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

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 😕🙃

@acmaier3, I’ve spent almost 30 years either developing, optimizing, working with, or doing basic and applied research on studio equipment, audio, recording, and processing and have spent countless hours listening to music as its played and what gets recorded and played back.


How about you?


Timbre exists, or accurately the relationship between the various harmonics and their attack and decay. However, the properties that mahgister attempts to assign don’t exist. His failure to understand the underlying mathematical composition of signals and hence why digital is able to capture anything that can be called "timbre" in far greater accuracy than any current analog equipment, causes him to assign "ethereal" properties, that do not exist.

acmaier39 posts12-30-2020 3:37pmTimbre definitely exists... it’s why one guitar sounds different than another. Why nylon strings sound different than steel.
Audio2design is a fool arguing with facts like a homeless person yelling at a street sign.

Playing a record is like looking through a window. You're not really there. You're on the other side of a wall, looking through glass. Layers and layers of glass. Some of them clear, some colored, some optically perfect, some wavy as hell. The scene is bent and blurred and colored and far from perfect. But its perfectly clear to your brain. To your brain this is no different than looking at a fish in the stream. Yes the water is wavy, murky, muddy, maybe even. But for all that there is no doubt in your mind, not the slightest shred of doubt, that there is a nice tasty trout in the stream.

When we push play on a CD we get a video on a screen. And the picture we see, it went through all the exact same layers of distortions as the record. Only now in addition to and on top of all that its been converted to video. No matter how sharp the contrast, how vivid the colors, there is never a doubt in the mind, not the slightest shred of a doubt, that we are looking at a video monitor. There is no trout. Maybe never was. Could be really good AI. Who knows?

If digital is so wonderful then why do you think it is that all the best movie directors and actors try so hard to film on location, to actually perform their stunts? Its because the brain is uncannily good at figuring out what is fake, what is fraud, and what is real. When we play a record, whatever it was and however good or bad it sounds, at least we know its the real deal

@millercarbon  this is really good actually.  Some things are hard to explain.  A verbal explanation of the sound of analogue records is probably better left to a poet.  The adamant engineer types and the music production professionals want to reduce the discussion to the limits of their empirical understanding, which, it seems to me, is often lacking in emotional depth (present company excluded of course).  

My inner voice is telling me to say what I really think about this statement, but in the interest of being nice, I will just say this is really silly and shows a considerable lack of understanding of what a "signal" is.  I can take your favorite record Miller, recording it, and play it back to you on a digital playback system.  As long as I have a turntable running in that room, you will assume that you are listening to the record. You will not know it is digital. Digital can capture everything that can come off a record. The opposite is not true.


p.s. When they film on location, odds are very heavy they will be using digital cameras. The number of movies shot on film drops every single year, and today, technically, there is little reason to use film. Want a film effect (grain/noise), add it digitally. 

When we play a record we don't know it is the real deal, we know for sure it is fake (i.e. a recording).

If digital is so wonderful then why do you think it is that all the best movie directors and actors try so hard to film on location, to actually perform their stunts? Its because the brain is uncannily good at figuring out what is fake, what is fraud, and what is real. When we play a record, whatever it was and however good or bad it sounds, at least we know its the real deal