The entire experience of vinyl helps to create its appeal. Vinyl appeals to multiple senses—sight, sound, and touch—versus digital/streaming services, which appeal to just one sense (while offering the delight of instant gratification). Records are a tactile and a visual and an auditory experience. You feel a record. You hold it in your hands. It’s not just about the size of the cover art or the inclusion of accompanying booklets (not to mention the unique beauty of picture disks and colored vinyl). A record, by virtue of its size and weight, has gravitas, has heft, and the size communicates that it matters.
Anyone who says vinyl sounds objectively better – using the same amplifier and speaker hardware as modern media – can hardly be taken seriously, but that doesn’t mean vinyl can’t sound subjectively better. When it comes to older music from the ’60s and ’70s, I enjoyed listening to it on vinyl records (I don’t have a record player at this moment), but that had nothing to do with sound quality, and everything to do with the more archaic, unique experience of listening to a vinyl record.
Imo, a lot of the bad rep from digital formats is bad implementation, varying from bad (re)mastering for CDs to encoding errors in mp3s. Don’t forget that, when they are introduced, one is comparing newly acquired skills for a new technology with decades of experience and technical refinements in the old one.
Using the same amplifier and speaker hardware vinyl can sound objectively better because they are usually better mastered.
In fact, most vinyls sound better than their CDs counterparts. That’s an empirical truth. On the paper, CD specs are superior to vinyl specs, yeah. But specs don’t matter, MUSIC matters. And music albums sound better on vinyl than CD most of the time.
Why that happens? Well, the reasons are endless: loudness wars, mastering process focused on MP3 and streaming, ecc. But those are excuses, reality is the only truth.
Right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsJ0BldwB5w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQgPAKEbBDY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eC6L3_k_48
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rofpSv8Rnco
Ehh, music is for listening, not looking at waveforms or spectrograms, that’s meaningless! (it’s like judging the quality of photographs formats by how they sound when the pictures are treated like sound spectrogram / converted to sound…idiocy, wouldn’t you agree?); it is a simple fact that, when you record vinyl output to a CD, nobody can distingusih the two.
You lost me at objective and empirical.
The listening experience is only part of the process, and I think it’s entirely reasonable that audio pareidolia plays a significant part in what is a subjective process. You get out of it what you expect you were going to get out of it which is sort of the point the author makes.
But I accept entirely that the mastering target of the original recording can play a significant part. Which is why I gather someone who has mastered a recoding for CD or MP3 might think the vinyl or magnetic tape version is rubbish.
It seems to be a pretty reasonable and moderate assumption, that how you “think” it should sound and how it was “intended” to be played makes a difference.
Is a violin still a violin if it’s made of plastic, and do you judge it against the timber version?
It was true for till recently for vinyl.
Nut now that every idiot wants to release on vinyl again and there are not enough people to work on it or they want it done cheap: they are just using a machine to do the mastering based on the CD audio and it sucks.
Just buy something newly released on both CD and vinyl and listen, you’ll know what I mean.
And in the past I even saw evidence that some vinyls were made from… mp3s. But of course audiophools swore by those records…
” vinyl can sound objectively better because they are usually better mastered”
Of course vinyl sounds better because it *IS* better.
What some people don’t seem to get is when you digitize an analog signal you lose part of it no matter what you do.
Easiest way to see this is today’s over the air tv broadcasts. Years ago no matter how bad the analog signal was you could still receive enough information to make out what was being transmitted.
With digital you either get what’s being transmitted or a frozen or blank screen, Nothing in between
The in-between is what you lose with digital music formats/music on cdrom.
yoko-t,
https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
+1
Yes, seems like a lot of people believe in the mythical “magic ear” that doesn’t exist. Sure, vinyl has better frequency range… which NOBODY can hear. There’s a reason 44100 Hz was chosen as the sample rate for CDs. More people need to read that link, though it probably won’t convince them – too much confirmation bias.
Well, the problem is that perhaps you cannot hear pure 44kHz, but in an impure sound (say, music) those high pitched frequencies can influence listenable frequencies and thus influence the harmonics, which might explain why VINYL sounds better despite human ears limitations. Plus that some analog amps treat signal differently than a “simple” DAC.
By posting audiophool misunderstandings, you make it evident that you simply don’t understand the science which makes digital possible…
Does anyone remember the old ads for the high-end Memorex Cassette Tapes that aired on tv showing a glass being shattered by the playback of Ella Fitzgerald voice, and does anyone ever recall seeing a ad using cdrom or other digital formats pulling off such a stunt?
