Are (analog) records actually considered to sound better than (digital) CD’s?
Word on the street is that vinyl record sales are increasing because of the supposedly better sound. CD’s are considered harsher. One the other hand, I’ve heard that digital format is so detailed that the human ear can’t hear the difference.
I’ve grown up under the assumption that digital was always better quality sound than analogue.
So in any case, is there some consensus of audiophiles that think analog records are actually better in sound?
I wouldn’t say there is a consensus but a lot of audiophiles believe vinyl records sound better than CDs. It also depends on the particular album in question.
A few years ago, I did a listening test between 10 vinyl and 10 CDs. Most vinyl versions (ignoring scratches & pops) sounded better than CD. For example, the 1976 Boston album sounded better on vinyl than the CD. However, Dire Straits Brothers in Arms sounded better on CD than vinyl. The vinyl version was harsher sounding.
A little distortion makes audio sound “warmer” and “smoother”. LPs inherently have a bit, but CDs have much less (theoretically none), and that’s one reason the latter sometimes sounds harsh in comparison.
I’d love to be pointed to some blind testing done in this area (even single-blind would work). I’ve never seen any rigor at all applied to this discussion.
When CDs first came out, I knew some people who worked in mid- to high-end audio retail. The claim then was the sampling rate for CDs wasn’t high enough to beat the quality of LPs. However, they were not engineers, they were salespeople (although they sold CD players too). Even today the half-speed mastered vinyl LP is supposedly still the best quality for consumer audio.
I do find it lamentable that the MP3 has become the standard, which is clearly degraded from CD quality. Over the last three decades the consumer market has shifted from high fidelity back to the days of “good beat, can dance to it.”
When I used a turntable, I had a mid-high end cartridge (Shure V15-V), and a pair of audiophile speakers (Audio Concepts Saphires) that were bi-amped. In every case, well-mastered CDs sounded better than vinyl of the same performance. Just the reduced noise floor alone made a huge difference.
Maybe someone with a $30,000+ system would say differently.
I was a bit of an audio snob in the 80s and in a moment of madness purchased a Linn Sondek LP12 with an Ittok arm and a Linn Troika cartridge. Almost £1800 and this was in 1986. This was THE benchmark for vinyl rigs back then. I was using good amplfication (NAIM) and speakers (Linn)
I could never really tell the difference between it and my old Pioneer PL12D which cost me £84.
I moved to the US and finally succumbed to CDs in 1990 when I bought a reasonably good Nakamichi CD1 for about $400. It didn’t sound any worse than the Linn. No better either except for the lack of pops and clicks.
So I sold the Linn and bought a $300 Rega. It doesn’t sound any worse than the Linn either.
FWIW, I am also a classically trained musician (piano) with a good ear even at my advancing age. I also had the Linn set up professionally.
I’m always highly suspicious about those claims, but to directly compare vinyl and CD seems rather difficult, because especially vinyl has extraneous tell-tale signs – the aforementioned crackling and popping (which I personally find far more irritating than any supposed ‘harshness’ in the CD audio, but I really can’t claim an especially developed hearing), which, for a fair comparison, would either have to be added artificially to the CD, or somehow subtracted from the vinyl, both of which seems to have the possibility of distorting the results.
However, there are certain findings that seem to support my scepticism, most of all perhaps the realization that CD audio apparently can’t be much improved on: in a double-blind test of 96 (and up) vs. 44.1kHz digital audio (the latter being the CD standard), participants weren’t able to tell a difference with significantly better-than-chance accuracy (article about the study here).
As for the mp3 vs. CD issue, things get even more muddy here – the psycho-acoustic algorithms used to achieve mp3 compression more or less guarantee inconsistent results; certain pieces of music lend themselves better to compression than others, and the compression is more efficient for some listeners due to the fact that it relies on ‘average’ hearing, which is nicely supported by this (small-scale) listening test carried out by German computer magazine c’t, which also finds that even ardent audiophiles typically can’t reliably distinguish between 256kbps mp3s and CD quality audio; frankly, I’d be surprised if most average listeners could distinguish between 192k and CD, I certainly can’t.
In the c’t test, by the way, one participant with a slight hearing disability won, probably due to his hearing being markedly different from average.
