BOOM! Snagged a new 2015.

Welcome to PriusChat, I hope you like your Prius as much as I have mine.

Each of us brings a different background, but we seem united by a desire to make our car serve us as well as possible.

 

Being of the age that lived through and witnessed the evolution and transition from LP's, cassette tapes, and yes even 8 track players to CD's and now simply "digital download", I'm somewhat fascinated by the re-emergence of the Vinyl Record.

One of the first "big" purchases I made, as a high school age youngster was a CD player. This was when a CD and CD player was the up and coming "new" format. What I remember was the constant assurance that Compact Disk was very much THE superior format.

I have to admit, this leaves me somewhat lost as to what the allure or attraction is to the old drop down LP, needle to groove recording.
I know proponents and supporters site a more "real" sound.

I know it's very generational, but I was very proud to be one of the first to start building a "digital" based music collection that was read by a "laser" and NOT a needle. Of course now, even CD's are dated, as most people just download music as a "file".

I'm not knocking the hobby, or the devotion or maybe even the reality, but I don't see how LP's can be considered anything but an nostalgic and archaic throw back.
I know even today people like to collect Stereoscopes, and Victrola's, but I'm somewhat surprised at this Frankenstein like rebirth of the LP.
I can't tell if it has staying power, or whether it's just a nostalgic trend being supported by a generation that never had stacks of LP's on a spindle being dropped down on a turn table. Perhaps they hear something whispered in the subtle hiss of a needle in the groove?

I'm usually the first to embrace the less technological approach. So I feel a little guilty that I DON'T want to buy LP's or a record player.

Oh...and by the way...Welcome to Prius Chat.

 

Hey d'er from d'e udder corner of d'e metro, eh... Congrats on your new wheels! I just picked mine up in December as well... absolutely love this car. Enjoy!

 

Congrats on your purchase and "Welcome to Prius Chat"!

 

all the best, you betcha!

 

Good to hear its a sweet purchase for you, congratulations! Post up some pics when you have

 

Congrats! And yes, post pics!

 

That's interesting to me, if only because on a different forum I had a discussion with a collector of LP's.
When I questioned why it wouldn't be possible to simply "record" the LP sound to a more modern format, he took it as auditory sacrilege, and assured me there was no way to duplicate the sound of a "live" LP being played.

My argument was that CD or digital format was simply a way of capturing and encoding sound, therefore digital might be using a Stradivarius to play the fiddle, in so much as capturing the sound, but that I found it hard to believe the sound (including needle hiss) couldn't be transferred to a digital format.

 

...welcome thanks for sharing with us

 

I still tend to be skeptical, that the LP sound couldn't be transferred to digital.

But every LP aficionado assures me that every time somebody tries to recreate the divine sound of vinyl in a digital format an angel loses their wings.

So I've given up.

 

Harry Nyquist and Claude Shannon have both joined the angels now, so they've had a chance to explain the whole business and, ever since, the angels are more mathematically literate and much more cheerful.

They had been crying because of the last paragraph in the zero-order hold article, but once they had re-read it and seen that the effect is a predictable, well-quantified frequency response droop that can be equalized out, they felt better.

-Chap

 

That's a beautiful graph.

Even though I concede that LP supporters have embraced a demonstrable science to justify stepping back 40 years in playback technology. I'm still going to be stubborn.

My "real time" memories of LP's were that they became dusty, needles became worn, and over time sound quality suffered.
I'm still dubious that digital recording technology couldn't be used to capture the analog sound at least to a point where the human ear couldn't really hear much of a difference.

I still suspect this whole LP movement is fueled by misguided nostalgia and/or a recording industry desperate to give us a product that isn't downloadable.

But my further memories of LP's do include the positives of alluring and creative jacket covers. Removing the LP's from antiseptic inner jackets and handling them with a "priest" like reverence. The sound of the LP as it dropped from the spindle to the turntable. The sound of the needle making contact with the grove.

I admit something was lost when we were mesmerized by the reflective shine of a CD, and the relative durability of playback by laser.

I'm just not willing to invest into tools to step back in time and regain those lost advantages.

PS.
Hope you are still enjoying your Prius Ownership Experience.
Sorry to of derailed the thread.

 

Glad to see you pulled off the wheel covers, looks so much better without them. Nice color too!!