I don’t understand why all vinyl enthuses like my self wont just admit that: Vinyl is nostalgic and tells a story that CD’s don’t. Its takes us back to a precious time and memory.
Same deal with tube equipment. We're nostalgic to the old fermilure coloration, noise and distortion. You could prove this by a listening test with a panel of people that have not had the old tech experience
You guys nailed it, I remember when CD's first came out, they used to have AAD, ADD , DDD and DAD on the discs to denote the recording, mastering path of the product, now you don't get that as essentially everything is DDD..REGARDLESS, you still need decent hardware to bring out the best in vinyl, the question of SPEAKERS needs to be covered in the mix as more efficient speaker will produce that 'warmer' more 'natural' sound vinyl enthusiasts swear by...
100% agreed. I find most CDs are excellent. Only the "remastered" ones of the legendary recordings tend to be compressed. Any of the newer pop music is garbage anyway. Who cares if it's compressed? But on the compression argument, every vinyl record has compressed sound. The format is extremely limited in dynamic range so the engineers compressed the recording. The truth is: PEOPLE LOVE COMPRESSED MUSIC. An inconvenient truth that explains why mp3s and then Spotify were/are so popular.
@@thinkzinc100 mp3s and spotify were only popular for their convenience, and because the average person doesn't pay attention to details in audio, or even knows what to listen for.
@@thinkzinc100 Spot on!!! Cd is objestively the best medium if you are aiming for the best way to reproduce what you did in the studio! Vinyl is all about nostalgia!
Well put. I agree completely. I love LPs because I tend to listen to the whole album. Digital tracks are my preference at work, in the car or when I'm doing chores around the house. But at night when I want to have an intense connection with the music I put on a record.
***** No, you wouldn't. I've spent $2,500 on a *Michell Gyrodec SE* turntable which took 4 months to build in the UK, $1,000 on a *Michell Techno A' Tonearm* which took 6 weeks to build in the UK, and $950 for a *Sumiko Blackbird Moving Coil (MC) Cartridge* (2.5mV), $700 for the *Michell HR Precision Motor Power Supply*, and it's the greatest investment I've ever made. The sound is magic to my ears with my (New In Box) *Pioneer HPM-100's*, and (New In Box) *Onkyo M-504*, and (New In Box) *Onkyo P-304*. I've got an Okki Nokki RCM, and 100's of sealed LP's that I spent thousands of dollars on. Bands such as: Journey; Madonna; Commodores; Whitney Houston; Def Leppard; etc). The truth is, they all sound like they're singing right next to me. The "warmth" that you hear people throw around isn't exactly a "myth". With CD and the "Loudness War" going on, engineers have tampered with the EQ too much therefore ruining the original, natural sound. I am no longer in the peaceful state of mind when I listen to their digital counter-parts. In a blind test, there is a noticeable difference. My guests can all agree with me. It's an extra sense or some sort of unexplained feeling that I or my guests cannot even begin to explain. I'm 25 years old, and it's a stunning listening experience. Hi-Fi is no doubt amazing when it comes to playing vinyl. As for my personal opinion, Vinyl wins. If you guys have not invested into something as serious as I have, then you cannot comment that CD is better.
Random access. Skip. Pause. Play. Records are more involving because they have to be. Maybe it's due to their purely lossless nature. Maybe it's mechanics, you have to be more deliberate when listening to record, you don't have have the choices.
I have spent far less money on my turntable that you have and still share your sentiments. I don't think it's required to spend all that much money on a system to get great quality sound. More money can mean a more realistic experience, but I think it's important for people to understand that good sound doesn't have to spend $10k+ in audio. A very well thought out system in the $2k range (or perhaps less) can sound excellent.
I agree, lps hav a beautiful, rich lower register, @ least that's where I hear th biggest difference in my musical preferences. But let's be honest lps are kind of a pain in th ass! They're hard 2 find, they're expensive, sound degeneration and newly manufactured lps won't always hav this " lively" sound, as they're being transferred from digital to analog. And @ this stage of my life if I were2 pursue a audiophile lp collection, I'd hav 2 mortgage my home 2 get all those copies of Stones, Zeppelin, Floyd . It would take forever to find copies, and would cost bank, and would most likely b degraded. So I'll stick with cd's 4 along time.
Well that's a very real thing - I've been refurbishing my old Dual turntable in order to listen again to some dub reggae I only have on LP, but going against the vinyl experience is the polution of the music with clicks and surface noise (which is very noticable in dub it turns out, directly detracting from the music wheras its practically unnoticable with rock guitar!) My suspicion is that surface noise on the lead-in groove evokes a Pavlovian response of anticipation, would be interesting to make a device to emulate this for other formats and see if that's a strong effect.
I’d love to get the drugs vinyl enthusiasts are on. My friend has a super high end stereo ( over $100,000.00). He got the highest end classical vinyl he had, extolled its amazing virtues, and put it on his $10,000.00 turntable. AND, he was right: I could hear every vinyl crackle PERFECTLY!!!
@siu-hung Hung : believe me, my friend had already thought of that. He has incredibly expensive record cleaners and antistatic devices... Really helps the pops and crackels come through clearly, LOL.
I have Dave Weckl's the Master Plan 1991 release and buy and still sounds the same like the 1st day actually now sounds better because i have better CD player Actually the CDs has no problem no matter how many times you'll play them since of course you treat them good like no scratching them e.t.c They have no friction to deteriorate them unlike tapes & LPs have
Moon Shine I had a cheap CD player about 25 years ago that you could hear the disk spin in the player. When I eventually upgraded my player it did sound a lot better because of the insulation on the player itself.
Smaller and easier to store, cheaper, you can play it in anything that has disk entrance, you can transfer it digitally to files, it's not so delicate, yeah I prefer CD
I prefer CD for that and other practical reasons. Easier to rip to denser storage. You can get a 1TB micro SDXC card and for < 100 USD a phone that can use it, bluetooth or aux cable, with your preferred music app. You don't have to connect the phone to any service unless you want to use it as a phone or connect it to the internet on the go without a hub. Odds are you will never fill that up in your life time with just music that you'd actually play more than once.
The problem is not with digital as a medium. Digital can sound fantastic if you have a high linearity and precise analog to digital converter. Most DSD Native recordings sound almost identical to master tapes. PCM on the other hand does have a great potential but there is no analog to digital converter in the market that can record above 20 bits of linearity in real time so as a result there will be quantization errors and you wont capture the full resolution.
@Allthatyoutouch Many reasons: accurate reproduction, no degradation or wear unlike vinyl and cassette, and preservation. There are also many other reasons that I can address but these are main ones.
That is a pretty fair statement. Granted I feel analog tape gives a much more musical and emotional connection to the performance and digital sounds like a one dimensional cardboard cut out of the same recording.
@@latourhighendaudio I also have an emotional connection to my physical CD. To say that you can only be connected to your music if you use an analog format is a bunch of nonsense. Believe it or not, but the process of reading the CD is actually an analog process. Instead of a magnetic head or a stylus, you do it via a laser and there are modules that translate the light variations into digital signals.
@No Name Yes all records whether vinyl or CD are EQ'd during the mastering phase. Records are EQ'd during the cutting process and CD/digital when they are set up to be then made into a glass master or made available as files. It is this final EQ that changes the sound the most. Many hi res digital files sound better just because they have been re- EQ'd not because of any audible difference in resolution between CD and Hi Res files, which the human ear cannot in any event detect (despite what audiophiles claim) .
I was deep into high end audio starting in the 1960's, so I experienced the vinyl thing to the max, when CD's came along I couldn't switch over fast enough! When you go to a live concert there's no clicks, pops or hissing, which you get from ALL records and none at all from CD's. So you have to pick and choose among the CD's to get the right ones, and besides even a decent CD player is far cheaper than your vinyl set-up. I've been there, done that and will stick to CD's! At 74 years old I choose the future not the past.
Streaming has made CD's utterly obsolete. Their only purpose is if you wish to own a physical copy of your music. Vinyl remains this cool hobby, which arguably still produces the best sounds. Sure they are expensive and inconvenient, but if you don't want to be bothered by that, pay Spotify 7euros a month and you are set.
For a 74 year old you sure make stupid broad statements. Who are you to tell someone that ALL records have the pops and hisses? Maybe yours which you played on shitty equipment sound noisy but not fucking all of them smfh.
@@lehtokurppa7824 How does a vinyl arguably produce the best sound? If a CD sounds worse than vinyl, it's almost certainly a technical problem in conversion and not the format's fault itself. A CD file literally by laws of physics should always, always sound equal (if not using the extra space in it) or better than vinyl. PCM doesn't lose details in sound, if anything is damaged or non-existing in the digital version, it's the settings/set up's fault.
@@lehtokurppa7824I use/ listen to all three mediums. I like the sound of Vinyl the best. Streaming is convenient and sounds great, but what many gloss over is that the monthly plans are getting more expensive and most people do not buy the digital album/ songs, and in the unfortunately you have nothing to show for all the money you have spent. $9.99-10.00 a month x 10years that a lot of money, and is what the companies are betting on,…the long run and that most people on average listen to the same songs and albums. Sure you will get outliers in the bell curve, on both sides, but these companies have done the research and know playing/ listening habits. In the long run people are paying and re paying for the same music over and over again. It’s the same concept as unlimited data on cell phone, that’s what most people get, but they hardly use much and on average use the same amount every month and very little of it on average. I use Qobuz to stream music, and the music sounds great, but I have more recently having been thinking getting rid of it and spending the money on buying CD’s, vinyl or even burning the digital albums on cd ( using wav or flac).
it's not the format that make music sound better, it's the way it was mastered. CDs mastered in 80's sound better than CDs today because the dynamic range compression wasn't horrible. I have a CD with a song from 1985 and the same "remastered" in 1996. the remastered is louder. still sound ok, but not as good as the original 1985 master.
remaster vinyl sound better than original, what i am noticed, even cd not sound that good, on vinyl is only best sound, not any digital able that, full fact!
It's still present on many commercial CD albums. The loudness wars are still very much alive I'm afraid, although some studios do go to great lengths to avoid it unless the producer demands otherwise.
I think dynamic range was a consequence of the technology in the 80s. They couldn't accurately measure the dB of the audio, so that's why old CDs never hit -0dB. Also, when you buy a modern song in vinyl, you often find it has more dynamic range for some reason, perhaps the producer uses less limiting for vinyl presses?
Guys, I am happy to hear that CD has this much potential that goes untouched many times. Challenge for you people who are awesome and know the answer: Please list some AMAZING recordings that are on CD that you feel are a great example of CD's capabilities. I really want to hear these and am excited to see what's out there! Thank you!!
Took me a long time to get a CD player. My vinyl set up had progressed over years until I could hear all the dynamics and the 3 dimensional sound. Close your eyes and you could not tell where the speakers were - except for the cracks and Pops. Sound went way back and outside the speakers. Vocals you felt you could almost touch them. CDs only get this to some extent usually on quiet or simple passages. So glad I kept all my vinyl records including singles. Very expensive to replace them but they do wear out! I don't think young people listen to music sat down in front of speakers (like I used to) or even have the very precise system of vinyl set ups now.
Digital is perfect sound forever as long as you don't try vinyl. My pick is vinyl, truthfully though...... Listen to whatever makes the listening experience good for you. Cheers
I totally agree with you: vinyls may be technically inferior, but they make you feel like if you had been there. It's like having the band in your living room. I felt that when reaconditioned an old Dual turntable and I got shocked at how Genesis' A Trick Of The Tail sounds.
The end game is how well did the engineers do their jobs when it comes to music being transferred from the old studio tapes to CD format? Back in the 70's a group called Iron Butterfly came out with a record titled " Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida" that had wicked 17 minute drum solo on it. I liked it so well I immediately bought my own copy of the record. A few years later, ETCO came out with a CD version of that record. Talk about a train wreck! The background hiss was so bad that a lot of the drums were just overpowered to the point of being inaudible! I had both the vinyl and the reel-to-reel version of that album (and still do) and neither of them had that unbearable hiss! Normally CD's have a very sterile sound but not in this case!
In the 80s sound quality on a record player wasn't as good unless you spent a fortune on a good needle. No scratchy static on cds compared to records they must use some computer technology today on a record player to eliminate the static from scatching. People would pay as much as 1000 dollars for a good needle for a turntable to get the best sound out of a record cds were a cheaper way to get good sound quality and the laser would not wear out the disk on cd players and cds took up less room than records in your stereo cabinet and you could buy a cd player capable of holding as much as a hundred disks so you didn't have to handle your disks once they were in the machine. Today we have a internet and technology to have a music collection in a thumb drive and record player needles can be manufactured a lot cheaper than in the 80s and technology has improved 1000 times what it was like back then a nightclub to get the best sound out of records back in the 70s and 80s would spend thousands of dollars on a good sound system with a top end turntable and cartridge
I guess the question is how much of the feeling is placebo and how much of it is actually a product of the sound coming from the player. I love Vinyl but I still wonder if that's the case sometimes. Objectively the sound of my digital files is fantastic but man I just enjoy sitting in front of my hometheater and putting on a Vinyl,
That's because vinyl retains the ultrasonic frequencies of the musical instruments. CD does not retain those frequencies. That's why CD sounds like crap to many.
I'm not big on streaming music. I've always enjoyed hard copies. I like CDs, Vinyl and cassettes equally. It just depends on what format I'm in the mood to listen to.
The simple truth is that if vinyl was better than CD, CD would not have taken off given it was nearly twice as expensive as vinyl back then. Classical music, with its sound range and variety of instruments is very demanding. The first CDs were in fact classical. Vinyl needs filters to remove the grinding of the stylus. CDs bought nearly 40 years ago still sound in mint condition. That can't be said for vinyl. Vinyl is only good for the artwork on the covers. A problem with analogue was that it was recorded on tapes that produced a hiss. That needed filtering out. Vinyl is not for serious music lovers. Yes got a mention there. My experience at the outset was CD was far superior. Same amp with both. S shape tone arm and Shure V15 Mark III and Mark IV cartridge. Tangerine Dream's Logos sounded very muffled compared to the far more vibrant CD. Being far more expensive unscrupulous salespeople will try and make out vinyl is the way to go. Today all music is digital. Even old analogue has been converted to digital on computers to remove tape hiss etc. So analogue should not get a mention really. It's history and analogue is dead. No more.
Vinyl is my preference. Whether the sound is better or worse, I prefer it. Also, the 'highest quality' sound recording I have ever heard was a 12 inch single of Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire' played through a very, very expensive vinyl set up, with expensive needle, cables, speakers, arm etc. A truly amazing and detailed sound. I have not heard anything close to this. There is also something to be said about the album as a complete experience. An album is far more aesthetically pleasing and has a comforting physicality that CD's can't match. I remember when CD's came out. Everyone was raving about them but at the time I was singularly unimpressed. To my ears the sound was not as good, lacking depth, though I am no technician. Perhaps the quality of digital recordings has now surpassed vinyl. Still, you can't beat listening to a good band on vinyl. A band who designed their music for the vinyl format so that each side of the album is an expression of their creativity, with different moods and tempos.
I agree! From my experience, it depends on the source material (era, genre, etc), where it was recorded/mastered, the playback device, amp, and speakers. I ultimately enjoy FLAC CD replications the most because of the convenience. I don't think it is really worth paying the extra money for the expensive 96kHz tracks and above, but I wish CDs were 44.1kHz/24bit though for the dynamic range or possibly a lower noise floor.
For me when I want to actually listen to music and enjoy the experience i always go to my vinyl collection, but if I am multitasking and listening to musc i will go with my CD collection or my hi res audio files! I love the natural smooth sound that vinyl produces and it definitely sounds like you are there with the artist!
Nope Records are trash compact, disc is Better better sound and plus it can be played on the Xbox records are piece of trash. I can't even be played on consult what a trash format,
I agree, CDs are better. I used to listen to the Beatles albums throughout my adolescence and adulthood and when I decided to buy the digitally remastered version of these same recordings on vinyl, they sounded better than those I used to listen to back in the days. Same thing for Elton John albums. I bought the 'Classic Years' collection released on CD in the early 90s, remixed and remastered by Gus Dudgeon, the same guy who did the original mixing in the 70s. It kept the same feel of the original recordings, but with improved quality. Sometimes, the difference was huge. Such is the case with the live album 11-11-70 whose British mixing was dull and the new digital one hot and rich. Another thing that makes CDs sound better is the fact that from the first to the last track the ratio between media and data is kept, as for vinyl due to the difference of diameter as the needle runs the grooves closer to the label, dicreases and this ratio is not kept and consequently sound resolution is lower. Pete Townshend used to say their best gigs had bad terrible sound.
+jtownshend The 2009 CD remasters are currently the definitive version for sound quality. Before the remasters I would have preferred the original early press vinyls for all albums except for the 1987 Sgt Peppers and White Album CDs.
When I was a kid we all hated vinyl, pops, clicks, scratches, skips, background noise. Now we finally have a system that gets rid of all that for the most part and now people want to go back to vinyl. I do agree that it's in the mastering of the cd's. There are some real bad ones out there but there are also real bad mastered lp's. All in all a good mastered cd is going to give you a clean sound for ever (unless abused).The lp will eventually get it's pops n clicks no matter how careful you are. The CD is the superior format.
You guys just confirmed what I've been saying for the last 25 years.A good analogue recording will almost always sound better on vinyl while a well recorded digital recording will sound better on cd.I just don't understand why Audiophiles continue to wage bitter war of words on this.
