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AVForums Super Veteran
I'm keen to hear people's views (good and bad) on needledrops, along with their underlying reasons. Now, I must confess, I don't own a turntable (I've never owned one) and my memories of vinyl are of the rice crispies variety. Having said that, excessive compression and limiting leading to really sh!tty sounding CD releases caused me to discover needledrops. An Aussie friend and avid vinyl fan made 24/96 needledrops of Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions & Revisited. I was sceptical, but know the albums well and took the FLAC encoded needledrops home convinced I was going to find 1,000 reasons why they were worse than the CDs. To my surprise what I discovered was that these digital recordings of vinyl playback sounded pretty damned good. Since then I've listened to numerous needledrops, generally of the 24/96 variety and I often find them to be better than their CD equivalent - principally because the noisefloor on a good pressing is very quiet (sometimes inaudible) and the vinyl cannot be butchered to the same extent the CD typically is. I've played back a few of these needledrops to people and they're usually very skeptical when I tell them they've just listened to a needledrop. What say you ... ?
