How good is better than CD?

[Arkless Electronics]

I have yet to hear a good 'needle drop' digital file. Many people claim that they can make the needle drop sound indistinguishable from the actual vinyl playback, but like I said, I've never heard it with my own ears. Every vinyl rip I've heard so far sounded inferior to the original.

Think about it for a second -- if indeed it was possible to make a vinyl rip indistinguishable from the actual vinyl playback, wouldn't many of us be prepared to drop good money for such rips? I mean, let's imagine someone has a top of the line analog rig (the dream turntable with the best fitted tonearm and cartridge feeding into the best SUT/phono preamp). Such configuration could cost tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes pushing the cost into the six figure territory. Few among us could ever dream of having such a system in our homes. Obviously, many of us have already had a chance, once or twice in our lives, to actually listen to such superior analog systems. And obviously, the quality of the reproduction via such a top notch system is vastly superior to many, if not most digital systems.

Now imagine being able to do the 'needle drop' on such dream system where the digitized copy would sound exactly like the original playback. Hey, I'd be the first to plonk big bucks into buying such FLAC files! That would give me the luxury of hearing the best possible sound quality without having to purchase and mess with such precious front end.

So the reason I'm skeptical that such vinyl rip is possible is basically there are no such perfect needle drop files available on the market.

Spot on. Nowhere near as good after digital recording IME and I find the whole idea of "needle drops" pretty moronic personally...

[walpurgis]

I find the whole idea of "needle drops" pretty moronic personally...

[Canetoad]

Needle drops to tape (R2R) can sound amazing! My experimenting with needle drops always loses something in the conversion and I usually only do them for vinyl albums I can't get a CD copy for, or the CD version is particularly dire.

[narabdela]

...I find the whole idea of "needle drops" pretty moronic personally...