Damain Crespo wrong, analog sounds are recorded in 24 bits and a CD can only do 16. So technically the Vynil is still superior because it can play 24 bit quality music, which the CD cannot.
@@Soldano999 And you can tell the difference, right? You're hearing and comprehension is THAT good? Let's play them both and I'll buy you a steak dinner if you get it right 5 out of 7 times which one is which during playback.
@@Soldano999 Talking about bits recorded as a vinyl analogue recording is madness. CD is the superior format with a higher dynamic range and a higher signal to noise ratio, that's an inescapable fact. That doesn't mean a CD recording will be better than Vinyl and could easily be worse but there is no doubt in terms of capability which one is technically superior.
Debunked long ago back in the late 80's and early 90's. Vinyl wins hands down if set up properly. It just have that life like sound, resonance etc that the cd's just can't quite capture. BTW the phono stage in the amp plays a huge huge role.
@MF Nickster I'm no audiophile nor a proclaimed possession of a pair of golden ears. But boy I had a few opportunities to hear some relatively expensive gear without going to insane levels and the LP simply sounded better through and through. It just has the sound, the tonal warmth and sense of presence that no amount of technical data/readings can explain. Have you had the chance to hear a properly set up system? I'm all ears and would be happy to review your suggestion and more if you have.
One other problem with vinyl records is that the sound isn't intelligently recorded onto the disc. On a CD the data is CIRC encodded. I look at a scratched Cd and try it, most of the time the data is read error free. The CD is encoded in such a way that data can be corrected if corrupted by small scratches and other marks. A vinyl record would need to be thrown out and replaced. Try this test, record a record and a cd from the same master. Take a needle and put a bunch of scratches all over the CD, do the same with the record. Play both. See which one you like better. You're unlikely to hear the scratches on the CD because of the CIRC encoding. The vinyl record will need to be discarded and replaced.
I tend to listen to the entire record when playing on a turntable and I tend to skip around when listening to CDs. If you want to hear a loud CD, check out D'Angelo's first CD. It's definitely was recorded waaaaaaay tooooooo loud.
I think the man reason CDs have slid in sales and quality is the fact, the mass production version is not the same as the original disc. Vinyl is the longest running pressed format in existence, which will never be touched
no it has more to do with ongoing digital evolution. 20 years ago CDs were the only practical way of accessing digital audio whereas now you have downloads and streaming for distribution. analog on the other hand is a dead format which stopped evolving decades ago. the ultimate expression of consumer quality analog was the hifi vcr with sound quality specs that almost match the CD. only the inferior record format survives in a niche market as unlike the superior hifi vcr and reel to reel formats, there is plenty of recorded material available.
+Dog & Crow No, the reason why CD sales have slid is because this is no longer the only way consumers can access digital audio. Digital distribution has evolved to downloads and streaming which have now overtaken CD sales. Analog formats are now dead in the sense that they will no longer evolve from here. From that perspective I agree with you that records will remain in existence in a niche market. If there was no digital audio I'm fairly confident records would be have been obsolete by now. Developments in tape technology was increasing at a rapid rate in the 1980s and the HiFi VCR in audio mode was far superior to the record, it even matched the CD on some measurements. In the late 1970s, around the time of the analog video disc and optical record player, there was some talk among the major manufacturers of creating a new optical record format, which would have required changes in record production. This would have been a significant advance in analog records but plans were shelved once the CD was introduced.
When CDs 1st started being made the engineers RESPECTED ... 0db and I have CDs that that further respected as well on the 100% scale the highest was 97% (just under 0db) compression was used VERY sparingly or not at all ... then later on the dynamic range was taken away and what used to be the loudest parts was slammed in the wall that would make Mount Everest cry what used to be very quiet parts was now all up in your ear ... loudness war in only two words
Just found you guys and subscribed! I'm a 64 yr. old male who love's music and hearing people talk about like you two. Your show is different from the rest and I love that. So I'll keep listening and you keep up the good work! WarrenG
Probably one of the better vinyl vs. CD videos I've watched.....many good points made. I've collected music on both formats for many years & will continue to listen to both. In general, I tend to prefer the CD format, & I've always felt that for vinyl to have any chance of sounding as good or better than a CD, some serious money must be spent on the sound equipment, which not all of us can afford to do......
I have a load invested in each format. Vinyl is better and if you are reaching for that holographic musical performance that's downright spooky it's expensive for sure. And finicky. I sprung for it because I'm not getting any younger and I wanted to see where it would lead. It's better than I had hoped for.
Tom Turner Speak for yourself. Most audiophiles want an accurate, clean sound not a coloured distorted one that one individual may perceive as "halographic".
Bad mastering is ruining the music. When will the recording studios stop adding db's and actually start processing the sound? In the past they took great care of how music sounded. Now they just ruin it. You can see how bad it is when a 60 year old record sounds better than a brand new cd.
Yes, 100x more than format wars, when you get a brickwalled new album from a favorite band, there's no hope for it to sound good. You're just left wondering what could have been.
I have analog recordings from the 50s and 60s that kick the living shit out of 99% of the digital recordings made today with, mastered on computers . You cannot replicate the liveliness from listening to an analog recording on an analog format. I do love my sacds though.
I have many records of this era too. I think you'd find they would kick the shit out of 99% of analog recordings made today as well. This is nothing to do with digital/analog per se but rather a reflection of modern mastering techniques. Your SACDs are a case in point. They have been mastered to suit a more audiophile audience but there is no reason why that mastering could not be put on to any other digital format, in fact I have several CDs that sound better than their SACD versions because the later DSD remaster was not done as well.
prep74 I agree, I also find it a bit comical how people talk about how bad CDs used to be, yet people actually in "the know" seek out early CDs because of the lack of compression and the flat transfer. Imo, some of the earliest CDs sound the best compared with today's masters.
hurkamur1 who tf cares about cds or vinyl just get a smartphone and a good sound system. Keep praising the delusional 'good' sound of your vinyl Also this cd mastering debate is absolute bs get real engineers know it better
I got the best of both worlds, I designed devices and very special cables that transform CD output to that "Vinyl Sound" but with no pops and hiss! Pure analog sound, no jitter! Hopefully one day, I will launch the devices / products... It's an amazing experience to listen...
But since this video, CD has really taken off again. In terms of heavy metal (my preferred genre), CD is certainly the better format given how tight the instrumental work is. I don't mean the rubbish that people often consider "metal" these days in the US and Australia, I mean the European bands that have that much more instrumental talent. I do think Vinyl is much better for older recordings from the 70s and before, but that "warm" sound you hear completely muffles out the noise during recording. However, that noise you do hear is generally, as mentioned in this video, the mechanical nature of vinyl. If you like that, that's absolutely fine, but I would rather hear the individual notes as crisply as possible. CD for me.
The best analogue medium is reel to reel tape. Simple as that. Studio grade tape rotating at 15IPS or 30IPS is MUCH better than vinyl. The drawback is that it's also the most expensive format. The reel to reel machines also require constant cleaning and calibration.
I love the warm firey crackle and deep bassy bell tones-that resonate deep down into my bones and soul-of vinyl. The EQ of CD versions are usually more balanced creating a sound that’s more articulate and pops out, but it tends to sound sterile.
Nailed it @8:17. Vinyl's greatest strength is the physicality of it, the ritual, focusing on and listening to an entire album, etc. I listen to all modern formats, and try very hard to approach the digital formats in a vinyl way. If fact I'd love to have a CD player with a visible platter, so that I could see the CD spinning. Any suggestions?
Try focusing on the music instead. The visuals are a distraction to appreciating find sound. But in regards to suggestions, none from the top of my head, but there are some "high end" top loading players which you can see the CD spinning as well as the player looking like it an expensive, sophisticated piece of equipment. It is the same eye candy approach used for high end turntables because marketing departments understand the psychology of expectation biases and placebo effects which in turn, allows the product to be priced much higher to audiophools than what it's truly worth.
All you need to hear is at 6:00. It depends on the recording format. Analogue recordings were not very well transported to CDs, compression removing all life. But a well mastered digital recording put on digital format or vinyl will sound the same.
Personally I don't care how clean and perfect CDs are. To my ears vinyl just sounds better. I don't expect (or care) that others may not feel the same and prefer digital recordings instead. Each to his own, as they say. :)
+BoingBB Wow, someone who makes sense! Yes sound is to a degree subjective and there is nothing wrong with preferring vinyl over CDs, or vinyl over its master tape (as many vinylphiles do). It is the same reason why we don't all have identical stereos or listen to the same music. No arguments here. The issue here is why some can't just accept subjective preferences and instead post unsupported claims, beliefs and psuedoscience as if they are suffering from some sort of an inferiority complex.
Preference is one thing and I like both, but technically a Vynil contains exact information, while the CD slices it to bits. So there IS more Information on a Vynil and It IS the closest one to reality. But there's a number of other factors in the balance as well, the masterin most notably.
Soldano999, I can assure you 100% that vinyl does not contain exact information by any means, distortion can be 2 or 3% for loud passages, surface noise is very high in quiet sections, crosstalk is at best about 25dB, and the stereo image separation has to be reduced in order to be able to cut tracks that don't skip. Vinyl reproduction is usually below fm stereo in all measurable parameters, let alone 16 bit digital.
Vinyl's definitely around to stay. Jack White's "Lazaretto" was recorded straight to vinyl and the LP was/is a HUGE seller. This record definitely sounds better in it's intended format. I agree with you guys, though. It's all about how it was recorded/transferred.
Vinyl sounds better because of placebo. If you want something to sound better, it's very easy to trick yourself into thinking it does. I used to be a DJ, i love vinyl because its tactile and wonderful. In a club nobody could tell the difference anyway. If you want excellent reproduction of the original sound as recorded, get as close to the original production as possible. These days that means get the master digital waveform (huge). If you agree frequencies your ears and brain cant pick up don't make a difference, you can get that size down a lot, which is essentially one of the tricks done to original productions in order to get the size down to fit a cd. When in doubt do a proper "pepsi challenge".
I understand the argument but even if it is placebo in the end some people (like me) actually likes the sound of vinyl records. It is hard because listening although dependent to sound is different from it as so much as listening is psychoacoustic. Also instead of debating on why digital is a more accurate representation of sound, people should research on why some people "hear" digital music as cold apart from the placebo effect. I'm not sure but apart from the warmth that I feel from listening to analog (which you can explain as placebo) It sounds as if digital music either takes out certain harmonics or frequencies that we cannot hear load enough to accurately tell but we can actually feel. Again this is not an accurate description but this is the most accurate description of what I hear. Again maybe it is just a mixing issue or maybe today's mix is not done with enough care and dynamic range but in the end this is what I perceive. As much as I want the convenience of digital music, it is the feeling of actually listening to the song and feeling something about it that I miss a lot. Something that I just rediscovered after listening to vinyl again (after 20+ years).
+Henry Posadas Why do you need to do research on why some people prefer the sound of vinyl? The majority of people, as shown in survey after survey, prefer the more accurate sound of CDs. The technical facts and sonic measures support that CDs sound better. Therefore, a better subject for research which sits better in the realm of psychology than sound science, is why some people that prefer vinyl feel a need to dapple in psuedoscience and magical thinking to justify a legitimate sound preference.
It is very easy to test CD vs, Vinyl objectively. I played the same orchestral music both on a simple CD player transport and on a vintage Turntable, and I noticed that a properly recorded CD has almost equal if not higher quality in comparison to the vinyl, provided that one uses a proper synergic system (In my test: Music: Brahms "Symphony No 1" Sibelius "Karelia Suite"; Turntable: Denon DP-47F+ Phono Preamp: Parasound Zphono; CD Player: Pioneer, + DAC: iFi Pro DSD; Amplifier: Parasound Halo 21; Speaker: Focal; Sub-Woofer: JBL)
Vinyl has technical limitations.. play an LP until the end and listen to those higher frequencies, yuck!! .. mono bass, 'de-essing' .. Done properly of course, both sound fab.
At the end of all this bickering and backlashing, you just have to ask yourself this: "¿Por qué no más dos?" Seriously, if you're that into music, just get either a CD or a vinyl record! It's not that hard, people!
The mechanical nature of the vinyl adds also resonances from the stylus assembly, cartridge and tonearm. Theese resonances put colour and character in the reproduced sound which are normally absent in the digital sound, hence lack of "life" in the "sterile" digital recording. Those resonances act also as kind of redundancy or short reverberation that arguably improves inteligibility of the sonic information. All in all vinyl is not Hi Fi. It may be High End (if we look at price tags) but otherwise it's just cool 😉, or better yet, hype.
Also, The industry wants to sell you the same music as many times as possible. There are Beatles albums you could have in 8 Track, Vinyl Old one, CD, MP3 Downloads, now "Hi-Res" and New vinyl. They have sold you the same music 6 times. Each tie they tweak it to sound a bit different. However technically there is no question, that digital has the edge. Channel separation, dynamic range and response.
I've always loved the sound of vinyl but with a lot of music being recorded in digital to begin with when they transfer that music to vinyl it's not as clear or loud but what is key is artists need to make sure they have a great mastering engineer for both formats. I will say that cassettes also was a great format but that's another discussion.
Sadly, a LOT of great music that came out on vinyl, and even a lot that was recorded on the old 8-tracks, never made it to CD format. All of that music is gone, lost forever unless you are lucky enough to have saved your old vinyl records. One sad thing is that these new Crosley Cruisers and others are destroying a lot of good vinyl because people don't know to replace the stylus (needle) periodically. They come with a cheap sapphire and that should be swapped out for a good grade diamond as soon as possible. Doing that periodically will insure that, even as cheaply made as the CC is, it can still give a long life of good vinyl playback.
LPs were compressed for radio too. I remember playing The Beatles Second Album with an EQ in the 70's. It was at a constant loud level up to 8kHz (or was it 4kHz?). Whatever it was, it was the frequency band of AM radio. So the bottom line is that you need a good transfer to whatever media you use.
All new vinyl is recorded from a digital source. I gave up on vinyl back in 1985 and I have 0 regrets. I love my 40+ year old CD collection and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
How much money would you have to spend on a turntable setup to match the sonic detail of a CD played on a mid-range CD player? Regarding the compression argument, the vinyl has compressed audio every time (because of it's extremely limited range), where the CD MAY have compressed audio. Further, many modern albums were mastered from a digital recording. Going beyond all of this, HiRES digital through a good dac smokes vinyl and there's no degradation every time you play it. Vinyl is a format for fetishists. There's more involved with accessories and tweaking than enjoying the music. I love many formats including vinyl but arguing that it's a superior format is a fool's errand.
The specifications of vinyl might be less but you totally forget that when you actually compare them to each other, a vinyl record also barely gets any damage when the cartridge and tonearm mass matches well and set the tracking force / anti skate right. I don’t know what you’re referring to with ‘limited range’ but in case you mean frequency range that can differ, a vinyl record can have a frequency range of 7hz - 50khz and higher.
Vinyl is cracking after 15 spinning, and after some years -- the recording sounds as if you listening to it in a kitchen while frying on a pan where oil is mixed with water; splashing. I think vinyl is supported by large manufacturers for it is impossible to counterfeit it, but after invention of CD, practically vinyl became obsolete: CD is for as long as they will produce players; with perfect sound -- if the perfect audio! May 14, 2023
When I first got in to collecting classical music at the age of 13, I was limited to taping it off of a low-power college FM station. It added a swishy-swirly noise to the signal, which was already deficient in bass and highs, and when played back later on cassette ended up a noisy, hissy, midrange-heavy sound (no Dolby noice reduction on that Sharp mini-system). I didn't care. I loved exploring this new (to me) musical path regardless of how it sounded. A year or so later I recieved a classical CD as a gift.....and it sounded too clean, too quiet, too sterile, to my ears that were used to all that hiss and noise. I guess I had it in my head that "old" music was more faithfully reproduced the lower the fidelity. I eventually got over it and began collecting classical CDs once I was making my own money, and moved on to DVD-a and SACD, and eventually digital files. Still sometimes miss that stack of noisy tapes though. I wonder...could some small part of vinyl enthusiasm be due to the format's inferiorities sounding "correct", with clicks, pops, rumble, hiss, and warble being a part of the music for many listeners? I remember some people vowing to stick to VHS because DVDs looked too "good", whatever that means. I'm betting there's a similar situation with a percentage of vinyl enthusiasts.
The reason why the track "exploded" when you switched from flac to vinyl is that reduced dynamic range of vinyl = compression. It was vinyl that started the loudness war. It's part of the reason why audiofools prefer the sound of vinyl. It's perceived by the brain as sounding bigger and better in a similar way to clicking a loudness button or turning up the bass and treble (please don't do that). It creates an audio illusion but is not a faithful reproduction of the original sound the mix engineer produced and wanted you to hear. By contrast, digital gives you a very faithful reproduction of the original sound. This can be demonstrated by going to a studio, producing a digital mix, cutting it to vinyl and taking a digital copy. Now play the mix again and it will sound just as you intended. Play the digital copy and it will sound identical. Now play the vinyl and it will sound completely different. Audio quality is the ability to faithfully reproduce the original sound, and that is why I get so pissed off with audiofools ranting that vinyl is better quality than digital! Glad I got that off my chest.
Exactly you said "cut a digital mix" of course it will sound better played back on a digital format, just as he said. People that like vinyl tend to also love analogue recordings and music recorded and mastered from the original tape specifically for vinyl sound better than digitally recorded music transfered to vinyl, it doesn't take a genius to work that out. I play both and have great sounding CDs and great sounding vinyl, my great sounding vinyl sounds better to my ears that my great CDs, if that's just "perceived" as you say, well my perception is all I can go by, so if it's perceived to me to sound better then it sounds better. Perception is reality after all.
