Vinyl > Digital on HowStuffWorks, Is their explanation incorrect? Options

[snoozer]

My friend won't give in that he just likes the motions of putting his records on his turntable but he found this website:

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question487.htm

This means that the waveforms from a vinyl recording can be much more accurate, and that can be heard in the richness of the sound.

From the graph above you can see that CD quality audio does not do a very good job of replicating the original signal. (at 16/44.1)

I referred him to this:

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Vinyl_Myths
(http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=85436)

I'm trying to understand the specifics but I'm a little lost. Are these two contradictory? Could someone clear up where HowStuffWorks might be disseminating wrong info?

This post has been edited by Peter: Feb 19 2009, 02:32

Reason for edit: Link now less search engine friendly.

[Dynamic]

Sorry to resurrect an oldish topic, but OMG!

I've just googled for...
Vinyl versus CD

Top link is to http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=375592 - a Google Answers response which I didn't provide a proper link to for fear of improving its Google rating - and is completely misguided or patently false. All responses are pretty old (2004).

If you wanted to know the objectivist right answer, you're unlikely to search for Vinyl myths and would struggle to come across Hydrogen Audio's rational, sound reasoning (no pun intended) that CD is superior to Vinyl as a delivery format to human listening as long as one sticks to the rules.

The rules include pre-filtering to avoid aliasing below the Nyquist frequency, quantization with appropriate dither and reconstruction with appropriate reconstruction filtering (whether done by analogue filters or oversampling).

The google search...
LP vinyl compare CD
...isn't much better and the same Google Answers result is now second highest.

Is CD better than LP?
...is a poor search
Is CD better than vinyl?
...provides a better second link, Audio myth: Vinyl better than CD? | Audio DesignLine

A myth so popular is hard to supercede in terms of answer-finding, and SearchWiki appears to be pretty-much useless to warn people of false information.

From a blind testing perspective, it's possible make a demonstration by means of properly digitising a good Vinyl source, that the analogue sound and its digitial reproduction are indisinguishable to the human ear. I'm pretty sure Pio2001 spent a lot of time doing this and reporting his results on Hydrogen Audio some years ago. Therefore, even if pops and crackles, hiss etc are desired, they can be transparently reproduced on CD.

An example is to feed an analogue source of any quality we choose in case A, directly to the amplifier, or in case B, via a good properly filtered ADC and DAC at CD specifications (i.e. at some stage, the digital signal must be reduced to 44.1kHz, 16-bit per channel with proper dither) and then to the amplifier. Switching in (case B) and out (case A) the digital stage one can attempt to determine whether or not the digital stage is transparent (subject to negligible delay). If the switch position is kept secret to the experimental participants, we have an ABX test. We could even use a repeating loop of studio magnetic tape with a suitably high tape speed that should satisfy the most stringent analogue enthusiasts.