Chris Pearson said:

I find it a bit sparkly. It is difficult to put it into words, but I suspect that it has to do with contrast.

I had the same experience going from vinyl to CD, but overall I preferred CD.

Now, the quality of sound with surround system with relatively small speakers is brilliant, and good enough for most people at home - and I don't think I will return to analogue audio. It's great to reminisce and look at the old album covers. I've not thrown away my vinyl albums, and now my son is listening to some of them on his vinyl player ... and enjoying the artwork ... as part of the recent revival.

gkenyon said:

Now, the quality of sound with surround system with relatively small speakers is brilliant, and good enough for most people at home - and I don't think I will return to analogue audio.

Yes, it is amazing what small speakers can achieve. Then again, the ear drums are only about 1 cm in diameter or about the size of the tip of your index finger. (Slightly larger than a BS EN 61032:1998 finger tip.)

gkenyon said:

It's great to reminisce and look at the old album covers. I've not thrown away my vinyl albums, and now my son is listening to some of them on his vinyl player

Forget vinyl, what about your 78s?

Chris Pearson said:

what about your 78s?

I'm old enough to remember the setting on the turntable, but I never owned any of them. Not that I don't admire a wide variety of music, but the reality is people were burning their "radiograms" and grammophones in the 1970s when I was a toddler, and people were smashing the Bakelite '78s.

Andy Millar said:

The ears themselves might deteriorate, but the brain can even improve it's ability to process sound over time given practice

To add to that, this is a great book I've just finished this book...

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442453/this-is-what-it-sounds-like-by-ogas-dr-susan-rogers-and-ogi/9781529114010

...that expands on what you said. Amongst other things, it explores what authenticity (in music) means to individuals.

Not all of them - by the late 70s I was repairing the odd radiogram, well, valve swapping and doing basic 'wire off' and switch cleaner  type repairs anyway, when the shops would no longer repair them. Like the 1950s piano smashing contests, the radiogram destruction probably varied a bit. And there were some terrible designs out there. Rather like some folk look nostalgically at old houses and say 'they built them well back then' what they mean is they built the ones that are still here now, well, back then. The slum grade stuff has been bulldozed and rightly so.

Mike.

Andy Millar said:

Anyway, I moved into the rail industry

No way! The Railway's my day job! I joined BR as an Engineering Management Trainee (probably one of the best graduate training schemes ever) and remain. Small world.

I do have a 1920s HMV wind up gramophone (bought by my brother and sister for a couple of shillings in the 1950s) together with a pile of 78s in the bedroom...when you look at it with an engineering eye it's actually a very neat bit of technology. And really quite good for explaining how sound waves work

Re vinyl and CD, I found this most interesting in the early days of CD players, to me they sounded dreadful whereas I didn't mind the pops and scratches of vinyl, other people were much more irritated by the background noise of vinyl but didn't mind what I could hear in CD players. The problem with the early CD players was that, if you imagine them playing back a peak-to-peak triangle wave, each "step" in the A/D process was likely to be of a different height to the next one - say the average step height across the 65,535 steps is 1uV, then in practice one bit step might be 0.1uV and the next 1.9uV (to take it to extremes). The manufacturers worked hard to makes sure that each step always went upwards, but they weren't necessarily even. Which produces a very non-musical (non-harmonic) distortion. Vinyl does also typically have distortion too of course, but it's more likely to be harmonic. But there you go, again it was a case of things that annoy some people and not others. And, at least to my ears, got resolved in reasonably priced CD players by the end of the 1990s.

And then of course currently one of the biggest selling formats is the compact cassette which, pure audio wise, has to be one of the most appalling formats ever developed. (Although a very clever bit of technology for its time.) Just like I do have a much loved two-valve guitar amp behind me...

Re small speakers, what they can't do sadly is move enough air to project bass sounds at any distance. (OK, you can combine lots of small speakers, but that's really the same impact as having one big speaker.) Frustrating point at the moment as I've been playing quite a bit of bass guitar in otherwise acoustic bands recently, acoustically the only solution would be to move to double bass (which are both massive and really hard on the fingers for a very good reason) or to carry a bass amp. And even though I have about the smallest one it's possible to get (that's of any use) it's still a lump. It does feel like there are times when you just get hit by the laws of physics, but it would be great if somebody did come up with a cunning way of slowly moving lots of air without needing lots of weight / size! I'll keep hoping.

Contact made 

mapj1 said:

Not all of them - by the late 70s I was repairing the odd radiogram, well, valve swapping and doing basic 'wire off' and switch cleaner  type repairs anyway, when the shops would no longer repair them.

I did the same with televisions. They could be had for 10/-, which soon became 50p. The CRTs were faded so the curtains had to be shut, but with luck one lasted for 6 months.

mapj1 said:

Rather like some folk look nostalgically at old houses and say 'they built them well back then' what they mean is they built the ones that are still here now, well, back then. The slum grade stuff has been bulldozed and rightly so.

Most of my 120 y.o. house was built well, but it has become apparent that there was extensive refurbishment circa 1982. The real problem was lack of maintenance and ivy growing up the walls. At which point, young folk will ask, "What is maintenance?"

Andy Millar said:

And then of course currently one of the biggest selling formats is the compact cassette which, pure audio wise, has to be one of the most appalling formats ever developed.

More convenient than reel-to-reel, but you were lucky to hear both sides without the tape wrapping itself around the rollers. The great thing was portability (better than a wind-up gramophone) and you could get one for your car.

P.S. I still have a valued car radio (wireless?).