You can take any quality of digital format and print it on Vynil, Vynil can handle it. You CANNOT make a CD sound like 24bit studio quality. CD's only do 16 bits. Therefore your argument is invalid. Vynils ARE the closest to reality, CD's are just an approximation created from bits. In ten years there will be no more CD's but Vynil will still be a thing.
As someone who collects vinyl, i will 100% agree that it is about the experience and aesthetic. It is also a godawful money sink, so i dont recommend people to get into it.
Here we are in 2022 and CD is making a comeback, and I can't buy a freaken vinyl record without big pops and cracks or warps to save my life, not to mention the cost keeps going up up up.
Actually, vinyl is also a manipulated signal. The 1953 standard adopted by RIAA uses a curve in which the signal is compressed by 20 db at 20Hz and expanded by 20 db at 20kHz when recording from the master tape onto the lacquer. The phono stage of the preamp then has to expand and compress the signal again; however, this is all done via analog circuits. (This is for the readers- you guys know this). Also in your previous blog (www.audioholics.com/audio-technologies/dynamic-comparison-of-lps-vs-cds-part-4), you've nicely demonstrated on your oscilloscope that the noise floor for vinyl is actually superior to CD above 2kHz. In the end, though, as you say it's all about the particular recording and knowing what's so-so versus exceptional. I prefer vinyl over CD most of the time, but if the same recording is in SACD I will pick that one. But then there are the rare audiophile reissues of LPs in 45rpm vinyl....
Well done! This is the one video on this channel that actually was clear and informative (with accurate information). The video answers the question in the title of the video, i.e. "which sounds better", and the reality is that depending on all the factors, one can be noticeably "better" sounding than the other depending on the arrangement of all the factors. Was they left out is that there are even more factors involved, such as psycho acoustic factors, some people simply respond to some sounds better than another person does. This characteristic is very evident in the vacuum tube vs transistor war, and is very prevalent in the audiophile sector. There are also people who are stuck in their head with which one is better so they just will not give up on their chosen format because that format is "logical" to them as to being somehow better.
I think I prefer vinyl, I feel like it brings something extra to the music experience from the bigger art work to the way it sort of forces you to listen to an Album a certain way. Because of Digital Downloads and Apple Music etc these days the only reason I even have to use a CD is in my car because it's only really got a CD player. I know my 2012 copy of Abbey Road probably won't sound any better then my 2009 CD of Abbey Road but the packaging is just much cooler... sort of.
+ma fi you obviously never heard good analog and or vinyl. Simply a ignorant comment to make. Again from someone who probably has a cheap ass system and never heard a good record on a GOOD turntable. Sorry dude but you can't make comments like that and not get a smack down when there not based knowledge about the subject.
Nice comparison. I like that you can recommend a turntable without arguing it's a better sounding format in general. At the end of the day, it's a fun experience to throw on a record and sit and listen, imperfections and all. Even if it's 100% nostalgia, if it makes for a more enjoyable experience when the mood strikes, it's worth it.
I feel part of the attraction to vinyl is that you have to maintain your albums, you have to choose your turntable, you have to choose your cartridge and you have to choose your pre-amplifier. All of these choices make vinyl listening more personal than a digital medium and if you feel more involved with the music you will probably like that format better.
Agreed. But in reality, if one is serious about one's cd-player, it's kind of the same: cleaning cd's, cleaning laserdiode, careful setup, power in question, darkness so light cannot disturb the diode, upgrading a lot of the copmponents inside the player, seperate dac, seperate anti-jitter, reclocking, seperate powerstation and so on. and btw. copies homemade do tend to distort over decades. No protective lacques layer on top. And new factory recorded cd's have small holes in it, so it will destroy at some point in time. I experienced two cd's from 1988 to 2021. That's a very low rate, but it happened. Then there's the "magic" stiff, like green tusch, dampening stickers and what not. Oh, I think it's kind of the same as LP, which btw. is "long playing" (to you guys making the video). I find that LP's doe snot sound better, just different. And why choose a cheesy cd-player, when you know that upsampling and what not kills some of the sound (as demonstrated by say Audio Research)? And why not havea talk about cd player construction in general? Traditional record playback have had a lot moretime to develop and still is. And cd playback kind of had to be perfect from the get go. And in that field a lot have happened too. dac chips, transports, poser supplies and what not. I think, to makea better more complete understnading and to have that debate you have in your video, you need to take some of all these steps to have a far better picture of what's going on and why. Thanks for sharing. Kind regards. ps: I think any serious music listener, should have both a LP player and cd-player at a high level in their system. pps: I like my cassette player too ;)
there a lots of artefacts associated with vinyl replay which don't go away with even the most exotic turntables or pristine pressings,happily,many of these artefacts are euphonic-phase anomalies magically expanding the stereo image,tonearm resonance warming up the mid-range,HF roll off giving that silky tone.its more of a case of what vinyl adds to reproduction than what CD omits.beyond that its a matter of preference.
+ma fi Yep. One can spend tens of thousands on a turntable set up but it still won't sound any better than a $400 CD player, if only due to the limitations of the vinyl record itself. Of course if someone prefers the lower resolution vinyl sound then spending more on a better quality turntable set up will make it sound more pleasing to them. My Linn owes me over $12k to date and I recently replaced the Dynavector cartridge with a Benz Wood which gave a better top end, still not close to good quality digital though.
Absolutely on the money. Most Anything that was master recorded on tape will sound better on properly cut vinyl. Digital can sound really good mastered to vinyl but its totally dependent on the expertise of the sound engineer. The issue right now is unscrupulous morons in record companies ruining the experience of new converts to vinyl by reissuing back catalogue pressed straight from CD or other digital files and they sound so bad they are nothing more than 180 gram frisbies. These charlatans need exposing, so people coming to vinyl for the first time and maybe coming back to the format are not ripped off and can get the richly rewarding experience they deserve from this beguiling, enduring way of listening to music.
There simply isn't a definite answer. Cd's (or any digital form), mastered without the use of a hard-limiter or compressor can >sound< better then vinyl. *HOWEVER, with many modern releases, the loudness war has taken over and digital music is mostly brickwalled. Especially with more commercial releases. It lacks dynamic range. Vinyl audio has to be mastered differently to suit the format and "brickwalled" source material is not suitable for a good vinyl pressing. So it really depends on the particular release when it comes to digital vs. vinyl. Also, as a minor note: There are studies that although we are unable to hear audio above around 20khz, we subcontiously still perceive higher freuencies. Vinyl mastered from analog tapes and such also has the advantage of a natural roll-off in frequencies. Not a scissor "CUT" at < or = 22.050kHz like on a CD.
People are terribly misinformed. Vinyl has to have more dynamic compression applied. Vinyl requires equal bass on both channels. Vinyl requires an EQ (RIAA) so the needle won't jump out of the groove. Any faults in CD mastering are human error, not choices made to deal with the format.
Wrong. Not all bass is summed on all records. Yes records have to go through a RIAA curve and then back through a reverse curve to reproduce it back flat, so what, if it's good equipment it can be a excellent representation of the original source. Digital has its own issues, it must be converted to digital ( loss of information ) then back to analog (more loss of information). You need to get it out of your head that if it's digital it captures all the information, and digital can't lose information. Typical wrong thinking
+LaTour High End Audio Show me where I claimed that digital didn't lose information. Digital doesn't lose any audible information. Vinyl actually loses audible information. You can post spectrograms of vinyl all you want that show content in high frequencies. They are merely harmonics created by the hardware. None of that is actual musical information. It's noise.
+LaTour High End Audio so you are suggesting digital to audio conversion all done within the electronics domain is somehow more lossy or compromised than a conversion done through transducers? putting aside the conversion processes involved in cutting a record, playback involves converting energy from a moving spiral {ie a spinning record), into magnetic and electrical energy through a transducer (ie the cartridge). that is three different conversions of energy states with all the associated inefficiencies and losses. even if you are a denier of basic physics, you can't escape that there is not even one measure of sound fidelity which vinyl matches, let alone exceed, that of a CD. if we had to start from scratch designing a hi fi playback device and format but with the knowledge of today, do you seriously believe that they would come up with a record player?
+Chooke Chooke The same goes for video. All of these people clinging to 24 FPS because it looks so "cinematic" and anything higher than 24 looks like a "camcorder." Do they honestly believe that if 100 years ago they could have started with frame rates like 100+ FPS, they would have just stuck with 24 because it looks "cinematic?" They wouldn't have even known because they had nothing to compare it to. Perhaps the frame rates that have been experimental have been in some sort of uncanny valley, and we may need to push them even higher... 48 and 60 FPS is all that's been tried in modern day. I don't even get why anyone would even be involved in the ritual of playing back a vinyl record. You have to clean it. Yeah, dust does make its way into a record sleeve. A record has a charge, and it attracts dust. It needs to be cleaned of dust before every play. Even then, one does not get all of the dust. Every the needle hits dust, it also damages to groove, so now that pop or click is permanent.
+LaTour High End Audio And bass may not need to be summed 100%, but it requires some level of summing, and even if it wasn't, the mechanicsl of things wouldn't allow that great of channel separation at low frequencies, where as in digital audio, it's 100% absolute separation. The only limiting factor is crosstalk in the analog electronics. It's measurable, but completely inaudible with good design. With vinyl, no amount of design can eliminate it, unless one uses one of those ridiculous Japanese laser beam turntables.
To be honest in my personaly experience this principal question never came up. Personaly i never got rid of my vinyl collection in the eighties like so many did,but simply added the CD as a format. I wasnt a early adopter,but in the late eighties i also had a decent player and slowly but surely it became my main medium. And the reason why is not because it sounded principly better but CDs became pretty cheap over the years and im not exactly someone who has a big budget.... Well,for some years now folks "rediscover" vinyl and praise the "more natural,more organic and warm sound" or something like that. Wow ! That is new to me,although i never stopped listening to vinyl the whole years. For me that characterises more the sound colouring of some cartridges out there than vinyl itself. It reminded me that the renaissance of tube amps some years ago was accompanied by similar arguments. Was it true ? No. Why not ? Because an amplifier,solid state or tube,can be designed to have certain sound characteristics without harming a linear frequency response and decent numbers for THD and S/N. Probably if we were still in the eighties some serious review magazine could analyse through in deep measurements where this "tuning" is happening,but since we are in the "informationage" such profane hard fact presentation made way to endless opinion pieces without any foundation in comprehensable measurments. But back to vinyl vs. CD. Imho both are good enough for a enjoyable listen. And that is all what counts on a personal level. Both have pros and cons and both are meanwhile technical outdated. But hey,i also still have my tapes of radiorecordings from the early eighties and enjoy listening to them,because what counts is sufficient quality to be enjoyable. Even a tape can give me that. So im certainly not a person on the hunt for the holy grail here,so to speak,like many so called audiophiles seem to be,but someone who likes music.
+Eric Sveinson No, it is all digital these days. In fact, or inconvenient fact to some, is that digital found its way into vinyl before CDs were introduced. Since the mid-1970s, vinyl mastering houses have been using digital delay lines instead of analog delays on the signal going to the lathe that cuts the spiral groove. So even in the unlikely event that 100% of the recording, mixing and mastering was done entirely using analog gear and media, the end of the vinyl mastering process may well have involved a conversion to digital and back. The only way you can be sure that a record is completely analog is to find a pristine record pressed before 1975. But even then, the whole point of going digital is for better sound quality by eliminating the inefficiency and loss from analog processes.
+Jan KafkaApart from a handful of boutique studios catering to the "must all be analog" minority, nearly all of new records are from a digital source as there are few recording studios that still do analog recordings. Apart from the excellent, though very 20th century, 24 track analog recorders being superseded by digital, even basic things like good quality blank tapes are hard to get these days. As with any format, the vinyl record should benefit from a higher quality digital source providing it is mastered properly. In any event, as I said before, if you wanted an all analog recording, if that is your thing, then the only way to be sure is to pick up a good used LP that was pressed before the mid 1970s as digital delay lines came into wide use before the late 70s which meant that the process of cutting the record through the lathe would have had a conversion to digital and back. A lot of people don't realise that digital came to LPs before the CD, and it did so to improve the sound quality.
If you are going to the weekend market or opshop any where in Australia. CD's can be bought from a dollar or two.Second hand LP's are selling much more than the price of a brand new cd.
Why not take an album that works great on vinyl, digitize it with a neutral AD with no filtering what so ever, burn it to CD, use a player as transport and play it with a neutral DAC, then compare the result of the FLAC, the CD and vinyl? That way you're eliminating all but the medium and comparing oranges to oranges. You could also digitize a record which sounds good and rip the same track from the album and compare the waveform, I'm 99 % sure you'd find the CD is compressed into oblivion whereas the vinyl has more dynamic range. So I agree, CD is the better format, but the best source material is on vinyl because the mastering engineers are unable to compress it due to the physics of actual grooves in the record. With CD they have this freedom and destroy the source material. Let's hope replaygain on devices stops the loudness war so we can enjoy good quality source material. Although I'm afraid they enjoy making redbook sound bad to make a market for high rez and vinyl. There is really no need for anything higher than 44.1 outside the studio, as 96dB of dynamic range is far than enough and the noise floor is impossible to hear. Heck, it's even difficult to hear the difference between a 320kbit mp3 and 44.1! I'm not sure I could do it with a statistical significant result.
Ummmm no you are absolutely wrong... they will take the loudness war mastered stuff and still put it on vinyl with in vinyl dynamic range I have such a vinyl and I have compared the wave forms and it looks just like the CD copy (viewing the same song of course)
Very well done. One thing to add, that I have reviewed on other sites, is the quality of digital recording will vary of course, depending on how they recorded it, but also how they play it back. So you can have a DVD audio disc, which I think has 192kHz/24-bit, while CD audio discs have 44.1kHz/16-bit. But also, you need equipment that can replicate the same quality, or else you'll be losing some of the precious data. So for example, to get the best audio experience from a DVD audio disc, you would want to make sure it had a 192kHz/24-bit DAC. But to get the best audio quality from a record player, you might want to just upgrade your stylus. That's it. No other fancy components to have to worry about.
*Sigh* Does anyone really see a problem with this argument in general? Everyone who claims themselves to be an "audiophile" always try to make these arguments of which one sounds better like there is some glorified definitive answer encrusted in gold hurdling through space on the Voyager probe. Everyone who makes these arguments misses the point of even buying an album in the first place, LISTENING TO MUSIC. So much time is spent listening to "sound" and not spent listening to "music." If the music is great, why should it matter if someone bought it on vinyl, CD, or iTunes? IF IT'S THE MUSIC YOU LIKE, LISTEN TO IT! Also, before anyone claims that I am "un-educated" on the subject, I have a degree in music with extensive study in audio engineering. I am a mix engineer and I despise the concept of the loudness race. I used to study this debate back in my college days to the point my head would explode, and in the end my mixes sounded like crap, my grades were slipping and I constantly found myself on the search for "better sounding music." LISTEN TO MUSIC, NOT SOUND!!!
Kevin LaTour We can see what you have done here. You make it out that you agree with Robert but that was only a distraction for you to then give your uninformed and misguided opinion on vinyl vs digital - you are the definitive example of a "claimed audiophile" the OP is talking about!
Prep who is afraid to post his name and stays anonymous simply goes onto forums related to audio and lam bashes those who dont agree with him and supports analog. Prep whatever your name is, I have extensive knowledge on the subject of both analog and digital from recording to mastering, to the very best in playback systems. I have been doing this for over 40 years so dont make a fool of yourself trying to discredit my knowledge. Again I support both formats, but all said and done, analog both on the master tape side, and when its well mastered and properly mastered onto vinyl it kills even the very best in digital. Its not even close. Now if you have a low end system sure you probably will be hard pressed to hear the difference, infact when you compare a cheap turntable to a budget cd player most will prefer the cd. Not to say there arent some decent quality budget turntables and cartridges you just have to be selective to get something good, AND it must be properly calibrated. Anyway prep you are simply being annoying and we are all entitled to our opinion even if it differs from yours. So dont get ugly and defensive, play nice in the sandbox.
What a load of waffle. You have yet to post anything that is not psuedoscience or ignorant opinions. And you have been caught out at least three times appealing to engineers agreeing with your mythology yet I provided direct quotes from them contradicting your statements, yet here you are one year later thinking you can be taken seriously? So not only are you ignorant and misguided on matters hi fi, you even lie as some sort of crutch. I doubt you know anything real about the subject matter as nearly all your post contents border on crankster material.
Still afraid to post your name. I stated my knowledge and expertise on the subject what makes you think your such an expert ? My guess nothing, you simply are here to create drama and talk about no technical information on why you THINK digital is better. I have given my reason I feel analog is better but you have given nothing on the digital side. So talk about someone that has nothing important to say, you are the crankster. Lets have a real world debate give me something ANYTHING to dispute your claims. You cant dispute any of mine so it is YOU that has to prove yourself.
I pretty much agree with everything you have said in this video. I do agree that most Analog to CD transfers to not sound good, and the vinyl recording sound is 10 times better. Case in point: Listen to John Denver's Greatest Hits volume 1, or 2 on CD and then listen to the Vinyl Lp of the same recording. I was blown away by the sound of the vinyl recording as there is a big difference in the sound. But, I am not knocking CD as it is a great format for music, especially in the car, but I will admit I miss the day when I used to make compilation cassette tapes for the car, Sadly, that is a lost art for most people, but I still make compilation cassette tapes sometimes.