Such ads weren’t repeated probably because they were, well, stupid… (but of course some audiophools would like you to believe that shattering glasses is the purpose of audio hw…)
I understand the mystique of listening to an album, it is like a ritual for some people. Mainly because that is what they grew up with, and they associate that experience with the actual experience of listening to music.
But to claim vinyl is the better system for music reproduction is just a very subjective opinion. Objectively vinyl really is not that good of a medium for music storage and reproduction compared to modern alternatives. Far from it actually. It is incredibly noisy, very dependent on the quality of the actuator/needle system in the record player, it degrades with each play, and has serious limitations in terms of channels and ranges of audio that can store and reproduce.
Some people do not understand that a lot of progress is based on the limitations and problems of the current state of technology that leads people to solve and create new systems that overcome those limitations/problems.
What happens, in my opinion, is that people make strong emotional connection with the products/technology of their formative years or with special occasions in their lives, to the point they assume that product/technology is the essence of the technology/goal itself.
When color film was introduced, tons of critics complained because they had grown up associating cinema with being black and white, so they claimed something was “lost” in the transition to color. It also happens in this site constantly, when the old farts keep crooning about the freaking Amiga or any other old ass system how that’s when “computing” was fun and how things were supposed to be. They don’t see how kids these days are having a blast developing all sorts of apps on their current systems (which are orders of magnitude cheaper and more democratic than those crappy 80s or 90s boxes and buggy OSs)
This is a constant, perhaps part of the human experience. In the future, when we have neural implants which deliver music to our brains with perfect reproduction, I’m sure today’s kids will be complaining about how that’s worse because real music is supposed to be listened using airpods and an iphone.
Tl:Dr, no vinyl does not sound better, far from it. Unless you like crackling noises and degradation of quality with each passing play of the record.
If anyone prefers vinyl for sound quality reasons, they should rip it the first time they play it, because it degrades with use. And sure, mastering, EQ etc might make a difference between vinyl and digital consumer formats, but probably much less than the difference between good and bad recording. Let’s face it, at my age even bothering to also download flac where available, and not just mp3, is probably a conceit.
I can *understand* the experiential side of it, but I was always too worried about wear & tear to get any extra enjoyment out of that. I’ve bought two vinyls in the last four years, direct from the artists, to support them. There is no such “special value” to the other vinyl in my collection (all bought 1990 or earlier), and if I could just swap all 79 of those for CD or downloads I’d do it in a heartbeat.
Just a quick scan of the web it’s quite interesting this debate, it reminds me of those $300 gold plated leads that are objectively better.
@gld59, I think you are correct, the most objective measure of a benefit might be to those struggling artists selling vinyl at the door.
Nostalgia is not special to vinyl disks. Any obsolete technology can have it’s fanbase of nostalgians, and many do.
Not only nostalgia, but also survivor bias. We compare the average quality of today (all the junk in the billboards) with the top items from the past (the 10 songs per year that everyone remembers decases later).
We also put a lot of value on things that we cannot do ourselves. We can all burn cd’s, but we cannot do the same for vinyl records so we assume that only specialists make vinyl records and their quality will be higher than those cd’s.
Psychology is a powerful influencer
Even sales of tapes have increased again.
Pre-CD, I only bought vinyl if it had great artwork or songs unavailable on cassette. I would then copy them on to tape because that was so much more convenient.
I used to think I missed what some people refer to as the “ritual” of playing vinyl records (as described in the article) but after my partner and I spent a month housesitting for one of her friends and being given free reign to play the vinyl records, I was reminded of how much hassle and stress was involved.
Regarding sound quality, for the equipment I have and the circumstances in which I listen to music, an mp3 is absolutely fine.
The ritual is magical…
Anyways, there were vinyls bridging old and new – data vinyl!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FloppyRom_Magazine.jpg
http://www.kempa.com/vinyl-data/
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE
from https://github.com/janbredenbeek/Basicode-wiki/wiki#basicode-across-europe
While I wouldn’t call myself ‘anti-vinyl’, I didn’t really purchase that many records (under 100) before CDs came out and I started buying those. I thought they did sound ‘better’, at the very least cleaner. However, as time has gone on, CDs have gone somewhat downhill…mostly due to the ‘loudness war’ but also because I think many producers have become a bit lackadaisical in their attention to detail during mixing and mastering…maybe they think ‘digital’ will cover up for them or something.
