Guybrush

Certainly, but they must be becoming an increasing rarity. CDs have been around since the early 80s and is a digital format. I assume you know Donald Fagen's The Nightfly and its fully digital production? Popular music is frequently remastered again and again, replacing older masters in circulation.

There are probably cases where someone had a vinyl master on tape and digitized it and put it on a streaming platform or something, but if you have a stereo mix, you'd more likely master it again at some point, if not for streaming, then probably for CD.


I wasn't writing about how much YOU spent on your turntable, but that I find it morbidly interesting that SOMEONE could spend more money on a turntable than I did for my entire studio, mics and preamps and all.

We obviously have two very different perspectives. You probably coming from the side of the romantic music consumer / hi-fi world and myself perhaps slightly more from the production side of things.

There can sometimes be quite a gap between those two worlds. As an example, take those hz that I alluded to. In the hi-fi world, manufacturers can make turntables that pick up hz far beyond human hearing. They may say sure, you can't hear them, but these frequencies interact to create pleasing harmonics in the audible range.

However, on the music production side of things, they might say beware of saturation / distortion units because they create distortion upwards in frequency range which will bounce down which may cause distortion in the audible range. It's something you DON'T want, so you put EQs in place to prevent that. Then your mics generally pick up something like 20 to 20 000 hz meaning they don't record sounds beyond audible range and in any case we cut those frequencies off to give us headroom to raise the decibels on our songs a little. This is common practice.. so do you really need a deck/stylus that can accurately pick up sounds way above audible range?

So you see, the hi-fi world and the reality of music production doesn't always line up.

Speaking for myself, but probably also many more, the decisions I make when I'm mixing are not thousand dollar decisions. I EQ a track in a matter of seconds. My ears are damaged from years of abuse, so how good it sounds to others is to some degree guesswork. It's fairly common practice to mix a song for a set amount of time (like X amount of hours) and then just stop because in theory, you could be mixing forever and noone wants to do that. It may be better to just set a limit for yourself. I just released a single that I mixed and mastered myself and I know I could've done more work to tighten up the bottom end, but I simply didn't bother because I'd spent enough time on it already and the sound of it didn't bother me. Generally, I know that a mix is nearing completion (for me) when the changes I make don't sound better. They just sound different. A lot of expensive equip I've tried also equates to that. It's perhaps different, but that doesn't always mean better. Mic preamps sometimes fall into this category.

For turntables like the ones you listed, it might be great for the owners if music was mixed and mastered with those turntables in mind. Like, say, real attention was paid during mixing to the subtle nuances that only such a pristine deck could uncover, but I don't think that's the case. At least I don't do that. What I see, do and read about is music back in the days being produced with consumer radios in mind. That's obviously because radio was how most music was consumed. Today, a popular thing to do, which I practice, is a car test. I play my mixes on my car stereo because the car is a place where I and many other people listen to music. You got noise coming from the car itself as well as traffic outside and you want the focus stuff like vocals to sound clearly in those sort of environments.

Now I'm not bashing a good stereo setup which is absolutely great. But spending 160 000 dollars on a turntable (not saying you did) just sounds like folly to me. The decisions that were made during production weren't 160 000 dollar decisions and music wasn't mastered with diamond styluses in mind. You get a stereo signal out of it and it might not be that much different from what you'd get out of a more reasonably priced rega deck. And if it's different, are you sure that means better? Add to that the problems with vinyls that include, among others, less bottom end, reduced quality if there's too much playtime on a side, possibly warping of the LP or uneven rotation speeds, tonearm too light or heavy, scratches, the stylus not being fine enough or going too fast near the center of the record to correctly follow every tiny groove, etc. How much money is it reasonable for most people to spend correcting such problems (real & imaginary) when they don't have to? Some people read into myths about digital and invest a lot of cash in analogue and they're obviously very prone to making various logical fallacies. Blind testing tends to show a truer picture of reality.

edit:

Also a funny irony/difference between hi-fi and music production communities. In digital music production, they love "analogue". There are a bunch of tape and vinyl plugins / emulators which are popular. What they generally do is introduce distortion, flutter, warbles etc. - the very things that I assume manufacturers of analogue hi-fi equip are working hard to eliminate. People often want them because the distortion is sometimes pleasing and errors make a digitally produced track somehow sound more authentic.

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