+Richard White So you base an opinion on a sample of one? It really gets down to the mastering. I have several albums that sound better than the CD counterpart for that reason, just as back in the day I'd come across the occasional compact cassette that sounded better than the vinyl counterpart. Try a fair comparison, on albums which are known to have been mastered well on both CD and vinyl. For example, comparing my Pink Floyd DSOTM black triangle CD to my MFSL UHQR vinyl (considered to be definitive vinyl version), the CD easily sounds better, clearer more detailed and far more accuracy in bass and drums and sax, just more realistic overall. Same thing if you compare the original Dire Straits Brothers in Arms CD with the original LP release, the CD is far better. The upshot is that if you get a CD that has been mastered well, it has to sound better because the CD format betters the vinyl on any analog sonic measure - ie dynamic range, signal to noise, linearity of frequency response, distortion, stereo separation and so on. There is no magic here, just basic sound physics.
+prep74 No, I do not base my opinion on one Vinyl album. I could give hundreds of examples of vinyl sounding better or more natural then CD's. Another example would be the "Phase 4 Stereo" London record label. The Superior sound on these records would give CD's a run for their money. More then likely, the best sounding records ever. I do agree that Mastering a recording well or not well, defines how the finished product will be. I am not saying CD's do not sound great, but most of them lack the warmth of sound you can only get from a record album, and also with a vinyl record you have something physical in your hand, large pictures on the front and back, with liner notes. There is a very good reason why vinyl records have come back in 2016 and they are once again back and more and more people and young people are getting into vinyl, and CD sales have been in a slump for some time now.
Well my best sounding CDs easily outperform the best I have on vinyl - and that includes records produced by MFSL and Speakers Corner. And so it should as there is not even one analog sonic measurement where vinyl matches, let alone exceed, that of a CD. I have come across very warm CDs and very cold vinyl and vice versa. Personally, I prefer true high fidelity that isn't coloured, ie neither warm or cold, just natural and faithful to the music source. I wouldn't overstate the vinyl comeback either. The current ARIA figures show vinyl make up 6% of all album sales vs 94% digital. Out of the 94% digital, 40% are CDs. Out of the 6% vinyl sales, I'd be willing to wager a bet that most are bought by hipsters who play their records on a Crossley or something similar. In any event, a CD is just a storage medium for a digital file and up to about 20 years ago that was the only way a consumer could access digital music. Now of course the format has evolved into many different forms including downloads and streamings. It would be remarkable if CD sales didn't decline given the greater scope of digital accessibility. I agree with you on the other aspects though. There is something charming about having a large album cover (particularly bi-folds) with cover art and liner notes. That aspect sadly is being lost with audio progress.
How can you consider audible noise, hiss and pops, that you get with vinyl ,high fidelity? I think you guys are sharing a preference and to some degree engaging in nostalgia when you speak warmly about vinyl.
And you're obviously showing your lack of knowledge about what good vinyl sounds like. Hiss isn't specific to records; I've got records where you can hear the tape hiss drop off after the song is over. I also have many records, not all 'audiophile' specific, which don't have pops, crackles or other 'audible noise' any worse than CDs; clearly you don't, so it just means you're not an experienced record user. I don't even have a lot of fancy expensive gear, but I know how to use records and get the most out of them, and I know firsthand that your comment reflects ignorance of the subject. You're talking about bad records and pretending you're talking about ALL records. Well, bad CDs sound much worse than records because they won't even play at all, and a bad record will at least still play.
Just got into vinyl and my dad gave me his old turntable and I do think vinyl sounds better plus it means more. You have to take care of your vinyls more then CDs. Plus vinyls last a long time if you take care of them. CDs only last maybe 100 years.
Listening to an old CD of Houses of the Holy on a Revox B225, and the album on a Denon DPL-30 w Astatic cartridge and Stax headphones, they sounded the same to me
I am a electrical engineer and audiophile. Everything you said I have been telling people about compressed cd, iTunes etc. I also work part tile in a audio store where we sell B&W, Revel, Paradigm and Goldenear. I try to tell people about how analog sounds better if recorded that way. I hate compression. How do I know if a cd is compressed. I also believe room eq. is overated. Am I right?
+gactjackson Mostly wrong. Not all CDs, ITunes etc are compressed, you need to do a bit of research to find the better mastered copies. Well mastered digital will always outperform the analog counterpart, though subjective tastes may vary. The Mastered for ITunes range is quite good too. Likewise not all analog material sounds good, it depends on the recording. Totally disagree with you on the room eq. Room acoustics along with speaker quality and recording quality are by far the biggest influence on sound reproduction quality.
+prep74 The only EQ that is good is at the bass levels. When you start eq and adding power that the room takes out its hard on the speakers and the amp. Most music downloaded is compressed. I agree with you on good speakers etc.
What can realistically be expected from vinyl? Well cared for vinyl can sound very good. Unless vinyl has some nostalgic value to you it isn't worth bothering with. It has no advantages over a CD and is more difficult to work with, it has no portability, and the records can be too easily scratched. The CD is an exact copy of the master. The best vinyl can do is to approach the quality of a CD. It can never exceed it because the CD is an exact copy of the original. We use Cd's for data storage because they give you an exact copy. Bit for bit without errors. Vinyl does not do that.
i take allready Back vinyl, part nostalgy for and vinyl come Back, and cd die in the future complete, but you can download with vinyl code, if you want also digital version the same album.. cd die, i think, because some lightheads put music in net, thats really stupid thing..
+Scott Currier The thing is that although digital outperforms analog formats for sound quality, vinyl is not the best form of analog playback. Reel to reel and Hi Fi VCR analog formats sound better as they are far less compromised.
+prep74 Yes, i agree with you, VHS-HIFI is superb as long as the tape is not damaged and reel to reel at high speeds can provide excellent audio quality as well. 15ips and up if you want really good audio. Otherwise you may be better off with vhs-hifi.
High speed reel to reel and vhs or beta hifi both move a lot of oxide in front of the recording heads. The hifi methods use flying heads whlie he reel to reel uses a fast tape speed and linear recording. VHS-HIFI was available at a pretty reasonable price and gave you up to 6 or 8 hours on a tape. The drawback was that it was very sensitive to any issues with the tape. You really need multiple copies in case you had some issues with a few seconds of a song that would be enough to render that recording of that song ruined. I made many recordings of music onto vhs-hifi. I would record the music onto the HIFI signal and the audio from the program I was recording would go on he linear track at the bottom of the tape so you could either listen to the music or watch the tv program and listen to the tv audio on the linear mono track. Good stuff back in the late 80s and early 90's.
+prep74 By the way there were pcm adapters that would replace he video signal on a VCR with a digital audio signal. There was several mHz of bandwidh available on a video tape so putting a digital signal onto video tape was quite do-able. Channel 44 in Boston used to transmit digital audio from time to time. You would see a line on the screen with a back and white background. A pcm adapter was required to listen to the digital audio. You could do the same thing with a video recorder. VHS hifi was so good that I'm not sure it was worth bothering with pcm.
Simple concept: The human ear was never designed for absolute silence. The world has noise. 0's &1's are a wave assembled with nothing but absolute silence in between. CD sounds brighter, clearer because of this...however the human ear (brain) can be disturbed by it as well. As for technical...you were spot on. I have been producing and mixing for over 38 years...analog and protools. As an engineer I prefer analog but I have to work in digital. Besides..you record an analog LP and then it gets dumped to CD 16 bit 44.1....you are back to additional problems if you did not prepare for that or surprisely even know that the mixes must be done accordingly for the end product. Todays converters are excellant but I still a difference between and analog wav and a digital reconstruction of the wav. Thanks guys. Good job.
I wonder if the people that are hanging onto vinyl are the same as those hanging onto film for cameras. We went digital in the 80s, and we've never looked back. I wonder if the sound of vinyl is a thing of nostalgia. Maybe I should re-listen to some of our old records. Speaker technology has certainly improved. I'll bet that any of today's popular recordings could be remastered to sound better than any vinyl record just by changing the amount of compression used, since that is the true culprit of reduced sound quality in many of today's recordings.
ThingsDemystified Yes but sadly compression is killing modern music on digital format. A prime example, compare Adele 21 on vinyl vs CD and you will hear the difference NOT b/c Vinyl is a better format but b/c the mastering was done with greater care.
Audioholics I think the video could have been a little bit more explicit about when you're comparing the capabilities of the formats, CD vs vinyl, and when you're discussing the qualities of the products out there for sale. It appears a lot of the posts are talking past each other due to confusing these two very different issues. Most vinyl-philes have the misconception that the format is flawed, not that it's better because the recording engineers/the marketers/etc etc mucked up the recording/reproduction of the CD. I still assert that you could take the best vinyl record known to man and reproduce it on CD accurately enough that a human couldn't perceive the difference. This of course assumes qualified engineering of the whole process.
Good pt and agreed. A properly engineered CD should outperform a vinyl record. The only advantages vinyl may have over digital are the nostalgia factor and if people like to hear the clicks and pops.
The analogy with film photography is totally valid., and I can comment on this both as a photographer and as an "audiophile". There is more than the merely technical aspect of a format. We have come to a point where analog (or photochemical) and digital will both give excellent results given some skill, knowledge and proper equipment. Digital was invented because its easier, faster, lighter. Digital format is way more forgiving to the point where you just need to press some buttons. This is an awesome thing and we've benefited from digital in countless ways, but if there is a major downside, is that of taking the human element out of the experience. Vinyl and film take back that element, it demands time and care, by being more demanding its more rewarding. Film photography makes you think more about what you're doing, you only have 12 shots and you must use them wisely. Vinyl pushes you to really sit and listen an album as whole work of art rather than individual songs
I listen to a lot of Classical and I like both vinyl and CD for different reasons, but I prefer vinyl for the more tactile experience. It's more engaging and more interesting. The new Analogue Productions vinyl remasters of some of the RCA Living Stereo releases from the late 1950/60s sound absolutely fantastic.
Check out the DECCA recordings of the same era they are generally magical done by people who knew what they were doing and executed it with care and attention to detail. How these guys managed to capture the delicacy and dymamic power of a full symphony orchestra in equal measure is unrivalled even with all the technology available today.
CD wins hands down simply because most modern music isn't even available on vinyl. I want to listen to music I like not frequency response diagrams, warmness factors and other technical bits and I don't want to limit myself to recording my grandpa played or a few modern releases.
Actually CDs lose hands-down in that argument because they didn't exist for the first 100 years of recorded music, and there are still hundreds or thousands of albums which have never appeared on CD, and I don't just mean low-budget unknown stuff. You have chosen to pre-limit yourself to CDs, and you make it clear that you don't want to know anything about how sound works, so maybe your comment was just something to make yourself feel good about your technical ignorance and minimal knowledge of music. "I want to listen to music I like not frequency response diagrams"--- and how is this something in favor of CDs? Oh yeah, it ISN'T.
Not sure what you listen too but every single major release nowadays gets released on Vinyl. Vinyl's outsell CDs 45 million to 33 million in 2022, and if the trend of the last 10 years+ is any indication the gap will be wider in 2023. It's the dominant physical format by a mile.
Very good talk guys. Really liked what you are saying. I persoanlly think that if you force yourself to choose vinyl over CDs or vice versa it is not much different than only listening to one genre of music. Why lock yourself in that box. CD and vinyl each have something that the other doesn't. Some are measurable differences and some are not measuralbe. I think some music lends itself better to the vinyl format and other music to the cd format. Heck, if you talk about earl 80s thrash metal I actully think that lends itself better to the cassette format lol. In my world I just choose to enjoy all three and have purchased many of the albums I love on cd and vinyl.
+mrhoffame Everything that can be heard can be measured and it is. It is typically only charlatans that resort to special pleadings. Having said that I agree that format is not as important as the quality of the recording or the mastering effort that was put into that format which is why I run both digital and high end analog at home.
+mrhoffame Basically agreeing with you about not locking yourself in a box, some recordings have been mastered better on vinyl and others have been mastered to take advantage of digital. But also disagreeing with you on the other point that some differences are not measurable. If that was a case we would know what we need to measure and would have come up with something to do so. The only thing that cannot be measured is why some individuals prefer one format over another even if the mastering quality was similar - that belongs in the rapidly growing field of psychoacoustics.
prep74 Maybe I wasn't clear. I'm not saying things are not measurable. What I was saying is that what rings right in one person's ear is not a measurable thing. It is extremely subjective. Kind of like saying you can measure the PSI of a person pressing their hand against your back, but if you ask one person is that massage feels good they say yes. The next person says it's too hard and painful. That is kind of what I think about when people start using measurement to determine what format sounds better it's measurements or if it sounds better are two very different things that get lumped together a lot in the audiophile community.
mrhoffame Sure but don't you agree that there has to be some objective standard of measurement given the preponderance of subjective opinions, particularly when an individual's subjective opinions of audio can change over time and can also be influenced by expectation biases, cognitive dissonance etc? I sort of get what you are saying with the pain example but hard measures such as signal to noise ratio or dynamic range are not based on subjective notions or averages of what a person feel, such as pain; in audio these are precise measurements and used by all hi fi manufacturers when designing and testing their products. They correlate closely with how people perceive sound quality despite some on the outer. For example, I suppose someone can subjectively tolerate a higher noise to signal or lower dynamic range than others in their music, and it may not be tragic, but the higher signal to noise ratio in particular will reduce resolution by masking more of the nuances - that is not a matter of subjective debate, the masking effect is real and if someone subjectively prefers greater masking then it can be confidently stated that they are not really into hi fidelity reproduction than someone who prefers music to be unveiled.
This video in a nutshell: "CD or Vinyl? Yes."
I don’t understand why all vinyl enthuses like my self wont just admit that: Vinyl is nostalgic and tells a story that CD’s don’t. Its takes us back to a precious time and memory.
@Superrooper Rall I apologize, your just smarter than me. Lol nothing better to do than correct grammar on the tubeyou? Lol.
Same deal with tube equipment. We're nostalgic to the old fermilure coloration, noise and distortion. You could prove this by a listening test with a panel of people that have not had the old tech experience
Not nostalgic for me💁♂️ I just personally like the big packaging and organic analog dynamic range ‼✌😁🎶
Because some vinyl enthusiasts actually do know what to do to make them sound right.
Because that’s pretentious. I just care about sound quality that’s it.
From the picture i thought this is about misuse of steroids
Might as well have been !
😆😆😆
Lou Ferrigno
😂😂😂
We're here to...PUMP YOU UP!!!
You guys nailed it, I remember when CD's first came out, they used to have AAD, ADD , DDD and DAD on the discs to denote the recording, mastering path of the product, now you don't get that as essentially everything is DDD..REGARDLESS, you still need decent hardware to bring out the best in vinyl, the question of SPEAKERS needs to be covered in the mix as more efficient speaker will produce that 'warmer' more 'natural' sound vinyl enthusiasts swear by...
100% agreed. I find most CDs are excellent. Only the "remastered" ones of the legendary recordings tend to be compressed. Any of the newer pop music is garbage anyway. Who cares if it's compressed? But on the compression argument, every vinyl record has compressed sound. The format is extremely limited in dynamic range so the engineers compressed the recording. The truth is: PEOPLE LOVE COMPRESSED MUSIC. An inconvenient truth that explains why mp3s and then Spotify were/are so popular.
@@thinkzinc100 mp3s and spotify were only popular for their convenience, and because the average person doesn't pay attention to details in audio, or even knows what to listen for.
@@thinkzinc100 Spot on!!! Cd is objestively the best medium if you are aiming for the best way to reproduce what you did in the studio! Vinyl is all about nostalgia!
Well put. I agree completely. I love LPs because I tend to listen to the whole album. Digital tracks are my preference at work, in the car or when I'm doing chores around the house. But at night when I want to have an intense connection with the music I put on a record.
***** No, you wouldn't. I've spent $2,500 on a *Michell Gyrodec SE* turntable which took 4 months to build in the UK, $1,000 on a *Michell Techno A' Tonearm* which took 6 weeks to build in the UK, and $950 for a *Sumiko Blackbird Moving Coil (MC) Cartridge* (2.5mV), $700 for the *Michell HR Precision Motor Power Supply*, and it's the greatest investment I've ever made. The sound is magic to my ears with my (New In Box) *Pioneer HPM-100's*, and (New In Box) *Onkyo M-504*, and (New In Box) *Onkyo P-304*. I've got an Okki Nokki RCM, and 100's of sealed LP's that I spent thousands of dollars on. Bands such as: Journey; Madonna; Commodores; Whitney Houston; Def Leppard; etc).
The truth is, they all sound like they're singing right next to me. The "warmth" that you hear people throw around isn't exactly a "myth". With CD and the "Loudness War" going on, engineers have tampered with the EQ too much therefore ruining the original, natural sound. I am no longer in the peaceful state of mind when I listen to their digital counter-parts. In a blind test, there is a noticeable difference. My guests can all agree with me. It's an extra sense or some sort of unexplained feeling that I or my guests cannot even begin to explain. I'm 25 years old, and it's a stunning listening experience. Hi-Fi is no doubt amazing when it comes to playing vinyl. As for my personal opinion, Vinyl wins. If you guys have not invested into something as serious as I have, then you cannot comment that CD is better.
Random access. Skip. Pause. Play.