But I’ve also come to find that vinyl DOES ‘sound better’…there is definitely something a bit hard to quantify, but on very good equipment (we’re talking hi-fi here, multi-thousand dollar components) it is very, very easy to choose vinyl over CD, though less-so over higher quality formats like Blu Ray Audio or SACD…but it is still there. I think it is because ALL digital formats are, by the nature of how they work, LESS than a truly good analog source. There is less data. Think about it…digital formats have a truncated frequency range…so they contain less information that way. AND, they are sampled…they are essentially a bunch of millions of ‘snapshots’ of the sound, rather than the straight-up sound. There is data missing that way as well.
Yeah, a CD has the range of AVERAGE human hearing…20hz to 20,000hz. Maybe audiophiles are those that can hear beyond those limits? Maybe there are bits outside of that range that even those with average hearing can sense? Maybe there is harmonic detail that is missing with the digital sampling method? Who knows…I doubt it is measurable with current technology. But, yes, analog music ‘sounds better’, at least on high fidelity equipment….even if the pops and crackles are annoying as hell…
Posted some videos up there (“awaiting moderation”) that shows there is indeed a cutoff frequency in the CD, not in the VINYL because you get a raw analog output regardless of the mastering. You hardly can “saturate” a VINYL sound while it is easy to get CD digital data clamped to 16 bits (or less). Those videos demonstrates the effect quite well, but that sure shows what a bad EQ can do on CD.
You’re wrong about a couple of things.
First, CDs have greater dynamic at 90-95 dB compared to vinyl, at 70-75 dB.
When referring to “cutoff frequency”, are you referring to the maximum possible frequency a digital recording can have? Because, if so, at 44Khz it is twice what the human ear can hear. That number is chosen for a specific reason, in that any waveform can be reproduced exactly by individual samples if you sample at a rate that is twice the frequency of the waveform. Since the highest the ear can hear is 22Khz, the sample rate of CDs is 44Khz.
And, no, you don’t get raw analog output when making a vinyl record. Every record has it’s audio go through a 16-bit 50Khz DAC at some point.
Yes. Vinyl records are analog reproductions of a digital signal. It’s been this way since the late 70’s.
I’d like to believe like you, but strangely, the videos I posted are quite demonstrating and convincing.
“Yes. Vinyl records are analog reproductions of a digital signal. It’s been this way since the late 70’s.”
And before the late 70’s?
Before the 70’s our mics were not good enough but in the seventies they got really good, as also the whole production expertise.
Typical vinyl records are effectively “clamped” more than CD, they are the equivalent of around 12 bits or so, the rest is noise / contains no information (and anyway, you must realise that the typical source of audio for vinyls are, for quite some time, CDs…)
Osmodious,
Taste in music has changed, the loudness wars are very real. Music and genres have changed dramatically, and many people consider modern music worse for their tastes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/what-these-grammy-songs-tell-us-about-the-loudness-wars.html
That’s fine, but this really says more about the correlation of that type of music with the existence of vinyl than the recording quality of analog and digital formats themselves.
Often times the suggestion that analog recordings are better come from the idea that mathematical analog representations are perfect. However in the physical domain analog recordings are inherently imperfect and have a finite frequency response. The slope of a pit and motion of a needle are finite and the process of making analog copies will also be imperfect.
Digital is also finite and inexact, but it can mathematically represented to arbitrarily high levels of precision. So assuming sufficient precision on the digital side, there should be no question that it can represent a waveform better than a physical analog medium, obviously it can. The real question is how much accuracy is needed to beat the physical analog copy and whether digital ADCs & codecs genuinely give us that accuracy.
I’m sure people have already done this test somewhere, but it’d be interesting to take some pure mathematical waveforms and comparitively see how well standard analog audio equipment and digital audio equipment can handle them.
The next question is regardless of how accurately we can represent waveforms, how well can humans perceive them. There’s obviously some point at which humans just can’t perceive the difference that additional fidelity gives us through scientific A/B testing, That point could be different for different humans, but given enough of a safety buffer, recording fidelity above our sensory limits doesn’t really matter. Assuming audio scientists have done their job well, it’s highly unlikely that anyone can even perceive a digital copy at sufficiently high quantization levels and sample rate.
How many times we had this same question raised by “believers” here? ;p
And how many times we had already said that no, opinions from random guys don’t have the same validity of those of experts?
By the way, I will repeat it one last time: the worst offender on sound reproduction is the speaker all the others pale in comparison.
