Do you think vinyl records sound better than digital music?
 

I'm listening to Sgt Pepper's tonight on my record player. It sounds so much better and more realistic than the digital version. To me the difference is huge... Do you notice a big difference between vinyl and digital?

Yes, absolutely.

There are some LPs that I find do sound better than CDs, it all depends on the pressing.

Some people tend to like the distortion and limited dynamic range of vinyl. Plus I guess they like the instant destruction of the track starting on the very first play. They also like the warm distortion of tube gear.

Most nutcase audiophiles with decent hearing (like myself, 25 years ago) spent thousands on esoteric bits of gear like direct-to-disc vinyl, virgin vinyl, the Garrard 301 Grease Bearing turntable, transcription arms, Thorens TD124MKII, DBX 5BX, Altec 604-Es, Bozaks, bazillion dollar cartridges, EQed speaker systems, room analyzers, Dolby gear, other dynamic range inhancers, equalizers, tone control banks, and all of their previous and later iterations, trying to get close to the sound of a simple CD from a vinyl record source.

Most of us tossed out all that junk and routed the signal directly from CD player to gain-controlled amps. It took about two years to get really good CDs, but the worst of them were (and remain) light-years better than vinyl on both sound and durability.

I've listened to masters directly off the Studer, Otari, and others in direct comparison with vinyl. Half of the music is missing on the test pressings, let alone the mass-stamped consumer end-product.

Vinyl remains absolutely great for nostalgia, kinda like going to a high school reunion to see what the homecoming queen and the quarterback look like all those years later.

Always instructive to learn from someone else what I am hearing ;)

Vinyl deniers should a/b the CD and vinyl of David Gilmour's Live in Gdansk. Both great, the vinyl sounds better to me. My turntable is an old Harmon Kardon T40, nothing fancy.

I prefer digital recordings sound wise for most anything done since the early days of digital.

Vinyl is better if you’ve spent the money needed for a decent system, your hearing is good, you are listening in a nice room, etc. Had a decent system once, but certainly not MacIntosh — or modern equivalent— level.

Nowadays, I love streaming with almost unlimited choice of music and a modest set of headphones. No media storage or big systems to maintain.

I usually play my guitar or mandola if I’m in my quiet cave (little room). Often record it to listen later, even if just once.

But there was a time when tube amps and preamps, decent speakers, etc., were important and appreciated.

…different…yes….better?…..that’s up to the listener to decide….

Really good, practical point. I don't have the money to spend on a great setup. I have a Sony record player and an Andover Spinbase, which together cost well under $1000. And I can compare that to a bluetooth Bose speaker, one of those small one-foot things, through which I play music from Spotify. If there's a marked difference in quality between vinyl and digital, I'm not sure if I'll ever have the setup or the ear to tell the difference.

Back in the early to mid '80s, I had a coworker who was a huge audiophile (with a trust fund income). State of the art, from turntable/cartridge, CD player, amplifying system and speakers. He gave me a blindfold test with the same passage from an Angel recording of Aida. Hands down, the LP had a better sound. He had well over $10,000 (close to $30,000 in today's dollars) invested in his system, so an average system might not give the same results, especially depending on the TT and cartridge as any distortion or lack of fidelity there would be magnified.

I believe I don't have golden ears, and I grew up in a time and with a budget that limited what I could spend on music listening equipment back in the LP era. I enjoyed listening to music very very much back then, even if the limited quality of my equipment might seem as if it would disqualify me from that. I heard the music through the rough presentation of the sound of it.

I heard CDs around the time they came out*, though I didn't own a CD player for some time (no money for one, and I had a considerable investment in LPs which is where my music listening budget all went). They sounded good to me on what where probably pretty good systems for the era. I noticed the absence of surface noise and other vinyl record artifacts the most -- that was striking and welcome. Yes, I'm aware I'm supposed to hear digital inexactness in representing waves, missing "warmth" and so on. Didn't hear that -- bad ears or focus being elsewhere? Can't really say.

I eventually got a CD player, eventually a lot of CDs. At that time, I preferred their sound over playing my LPs. Now I tend to listen to streaming services, which we all know isn't ideal from a reproduction standpoint,** but I sure love the most anything whenever you want, wherever you are in an instant access. Just like the teenager who listened on transistor radios and cheap plastic turntable combos I'm listening most to the music and less to the quality of reproduction. I listen to music from all eras, so a lot of it was digital from the microphone or the board on, and even some that was digital from the moment the note was made.

When I occasionally listen to my old LPs and try to be objective, I sometimes find the mixes (particularly early stereo mixes) and mastering odd and not particularly effective. Those are artifacts of taste and their times to a degree, and not the fault of the format. Similarly, but contrastingly, I really really miss the LP package. That may be nostalgia, but that great foot square cover, and liner notes, and eventually inventiveness in using the packaging format added something I think was a real objective plus.

*The Twin Cities was something of a early digital recording adoption center, and some of my early CD listening experiences were with an MD who was an investor in Rykodisk.

**The compressed formats of course, and then that "anywhere/anytime" often means earbuds too. And then there's the issue of how little artists and recordists get per play.

Hold on, let me get some popcorn!

I absolutely can tell the difference between analog/analog vinyl, and MP3 digital. MP3's are nasty and flat in comparison. But there haven't been widespread creation of pure analog recordings (analog tape to analog master to vinyl) since digital mastering became common, maybe in the 1980's. I have some Miles Davis recordings on both AA vinyl and somewhat early CD's, and the difference between them is astounding. The vinyl, on an entry level audiophile system, is so clear and transparent, you can tell where the instruments are located, the dynamic range is much greater than the exact same recording on CD. But digital has come a long way, has made great strides both forward and back. MP3 is sampled at 320 Kbps, CD's are sampled at 1,140 kbps and there is a high resolution audio format that samples at 9,216 kbps. Somewhere in there they do get better than analog on vinyl, I would expect. Vinyl recordings from current digital masters are not all that special, I wouldn't buy one, I'd buy the CD.

