Sound Quality Difference Between Vinyl And Digital

Writing for the wall street journal neil shah reported in his article why vinyl s boom is over that.

Sound quality difference between vinyl and digital.

The sound wave produced by analog playback could be further from the original than a good quality digital file would be. To break down what vinyl can. That s why snare drums cymbal splashes and other loud instruments have so much more punch in vinyl recordings. Check out our listening results.

It therefore surprises some that highly respected audio experts will say a top flight record player far surpasses the sound quality of all digital sources. 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. We compare the sound quality of analog vinyl vs digital audio cd flac on a 100k stereo setup. Vinyl can still push music to the limits of its dynamic range 55 70db but it often shies away from doing so in order to maintain sound quality.

Cd quality sits somewhere in the middle with 44 100 samples per second at 16 bit accuracy. Original sound is analog by definition. It is easy to be carried away with the marvels and speed of advance of digital mediums. It caused songs to sound distorted and unpleasant and removed their depth and texture.

The comparison of sound quality between vinyl records and digital recordings stands tall among these platform debates. The quality of a digital reproduction is dictated by how many of those samples of the original are made. Old lps were cut from analog tapes that s why they sound so high quality. Digital music as source for vinyl.

The results may surprise you as they did us. But the majority of today s new and re issued vinyl albums around 80 or more several experts estimate start from digital files even lower quality cds. Observation and comments on the difference between analogue vinyl and digital formats. Since vinyl is an analog format it can suffer from the same problems.

Sound quality depends on a lot of factors and it is impossible to. The answer lies in the difference between analog and digital recordings. A vinyl record is an analog recording and cds and dvds are digital recordings. There s very little compression so the loudest parts of those sounds often.

The problem here is that it had a tremendous result on the audio quality. Take a look at the graph below. Nearly all audio enthusiasts take one side or the other some openly and with zeal most with subtlety and qualifying their preference through acknowledgements of the pros and cons of each.