However, I haven’t been able to find any larger-scale, somewhat more significant studies regarding this issue.
Agreed. I’ve always wondered if you could make CD’s sound better to people who preferred vinyl by simply mixing in an analog track of silence playing from a record player (to provide crackles and pops with perfect fidelity).
The big difference in my experience – and this is by no means scientific – is that the analog sound on vinyl is a more accurate representation than that on a CD. I can hear music in three dimesions on a record player – even the cheap, shitty one I have at home – but I can’t with a digital signal. If I close my eyes and imagine a band playing on a stage, I can hear that the drummer is several feet behind the guitar player and the keyboardist is somewhere off in the corner, and so forth. Now, with a fancy enough CD player and speaker set, my understanding is that there is enough data on the digital recording that a similar 3D sound experience can be acheived, but I’m not prepared to drop a few grand on a system just so I can hear fireworks going off above the stage on an “Eagles Live” recording. And there is also the distinct possibility that my brain is just playing tricks on me.
Anyway, notwithstanding the pops and hiss (which are annoying), I prefer the sound produced by vinyl. In the meantime, I will stay tuned to this thread to see what the smart people have to say.
I had a direct to disk copy of Dark Side of the Moon. Far superior to any cd, in detail and dynamic range. When it was new you could walk in the room at the start of all the clocks going off, and not hear a thing. By the end of the crescendo, you almost needed to run out, it was so loud. So, yes, LP’s, under ideal circumstances, can be superior to cd’s.
I just wonder how much of it is hearing the hissing and popping of an LP bringing you back to the “good old days” when you were drinking cheap whiskey and (trying) to get laid every weekend?
IMO, quality is a function of the effort put into converting between the two formats. (WARNING: gross oversimplification follows.) A lot of earlier CD pressings were crappy because the labels simply played the analog signal into a computer and slapped the result onto a CD. These are a mixed bag, with some disks being almost indistinguishable from the vinyl and others clearly inferior. Other CDs were reengineered and sound much better.
Of course, this only applies to CDs made from analog recordings, which will be indicated by the letters AAD (analog, analog, digital) on the CD or packaging. More and more albums are created straight to digital, which will be indicated by DDD on the disk or packaging.
IMO, a well engineered CD is equal or better than vinyl because vinyl will always have some popping and hissing. The changes in the quality of the sound due to the limitations of the digital formatting are generally beyond the range of the human ear, though the the “warmness” may change. A poorly engineered CD from analog will be inferior to the vinyl.
As a side note, MP3s can be comparable to CD quality if they aren’t compressed too much, certainly within the limitations of most cheap earbuds distributed with most MP3 players. Of course, by not compressing the file, you lose the benefit of creating an MP3 in the first place. When listening to an MP3 player, do yourself a favor and buy some decent earbuds and bump the bitrate up to 192kHz or more.
I’ve always felt that the difference between the concepts “analog” and “digital” are best illustrated with clocks.
Representing the digital world is a digital clock, displaying digits for the hour, minute, and second. If you’d like, it can even display decimal fractions of a second, to whatever number of decimal places that you like, provided that the number is a finite number. In the other corner, we have an analog clock, with an hour hand, minute hand, and second hand, all of which move smoothly, rather than in ticks.
Each has a disadvantage over the other. The digital clock is easy to read, but is almost never exactly correct, because the correct time is displayed only for an instant, and then stays unmoving until it changes. The analog clock is always exactly correct, but is difficult to read because it is constantly in motion.
Carrying this over to sound recordings, it seems to me that true sound is on an infinite range of wavelengths, and a digital recorder must round off each and every one of them to whatever degree of accuracy it is capable of. In contrast, the analog recorder can capture the full range of everything. In actual practice, the digital may sound better if it can capture the very fine distinctions, etc.
$5000 power cords don’t make any audio difference and they’re scams. But $10,000 power cords ---- that’s when you really can discern an improvement in sound quality.
While there’s plenty of stupidity in the world of audiophiles, it’s unfair to classify them all that way. The average person, for example, probably couldn’t tell the difference between a 128K mp3 and CD audio, but that doesn’t mean that anyone who thinks they can is fooling themselves.
