Article: "Spin Me Round: Why Vinyl is Better Than Digital"

The problem in assessing the alleged superiority of analog over digital or the contrary is simple to formulate:

Human hearings evaluation of an analog or digital format, in a specific room and in a specific electrical grid, is more impacted, unbeknownst to most, by the embeddings of the audio system, than by the analog or digital format itself most of the times...

The more important clue of a good S.Q. is the evalution of the naturalness of instrumental timbre...

But the experience of timbre in listening is influenced and conditioned by the mechanical, electrical and mainly acoustical embeddings of the audio system at least on par with the particular format to be evaluated...( without speaking of the specific hearing apparatus of any subject)

Then all those who pledge for an absolute superioriy of the vinyl over digital in ALL cases are going too far, over estimating their experience, which would be different in different embeddings or with different electronic components...

All those who pledge for an absolute superiority of digital over analog in all cases are similarly going too far for the same reasons...

The perception of timbre is one of the most complex matter in all acoustic pertaining to too many sciences to enumerate them...Linguistic, music, neurology and physics, mathematics and engineering being only the main one...

The complete description of the factors playing a role in the perception of timbre cannot be reduced to only digitalization method... The humain brain and his direct relation to the acoustic settings of his environment ask and solicit at the same times analog and digital functions, receptors and motors functions...

Then no single experience can establish the absolute superiority of a format....

The perception of a tone and his colored variation in time, timing with other colored tones or timbres, in a specific room, is a subjective phenomenon also; pretending in the absolute to reduce it to digitalization is only collapsing all the sciences and human experience implicated here in a engineering absolute pretense which at the end is only that: a pretense ignoring all that contradict it....

Pretending that vinyl is always and will be always superior, pertain to an illusion also, but a different one...One cannot extrapolate one experience to all other possible experience.....

Happy New Year....

Using the exact same mastering with MODERN digital SAMPLING, over several comparisons keeping my room and equipment static strongly favors the analog even though my digital setup is significantly more expensive and even “better” according to most. My conclusion is digital SAMPLING misses the instrument timbres and overtone interactions. 
I think some people have emotional reactions favoring digital bc they don’t have the time, patience, and history of collecting vinyl. Digital is easy, cheap, and has fewer needs to maintain stuff. Lazy like their opinions. 

Using the exact same mastering with MODERN digital SAMPLING, over several comparisons keeping my room and equipment static strongly favors the analog even though my digital setup is significantly more expensive and even “better” according to most. My conclusion is digital SAMPLING misses the instrument timbres and overtone interactions.

Congratulations for your deep dedication to music...

My experience DOES NOT contradict your experience.... It is only a different one...

My modest but genially minimalistic designed NOS dac gives to me the instrument timbre and his overtones.... But not in the beginning....Why?
My dac was enhanced greatly and all the other electronic components with it by being mechanically, electrically and acoustically rightfully embedded in my house/room...

My experience is that MOST audio systems are not well embedded at all or at best not optimally embedded... Most dac also are not good one, being too harsh and unnatural like, thin sounding or overdetailed and lacking flowing life then they are not good in reproducing the subtle timbre dynamics........




My experience is the embeddings is more powerful than most electronic parts upgrade and sometimes rival the entire audio system upgrading, dac included.... Most people dont know that at all because they never experience it.... Even pro in audio underestimate that...





I know that because in the last 2 years of listening experiments i transform totally my audio system without upgrading any part...

To answer your post i must say, that in a minimally rightly embedded or not embedded audio system, with one of the many hyped- dac on the market that are not so good, the perception of timbre cannot be good... Thin, harsh, unnatural....

It is not suprizing than many people prefer the more robust vinyl format which is more resistant to the very vulnerable timbre rendition from a recording in analog or digital format....Analog being more robust for timbre perception sustenance in a bad acoustical room...

But digital can rival vinyl nowadays and vinyl is not obsolete either but way impractical....

Happy new year and i wish you the best health prayers can buy for you....

Acmaier, the interaction between instruments is the same with either format and you are right some studio recordings are lifeless but that is the fault of the recording engineer not the format. 
Audio2 design is absolutely right. People's concept of digital is purely intuitive and in this case intuition is way out to lunch. Quantization error creates noise 96 dB down at 16/44.1 That is inconsequential and far less noise than the analog format produces not to mention that every step in the analog process adds distortion. This is not true for digital. Once the signal is in numbers it is impervious to distortion until it is returned to analog. Remember what analog cell phones were like? A real mess. Nothing even remotely like todays digital cell phones which are quiet and clear. 99% of modern music is digitized. If I play a vinyl copy of digitized music it will sound like every other vinyl album. I made that mistake once bragging about the recording quality of The Trinity Sessions which turns out to be a digital recording! Great sounding record. I love her rendition of Sweet Jane. This would make an interesting study, why so many of us have this obsession with vinyl. Many of us think it sounds more realistic or enjoyable. I certainly am amazed at how good this ancient technology can sound but digital files can also sound amazing and I do have digital copies of old analog albums that sound better to me than the original vinyl and this is in direct AB comparison. As many of us have mentioned, it depend on how the material was handled. I do not thin there is a generalization you can make as to which format is more preferable that will hold water and I'm not sure why we get into this discussion over and over again. It is not going to change. I will certainly be happy if analog formats survive. I certainly know digital will.  

Alas! unbeknownst to most, embeddings methods are more powerful than using vinyl or digital format in the S.Q. increase and more powerful than most partial or even in many cases than a complete upgrade...

I am flabbergasted that in all this audio forums i am the only one to tell this tale...


«Nobody throwing  rocks at you, you cannot be a prophet, only a deluded dude»-Groucho Marx speaking to me from his tombstone 😕🙃