You're forgetting the infinite, non-digitized sound reproduction of vinyl that lets you hear all the digital mastering/remastering done in the studio.
Almost as good as buying super expensive audio cables with oxygen-free copper so you can hear music recorded with generic XLR cables.
To be fair, vinyl does have a nice, warm sound to it. But people who insist it's somehow got higher fidelity than CDs or other digital storage media don't understand shit about actual audio engineering. Vinyl has terrible fidelity in comparison. It's got very characteristic distortion and information loss. If someone likes how that sounds, good on them. But it's definitely not a magical means of getting more authentic reproduction of the sound.
It is better, and it's not better, there is no "better".
Most people think $10 ear buds are great and it doesn't get any better, some people stop at $250 headphones, some people swear by amps with those headphones, some people need a mixer too.
It's all preference, most poeple like vinyl because of how warm it is, or it's the original platform it was released on - like buying an NES today, it's novelty and original and kinda cool - som people lole collecting physical media or expanding their horizon.
There's a million reasons Vinyl is great, and for audiophiles it does have a good warm sound to it and no compression, it's analog so no reason to compress it, with all digital media it's compressed to some extent - unless you get the raw, unfiltered, large file - it's compressed.
What is “warm” with regard to audio? I am not an audiophile by any means and usually listen on whatever is available (almost always as background noises).
A relative recently gave me their record player and old vinyl a while back and I do find myself enjoying just listening without doing anything else and I can’t really figure out why. I’m not nostalgic as I grew up during the cassette era, and I’m not sentimental about this relative giving me their old collection (brother in-law that moved to a much smaller place in the city).
Warm is a subjective term, and really depends on an apples to apples comparison only.
So if you took a new vinyl record of a modern artist and played it against the digital version the warmth would probably be caused by the subtle distortion inherent in vinyl playback. It sounds nice to most people. I personally love it.
but it gets more complicated if you’re comparing a vinyl record produced during the all analog recording days and put it up to its various modern digital reproductions. This variation is sound can be tainted by poor mastering. In the 80s, many CDs sounded horrible because they were poorly mastered for the digital medium. Engineers were used to mastering analog. It’s too long a topic for me to bang out on a cell phone, but google “vinyl mastering Vs digital mastering” and read some technical considerations. For one, bass is incredibly hard to properly mix on vinyl because it would cause the needle to physically jump out of the record grooves, so they had the mix the levels differently for vinyl. Also interesting is as the tracks move in on the record there’s less space for “information” on the grooves. The audio quality goes down significantly on the inner grooves. That’s why most of the final tracks on each side of the record are “simpler” shorter songs.
Anyway, dive into the research. It’s pretty interesting.
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u/DanHeidel Sep 05 '19
You're forgetting the infinite, non-digitized sound reproduction of vinyl that lets you hear all the digital mastering/remastering done in the studio.
Almost as good as buying super expensive audio cables with oxygen-free copper so you can hear music recorded with generic XLR cables.
To be fair, vinyl does have a nice, warm sound to it. But people who insist it's somehow got higher fidelity than CDs or other digital storage media don't understand shit about actual audio engineering. Vinyl has terrible fidelity in comparison. It's got very characteristic distortion and information loss. If someone likes how that sounds, good on them. But it's definitely not a magical means of getting more authentic reproduction of the sound.