Records are more involving because they have to be. Maybe it's due to their purely lossless nature. Maybe it's mechanics, you have to be more deliberate when listening to record, you don't have have the choices.
lol thats a good point man i do the same listen to it all hey cd fast foreward..good comment
I have spent far less money on my turntable that you have and still share your sentiments. I don't think it's required to spend all that much money on a system to get great quality sound. More money can mean a more realistic experience, but I think it's important for people to understand that good sound doesn't have to spend $10k+ in audio. A very well thought out system in the $2k range (or perhaps less) can sound excellent.
I agree, lps hav a beautiful, rich lower register, @ least that's where I hear th biggest difference in my musical preferences. But let's be honest lps are kind of a pain in th ass! They're hard 2 find, they're expensive, sound degeneration and newly manufactured lps won't always hav this " lively" sound, as they're being transferred from digital to analog. And @ this stage of my life if I were2 pursue a audiophile lp collection, I'd hav 2 mortgage my home 2 get all those copies of Stones, Zeppelin, Floyd . It would take forever to find copies, and would cost bank, and would most likely b degraded. So I'll stick with cd's 4 along time.
It's more about the experience and aesthetic that comes with vinyl for me
morganjholt yeah it's certainly an important quality that inspired me to listen to classic rock music on the original format.
Well that's a very real thing - I've been refurbishing my old Dual turntable in order to listen again to some dub reggae I only have on LP, but going against the vinyl experience is the polution of the music with clicks and surface noise (which is very noticable in dub it turns out, directly detracting from the music wheras its practically unnoticable with rock guitar!)
My suspicion is that surface noise on the lead-in groove evokes a Pavlovian response of anticipation, would be interesting to make a device to emulate this for other formats and see if that's a strong effect.
Absolutely
Yeah right.... Just like watching a Betamax music video, instead of a 4K digital HDR version. "the experience" BS
you guys should go Laserdisc. best of both worlds lol
I’d love to get the drugs vinyl enthusiasts are on. My friend has a super high end stereo ( over $100,000.00). He got the highest end classical vinyl he had, extolled its amazing virtues, and put it on his $10,000.00 turntable. AND, he was right: I could hear every vinyl crackle PERFECTLY!!!
Lol
@@MrTmax74 thanks. I thought it was pretty funny too, but I didn’t tell HIM !
@siu-hung Hung : believe me, my friend had already thought of that. He has incredibly expensive record cleaners and antistatic devices... Really helps the pops and crackels come through clearly, LOL.
LOL MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY. The pops and cracks just take me out of the daze every time lol.
Woah. Does he work as a doctor or something? How can he afford all that?
I have a 20-year-old CD that still sounds flawless and crisp
I have Dave Weckl's the Master Plan 1991 release and buy and still sounds the same like the 1st day actually now sounds better because i have better CD player
Actually the CDs has no problem no matter how many times you'll play them since of course you treat them good like no scratching them e.t.c
They have no friction to deteriorate them unlike tapes & LPs have
Moon Shine I had a cheap CD player about 25 years ago that you could hear the disk spin in the player. When I eventually upgraded my player it did sound a lot better because of the insulation on the player itself.
@Moon Shine It's about what kind of speakers u use. If the speaker is better, the sound will be better as well.
@Moon Shine that is correct. I was only referring to difference in sound quality caused by the speakers you use.
I have the vinyl record of the Spyro Gyra album that also sounds flawless and crisp.
I prefer CD for practical reasons: I can play at home and in my car anytime and anywhere..
Smaller and easier to store, cheaper, you can play it in anything that has disk entrance, you can transfer it digitally to files, it's not so delicate, yeah I prefer CD
I prefer CD for that and other practical reasons. Easier to rip to denser storage. You can get a 1TB micro SDXC card and for < 100 USD a phone that can use it, bluetooth or aux cable, with your preferred music app. You don't have to connect the phone to any service unless you want to use it as a phone or connect it to the internet on the go without a hub. Odds are you will never fill that up in your life time with just music that you'd actually play more than once.
i prefer them cuz they cheaperrr
The old vinyl records were analog. The new vinyl records are digitally recorded. The issue is not the format, it's how the sound is recorded.
The problem is not with digital as a medium. Digital can sound fantastic if you have a high linearity and precise analog to digital converter. Most DSD Native recordings sound almost identical to master tapes. PCM on the other hand does have a great potential but there is no analog to digital converter in the market that can record above 20 bits of linearity in real time so as a result there will be quantization errors and you wont capture the full resolution.
@@delatomvione9943 Why use digital at all ? Maybe it's more cost effective.
@Allthatyoutouch Many reasons: accurate reproduction, no degradation or wear unlike vinyl and cassette, and preservation.
There are also many other reasons that I can address but these are main ones.
@@delatomvione9943 The reproduction is not accurate and C.D.'s do wear.
@@allthatyoutouch3164 CD's are as good as it gets and CDs do not wear. How can they?
Anyone who knows anything about this knows that the sound is due to the mastering not the format.
That is a pretty fair statement. Granted I feel analog tape gives a much more musical and emotional connection to the performance and digital sounds like a one dimensional cardboard cut out of the same recording.
@Infinite Possibilities True...but a well mastered LP can sound better than a badly mastered CD
@Infinite Possibilities Well said dude who ever you are well said
@@latourhighendaudio I also have an emotional connection to my physical CD. To say that you can only be connected to your music if you use an analog format is a bunch of nonsense. Believe it or not, but the process of reading the CD is actually an analog process. Instead of a magnetic head or a stylus, you do it via a laser and there are modules that translate the light variations into digital signals.
@No Name Yes all records whether vinyl or CD are EQ'd during the mastering phase. Records are EQ'd during the cutting process and CD/digital when they are set up to be then made into a glass master or made available as files. It is this final EQ that changes the sound the most. Many hi res digital files sound better just because they have been re- EQ'd not because of any audible difference in resolution between CD and Hi Res files, which the human ear cannot in any event detect (despite what audiophiles claim) .
You kids can have your fancy-shmancy vinyl records. I'll stick with my eco friendly wax cylinders.
I was deep into high end audio starting in the 1960's, so I experienced the vinyl thing to the max, when CD's came along I couldn't switch over fast enough! When you go to a live concert there's no clicks, pops or hissing, which you get from ALL records and none at all from CD's. So you have to pick and choose among the CD's to get the right ones, and besides even a decent CD player is far cheaper than your vinyl set-up. I've been there, done that and will stick to CD's! At 74 years old I choose the future not the past.
Streaming has made CD's utterly obsolete. Their only purpose is if you wish to own a physical copy of your music. Vinyl remains this cool hobby, which arguably still produces the best sounds. Sure they are expensive and inconvenient, but if you don't want to be bothered by that, pay Spotify 7euros a month and you are set.
For a 74 year old you sure make stupid broad statements. Who are you to tell someone that ALL records have the pops and hisses? Maybe yours which you played on shitty equipment sound noisy but not fucking all of them smfh.
@@lehtokurppa7824 How does a vinyl arguably produce the best sound? If a CD sounds worse than vinyl, it's almost certainly a technical problem in conversion and not the format's fault itself. A CD file literally by laws of physics should always, always sound equal (if not using the extra space in it) or better than vinyl. PCM doesn't lose details in sound, if anything is damaged or non-existing in the digital version, it's the settings/set up's fault.
@@lehtokurppa7824I use/ listen to all three mediums. I like the sound of Vinyl the best. Streaming is convenient and sounds great, but what many gloss over is that the monthly plans are getting more expensive and most people do not buy the digital album/ songs, and in the unfortunately you have nothing to show for all the money you have spent. $9.99-10.00 a month x 10years that a lot of money, and is what the companies are betting on,…the long run and that most people on average listen to the same songs and albums. Sure you will get outliers in the bell curve, on both sides, but these companies have done the research and know playing/ listening habits. In the long run people are paying and re paying for the same music over and over again. It’s the same concept as unlimited data on cell phone, that’s what most people get, but they hardly use much and on average use the same amount every month and very little of it on average. I use Qobuz to stream music, and the music sounds great, but I have more recently having been thinking getting rid of it and spending the money on buying CD’s, vinyl or even burning the digital albums on cd ( using wav or flac).
For those of you who have now decided CDs are better and vinyl is worthless. Please PM and I will take those worthless records off your hands.
Uh that's the direct opposite of what's going on now. Vinyls' back baby.
Brian Smith funny how cds are becoming obsolete and vinyls are coming back lol
yeah i know. I guess CD's have been killed off by MP3 and streaming. Nothing against any format of course. They all have their particular purpose.
Vinyl has outlived every medium - and there are LOADS of them - remember the digital mini-disk?
Deaf by Hip-Hop no such thing as “vinyls”.
A properly mastered CD will sound better than vinyl, but in reality, dispshit mastering engineers compress the fuck out of music to make it "louder".
No it won't because it still won't have the ultrasonic frequencies that musical instruments emit. At least vinyl has them.
@@dtz1000 exactly
"Mhm. Yeah. Sure. Right. Interesting" + non-stop nods. Guy in red reminds me of how I like to contribute to group presentations.
So this is what Fez from That 70's Show is doing now...
😆😆😆😆😆😆
+Ricky X He's the Yes Man. :)
He got swoll AF
Robert Packham lol
Ricky X roidoholics
it's not the format that make music sound better, it's the way it was mastered.
CDs mastered in 80's sound better than CDs today because the dynamic range compression wasn't horrible.
I have a CD with a song from 1985 and the same "remastered" in 1996.
the remastered is louder. still sound ok, but not as good as the original 1985 master.
Compression only effected some music that was being played on the radio.Not all music on CD.
remaster vinyl sound better than original, what i am noticed, even cd not sound that good, on vinyl is only best sound, not any digital able that, full fact!
It's still present on many commercial CD albums. The loudness wars are still very much alive I'm afraid, although some studios do go to great lengths to avoid it unless the producer demands otherwise.
ALL HAIL THE PC MASTER RACE!
I think dynamic range was a consequence of the technology in the 80s. They couldn't accurately measure the dB of the audio, so that's why old CDs never hit -0dB. Also, when you buy a modern song in vinyl, you often find it has more dynamic range for some reason, perhaps the producer uses less limiting for vinyl presses?
Guys, I am happy to hear that CD has this much potential that goes untouched many times. Challenge for you people who are awesome and know the answer: Please list some AMAZING recordings that are on CD that you feel are a great example of CD's capabilities. I really want to hear these and am excited to see what's out there! Thank you!!
Velocity Design Comfort by Sweet Trip
Took me a long time to get a CD player. My vinyl set up had progressed over years until I could hear all the dynamics and the 3 dimensional sound. Close your eyes and you could not tell where the speakers were - except for the cracks and Pops. Sound went way back and outside the speakers. Vocals you felt you could almost touch them.
CDs only get this to some extent usually on quiet or simple passages.
So glad I kept all my vinyl records including singles.
Very expensive to replace them but they do wear out!
I don't think young people listen to music sat down in front of speakers (like I used to) or even have the very precise system of vinyl set ups now.
Same here!
Digital is perfect sound forever as long as you don't try vinyl. My pick is vinyl, truthfully though...... Listen to whatever makes the listening experience good for you. Cheers
I totally agree with you: vinyls may be technically inferior, but they make you feel like if you had been there. It's like having the band in your living room. I felt that when reaconditioned an old Dual turntable and I got shocked at how Genesis' A Trick Of The Tail sounds.
The end game is how well did the engineers do their jobs when it comes to music being transferred from the old studio tapes to CD format? Back in the 70's a group called Iron Butterfly came out with a record titled " Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida" that had wicked 17 minute drum solo on it. I liked it so well I immediately bought my own copy of the record. A few years later, ETCO came out with a CD version of that record. Talk about a train wreck! The background hiss was so bad that a lot of the drums were just overpowered to the point of being inaudible! I had both the vinyl and the reel-to-reel version of that album (and still do) and neither of them had that unbearable hiss! Normally CD's have a very sterile sound but not in this case!
In the 80s sound quality on a record player wasn't as good unless you spent a fortune on a good needle. No scratchy static on cds compared to records they must use some computer technology today on a record player to eliminate the static from scatching. People would pay as much as 1000 dollars for a good needle for a turntable to get the best sound out of a record cds were a cheaper way to get good sound quality and the laser would not wear out the disk on cd players and cds took up less room than records in your stereo cabinet and you could buy a cd player capable of holding as much as a hundred disks so you didn't have to handle your disks once they were in the machine. Today we have a internet and technology to have a music collection in a thumb drive and record player needles can be manufactured a lot cheaper than in the 80s and technology has improved 1000 times what it was like back then a nightclub to get the best sound out of records back in the 70s and 80s would spend thousands of dollars on a good sound system with a top end turntable and cartridge
I guess the question is how much of the feeling is placebo and how much of it is actually a product of the sound coming from the player. I love Vinyl but I still wonder if that's the case sometimes. Objectively the sound of my digital files is fantastic but man I just enjoy sitting in front of my hometheater and putting on a Vinyl,
That's because vinyl retains the ultrasonic frequencies of the musical instruments. CD does not retain those frequencies. That's why CD sounds like crap to many.
I'm not big on streaming music. I've always enjoyed hard copies. I like CDs, Vinyl and cassettes equally. It just depends on what format I'm in the mood to listen to.
The simple truth is that if vinyl was better than CD, CD would not have taken off given it was nearly twice as expensive as vinyl back then. Classical music, with its sound range and variety of instruments is very demanding. The first CDs were in fact classical. Vinyl needs filters to remove the grinding of the stylus. CDs bought nearly 40 years ago still sound in mint condition. That can't be said for vinyl. Vinyl is only good for the artwork on the covers. A problem with analogue was that it was recorded on tapes that produced a hiss. That needed filtering out. Vinyl is not for serious music lovers. Yes got a mention there. My experience at the outset was CD was far superior. Same amp with both. S shape tone arm and Shure V15 Mark III and Mark IV cartridge. Tangerine Dream's Logos sounded very muffled compared to the far more vibrant CD. Being far more expensive unscrupulous salespeople will try and make out vinyl is the way to go. Today all music is digital. Even old analogue has been converted to digital on computers to remove tape hiss etc. So analogue should not get a mention really. It's history and analogue is dead. No more.
I enjoy buying and listening to vinyl from the 80's and 70's I'll buy modern CDs because I feel they sound better but the older vinyl I enjoy a lot
Vinyl is my preference.
Whether the sound is better or worse, I prefer it. Also, the 'highest quality' sound recording I have ever heard was a 12 inch single of Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire' played through a very, very expensive vinyl set up, with expensive needle, cables, speakers, arm etc. A truly amazing and detailed sound. I have not heard anything close to this.
There is also something to be said about the album as a complete experience. An album is far more aesthetically pleasing and has a comforting physicality that CD's can't match.
I remember when CD's came out. Everyone was raving about them but at the time I was singularly unimpressed. To my ears the sound was not as good, lacking depth, though I am no technician. Perhaps the quality of digital recordings has now surpassed vinyl. Still, you can't beat listening to a good band on vinyl. A band who designed their music for the vinyl format so that each side of the album is an expression of their creativity, with different moods and tempos.
Just because vinyl is your preference doesn't give you the right to decide what format I will eventually buy.
I agree! From my experience, it depends on the source material (era, genre, etc), where it was recorded/mastered, the playback device, amp, and speakers. I ultimately enjoy FLAC CD replications the most because of the convenience. I don't think it is really worth paying the extra money for the expensive 96kHz tracks and above, but I wish CDs were 44.1kHz/24bit though for the dynamic range or possibly a lower noise floor.
You will never use 24 bit dynamic range. Ever. Unless you are an engineer mastering music.
Do you guys work out together?
The left one looks like he'd struggle with 20lbs dumbbells
Did they PUMP YOU UP?
For me when I want to actually listen to music and enjoy the experience i always go to my vinyl collection, but if I am multitasking and listening to musc i will go with my CD collection or my hi res audio files! I love the natural smooth sound that vinyl produces and it definitely sounds like you are there with the artist!
Thank you Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno for the comparison.
It’s way easier to roll a doobie on an album sleeve than on a CD case so...
good one
Records sounds better. I don’t know why. But they do
Nope Records are trash
compact, disc is Better better sound and plus it can be played on the Xbox records are piece of trash. I can't even be played on consult what a trash format,
I agree, CDs are better. I used to listen to the Beatles albums throughout my adolescence and adulthood and when I decided to buy the digitally remastered version of these same recordings on vinyl, they sounded better than those I used to listen to back in the days. Same thing for Elton John albums. I bought the 'Classic Years' collection released on CD in the early 90s, remixed and remastered by Gus Dudgeon, the same guy who did the original mixing in the 70s. It kept the same feel of the original recordings, but with improved quality. Sometimes, the difference was huge. Such is the case with the live album 11-11-70 whose British mixing was dull and the new digital one hot and rich. Another thing that makes CDs sound better is the fact that from the first to the last track the ratio between media and data is kept, as for vinyl due to the difference of diameter as the needle runs the grooves closer to the label, dicreases and this ratio is not kept and consequently sound resolution is lower. Pete Townshend used to say their best gigs had bad terrible sound.
+jtownshend The 2009 CD remasters are currently the definitive version for sound quality. Before the remasters I would have preferred the original early press vinyls for all albums except for the 1987 Sgt Peppers and White Album CDs.
@@lowjamz828 Vinyl is better dude.
When I was a kid we all hated vinyl, pops, clicks, scratches, skips, background noise. Now we finally have a system that gets rid of all that for the most part and now people want to go back to vinyl. I do agree that it's in the mastering of the cd's. There are some real bad ones out there but there are also real bad mastered lp's. All in all a good mastered cd is going to give you a clean sound for ever (unless abused).The lp will eventually get it's pops n clicks no matter how careful you are. The CD is the superior format.
