I never had a large collection of records, but I have quite a few CDs.
Edited: P.S. I went back and listened to "Jody". If somebody picked this as the A-Side, then nobody would have ever heard of Del Shannon.
Welcome to the Vinyl Music Lovers Society SQLGeek! Digital folks will tell you that the warmth, depth and "soul" that you're hearing is an artifact poor quality sound reproduction. Don't let 'em fool ya.
Sound is a wave, to produce a pure tone, it must maintain that form. Amplifying that wave should be an instantaneous process. In digital media, time has been separated into discrete fragments, and digital data can be derived that describes the instantaneous signal voltage at a point in time. This process is repeated 44,100 times each second in a CD. Compared to an analog amplifier, this is very slow. The analog domain does not use time fragments, all processing is done on a continuous basis. With digital reproduction you wind up with a step pyramid form instead of a smooth wave. Sort of like the pixilation you see when you magnify a digital image. Breaking the wave reduces fidelity.
Depending on the type of amplifier you use, distortion is added to the wave. Tubed/valved amplifiers introduce less distortion due to the way they handle voltage, but are hot, expensive and somewhat fragile. Discrete circuitry using individual transistors increases distortion slightly over a tubed amp, but are much less fragile and lower in cost. Integrated circuits introduce large amounts of distortion, but don't heat up a lot and are cheap. Most quality discrete circuit system will reproduce sound with 0.08% to 0.01% total harmonic distortion. Integrated circuit systems have been rated as low as 0.0001% THD. They achieve this through the introduction of a continuous feedback loop process that resamples the signal thousands of time per second, and while the wave looks smooth on a scope, the ear can hear the difference.
