Vinyl vs. CD My Conclusions

After a two month period of listening and comparing, I have come to some startling conclusions about the state of recorded music. This video lays out some of them. I hope you will share this video with others who are into music and audio and I invite you to comment and air your views. :) JC

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  Music

[OkieFats ITCXTC]

I have a load of digital equipment I use in my home studio but I use tube pre-amps, tube main amps and mix my masters down to stereo reel to reel at 15 ips with DBX noise reduction. It sounds so much better than a digital master. I won't go into the science of it all but it is backed up by scientific fact. Vinyl is the same way. I doesn't look better in theory but in reality analog sounds better on all fronts.

[Joe Collins]

Digital can sound very good if you understand it's limitations and don't go nuts over-processing everything. Analog has more depth but it's the crappy mastering I'm railing against here and not just the difference in formats. I have some CD's that are incredible sounding and some LP's that really suck but in general, I prefer the analog experience most of the time.

[TheFRiNgEguitars]

Nice presentation here, but my 2 cents worth is that not all CD's (and records) are created equally. I have some duplicate factory pressed Cd's (or records) that sound very different, for better or worse, the difference being where they were mastered. The quality of sound is highly dependent on the quality in the mastering and the source. I believe this is more of a factor of how a record or CD sounds, more so than analog or digital format. Records were largely pressed from fresh masters.

[Joe Collins]

'Tis true.... However, there are resolution issues to tend with in digital audio and sometimes the lack of depth in digital can be devastating to some material. :)

[EarnestLamb]

I have a consumer grade DVD Video recorder that records uncommpressed PCM at 48K 8-bits per channel (what other people call 16-bit Stereo). And "when" I use that to record my favorite vinyls, I can hear more (when playing that DVD back) than I can from their 44.1K CDs. But I agree with you, that Mixers nowadays are clock-punching jokes, but they are precisely doing what the industry wants them to do.

[Joe Collins]

You got one thing wrong... It is NOT 8 bits per channel... That would sound awful. Stereo PCM is 16 bits per channel always. :)

[Joe Collins]

The difference is not EQ... Do you really think that I am that naive? There's way more to this than that.

[Cartoonyworld109]

There is a reason why vinyl sounds better. Look up "compression".

[Pericles Vicente]

Another thing I'd like to say, is about loudspeakers. Most modern speaker system have huge and strong magnets and very acute angled cones. OK, it is perfect. Perfect to listen to recordings mastered today, for such systems. In old vinyl days, most speakers had weak magnets and broad angled cones, that give some sort of damping effect on loud and high pitches. That was taken into account when LPs were being mixed and mastered, and the hearing bias of the engineers of that time was also different.

[Pericles Vicente]

In my opinion, well recorded and well pressed LPs sound better BECAUSE they were mastered to be played on real life systems, not in sharp crystal clear audio systems in ideally equipped labs. All vinyl sound engineering was made keeping in mind the analog system that would play them back. Many CD remasterings cannot achieve what they say, for the simple fact its original mixing was made precisely for an analog playing system. Remastering can do a lot of things, but cannot do magic.

[w7777777s]

Vinyl seems to shine best in more intricate subtle audio like smaller acoustic ensembles recorded in a natural way without much compression. Anything that is naturally loud and compressed, (metal?) mastered loud to vinyl suffers a bit, as does very wide dynamic range like full symphony orchestras with no compression because they naturally exceed the signal to noise ratio / dynamic range of even the best vinyl (or analog tape without noise reduction) without a bit of gain riding or compression.

[w7777777s]

I have some albums I have even collected intentionally in even more formats including iTunes downloads (which are getting much better), MP3s (decent bitrate) and all the tape formats including reel to reel. Occasionally R2R will sound best, very late cassettes played back on a properly adjusted calibrated machine can sound surprisingly adequate. Dubbing good vinyl to 16/44.1 CD quality wave files always produces a flattening of the sound stage and openness.