Somehow, people want to believe on “magic”, math and physics be damned.
All of you that believe on “audiophiles”, go and buy the most expensive gold-plated cables you can find. :p
PS.: I think it is clear but, just to be sure, the critics are not direct toward you Alfman
‘Assuming audio scientists have done their job well, it’s highly unlikely that anyone can even perceive a digital copy at sufficiently high quantization levels and sample rate.”
Wrong. Most people will tell you that digital copies sound flat or lifeless when played back on digital devices.
yoko-t,
Wrong. Double-blind tests win out.
yoko-t,
kwan_e said it, blind A/B testing is how you have to measure this scientifically because just asking people will get you a biased & scientifically unsound dataset (no pun intended). You can increase the depth and sample rate in small increments until no humans are able to identify the differences more than 50% of the time (ie a random coin toss). Subjects can’t introduce bias when they can’t persieve a difference.
To be clear, in non-blind tests some people will consistently tell you X sounds better than Y owing to our brains trying to make the real world align with preconceptions, conscious and unconscious. Human nature has a tendency to respond as one would expect us to response even when the responses don’t fit the facts. Science can be used to measure this too by lying to the subjects about the nature of the test with false A/B samples.
I’m reminded of the penn and teller water bottle survey, which although not very scientific shows this effect pretty well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFKT4jvN4OE
Here’s the funny thing, even if something like audio quality is based on a lie, some people might subjectively enjoy analog records better anyways because of the nostalgia and fondness for previous experiences, which isn’t a bad thing. Having an old fashioned record player can change a room’s atmosphere and give it character. It doesn’t have to be supierior to modern tech to be enjoyable.
yoko-t,
Well I hope those “most people” you said exist have a hell of good set of speakers, just to start. Don't believe me? Look at the frequency response and distortion fields of them, specially at the extremes.
Don't get me wrong, it is not that I don't believe on you but that all blind tests that were done and all we know about math, physics and biology involved on our sense and the paraphernalia that we use to capture and process sound just seems to contradict you.
Frequently (just to not say always; lets keep a little margin to no characterize confrontation) the perceived difference comes from inappropriate ripping/processing, i.e., whoever did it didn’t take the time to learn how to properly do it or, perhaps, thought they knew and messed with default settings.
For some time, I refuse to try to influence the desire of people to acquire sound equipment as there are too many bullshit floating around pushing people to acquire things that have a huge cost without giving a fraction of a cent of real improved performance over real good and down to earth ones.
Like Alfman said, read about loudness war and be aware that it didn’t play a shameful role only on CD/digital media, it spread to speakers, amplifiers, equalizers and other equipment.
“Flat” is a geometrical term, “lifeless” – funeral term I suppose, not whatever nonsense you convinced yourself of…
Osmodious, what makes vinyl versions “stand out” can be just as well achieved by simply recording vinyl output to a CD (it’s indistinguishable, no need for “higher quality formats like Blu Ray Audio or SACD”)… Placebophiles claim to be able to hear beyond CD limits, but they are unable to demonstrate it in any rigorous, scientific testing.
Is there irony in posting spectrums produced by an ADC and then claiming DAC is somehow flawed?
Even so, most of the displayed spectrum data is noise, so in this quality debate is the true claim “Music with some dirt” is better than purity. I suppose that makes this debate no different than fans who arguing live music is better than recordings. Of course there is no correct answer, only subjective attitudes from either side of the debate. You may as well debate the color of your favorite audio tone!
If you made a recording of an LP with high quality digital equipment, it would be very very very hard to distinguish between the LP and the digital recording of that LP and much more harder to tell which version of both is the original or which sounds better.
I don’t believe that Vinyl is the better technology, but sometimes CDs sound worse. One I’ve compared a Jethro Tull album on LP and CD and the LP was obviously better sounding (not warmer, but tighter, better defined – at least me and a friend agreed). This only means that they somehow managed to make a crappy CD out of good recording.
AD/DA converters a pretty damn good since quite some time. It’s the most perfect part in the audio signal chain. We really should focus on everything else…
Not “very very very hard to distinguish between the LP and the digital recording of that LP”, but impossible; this test have been done many times, nobody is able to ABX between a LP and CD recorded from that LP.
But don’t use placebophile terms… And while there quite possibly was a difference of mastering between the two, that’s not how proper blind test is setup – making digital copies out if vinyl to compare is crucial.
Dunno, but I do know people are strange so that might explain it.