Needles & Grooves

You’re opening up a whole new can of worms...there are a lot of good audiophile labels for classical. I’d have no clue where to start though.

There are a few Speakers Corner you might be interested in.

I mean AP does that Janos starker playing Bach cello

Are you into SACDs? The SACD market for Classical is quite large.

Man we think one steps are pricey. Classical audiophile is a whole other level.

Found this list on a Portuguese web shop Classical Music - Vinyl Gourmet

A lot of people prefer originals for pre-digital classical and many things are fairly cheap if you are willing to go used. Some people are bothered a lot more with Classical by noise and wow/flutter on vinyl and go all digital for that reason.

@dhodo do some extreme audiophiles still use reel to reel machines or is stuff like the tape project more just jazz and the occasional rock album

Obviously though that's like 500 dollars an album and usually requires mods

Not sure! Don't know much about the reel to reel world.

honestly, classical is a genre that benefits most from CD/digital - its massive dynamic swings can be very difficult to track on vinyl.

@kvetcha Funny enough @RHANDMJ made a similar observation recently in the Definitive Audiophile Pressings thread regarding the benefits of digital mastering and compression for the dynamic ranges found in classical music

@kvetcha @Lord Diaper Baby then we'd have to go into the whole conversation about DSD and if their DAC supports it or getting an SACD player because that's apparently the best for digital classical

Classical vinyl is still probably very nice and DEFINITELY the cheapest analog way

Like, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love vinyl, but the CD as a format was, in part, designed around how best to play back classical music.

Some audiophiles will fight over that, specifically for red book, but yeah maybe go into the dark side thread

@duke86fan i disagree. Don’t think you need to jump from no digital to buying a SACD or DSD rig...DSD makes no sense to me as a realistic and even slightly affordable way to listen to music. A Qobuz subscription would be more than fine for most people depending on the titles you want.

@MikeH ok I just remember a bunch of people claim DSD is the best for it because dynamics and being analog sounding

@duke86fan it very may well be, but i think from a practical perspective, not sure DSD makes sense for most people with the gear most of us have or can afford. I looked into DSD just out of curiosity when I got my DAC and with how expensive and limited DSD album downloads are, I ended up being totally fine with a Qobuz subscription.

Tbh all hires downloads are too expensive

@duke86fan agreed and it's hard to justify it when you can have Tidal or Qobuz for a fraction of the cost each month and have access to nearly everything. it helps that I also have a redacted account and i buy a lot on bandcamp where I get the vinyl + a high res download included. It's hard for me to justify dropping $20-$25 on a single album download.

Same, knowing the HD tracks version of American idiot (the only hi Res track I needed) was available as an mqa full resolution file I could have for the price of one album a month from them made it all useless (my phone natively supports mqa and I'm already getting either a hipdac or dragonfly red)