Vinyl may be making a comeback in a big way, but this long and technically informative piece in LA Weekly suggests CDs may actually sound better after all. The digital nature of CDs means it’s possible to capture an amount of dynamic range that simple wasn’t mechanically possible with vinyl.
It is a fact that vinyl sounds different from CDs. And many people prefer vinyl’s sound. But it’s not clean reproduction of a recording that makes vinyl a preferred format; it’s the affect the vinyl adds to a recording that people find pleasing.
“I think some people interpret the lack of top end [on vinyl] and interpret an analog type of distortion as warmth,” says Jim Anderson, a Grammy-winning recording engineer and professor at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. “It’s a misinterpretation of it. But if they like it, they like it. That’s fine.”
It’s also clear that the vinyl experience is about more than just sound. Pete Lyman, co-owner and chief mastering technician at Infrasonic Sound, an audio and vinyl mastering studio in Echo Park, says he believes listeners are gravitating toward vinyl for the physical experience of owning, holding and flipping an LP.
“I don’t think that [sound is] really the appeal for people right now,” Lyman says. “They like the collectability factor. They like the whole ritual and process of listening to it. They’re more engaged with the music that way.”
So, is the vinyl revival purely down to middle-aged men trying to recapture their long-lost youth? (I know of no female vinyl enthusiasts!). One reason may well be that many contemporary CDs are intended to be listened to in cars or to be ripped to iPods for listening to on public transport. So they’re given a loud compressed mastering intended to punch through background noise, making little use of the CD format’s dynamic range. In contrast, vinyl recording are sold to be played on Big Expensive Stereos.
One of the reasons for the “vinyl is better than CD” meme was that in the early days of CDs, the D/A and A/D converters used to both master CDs and play them back were quite noisy and primitive by today’s standards. My wife used to have one of the first-generation Sony Discmans, and discs played back on it sounded markedly noisier than when played back on newer hardware. And that was back in 1993, so you can imagine things have gotten a better since.
The loudness wars are a big part of why modern music sounds terrible, but I think that’s a slightly orthogonal issue.
That’s actually mentioned in the article; hence many classic albums got remastered a few years after their first CD release. Then came the Loudness Wars and ruined everything again.
You cannot master vinyl as loud as CDs or the needle will jump out of the groove. It’s such a shame that CDs have so much dynamic range that doesn’t get used. Having said that, most of the music reviewed here isn’t brickwalled, which is nice.
The other thing vinyl adds is second order harmonic distortion through the tone arm and needle, this gives you some of that ‘analogue warmth’ that people talk about. I own a turntable and there is something nice about an all-analogue signal chain and handling the discs and artwork (handling is one of the reasons I still use CDs). But I’m under no illusions: from a technical standpoint, digital is superior in every way. Better signal to noise ratio, better dynamic range, lower distortion, etc. But you know what, sometimes I just like hearing Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl
Never mind the sound, vinyl clearly wins on packaging. I want lyrics and liner notes I can read without a magnifying glass. I want gatefold sleeves!
And that probably is one of the biggest appeals. It’s the one thing about vinyl I miss.
And LaserDiscs!
Bring back 8-track cartridges!
Apparently the audio cassette has been making something of a comeback recently. There have been a couple of releases reviewed at Angry Metal Guy that have cassette options. Of all the things to come back, the cassette! At least vinyl can at least sound good when it’s clean, cassette tapes are just complete rubbish from start to finish. Copious background hiss, warping, poor fidelity, low dynamic range, having to fast forward or rewind the stupid things, even smaller artwork than CDs, I could go on… Does the audio cassette have any redeeming features in the modern world?
Difficult to see any attempt to revive the cassette as anything other than a very short-lived fad, or a marketing gimmick. Cassettes were awful, and it was always only a matter of time before the player chewed them up.