Vinyl Vs Cd Vs Digital

Even the standard redbook cd 44khz 16 bit resolution has about a 26db advantage to vinyl with respect to dynamic range and at least a 40 50 db advantage in stereo separation as well as unmeasurable wow and flutter.

Vinyl vs cd vs digital. Vinyl for the most part avoided the loudness war with the rise of digital music cds included it s possible to make a track sound louder than it naturally should. Maybe it was coincidence but vinyl began its resurgence at around the same time as recordings started this trend. Digital got its act together but not until the death of the cd. For doing this test i recorded the same song three times with this gear.

Some may argue about quality but there s no doubt that having a vinyl of your favourite. A digital recording doesn t degrade overtime like a record does when played too many times. Comparing compact discs cds to vinyl or gramophone records is the musical equivalent of comparing digital photography with film photography. I can go on but you get the point.

On a cd the separation between the left and right channels used in recording is over 90 db. It wasn t long before vinyl recordings of the same content often had better sound quality at normal listening volumes simply because they had higher dynamic range. In this video you can hear the real difference between a cd and a vinyl. Digital music is the most convenient way to listen to music today whether it s obtained legally or not.

The problem here is that it had a tremendous result on the audio quality. Original sound is analog by definition. Though cd s sample rate is high and we re all well aware how good they sound the idea of its being converted once into digital and then back to analogue losing and approximating information seems to infer it will always be inferior to vinyl. Cd players because they use super accurate digital buffers are immune to this.

Yet there seems to be a large revival of vinyl records mainly due to either the hipster crowd or nostalgics. There s another far superior reason why vinyl is better than lossy digital formats.