Comments on: CDs May Actually Sound Better Than Vinyl?

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 13:18:16 +0000

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.

By: Synthetase

Synthetase — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 03:31:57 +0000

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?

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 14:04:57 +0000

Bring back 8-track cartridges!

By: Serdar Yegulalp

Serdar Yegulalp — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 13:59:22 +0000

And LaserDiscs!

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 08:25:47 +0000

And that probably is one of the biggest appeals. It’s the one thing about vinyl I miss.

By: David Meadows

David Meadows — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 07:44:08 +0000

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!

By: Synthetase

Synthetase — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 23:07:23 +0000

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

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 19:20:53 +0000

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.

By: Serdar Yegulalp

Serdar Yegulalp — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 19:10:30 +0000

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.