Has anyone been able to define well or measure differences between vinyl and digital?

Reading the answers, @asctim ’s most resonates with me. Some of my favorite recordings are on vinyl. Some of my favorite recordings are digital. I don’t feel a need to declare vinyl better than digital to like it. Neither is my first born :-) I have never seen any argument that holds up that supports vinyl having any property better than digital. IMHO there is probably something to the magic that @asctim describes, flaws or not. Vinyl also ties one had behind the back of the person working on it. Does that force them to pay more attention to what they are doing? Groove space is a limited quantity. Make the most of every one and do it right or it will sound terrible. Digital? Throw whatever you want down, it will fit and come out the other end.

@sns , I cannot speak for audio equipment in general, but for professional speakers (that some consumers buy), except for lunch room conversations, analog as a storage medium is not something that ever comes up. We never say, "we better feed this with a record player or tape player in case we missed something" though some people bring in needle drops.

IMHO as well, I think the MOFI debacle should put to rest much of these discussions. It won't, but it probably should. We could be spending effort figuring out where the magic comes from, not making up properties that always fall apart under the magnifying glass.

@thespeakerdude

I have found that vinyl records sounded better than the same album on CD. My girlfriend whole heartedly agreed. I wondered why the CDs sounded relatively crispy and lacking in richness and fullness. I suspected frequency response, but this is hard to test on an LP playback chain. How do you test it? Is there a record with a sweep tone on it that can be used as a reference point? I couldn’t find one so I resorted to comparing the spectral content of the same song played through my CD player or through the LP chain. What I found was a nice gradual roll off of the highs on the LP compared to the CD. This was consistent across multiple albums. So using a digital equalizer I replicated that roll off for the CD player and the CDs sounded much better! I tricked my girlfriend with the equalizer. So that’s another interesting point about LP playback. What really is the frequency response? A gradual treble roll off does not necessarily create an impression of a lack of highs. It can sound bigger, fuller, deeper, more spacious. It might even sound more detailed if the overall balance in the listening room comes across better. If someone has experience with calibrating frequency response on cartridges and phono stages I’d like to learn more about that. If it turns out they really are producing flat playback response on most high end systems that would be interesting to know. My system was not high end, just a Sumiko Blue Point on a Project One turntable playing into a Creek integrated amp. Stereophile, I think, had put me on to that setup as a decent budget rig that could beat most digital.

@asctim , here you go. https://www.audiogon.com/listings?q=test+record

RCOA test systems record has a frequency sweep. So does the Stereo Review one but it is pretty old.

Some newer ones here:

https://store.acousticsounds.com/g/48/Test_Record

Perhaps you can post how to do your phase test and the frequency roll off. I wonder if that is unique to your setup?

@thespeakerdude

Thanks! So I assume those records have perhaps sweeps and pink noise, white noise, etc, which you could get a line level reading off of the phono stage output to analyze. Anybody here tried that?

I did my testing using a Behringer DEQ2496 and calibrated microphone fixed on a tripod in front of one of the speakers. I didn't do a phase test. It had a real time analyzer on it and I’d just play the music on LP and watch that real time analyzer with it’s peak hold feature. I’d take a picture of it at the end of the song, re-set the peak hold, and then play the same song on the CD and compare the peak hold values at the end. It was crude but I could definitely see a consistent difference with the highs not coming up so much on the LP playback. 

I never tested the Sumiko Oyster cartridge I had before the Blue Point but I’d bet it was even more rolled off. That was a moving magnet cartridge and I had a Carver Pre-amp with the right settings for that.

@tomcy6

A blind analog/digital test recently came to light which caused a great deal of consternation among the analog contingent of our hobby and brought doubt.to some of their claims of what they can hear.

It was recently discovered that MoFi Labs had a digital step in the mastering - pressing chain of their Lps going back at least to 2011 and maybe even further back.

MoFi found that record labels were often not willing to loan master tapes out to them, so they put together a portable Studer tape deck that they could take to the record label vaults to make copies of the master tapes that they then used to make their MoFi Lps, including the very expensive one-steps.

MoFi started with the analog master tapes but they were recording them to DSD, plain old DSD in some cases but 4x DSD in most cases. Audiophiles bought these Lps for over a decade and loved them. There was the rare voice here and there that didn’t like them, but no more than with any album no matter how pure its lineage. Michael Fremer had a number of them on his 100 best sounding Lps list.

Thousands and thousands of analog listeners could not tell that the MoFi Lps had been produced from a digital source even after many listens over a period of years on their own systems.

So, MoFi definitely should have been upfront about the source for its Lps, but they weren’t, and no one could tell. I’m not saying that there aren’t differences between analog and digital, but there may be factors other than sound quality involved for those who find digital fundamentally flawed, In My Humble Opinion, YMMV..

Interesting story indeed. Thank you for sharing.

Plain DSD format, otherwise known as DSD64, uses 1 bit at 2.8224 MHz. Thus the density of recorded information is 2.8224 MegaBits per second.

CD uses 16 bits at 44.1 KHz. The corresponding density is 16 x 44.1 =  705.6 KiloBits per second = 0.7056 MegaBits per second.

2.8224 / 0.7056 = 4.0. Thus, DSD encodes 4x amount of information per second compared to CD.

DSD 4x, otherwise known as DSD256, encodes 16x the amount of information per second compared to CD. 11.2896 MegaBits per second. That's quite a difference.

Why is that important? It is important because research of human hearing system resulted in understanding that the rate of flow of information from cochlea to brain is between 3.5 MegaBits per second and 4.0 MegaBits per second.

Auditory processing circuits in the brain drastically compress this flow of information: this explains why lossy encoding works so well. Still, if some part of the original 3.5. to 4.0 MegaBits per second flow is arbitrarily removed, artifacts may occur.

As we can see, CD falls about 5.7x short of the target of complete digital transparency. DSD64 falls about 1.4x short.

DSD128 encodes more information, by factor of 1.4x, than the nerves running between cochlea and brain can transport. DSD256 exceeds the sufficiency threshold by factor of 2.8x, and thus shall be considered far more than enough.

How does this compare to other common PCM formats? Let's see.

24 bits x 48 KHz = 1.152 MegaBits per second. Falls short of sufficient 4.0 by factor of 2.88x.

24 bits x 96 KHz = 2.304 MegaBits per second. Falls short of the sufficient 4.0 MegaBits per second by factor of 1.44x. About the same in this regard as DSD64.

And finally, 24 bits x 192 KHz = 4.608 MegaBits per second. This exceeds the sufficiency threshold. Fittingly, this is the predominant format professional studios use for mixing the most complex recordings.

So, two of the most commonly used formats, DSD128 and PCM 24/192, can be considered as transparent to human ear as any analog format can possibly be.

The real tragedy of the 20th century is that so much music was published in the insufficient for full transparency format: CD of 16 bits x 44.1 KHz.