Young HiFi dot com

So, tis’ the season to be jolly again… finally! I’ll be hitting the hay in a short while, so I just popped in to tell you that I’m still alive and haven’t forgotten about the blog. There won’t be anything about audio today. This time let’s get a bit more personal…
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This is the last part of the “Vinyl records: Collecting 101″ post series. Future vinyl-related topics will most probably be discussed only in singular posts.

The last thing I’d like to talk about is the “hardcore” aspect of vinyl collecting, namely finding vinyl oddities/very rare albums and releases which never made it to the digital-era music market…
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You can’t imagine how many times I’ve tried to start this next part. I don’t know why, but I guess I’ve been suffering from “writer’s block” again. Anyway…

Today we’ll concentrate on taking care of our record collection…
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My friend Robert Benson (he runs the www.collectingvinylrecords.com website), has sent me an interesting link yesterday.

It’s an article from the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, titled “Everything Louder Than Everything Else”. Here’s a short review:

It’s author, Joe Gross, makes a very elaborate study on modern record loudness levels and tries to answer the question as to how and why does today’s popular music can be exhausting to us, the listeners.

Joe touches the subject on both sides: from the music enthusiast’s and from the sound engineer’s (a.k.a. “the expert’s”) point of view.

Read on for some interesting excerpts from the mentioned article…
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Now this news is suprising, funny & pretty extraordinary. Apparently, some serious HiFi enthusiasts praise the old 1st generation Sony Playstation gaming console as a high quality CD player !

The people who tried to experiment a little with the console say that the CD transports may not be worth much, but it turns out that Sony put a pretty high-class DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) in the launch-edition (the very first model) of the old Playstation…
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Finally, the media start to notice the most significant problem of portable music media popularity: the omnipresent compromise in sound quality.

What does it mean ? It’s very simple actually. Just think logically: how can a small iPod surpass or even be equal in sound reproduction quality to, let’s say a home theater system ? The stratling thing is, most youngsters think that portable equipment really sounds THE SAME or if not then it can’t be such a big diff…

In my opinion, such a way of thinking about audio doesn’t even need a commentary, so let’s leave it at that (I wouldn’t want to make new enemies ;)).

Anyway, check the scoop out for yourself by reading this news article:
“Thousands of songs in your pocket: An audiophile’s nightmare?”

Also, the CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) just recently started a campaign called “The Great Audio Experience“. It’s main goal is to popularize great sounding audio devices and it’s especially dedicated to the younger generation. It even got support from the band 3 Doors Down. You can check it out at the GAE’s official website.

Time for the next part of the “Vinyl records: Collecting 101″ series.

Today I’ll concentrate on the aspects of buying a vinyl record…
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It’s time for another whopper post. This time I’ll try to introduce you to the wonderful world of vinyl record collecting.

As this subject is quite a comprehensive one, it looks like I won’t be able to include every important aspect in a single post. That’s why I’ll divide it to seperate parts, which I’ll be posting in the following days in a consecutive (I hope) manner.

On a side note: consider these series of posts as sets of handful tips or a “beginner’s guide”, dedicated for the most part to people who are new to this topic, but I can’t promise that vinyl veterans won’t find anything interesting for themselves.

The question for today’s part is: “What kinds of vinyl records are there anyway?”
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