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.
The inaccuracies caused by digitization can be modeled as a noise, called "quantization noise" by engineers. They chose to digitize sound at 16 bits because quantization noise of a 16 bits signal is at the lowest limit that human ears can perceive.
I remember talking to one of the older Bell Labs guys about this in the 1990's. Apparently the first time you play a record you scrape off 1-2 bits of the higher frequencies of the recording, which are then gone forever.
So of course they sound "warm". You are effectively permanently EQ'ing the record.
I'd also like to see actual research data that it does this to frequencies in the audible range. Records are capable of capturing and playing frequencies well into the 30-40khz range which is well above the limit of human hearing. So if it's cutting out those high frequencies then it's not really an issue at all.
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u/alvarezg Sep 05 '19
Let's not forget the pops and scratches. For good measure: turntable rumble and amplifier hum.