Just take care of your records, lol.
You guys just confirmed what I've been saying for the last 25 years.A good analogue recording will almost always sound better on vinyl while a well recorded digital recording will sound better on cd.I just don't understand why Audiophiles continue to wage bitter war of words on this.
but then all those high end bullshit artists with their magical snake oil products would go bust
so defensive
wonder why ?
Damain Crespo wrong, analog sounds are recorded in 24 bits and a CD can only do 16. So technically the Vynil is still superior because it can play 24 bit quality music, which the CD cannot.
@@Soldano999 And you can tell the difference, right? You're hearing and comprehension is THAT good? Let's play them both and I'll buy you a steak dinner if you get it right 5 out of 7 times which one is which during playback.
@@Soldano999 Talking about bits recorded as a vinyl analogue recording is madness. CD is the superior format with a higher dynamic range and a higher signal to noise ratio, that's an inescapable fact. That doesn't mean a CD recording will be better than Vinyl and could easily be worse but there is no doubt in terms of capability which one is technically superior.
Debunked long ago back in the late 80's and early 90's.
Vinyl wins hands down if set up properly.
It just have that life like sound, resonance etc that the cd's just can't quite capture.
BTW the phono stage in the amp plays a huge huge role.
@MF Nickster I'm no audiophile nor a proclaimed possession of a pair of golden ears. But boy I had a few opportunities to hear some relatively expensive gear without going to insane levels and the LP simply sounded better through and through. It just has the sound, the tonal warmth and sense of presence that no amount of technical data/readings can explain.
Have you had the chance to hear a properly set up system?
I'm all ears and would be happy to review your suggestion and more if you have.
One other problem with vinyl records is that the sound isn't intelligently recorded onto the disc. On a CD the data is CIRC encodded. I look at a scratched Cd and try it, most of the time the data is read error free. The CD is encoded in such a way that data can be corrected if corrupted by small scratches and other marks. A vinyl record would need to be thrown out and replaced. Try this test, record a record and a cd from the same master. Take a needle and put a bunch of scratches all over the CD, do the same with the record. Play both. See which one you like better. You're unlikely to hear the scratches on the CD because of the CIRC encoding. The vinyl record will need to be discarded and replaced.
I tend to listen to the entire record when playing on a turntable and I tend to skip around when listening to CDs. If you want to hear a loud CD, check out D'Angelo's first CD. It's definitely was recorded waaaaaaay tooooooo loud.
I think the man reason CDs have slid in sales and quality is the fact, the mass production version is not the same as the original disc. Vinyl is the longest running pressed format in existence, which will never be touched
no it has more to do with ongoing digital evolution. 20 years ago CDs were the only practical way of accessing digital audio whereas now you have downloads and streaming for distribution. analog on the other hand is a dead format which stopped evolving decades ago. the ultimate expression of consumer quality analog was the hifi vcr with sound quality specs that almost match the CD. only the inferior record format survives in a niche market as unlike the superior hifi vcr and reel to reel formats, there is plenty of recorded material available.
+Dog & Crow No, the reason why CD sales have slid is because this is no longer the only way consumers can access digital audio. Digital distribution has evolved to downloads and streaming which have now overtaken CD sales. Analog formats are now dead in the sense that they will no longer evolve from here. From that perspective I agree with you that records will remain in existence in a niche market. If there was no digital audio I'm fairly confident records would be have been obsolete by now.
Developments in tape technology was increasing at a rapid rate in the 1980s and the HiFi VCR in audio mode was far superior to the record, it even matched the CD on some measurements. In the late 1970s, around the time of the analog video disc and optical record player, there was some talk among the major manufacturers of creating a new optical record format, which would have required changes in record production. This would have been a significant advance in analog records but plans were shelved once the CD was introduced.
Pauldjreadman CDs are outdated. Blu-Rays are the way to go now
Cds slid in selles couse piracy. Period.
When CDs 1st started being made the engineers RESPECTED ... 0db and I have CDs that that further respected as well on the 100% scale the highest was 97% (just under 0db) compression was used VERY sparingly or not at all ... then later on the dynamic range was taken away and what used to be the loudest parts was slammed in the wall that would make Mount Everest cry what used to be very quiet parts was now all up in your ear ... loudness war in only two words
Just found you guys and subscribed! I'm a 64 yr. old male who love's music and hearing people talk about like you two. Your show is different from the rest and I love that. So I'll keep listening and you keep up the good work! WarrenG
Keep regulating
Probably one of the better vinyl vs. CD videos I've watched.....many good points made. I've collected music on both formats for many years & will continue to listen to both. In general, I tend to prefer the CD format, & I've always felt that for vinyl to have any chance of sounding as good or better than a CD, some serious money must be spent on the sound equipment, which not all of us can afford to do......
I have a load invested in each format. Vinyl is better and if you are reaching for that holographic musical performance that's downright spooky it's expensive for sure. And finicky. I sprung for it because I'm not getting any younger and I wanted to see where it would lead. It's better than I had hoped for.
Tom Turner Speak for yourself. Most audiophiles want an accurate, clean sound not a coloured distorted one that one individual may perceive as "halographic".
prep74 I was speaking for myself. JMO
Tom Turner I pay you that.
prep74 For some pretty good info from a mastering engineer go to
Steve Hoffman-What sounds just like the master tape. Interesting.
Bad mastering is ruining the music. When will the recording studios stop adding db's and actually start processing the sound? In the past they took great care of how music sounded. Now they just ruin it. You can see how bad it is when a 60 year old record sounds better than a brand new cd.
Yes, 100x more than format wars, when you get a brickwalled new album from a favorite band, there's no hope for it to sound good. You're just left wondering what could have been.
I have analog recordings from the 50s and 60s that kick the living shit out of 99% of the digital recordings made today with, mastered on computers . You cannot replicate the liveliness from listening to an analog recording on an analog format. I do love my sacds though.
I have many records of this era too. I think you'd find they would kick the shit out of 99% of analog recordings made today as well. This is nothing to do with digital/analog per se but rather a reflection of modern mastering techniques. Your SACDs are a case in point. They have been mastered to suit a more audiophile audience but there is no reason why that mastering could not be put on to any other digital format, in fact I have several CDs that sound better than their SACD versions because the later DSD remaster was not done as well.
prep74 I agree, I also find it a bit comical how people talk about how bad CDs used to be, yet people actually in "the know" seek out early CDs because of the lack of compression and the flat transfer. Imo, some of the earliest CDs sound the best compared with today's masters.
hurkamur1 who tf cares about cds or vinyl just get a smartphone and a good sound system. Keep praising the delusional 'good' sound of your vinyl
Also this cd mastering debate is absolute bs get real engineers know it better
I bet you there is a person in the back there laughing his pants off watching a debate over CD and Vinyl while he's rewinding his reel to reel tape ;)
Nah. I'm loading up music to my SD card.
Music in a gameboy cardridge
I got the best of both worlds, I designed devices and very special cables that transform CD output to that "Vinyl Sound" but with no pops and hiss! Pure analog sound, no jitter! Hopefully one day, I will launch the devices / products... It's an amazing experience to listen...
But since this video, CD has really taken off again. In terms of heavy metal (my preferred genre), CD is certainly the better format given how tight the instrumental work is. I don't mean the rubbish that people often consider "metal" these days in the US and Australia, I mean the European bands that have that much more instrumental talent. I do think Vinyl is much better for older recordings from the 70s and before, but that "warm" sound you hear completely muffles out the noise during recording. However, that noise you do hear is generally, as mentioned in this video, the mechanical nature of vinyl. If you like that, that's absolutely fine, but I would rather hear the individual notes as crisply as possible.
CD for me.
The best analogue medium is reel to reel tape. Simple as that. Studio grade tape rotating at 15IPS or 30IPS is MUCH better than vinyl. The drawback is that it's also the most expensive format. The reel to reel machines also require constant cleaning and calibration.
I love the warm firey crackle and deep bassy bell tones-that resonate deep down into my bones and soul-of vinyl. The EQ of CD versions are usually more balanced creating a sound that’s more articulate and pops out, but it tends to sound sterile.
Nailed it @8:17. Vinyl's greatest strength is the physicality of it, the ritual, focusing on and listening to an entire album, etc. I listen to all modern formats, and try very hard to approach the digital formats in a vinyl way. If fact I'd love to have a CD player with a visible platter, so that I could see the CD spinning. Any suggestions?
Try focusing on the music instead. The visuals are a distraction to appreciating find sound.
But in regards to suggestions, none from the top of my head, but there are some "high end" top loading players which you can see the CD spinning as well as the player looking like it an expensive, sophisticated piece of equipment. It is the same eye candy approach used for high end turntables because marketing departments understand the psychology of expectation biases and placebo effects which in turn, allows the product to be priced much higher to audiophools than what it's truly worth.
Ryan Barnhart Like what the other guy says just listen to the music. Doesn't matter what you have to do or what it does and just appreciate the music.
Ryan Barnhart try CEC CD players. They are top loaders with visible disc spinning. I have cec CD player and really ritual is like vinyl.
@@xfilesfoxisdead7979 I rather see a record turning than a high revving CD
All you need to hear is at 6:00. It depends on the recording format. Analogue recordings were not very well transported to CDs, compression removing all life. But a well mastered digital recording put on digital format or vinyl will sound the same.
Personally I don't care how clean and perfect CDs are. To my ears vinyl just sounds better. I don't expect (or care) that others may not feel the same and prefer digital recordings instead. Each to his own, as they say. :)
+BoingBB Wow, someone who makes sense! Yes sound is to a degree subjective and there is nothing wrong with preferring vinyl over CDs, or vinyl over its master tape (as many vinylphiles do). It is the same reason why we don't all have identical stereos or listen to the same music. No arguments here. The issue here is why some can't just accept subjective preferences and instead post unsupported claims, beliefs and psuedoscience as if they are suffering from some sort of an inferiority complex.
Preference is one thing and I like both, but technically a Vynil contains exact information, while the CD slices it to bits. So there IS more Information on a Vynil and It IS the closest one to reality. But there's a number of other factors in the balance as well, the masterin most notably.
Soldano999, I can assure you 100% that vinyl does not contain exact information by any means, distortion can be 2 or 3% for loud passages, surface noise is very high in quiet sections, crosstalk is at best about 25dB, and the stereo image separation has to be reduced in order to be able to cut tracks that don't skip. Vinyl reproduction is usually below fm stereo in all measurable parameters, let alone 16 bit digital.
That's probably because of the speaker it's connected to being different. The actual quality is nearly the same.
BoingBB depends on how the record is mastered & what the source was.
Vinyl's definitely around to stay. Jack White's "Lazaretto" was recorded straight to vinyl and the LP was/is a HUGE seller. This record definitely sounds better in it's intended format. I agree with you guys, though. It's all about how it was recorded/transferred.
Vinyl sounds better because of placebo. If you want something to sound better, it's very easy to trick yourself into thinking it does. I used to be a DJ, i love vinyl because its tactile and wonderful. In a club nobody could tell the difference anyway. If you want excellent reproduction of the original sound as recorded, get as close to the original production as possible. These days that means get the master digital waveform (huge). If you agree frequencies your ears and brain cant pick up don't make a difference, you can get that size down a lot, which is essentially one of the tricks done to original productions in order to get the size down to fit a cd. When in doubt do a proper "pepsi challenge".
Wrong
I understand the argument but even if it is placebo in the end some people (like me) actually likes the sound of vinyl records. It is hard because listening although dependent to sound is different from it as so much as listening is psychoacoustic. Also instead of debating on why digital is a more accurate representation of sound, people should research on why some people "hear" digital music as cold apart from the placebo effect. I'm not sure but apart from the warmth that I feel from listening to analog (which you can explain as placebo) It sounds as if digital music either takes out certain harmonics or frequencies that we cannot hear load enough to accurately tell but we can actually feel. Again this is not an accurate description but this is the most accurate description of what I hear. Again maybe it is just a mixing issue or maybe today's mix is not done with enough care and dynamic range but in the end this is what I perceive. As much as I want the convenience of digital music, it is the feeling of actually listening to the song and feeling something about it that I miss a lot. Something that I just rediscovered after listening to vinyl again (after 20+ years).
Btw sorry for my spelling and grammar. Haha. I can't seem to find the edit button on my iPad.
+Henry Posadas Why do you need to do research on why some people prefer the sound of vinyl? The majority of people, as shown in survey after survey, prefer the more accurate sound of CDs. The technical facts and sonic measures support that CDs sound better. Therefore, a better subject for research which sits better in the realm of psychology than sound science, is why some people that prefer vinyl feel a need to dapple in psuedoscience and magical thinking to justify a legitimate sound preference.
It is very easy to test CD vs, Vinyl objectively. I played the same orchestral music both on a simple CD player transport and on a vintage Turntable, and I noticed that a properly recorded CD has almost equal if not higher quality in comparison to the vinyl, provided that one uses a proper synergic system (In my test: Music: Brahms "Symphony No 1" Sibelius "Karelia Suite"; Turntable: Denon DP-47F+ Phono Preamp: Parasound Zphono; CD Player: Pioneer, + DAC: iFi Pro DSD; Amplifier: Parasound Halo 21; Speaker: Focal; Sub-Woofer: JBL)
Vinyl has technical limitations.. play an LP until the end and listen to those higher frequencies, yuck!! .. mono bass, 'de-essing' ..
Done properly of course, both sound fab.
At the end of all this bickering and backlashing, you just have to ask yourself this: "¿Por qué no más dos?" Seriously, if you're that into music, just get either a CD or a vinyl record! It's not that hard, people!
The mechanical nature of the vinyl adds also resonances from the stylus assembly, cartridge and tonearm. Theese resonances put colour and character in the reproduced sound which are normally absent in the digital sound, hence lack of "life" in the "sterile" digital recording. Those resonances act also as kind of redundancy or short reverberation that arguably improves inteligibility of the sonic information. All in all vinyl is not Hi Fi. It may be High End (if we look at price tags) but otherwise it's just cool 😉, or better yet, hype.
Also, The industry wants to sell you the same music as many times as possible. There are Beatles albums you could have in 8 Track, Vinyl Old one, CD, MP3 Downloads, now "Hi-Res" and New vinyl. They have sold you the same music 6 times. Each tie they tweak it to sound a bit different. However technically there is no question, that digital has the edge. Channel separation, dynamic range and response.
I've always loved the sound of vinyl but with a lot of music being recorded in digital to begin with when they transfer that music to vinyl it's not as clear or loud but what is key is artists need to make sure they have a great mastering engineer for both formats. I will say that cassettes also was a great format but that's another discussion.
Sadly, a LOT of great music that came out on vinyl, and even a lot that was recorded on the old 8-tracks, never made it to CD format. All of that music is gone, lost forever unless you are lucky enough to have saved your old vinyl records. One sad thing is that these new Crosley Cruisers and others are destroying a lot of good vinyl because people don't know to replace the stylus (needle) periodically. They come with a cheap sapphire and that should be swapped out for a good grade diamond as soon as possible. Doing that periodically will insure that, even as cheaply made as the CC is, it can still give a long life of good vinyl playback.
LPs were compressed for radio too. I remember playing The Beatles Second Album with an EQ in the 70's. It was at a constant loud level up to 8kHz (or was it 4kHz?). Whatever it was, it was the frequency band of AM radio.
So the bottom line is that you need a good transfer to whatever media you use.
You can’t compress lps or else the needle will jump.
I prefer 320kb/s mp3 sound-wise, but I love the intimacy of vinyl records.
Lol funny
All new vinyl is recorded from a digital source. I gave up on vinyl back in 1985 and I have 0 regrets. I love my 40+ year old CD collection and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
How much money would you have to spend on a turntable setup to match the sonic detail of a CD played on a mid-range CD player? Regarding the compression argument, the vinyl has compressed audio every time (because of it's extremely limited range), where the CD MAY have compressed audio. Further, many modern albums were mastered from a digital recording. Going beyond all of this, HiRES digital through a good dac smokes vinyl and there's no degradation every time you play it. Vinyl is a format for fetishists. There's more involved with accessories and tweaking than enjoying the music. I love many formats including vinyl but arguing that it's a superior format is a fool's errand.
The specifications of vinyl might be less but you totally forget that when you actually compare them to each other, a vinyl record also barely gets any damage when the cartridge and tonearm mass matches well and set the tracking force / anti skate right. I don’t know what you’re referring to with ‘limited range’ but in case you mean frequency range that can differ, a vinyl record can have a frequency range of 7hz - 50khz and higher.
And about the turntable, around €200 if you know what you’re buying.
Vinyl is cracking after 15 spinning, and after some years -- the recording sounds as if you listening to it in a kitchen while frying on a pan where oil is mixed with water; splashing. I think vinyl is supported by large manufacturers for it is impossible to counterfeit it, but after invention of CD, practically vinyl became obsolete: CD is for as long as they will produce players; with perfect sound -- if the perfect audio!
May 14, 2023
I copied the whole comment section to Balabolka. It takes almost 8 hours to listen. I assume that it's going to be interesting.
