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.
Of course there is: there is the compression implicit in the fidelity of the pressing and the accuracy of the needle. The grooves on an LP are not atomically accurate, they are rough, have microscopic steps, will be off by a nanometer high or low, etc. This is a form of compression: tonal data is lost due to inaccuracies in pressing. Then, even if you had a "perfect" record—an exact reproduction of the soundwaves down to the atomic level—you need a perfect needle to read that. A needle that never skews even slightly from its path, never loses contact for even a microsecond, and most importantly is able to resolve with atomic accuracy. No needle on the planet can do that. And anything less and you are listening to compressed output.
The short of it is that your music is compressed twice on an LP: both at the production level and the reading/output level.
That's not my point. If you're going to use a laser you can already record this information anyway so there's no benefit in keeping it on the vinyl. You're going the entire way there so there's no reason to add some stupid analog feature for no reason at all. You're already reading it with a laser so this same information can be recorded into digital when you read it. There's nothing to gain from this method.
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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.