Sound Quality Vinyl Vs Digital

A vinyl record is an analog recording and cds and dvds are digital recordings.

Sound quality vinyl vs digital. These purists wonder if digital files can really give you that analog sound of our youth. 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. And when cds first. Sonically vinyl has both strengths.

These days many records are made using playback of a. Take a look at the graph below. Lots of audiophiles say that when it comes to sound quality nothing beats vinyl. Sound quality from a technical standpoint digital cd audio quality is clearly superior to vinyl.

The problem here is that it had a tremendous result on the audio quality. 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. The answer lies in the difference between analog and digital recordings. In some ways it s the audio equivalent of driving a ford pilot.

Cds have a better signal to noise ratio i e. By every measure digital audio is superior to analog. The vinyl lp is a format based on technology that hasn t evolved much over the last six decades. Sound quality depends on a lot of factors and it is impossible to definitively state that either analog or digital is fundamentally better.

There s another far superior reason why vinyl is better than lossy digital formats. The quality of a digital reproduction is dictated by how many of those samples of the original are made. Original sound is analog by definition. There is less interference from hissing turntable rumble etc better stereo channel separation and have no variation in playback speed.

Digital got its act together but not until the death of the cd. 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. It is why mp3 with relatively few samples is so poor and hi res audio with far more is the closest we have to a studio recording.