When I first got in to collecting classical music at the age of 13, I was limited to taping it off of a low-power college FM station. It added a swishy-swirly noise to the signal, which was already deficient in bass and highs, and when played back later on cassette ended up a noisy, hissy, midrange-heavy sound (no Dolby noice reduction on that Sharp mini-system). I didn't care. I loved exploring this new (to me) musical path regardless of how it sounded. A year or so later I recieved a classical CD as a gift.....and it sounded too clean, too quiet, too sterile, to my ears that were used to all that hiss and noise. I guess I had it in my head that "old" music was more faithfully reproduced the lower the fidelity. I eventually got over it and began collecting classical CDs once I was making my own money, and moved on to DVD-a and SACD, and eventually digital files. Still sometimes miss that stack of noisy tapes though. I wonder...could some small part of vinyl enthusiasm be due to the format's inferiorities sounding "correct", with clicks, pops, rumble, hiss, and warble being a part of the music for many listeners? I remember some people vowing to stick to VHS because DVDs looked too "good", whatever that means. I'm betting there's a similar situation with a percentage of vinyl enthusiasts.
100% Preferred CD!
Okay it is all about what happens at sound recording
Thanks for clarifying
I always had tbis questions
The reason why the track "exploded" when you switched from flac to vinyl is that reduced dynamic range of vinyl = compression. It was vinyl that started the loudness war. It's part of the reason why audiofools prefer the sound of vinyl. It's perceived by the brain as sounding bigger and better in a similar way to clicking a loudness button or turning up the bass and treble (please don't do that). It creates an audio illusion but is not a faithful reproduction of the original sound the mix engineer produced and wanted you to hear. By contrast, digital gives you a very faithful reproduction of the original sound. This can be demonstrated by going to a studio, producing a digital mix, cutting it to vinyl and taking a digital copy. Now play the mix again and it will sound just as you intended. Play the digital copy and it will sound identical. Now play the vinyl and it will sound completely different. Audio quality is the ability to faithfully reproduce the original sound, and that is why I get so pissed off with audiofools ranting that vinyl is better quality than digital! Glad I got that off my chest.
Exactly you said "cut a digital mix" of course it will sound better played back on a digital format, just as he said. People that like vinyl tend to also love analogue recordings and music recorded and mastered from the original tape specifically for vinyl sound better than digitally recorded music transfered to vinyl, it doesn't take a genius to work that out. I play both and have great sounding CDs and great sounding vinyl, my great sounding vinyl sounds better to my ears that my great CDs, if that's just "perceived" as you say, well my perception is all I can go by, so if it's perceived to me to sound better then it sounds better. Perception is reality after all.
Agreed too. :)
I can’t agree with you on blaming vinyl for the loudness war. Blame the people poorly mastering CDs, not the preexisting format.
You can take any quality of digital format and print it on Vynil, Vynil can handle it.
You CANNOT make a CD sound like 24bit studio quality. CD's only do 16 bits.
Therefore your argument is invalid. Vynils ARE the closest to reality, CD's are just an approximation created from bits.
In ten years there will be no more CD's but Vynil will still be a thing.
As someone who collects vinyl, i will 100% agree that it is about the experience and aesthetic. It is also a godawful money sink, so i dont recommend people to get into it.
Records hands down!!
jesikebiking TEAM RECORDS!
@@GodzillaKaijuGK YES!!!!
@@cameronrobinson7400 Yeahhh!
Here we are in 2022 and CD is making a comeback, and I can't buy a freaken vinyl record without big pops and cracks or warps to save my life, not to mention the cost keeps going up up up.
When I first saw this I thought Lou Ferrigno was an Audioholic.
Actually, vinyl is also a manipulated signal. The 1953 standard adopted by RIAA uses a curve in which the signal is compressed by 20 db at 20Hz and expanded by 20 db at 20kHz when recording from the master tape onto the lacquer. The phono stage of the preamp then has to expand and compress the signal again; however, this is all done via analog circuits. (This is for the readers- you guys know this). Also in your previous blog (www.audioholics.com/audio-technologies/dynamic-comparison-of-lps-vs-cds-part-4), you've nicely demonstrated on your oscilloscope that the noise floor for vinyl is actually superior to CD above 2kHz. In the end, though, as you say it's all about the particular recording and knowing what's so-so versus exceptional. I prefer vinyl over CD most of the time, but if the same recording is in SACD I will pick that one. But then there are the rare audiophile reissues of LPs in 45rpm vinyl....
Well done! This is the one video on this channel that actually was clear and informative (with accurate information). The video answers the question in the title of the video, i.e. "which sounds better", and the reality is that depending on all the factors, one can be noticeably "better" sounding than the other depending on the arrangement of all the factors. Was they left out is that there are even more factors involved, such as psycho acoustic factors, some people simply respond to some sounds better than another person does. This characteristic is very evident in the vacuum tube vs transistor war, and is very prevalent in the audiophile sector. There are also people who are stuck in their head with which one is better so they just will not give up on their chosen format because that format is "logical" to them as to being somehow better.
I think I prefer vinyl, I feel like it brings something extra to the music experience from the bigger art work to the way it sort of forces you to listen to an Album a certain way. Because of Digital Downloads and Apple Music etc these days the only reason I even have to use a CD is in my car because it's only really got a CD player. I know my 2012 copy of Abbey Road probably won't sound any better then my 2009 CD of Abbey Road but the packaging is just much cooler... sort of.
properly mastered CD will sounds better every time.
Wrong
LaTour High End Audio correct,you are wrong.
+ma fi you obviously never heard good analog and or vinyl. Simply a ignorant comment to make. Again from someone who probably has a cheap ass system and never heard a good record on a GOOD turntable. Sorry dude but you can't make comments like that and not get a smack down when there not based knowledge about the subject.
+ma fi That is soo wrong. Poorly mastered ANYTHING will always sound bad,it's your source,and if that is bad,nothing is going to make it sound better.
+Glenn Steven properly mastered CD will sounds better every time. read it and think before you make a comment :) and do some research
Nice comparison. I like that you can recommend a turntable without arguing it's a better sounding format in general. At the end of the day, it's a fun experience to throw on a record and sit and listen, imperfections and all. Even if it's 100% nostalgia, if it makes for a more enjoyable experience when the mood strikes, it's worth it.
I feel part of the attraction to vinyl is that you have to maintain your albums, you have to choose your turntable, you have to choose your cartridge and you have to choose your pre-amplifier. All of these choices make vinyl listening more personal than a digital medium and if you feel more involved with the music you will probably like that format better.
Agreed. But in reality, if one is serious about one's cd-player, it's kind of the same: cleaning cd's, cleaning laserdiode, careful setup, power in question, darkness so light cannot disturb the diode, upgrading a lot of the copmponents inside the player, seperate dac, seperate anti-jitter, reclocking, seperate powerstation and so on.
and btw. copies homemade do tend to distort over decades. No protective lacques layer on top. And new factory recorded cd's have small holes in it, so it will destroy at some point in time. I experienced two cd's from 1988 to 2021. That's a very low rate, but it happened.
Then there's the "magic" stiff, like green tusch, dampening stickers and what not.
Oh, I think it's kind of the same as LP, which btw. is "long playing" (to you guys making the video).
I find that LP's doe snot sound better, just different. And why choose a cheesy cd-player, when you know that upsampling and what not kills some of the sound (as demonstrated by say Audio Research)? And why not havea talk about cd player construction in general? Traditional record playback have had a lot moretime to develop and still is. And cd playback kind of had to be perfect from the get go. And in that field a lot have happened too. dac chips, transports, poser supplies and what not.
I think, to makea better more complete understnading and to have that debate you have in your video, you need to take some of all these steps to have a far better picture of what's going on and why.
Thanks for sharing.
Kind regards.
ps: I think any serious music listener, should have both a LP player and cd-player at a high level in their system.
pps: I like my cassette player too ;)
there a lots of artefacts associated with vinyl replay which don't go away with even the most exotic turntables or pristine pressings,happily,many of these artefacts are euphonic-phase anomalies magically expanding the stereo image,tonearm resonance warming up the mid-range,HF roll off giving that silky tone.its more of a case of what vinyl adds to reproduction than what CD omits.beyond that its a matter of preference.
+ma fi
Yep. One can spend tens of thousands on a turntable set up but it still won't sound any better than a $400 CD player, if only due to the limitations of the vinyl record itself. Of course if someone prefers the lower resolution vinyl sound then spending more on a better quality turntable set up will make it sound more pleasing to them. My Linn owes me over $12k to date and I recently replaced the Dynavector cartridge with a Benz Wood which gave a better top end, still not close to good quality digital though.
Absolutely on the money. Most Anything that was master recorded on tape will sound better on properly cut vinyl. Digital can sound really good mastered to vinyl but its totally dependent on the expertise of the sound engineer. The issue right now is unscrupulous morons in record companies ruining the experience of new converts to vinyl by reissuing back catalogue pressed straight from CD or other digital files and they sound so bad they are nothing more than 180 gram frisbies. These charlatans need exposing, so people coming to vinyl for the first time and maybe coming back to the format are not ripped off and can get the richly rewarding experience they deserve from this beguiling, enduring way of listening to music.
There simply isn't a definite answer. Cd's (or any digital form), mastered without the use of a hard-limiter or compressor can >sound< better then vinyl. *HOWEVER, with many modern releases, the loudness war has taken over and digital music is mostly brickwalled. Especially with more commercial releases. It lacks dynamic range.
Vinyl audio has to be mastered differently to suit the format and "brickwalled" source material is not suitable for a good vinyl pressing.
So it really depends on the particular release when it comes to digital vs. vinyl.
Also, as a minor note: There are studies that although we are unable to hear audio above around 20khz, we subcontiously still perceive higher freuencies.
Vinyl mastered from analog tapes and such also has the advantage of a natural roll-off in frequencies. Not a scissor "CUT" at < or = 22.050kHz like on a CD.
People are terribly misinformed. Vinyl has to have more dynamic compression applied. Vinyl requires equal bass on both channels. Vinyl requires an EQ (RIAA) so the needle won't jump out of the groove. Any faults in CD mastering are human error, not choices made to deal with the format.
Wrong. Not all bass is summed on all records. Yes records have to go through a RIAA curve and then back through a reverse curve to reproduce it back flat, so what, if it's good equipment it can be a excellent representation of the original source. Digital has its own issues, it must be converted to digital ( loss of information ) then back to analog (more loss of information). You need to get it out of your head that if it's digital it captures all the information, and digital can't lose information. Typical wrong thinking
+LaTour High End Audio Show me where I claimed that digital didn't lose information. Digital doesn't lose any audible information. Vinyl actually loses audible information. You can post spectrograms of vinyl all you want that show content in high frequencies. They are merely harmonics created by the hardware. None of that is actual musical information. It's noise.
+LaTour High End Audio so you are suggesting digital to audio conversion all done within the electronics domain is somehow more lossy or compromised than a conversion done through transducers? putting aside the conversion processes involved in cutting a record, playback involves converting energy from a moving spiral {ie a spinning record), into magnetic and electrical energy through a transducer (ie the cartridge). that is three different conversions of energy states with all the associated inefficiencies and losses. even if you are a denier of basic physics, you can't escape that there is not even one measure of sound fidelity which vinyl matches, let alone exceed, that of a CD. if we had to start from scratch designing a hi fi playback device and format but with the knowledge of today, do you seriously believe that they would come up with a record player?
+Chooke Chooke The same goes for video. All of these people clinging to 24 FPS because it looks so "cinematic" and anything higher than 24 looks like a "camcorder." Do they honestly believe that if 100 years ago they could have started with frame rates like 100+ FPS, they would have just stuck with 24 because it looks "cinematic?" They wouldn't have even known because they had nothing to compare it to. Perhaps the frame rates that have been experimental have been in some sort of uncanny valley, and we may need to push them even higher... 48 and 60 FPS is all that's been tried in modern day.
I don't even get why anyone would even be involved in the ritual of playing back a vinyl record. You have to clean it. Yeah, dust does make its way into a record sleeve. A record has a charge, and it attracts dust. It needs to be cleaned of dust before every play. Even then, one does not get all of the dust. Every the needle hits dust, it also damages to groove, so now that pop or click is permanent.
+LaTour High End Audio And bass may not need to be summed 100%, but it requires some level of summing, and even if it wasn't, the mechanicsl of things wouldn't allow that great of channel separation at low frequencies, where as in digital audio, it's 100% absolute separation. The only limiting factor is crosstalk in the analog electronics. It's measurable, but completely inaudible with good design. With vinyl, no amount of design can eliminate it, unless one uses one of those ridiculous Japanese laser beam turntables.
To be honest in my personaly experience this principal question never came up. Personaly i never got rid of my vinyl collection in the eighties like so many did,but simply added the CD as a format. I wasnt a early adopter,but in the late eighties i also had a decent player and slowly but surely it became my main medium. And the reason why is not because
it sounded principly better but CDs became pretty cheap over the years and im not exactly someone who has a big budget....
Well,for some years now folks "rediscover" vinyl and praise the "more natural,more organic and warm sound" or something
like that. Wow ! That is new to me,although i never stopped listening to vinyl the whole years. For me that characterises
more the sound colouring of some cartridges out there than vinyl itself. It reminded me that the renaissance of tube amps
some years ago was accompanied by similar arguments. Was it true ? No. Why not ? Because an amplifier,solid state or
tube,can be designed to have certain sound characteristics without harming a linear frequency response and decent numbers
for THD and S/N. Probably if we were still in the eighties some serious review magazine could analyse through in deep measurements where this "tuning" is happening,but since we are in the "informationage" such profane hard fact presentation
made way to endless opinion pieces without any foundation in comprehensable measurments.
But back to vinyl vs. CD. Imho both are good enough for a enjoyable listen. And that is all what counts on a personal level.
Both have pros and cons and both are meanwhile technical outdated. But hey,i also still have my tapes of radiorecordings
from the early eighties and enjoy listening to them,because what counts is sufficient quality to be enjoyable. Even a tape
can give me that. So im certainly not a person on the hunt for the holy grail here,so to speak,like many so called audiophiles
seem to be,but someone who likes music.
modern vinyl is mastered from a digital source anyway bet the hipsters didnt know that
+Eric Sveinson No, it is all digital these days. In fact, or inconvenient fact to some, is that digital found its way into vinyl before CDs were introduced. Since the mid-1970s, vinyl mastering houses have been using digital delay lines instead of analog delays on the signal going to the lathe that cuts the spiral groove. So even in the unlikely event that 100% of the recording, mixing and mastering was done entirely using analog gear and media, the end of the vinyl mastering process may well have involved a conversion to digital and back. The only way you can be sure that a record is completely analog is to find a pristine record pressed before 1975. But even then, the whole point of going digital is for better sound quality by eliminating the inefficiency and loss from analog processes.
+Synthematix
Wrong! Not all modern vinyl is mastered from a digital source.
Of course, it's the Internet so facts don't matter...
+Jan KafkaApart from a handful of boutique studios catering to the "must all be analog" minority, nearly all of new records are from a digital source as there are few recording studios that still do analog recordings. Apart from the excellent, though very 20th century, 24 track analog recorders being superseded by digital, even basic things like good quality blank tapes are hard to get these days. As with any format, the vinyl record should benefit from a higher quality digital source providing it is mastered properly.
In any event, as I said before, if you wanted an all analog recording, if that is your thing, then the only way to be sure is to pick up a good used LP that was pressed before the mid 1970s as digital delay lines came into wide use before the late 70s which meant that the process of cutting the record through the lathe would have had a conversion to digital and back. A lot of people don't realise that digital came to LPs before the CD, and it did so to improve the sound quality.
Not all records, some newer records are sure, all depends on the band and label it's pressed on, so again that would not be a accurate statement
If you are going to the weekend market or opshop any where in Australia. CD's can be bought from a dollar or two.Second hand LP's are selling much more than the price of a brand new cd.
Why not take an album that works great on vinyl, digitize it with a neutral AD with no filtering what so ever, burn it to CD, use a player as transport and play it with a neutral DAC, then compare the result of the FLAC, the CD and vinyl? That way you're eliminating all but the medium and comparing oranges to oranges.
You could also digitize a record which sounds good and rip the same track from the album and compare the waveform, I'm 99 % sure you'd find the CD is compressed into oblivion whereas the vinyl has more dynamic range.
So I agree, CD is the better format, but the best source material is on vinyl because the mastering engineers are unable to compress it due to the physics of actual grooves in the record. With CD they have this freedom and destroy the source material. Let's hope replaygain on devices stops the loudness war so we can enjoy good quality source material. Although I'm afraid they enjoy making redbook sound bad to make a market for high rez and vinyl. There is really no need for anything higher than 44.1 outside the studio, as 96dB of dynamic range is far than enough and the noise floor is impossible to hear. Heck, it's even difficult to hear the difference between a 320kbit mp3 and 44.1! I'm not sure I could do it with a statistical significant result.
Ummmm no you are absolutely wrong... they will take the loudness war mastered stuff and still put it on vinyl with in vinyl dynamic range I have such a vinyl and I have compared the wave forms and it looks just like the CD copy (viewing the same song of course)
Very well done. One thing to add, that I have reviewed on other sites, is the quality of digital recording will vary of course, depending on how they recorded it, but also how they play it back. So you can have a DVD audio disc, which I think has 192kHz/24-bit, while CD audio discs have 44.1kHz/16-bit. But also, you need equipment that can replicate the same quality, or else you'll be losing some of the precious data. So for example, to get the best audio experience from a DVD audio disc, you would want to make sure it had a 192kHz/24-bit DAC. But to get the best audio quality from a record player, you might want to just upgrade your stylus. That's it. No other fancy components to have to worry about.
