Digitally remastered vinyl record? Seriously?


Hi folks, this is my first post in the forum. Today I went to my favorite coffee shop/record shop. They had the legendary U2 album "The Joshua Tree" as a 180g audiophile vinyl record which proudly wore a sticker "digitally remastered".

Well, I might be to nit-picky but doesn't that defeat the purpose? We love vinyl because it's an analog source which has all the beauty and vibrance of analog recordings. If you run it through an A-D converter, remaster and then run it back through a DAC (who knows what hardware they're using?) and press it in vinyl, you might lose the analog kick, don't you?

What's your opinion and experience?
128x128mblfan
Your question has no universal, true in all situations answer. Depends on the care and methods used in the creation of any given release. In the case of say, the Fleet Foxes eponymous release, there's no difference between the vinyl and digital in terms of quality. In the case of Robert Plant's newest release Lullaby and the Ceaseless Roar, the vinyl sounds much better than the digital cd. Don't know about the high rez release. I have many duplicates of digitally recorded cd's and vinyl where the vinyl sounds better. In some cases, the music is recorded at better than cd format resolution and those higher resolution files can be used to master the vinyl. I have many, many digitally recorded classical music lp's that sound fabulous. I also have digitally recorded classical music from some labels that sound mediocre at best. So, short answer IMO, is that it's throwing the baby out with the bath water if you dismiss all vinyl releases simply because they were digitally sourced.
Not sure about Joshua Tree, but Dark Side of The Moon 30th anniversary edition is digitally re-mastered as well and sounds like dream.