Audio DesignLine Blog
Audio myth: Vinyl better than CD?
Rich Pell
10/31/2007 1:35 PM EDT
Having had the opportunity - that is, "had no other option than to" - listen to my favorite music on vinyl for many years before switching to CDs, I know there's no way I'd ever go back. But there's no denying some people prefer the sound of vinyl - and it does have a sound - to its digital counterpart.
This brings us to one of the myths in the article:
Portability is no longer any reason to stick with CDs, and neither is audio quality.
Hey, it's one thing to subjectively prefer vinyl's "warmth" and "richer sound" (what others might call "muddy bass" and "rolled-off highs") to CDs. But that subjective judgment shouldn't be equated with better "audio quality," which implies a more rigorous technical standard of measurement.
Everything else being equal - and admittedly, that isn't always the case - I know of no technical criterion where vinyl is in any way superior to CD (with the possible exception of upper frequency range, but only in some special cases). This of course doesn't suggest that all CDs sound better than all LPs, or vice versa, or that CDs are perfect - only that CDs offer a (far) greater potential for accurate sound reproduction.
Which brings us to another myth:
Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes [as CDs], records generally offer a more nuanced sound.
Huh? The author here is referring to the so-called "loudness war," which refers to the music industry's tendency to highly compress the dynamic range of recordings so that they can be recorded at a louder level.
The fact that many in the recording industry are engaging in this silly and detrimental practice is really beside the point. There's no getting away from the fact that CDs offer - by far - the better recording medium for wide-dynamic-range recordings compared to vinyl by virtue of the former's inherently wider dynamic range capability.
And finally, when it comes to popular audio myths, here's one of my all-time favorites:
Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary.
This statement is, of course, mistaken on several points, but remains a popular belief among many non-technical audiophiles and listeners. Obviously it shows a misunderstanding of Nyquist's theorem, but also a failure to recognize - or acknowledge - that the "data present in an analog groove" is limited in any way.
Once again this appears to be a case of music listeners and audiophiles grasping for technical reasons to justify their subjective preferences. Why they persist in doing this I'm not sure - perhaps it has something to do with a need to be "right" - but in the vinyl vs. CD debate this approach is destined to prove unrewarding.
Comments, questions or suggestions? Email me at rich.pell@verizon.net.
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msd1107
11/1/2007 2:19 PM EDT
Not really mentioned is that analog is digital at the fundamental physical level. So there is an underlying noise floor and distortion level that can never be overcome.
Also, producing the analog record is an inherently distortion producing process. Playback is even more distortion producing at multiple levels (ever seen the response curve of a turntable responding to a noise burst?). Playback also is a destructive process, degrading the record on each playback. Paradoxically, the optimum way to preserve and enjoy your precious vinyl is to play it back once, digitizing it, store it on a computer, and play back the digitized copy.
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Mike_Demler
11/1/2007 7:18 PM EDT
Rich - good post. I had to go read the Wired article and post my comments there as well. I wrote an article more than fifteen years ago on the same subject. One explanation for this current blog storm is that all bloggers are provocateurs to some extent, aren't we? One a technical level, some vinyl nuts just see all those digital waveforms as somehow inherently flawed, and science be damned to convince them otherwise.
But this comment here: "analog is digital at the fundamental physical level. So there is an underlying noise floor and distortion level that can never be overcome" is equally wrong. At what level is that Mr/Ms msd1107? The quantum level? Noise in analog is still analog; thermal noise, shot noise, 1/f noise.
These are the fundamental limits on the noise floor, not anything digital!
-Mike analogeda.blogspot.com
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rpell
11/6/2007 5:11 PM EST
Mike,
Thanks. I enjoyed your take on the vinyl vs. CD subject as well on your blog (analogeda.blogspot.com). With all of the thing's vinyl has going against it - including the RIAA curve that you mention - it's amazing it can sound as good as it does.
Rich Pell
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Assaf
11/10/2007 4:19 AM EST
Hi all,
I would like to pin point few reasons, that I believe keeping the myth alive:
One of the reasons that Vinyl kept on living after the CD was introduced and still living up to this day, is the fact that a lot of titles - first introduced in the early years of the CD, were terribly digitally mastered or in other words the transformation from analog to digital was so bad, that they just sounded inferior to the Vinyl version.
Another reason is the fact that tapes made 40-50 years ago wore out with time. New CDs made from those tapes cant reproduce the original sound quality that was captured on vinyl those days.
The third and last reason is probably the fault of sound engineers in the quest for more volume and compression (i.e. the loudness wars) more and more titles are driven to the point that the recording reaches over the 0DBFS limit, this create a distortion that sounds worse then any overdriven vinyl recording.
The bottom line, most people dont understand and dont care abut the technical mumbo jumbo, and make wrong comparison between one media to another (Vinyl vs. CD), instead of making the comparison between one master recording to another, and as previously written, transferring a good sounding Vinyl to CD will sound as good as the original Vinyl.
Regards,
Assaf
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Assaf
11/10/2007 4:19 AM EST
Hi all,
I would like to pin point few reasons, that I believe keeping the myth alive:
One of the reasons that Vinyl kept on living after the CD was introduced and still living up to this day, is the fact that a lot of titles - first introduced in the early years of the CD, were terribly digitally mastered or in other words the transformation from analog to digital was so bad, that they just sounded inferior to the Vinyl version.
Another reason is the fact that tapes made 40-50 years ago wore out with time. New CDs made from those tapes cant reproduce the original sound quality that was captured on vinyl those days.
The third and last reason is probably the fault of sound engineers in the quest for more volume and compression (i.e. the loudness wars) more and more titles are driven to the point that the recording reaches over the 0DBFS limit, this create a distortion that sounds worse then any overdriven vinyl recording.
The bottom line, most people dont understand and dont care abut the technical mumbo jumbo, and make wrong comparison between one media to another (Vinyl vs. CD), instead of making the comparison between one master recording to another, and as previously written, transferring a good sounding Vinyl to CD will sound as good as the original Vinyl.
Regards,
Assaf
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earll
5/6/2010 9:16 AM EDT
billg at audiolabs:most recordings are analog befor they are transfered to digital.you can get the warmth of analog and still have the digital low noise figure,i have made recordings direct to a hd;which to me sounds a little raw,at some frequencys,the high end sounds very clear and undistorted,i have designed after many years an interface that makes a cassett,tape or cd sound better before it converted to digital format,it even fooled a recording eng at crystalrain studio's who thought he was listening to a cd.untill i stoped the tape.i use this to copy,from radio and vinal,as wellas cd's.
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