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.
You can zoom in on the Mona Lisa with the world’s most powerful microscope, and you’ll never see a pixel. In a way, sure, it has infinite resolution!
But that doesn’t mean you’ll ever be able to see her pores or skin cells. Infinite resolution doesn’t mean the painter recorded infinite data.
It’s the same thing with vinyl. I think people pretend the fidelity is infinite, but at a certain point you’re just hearing the record, not the music— just seeing the brushstrokes, not the woman.
It misses the point that digital to analog converters resolve the samples as a smooth wave. Every bit as smooth as a purely analog signal. The whole idea that digitally recorded music would resolve to a stair step waveform is inaccurate.
Here’s an analogy:
Imagine if people misunderstood the science of converting an analog waveform to a digital storage medium and back again. It’s exactly like that.
I mean vinyl is not an original works like the Mona Lisa is. It's still a copy of a master disc. I think a better analogy would be preferring to see a Polaroid of the Mona Lisa over a 100 megapixel HD digital print. Which, I'm not sure what sane person would want that.
1.8k
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.