H,
Totally agreed!

You've absolutely made my day!

Remember the Burwen Click & Pop Suppressor?

Best regards,
Howard Emerson

I don't think it's quite that simple.

Now this is just me, but with anything that's never been digital, like pre-80's vinyl or old tapes from work, or label-release cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes... I can listen to those for hours, even if it's music I don't love and/or a not-great recording.

But with anything digital, I'll start playing it (in civilian mode, for pleasure and relaxation) and I'll last about 15 minutes before I get agitated and have to shut it off.

If it's a work situation, or I'm plowing through a song list for somebody I'm gonna play with, I can manage without it being a big deal. But listening just for fun like I used to do pre-digital? No way.

This is exactly what I had in mind when I started my thread about old vinyl appreciation. :cool:

And you are also right about the timeline - first digital recording/mastering came about by the end of 70s..

To me, the pinnacle of analog recording, and mixing/production is Sade´s first albums... there´s nothing like that IMO

Sheffield labs pressings.

Try Thelma Houston, I've Got the Music in Me.

The CD sucked the life out of it big time.

Sheffield Labs which produced that album in the mid 1970's also has been for some time producing and selling CDs and swears by their audio quality. Digital (like most things) depends on when, where, and who.
I have for example the Sheffield Lab Test CD from 2011 - has extremely nice audio on it.

In the early 80s it became common to cut lacquers for LPs by running the master analog tape through a digital delay to the cutter head, while the actual analog audio only went to the preview circuitry. So your supposedly all-analog vinyl actually wasn't. And after the first run of lacquers for a release, the masters were dubbed to Sony 1610 or 1630 digital cassettes, and any lacquers for subsequent pressings were made from those.

Jim Gordon & Jim Keltner on drums.

What's not to love?

HE

At one point in time I thought I could hear all sorts of subtle differences in high-end audio gear. And some of the earliest CD releases were pretty dreadfully mastered and sound harsh and awful. But after a few years the industry figured out how to make a digital recording and release it on CD that sounded fine.

Then the MP3 era came along and I was totally convinced I could hear a different in audiophile lossless formats versus "compressed" lossy stuff. That lasted until I put together a great trouble and not inconsiderable expense a very high-end setup for doing A/B/X tests with very neutral DAC's, a good headphone amp and a few hundred dollar headphone.

It was absolutely shocking how far down I could squeeze the bit rate on an MP3 or AAC or other lossy format before the lossy track became distinguishable (in a blind test) from the original lossless encoding. Even with extremely well recorded and mastered digital source material.

Depending on the type of music sometimes as low as 96kbps bit rate would still fool me into not being able to guess which was which. I can't remember the particular format that worked best (maybe Vorbis?) but there was no source material I could find where a 256kbps lossy file sounded different than uncompressed whether MP3 or whatever. And the best encoder seemed "perfect" at 192kbps.

It was disappointing partly because I could not hear what I thought I was hearing and partly because at the end of the day you hate to have spend hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours finding a "no difference" result. But there it was.

I have a long standing sentimental connection with analog/vinyl recordings being a child of the 60's. I doubt at this point, anything would ever eclipse that even though I've made a career out of working with digital audio. When I listen to Sgt Pepper's on vinyl it's just a completely different vibe. It's emotional. Whether it's "better" audio or not is not really part of the equation for me.

Preach it.. glad to hear from someone who really knows ;)

Even with my limited knowledge - All analog was finished by 1983/4

And you can hear it... or you can´t :)

For me it's always been the quality of the singing, the quality of the composition, the quality of the playing ---- and everything else comes a long, long, long distant second.

My Linn LP12, Lingo, Naim ARO, Klyde was bettered by a Raspberry Pi3 and Alloo DigiOne hat streaming AIFF files. End of.

Many many thousands vs. a few hundred dollars.

As others have said, nostalgia and/or distortion.

Cheers,
Steve

Y'all know what they have to do to the signal to get it on vinyl and still be playable? The compression. RIAA EQ curve. Even the fact that the inner grooves have to hold more info in a given length due to fixed rotational speed so you actually lose quality on the later tracks on a side? The signal on a vinyl album doesn't have any more "fidelity" to the original than digital.

Yeah, bad digital sounds like crap, and there were plenty of early CDs that sounded bad before they figured things out. Likewise, low-bitrate, lossy mp3s can suck. But I'm with Brent Hutto. Get a player with good DACs (and most are good enough these days) and do a real blind ABX test, and I think you'll find that with high bitrate digital, even lossy, you won't be able to tell the difference.

I take that back--with some music, you might... because the digital can have a *greater* dynamic range than you can put on vinyl.

Don't forgot that any quality "affordable" CD players did not come along until the mid to late 90's.

Sadly, I don't recall what a record sounds like because I've been listening to digital music for so long.

Coincidentally, I unpacked a bunch of my records from the 80s and hung the album covers in my guitar room. I don't have a record player to play them to compare them to the CDs that replaced them though.

I wonder if the Greatest Generation used to crow about how wax-cylinders were superior to vinyl?

I think it comes down to “beauty is in the ear of the beholder”. Or beer holder?
I do enjoy spinning vinyl, pops, hiss, and skips.

I think Bart Simpson said something like that...