*Sigh* Does anyone really see a problem with this argument in general? Everyone who claims themselves to be an "audiophile" always try to make these arguments of which one sounds better like there is some glorified definitive answer encrusted in gold hurdling through space on the Voyager probe. Everyone who makes these arguments misses the point of even buying an album in the first place, LISTENING TO MUSIC. So much time is spent listening to "sound" and not spent listening to "music." If the music is great, why should it matter if someone bought it on vinyl, CD, or iTunes? IF IT'S THE MUSIC YOU LIKE, LISTEN TO IT! Also, before anyone claims that I am "un-educated" on the subject, I have a degree in music with extensive study in audio engineering. I am a mix engineer and I despise the concept of the loudness race. I used to study this debate back in my college days to the point my head would explode, and in the end my mixes sounded like crap, my grades were slipping and I constantly found myself on the search for "better sounding music." LISTEN TO MUSIC, NOT SOUND!!!
***** I think most people know that. It was a very poorly mastered album.
Kevin LaTour We can see what you have done here. You make it out that you agree with Robert but that was only a distraction for you to then give your uninformed and misguided opinion on vinyl vs digital - you are the definitive example of a "claimed audiophile" the OP is talking about!
Prep who is afraid to post his name and stays anonymous simply goes onto forums related to audio and lam bashes those who dont agree with him and supports analog. Prep whatever your name is, I have extensive knowledge on the subject of both analog and digital from recording to mastering, to the very best in playback systems. I have been doing this for over 40 years so dont make a fool of yourself trying to discredit my knowledge. Again I support both formats, but all said and done, analog both on the master tape side, and when its well mastered and properly mastered onto vinyl it kills even the very best in digital. Its not even close. Now if you have a low end system sure you probably will be hard pressed to hear the difference, infact when you compare a cheap turntable to a budget cd player most will prefer the cd. Not to say there arent some decent quality budget turntables and cartridges you just have to be selective to get something good, AND it must be properly calibrated. Anyway prep you are simply being annoying and we are all entitled to our opinion even if it differs from yours. So dont get ugly and defensive, play nice in the sandbox.
What a load of waffle. You have yet to post anything that is not psuedoscience or ignorant opinions. And you have been caught out at least three times appealing to engineers agreeing with your mythology yet I provided direct quotes from them contradicting your statements, yet here you are one year later thinking you can be taken seriously? So not only are you ignorant and misguided on matters hi fi, you even lie as some sort of crutch. I doubt you know anything real about the subject matter as nearly all your post contents border on crankster material.
Still afraid to post your name. I stated my knowledge and expertise on the subject what makes you think your such an expert ? My guess nothing, you simply are here to create drama and talk about no technical information on why you THINK digital is better. I have given my reason I feel analog is better but you have given nothing on the digital side. So talk about someone that has nothing important to say, you are the crankster. Lets have a real world debate give me something ANYTHING to dispute your claims. You cant dispute any of mine so it is YOU that has to prove yourself.
I pretty much agree with everything you have said in this video. I do agree that most Analog to CD transfers to not sound good, and the vinyl recording sound is 10 times better. Case in point: Listen to John Denver's Greatest Hits volume 1, or 2 on CD and then listen to the Vinyl Lp of the same recording. I was blown away by the sound of the vinyl recording as there is a big difference in the sound. But, I am not knocking CD as it is a great format for music, especially in the car, but I will admit I miss the day when I used to make compilation cassette tapes for the car, Sadly, that is a lost art for most people, but I still make compilation cassette tapes sometimes.
+Richard White So you base an opinion on a sample of one? It really gets down to the mastering. I have several albums that sound better than the CD counterpart for that reason, just as back in the day I'd come across the occasional compact cassette that sounded better than the vinyl counterpart.
Try a fair comparison, on albums which are known to have been mastered well on both CD and vinyl. For example, comparing my Pink Floyd DSOTM black triangle CD to my MFSL UHQR vinyl (considered to be definitive vinyl version), the CD easily sounds better, clearer more detailed and far more accuracy in bass and drums and sax, just more realistic overall. Same thing if you compare the original Dire Straits Brothers in Arms CD with the original LP release, the CD is far better.
The upshot is that if you get a CD that has been mastered well, it has to sound better because the CD format betters the vinyl on any analog sonic measure - ie dynamic range, signal to noise, linearity of frequency response, distortion, stereo separation and so on. There is no magic here, just basic sound physics.
+prep74 No, I do not base my opinion on one Vinyl album. I could give hundreds of examples of vinyl sounding better or more natural then CD's. Another example would be the "Phase 4 Stereo" London record label. The Superior sound on these records would give CD's a run for their money. More then likely, the best sounding records ever. I do agree that Mastering a recording well or not well, defines how the finished product will be. I am not saying CD's do not sound great, but most of them lack the warmth of sound you can only get from a record album, and also with a vinyl record you have something physical in your hand, large pictures on the front and back, with liner notes. There is a very good reason why vinyl records have come back in 2016 and they are once again back and more and more people and young people are getting into vinyl, and CD sales have been in a slump for some time now.
Well my best sounding CDs easily outperform the best I have on vinyl - and that includes records produced by MFSL and Speakers Corner. And so it should as there is not even one analog sonic measurement where vinyl matches, let alone exceed, that of a CD. I have come across very warm CDs and very cold vinyl and vice versa. Personally, I prefer true high fidelity that isn't coloured, ie neither warm or cold, just natural and faithful to the music source.
I wouldn't overstate the vinyl comeback either. The current ARIA figures show vinyl make up 6% of all album sales vs 94% digital. Out of the 94% digital, 40% are CDs. Out of the 6% vinyl sales, I'd be willing to wager a bet that most are bought by hipsters who play their records on a Crossley or something similar.
In any event, a CD is just a storage medium for a digital file and up to about 20 years ago that was the only way a consumer could access digital music. Now of course the format has evolved into many different forms including downloads and streamings. It would be remarkable if CD sales didn't decline given the greater scope of digital accessibility.
I agree with you on the other aspects though. There is something charming about having a large album cover (particularly bi-folds) with cover art and liner notes. That aspect sadly is being lost with audio progress.
How can you consider audible noise, hiss and pops, that you get with vinyl ,high fidelity? I think you guys are sharing a preference and to some degree engaging in nostalgia when you speak warmly about vinyl.
And you're obviously showing your lack of knowledge about what good vinyl sounds like. Hiss isn't specific to records; I've got records where you can hear the tape hiss drop off after the song is over. I also have many records, not all 'audiophile' specific, which don't have pops, crackles or other 'audible noise' any worse than CDs; clearly you don't, so it just means you're not an experienced record user. I don't even have a lot of fancy expensive gear, but I know how to use records and get the most out of them, and I know firsthand that your comment reflects ignorance of the subject. You're talking about bad records and pretending you're talking about ALL records. Well, bad CDs sound much worse than records because they won't even play at all, and a bad record will at least still play.
Just got into vinyl and my dad gave me his old turntable and I do think vinyl sounds better plus it means more. You have to take care of your vinyls more then CDs. Plus vinyls last a long time if you take care of them. CDs only last maybe 100 years.
I hope CD format never dies.
NaturalFork actually many stores are starting to stop selling cds, like target and Best Buy and starting to sell records
It wont
Listening to an old CD of Houses of the Holy on a Revox B225, and the album on a Denon DPL-30 w Astatic cartridge and Stax headphones, they sounded the same to me
CDs will be around forever. They are still the most popular format and most convenient
I am a electrical engineer and audiophile. Everything you said I have been telling people about compressed cd, iTunes etc. I also work part tile in a audio store where we sell B&W, Revel, Paradigm and Goldenear. I try to tell people about how analog sounds better if recorded that way. I hate compression. How do I know if a cd is compressed. I also believe room eq. is overated. Am I right?
+gactjackson Mostly wrong. Not all CDs, ITunes etc are compressed, you need to do a bit of research to find the better mastered copies. Well mastered digital will always outperform the analog counterpart, though subjective tastes may vary. The Mastered for ITunes range is quite good too. Likewise not all analog material sounds good, it depends on the recording. Totally disagree with you on the room eq. Room acoustics along with speaker quality and recording quality are by far the biggest influence on sound reproduction quality.
+prep74 The only EQ that is good is at the bass levels. When you start eq and adding power that the room takes out its hard on the speakers and the amp. Most music downloaded is compressed. I agree with you on good speakers etc.
What can realistically be expected from vinyl? Well cared for vinyl can sound very good. Unless vinyl has some nostalgic value to you it isn't worth bothering with. It has no advantages over a CD and is more difficult to work with, it has no portability, and the records can be too easily scratched. The CD is an exact copy of the master. The best vinyl can do is to approach the quality of a CD. It can never exceed it because the CD is an exact copy of the original. We use Cd's for data storage because they give you an exact copy. Bit for bit without errors. Vinyl does not do that.
i take allready Back vinyl, part nostalgy for and vinyl come Back, and cd die in the future complete, but you can download with vinyl code, if you want also digital version the same album.. cd die, i think, because some lightheads put music in net, thats really stupid thing..
+Scott Currier The thing is that although digital outperforms analog formats for sound quality, vinyl is not the best form of analog playback. Reel to reel and Hi Fi VCR analog formats sound better as they are far less compromised.
+prep74 Yes, i agree with you, VHS-HIFI is superb as long as the tape is not damaged and reel to reel at high speeds can provide excellent audio quality as well. 15ips and up if you want really good audio. Otherwise you may be better off with vhs-hifi.
High speed reel to reel and vhs or beta hifi both move a lot of oxide in front of the recording heads. The hifi methods use flying heads whlie he reel to reel uses a fast tape speed and linear recording. VHS-HIFI was available at a pretty reasonable price and gave you up to 6 or 8 hours on a tape. The drawback was that it was very sensitive to any issues with the tape. You really need multiple copies in case you had some issues with a few seconds of a song that would be enough to render that recording of that song ruined. I made many recordings of music onto vhs-hifi. I would record the music onto the HIFI signal and the audio from the program I was recording would go on he linear track at the bottom of the tape so you could either listen to the music or watch the tv program and listen to the tv audio on the linear mono track. Good stuff back in the late 80s and early 90's.
+prep74 By the way there were pcm adapters that would replace he video signal on a VCR with a digital audio signal. There was several mHz of bandwidh available on a video tape so putting a digital signal onto video tape was quite do-able. Channel 44 in Boston used to transmit digital audio from time to time. You would see a line on the screen with a back and white background. A pcm adapter was required to listen to the digital audio. You could do the same thing with a video recorder. VHS hifi was so good that I'm not sure it was worth bothering with pcm.
Simple concept: The human ear was never designed for absolute silence. The world has noise. 0's &1's are a wave assembled with nothing but absolute silence in between. CD sounds brighter, clearer because of this...however the human ear (brain) can be disturbed by it as well. As for technical...you were spot on. I have been producing and mixing for over 38 years...analog and protools. As an engineer I prefer analog but I have to work in digital. Besides..you record an analog LP and then it gets dumped to CD 16 bit 44.1....you are back to additional problems if you did not prepare for that or surprisely even know that the mixes must be done accordingly for the end product. Todays converters are excellant but I still a difference between and analog wav and a digital reconstruction of the wav. Thanks guys. Good job.
I wonder if the people that are hanging onto vinyl are the same as those hanging onto film for cameras. We went digital in the 80s, and we've never looked back. I wonder if the sound of vinyl is a thing of nostalgia. Maybe I should re-listen to some of our old records. Speaker technology has certainly improved. I'll bet that any of today's popular recordings could be remastered to sound better than any vinyl record just by changing the amount of compression used, since that is the true culprit of reduced sound quality in many of today's recordings.
ThingsDemystified Yes but sadly compression is killing modern music on digital format. A prime example, compare Adele 21 on vinyl vs CD and you will hear the difference NOT b/c Vinyl is a better format but b/c the mastering was done with greater care.
Audioholics I think the video could have been a little bit more explicit about when you're comparing the capabilities of the formats, CD vs vinyl, and when you're discussing the qualities of the products out there for sale. It appears a lot of the posts are talking past each other due to confusing these two very different issues. Most vinyl-philes have the misconception that the format is flawed, not that it's better because the recording engineers/the marketers/etc etc mucked up the recording/reproduction of the CD. I still assert that you could take the best vinyl record known to man and reproduce it on CD accurately enough that a human couldn't perceive the difference. This of course assumes qualified engineering of the whole process.
Good pt and agreed. A properly engineered CD should outperform a vinyl record. The only advantages vinyl may have over digital are the nostalgia factor and if people like to hear the clicks and pops.
The analogy with film photography is totally valid., and I can comment on this both as a photographer and as an "audiophile". There is more than the merely technical aspect of a format. We have come to a point where analog (or photochemical) and digital will both give excellent results given some skill, knowledge and proper equipment. Digital was invented because its easier, faster, lighter. Digital format is way more forgiving to the point where you just need to press some buttons. This is an awesome thing and we've benefited from digital in countless ways, but if there is a major downside, is that of taking the human element out of the experience. Vinyl and film take back that element, it demands time and care, by being more demanding its more rewarding. Film photography makes you think more about what you're doing, you only have 12 shots and you must use them wisely. Vinyl pushes you to really sit and listen an album as whole work of art rather than individual songs
great points Emilio!
I listen to a lot of Classical and I like both vinyl and CD for different reasons, but I prefer vinyl for the more tactile experience. It's more engaging and more interesting. The new Analogue Productions vinyl remasters of some of the RCA Living Stereo releases from the late 1950/60s sound absolutely fantastic.
Check out the DECCA recordings of the same era they are generally magical done by people who knew what they were doing and executed it with care and attention to detail. How these guys managed to capture the delicacy and dymamic power of a full symphony orchestra in equal measure is unrivalled even with all the technology available today.
CD wins hands down simply because most modern music isn't even available on vinyl. I want to listen to music I like not frequency response diagrams, warmness factors and other technical bits and I don't want to limit myself to recording my grandpa played or a few modern releases.
Cas Perry um, maybe you don't know that there are dozens of new artists on vinyl!
Actually CDs lose hands-down in that argument because they didn't exist for the first 100 years of recorded music, and there are still hundreds or thousands of albums which have never appeared on CD, and I don't just mean low-budget unknown stuff. You have chosen to pre-limit yourself to CDs, and you make it clear that you don't want to know anything about how sound works, so maybe your comment was just something to make yourself feel good about your technical ignorance and minimal knowledge of music. "I want to listen to music I like not frequency response diagrams"--- and how is this something in favor of CDs? Oh yeah, it ISN'T.
Almost all modern music is available on vinyl . Trust me .
Not sure what you listen too but every single major release nowadays gets released on Vinyl. Vinyl's outsell CDs 45 million to 33 million in 2022, and if the trend of the last 10 years+ is any indication the gap will be wider in 2023. It's the dominant physical format by a mile.
@@gamble777888 I posted this 7 years ago. The market has changed drastically since then.
This never gets old. Thank you, guys!
Fala tiozão.
Espero que vc tenha visto que vc foi citado no vídeo do sandman e platinho.
Very good talk guys. Really liked what you are saying. I persoanlly think that if you force yourself to choose vinyl over CDs or vice versa it is not much different than only listening to one genre of music. Why lock yourself in that box. CD and vinyl each have something that the other doesn't. Some are measurable differences and some are not measuralbe. I think some music lends itself better to the vinyl format and other music to the cd format. Heck, if you talk about earl 80s thrash metal I actully think that lends itself better to the cassette format lol. In my world I just choose to enjoy all three and have purchased many of the albums I love on cd and vinyl.
+mrhoffame Everything that can be heard can be measured and it is. It is typically only charlatans that resort to special pleadings. Having said that I agree that format is not as important as the quality of the recording or the mastering effort that was put into that format which is why I run both digital and high end analog at home.
prep74 Not sure I understand your point, but thanks for replying. Have a great one!
+mrhoffame Basically agreeing with you about not locking yourself in a box, some recordings have been mastered better on vinyl and others have been mastered to take advantage of digital. But also disagreeing with you on the other point that some differences are not measurable. If that was a case we would know what we need to measure and would have come up with something to do so. The only thing that cannot be measured is why some individuals prefer one format over another even if the mastering quality was similar - that belongs in the rapidly growing field of psychoacoustics.
prep74 Maybe I wasn't clear. I'm not saying things are not measurable. What I was saying is that what rings right in one person's ear is not a measurable thing. It is extremely subjective. Kind of like saying you can measure the PSI of a person pressing their hand against your back, but if you ask one person is that massage feels good they say yes. The next person says it's too hard and painful. That is kind of what I think about when people start using measurement to determine what format sounds better it's measurements or if it sounds better are two very different things that get lumped together a lot in the audiophile community.
mrhoffame Sure but don't you agree that there has to be some objective standard of measurement given the preponderance of subjective opinions, particularly when an individual's subjective opinions of audio can change over time and can also be influenced by expectation biases, cognitive dissonance etc? I sort of get what you are saying with the pain example but hard measures such as signal to noise ratio or dynamic range are not based on subjective notions or averages of what a person feel, such as pain; in audio these are precise measurements and used by all hi fi manufacturers when designing and testing their products. They correlate closely with how people perceive sound quality despite some on the outer.
For example, I suppose someone can subjectively tolerate a higher noise to signal or lower dynamic range than others in their music, and it may not be tragic, but the higher signal to noise ratio in particular will reduce resolution by masking more of the nuances - that is not a matter of subjective debate, the masking effect is real and if someone subjectively prefers greater masking then it can be confidently stated that they are not really into hi fidelity reproduction than someone who prefers music to be unveiled.