"Music Sounds Better on Vinyl", I am so tired of this argument being brought up by the layperson Options

[ozmosis82]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mona-elyafi/..._b_1008876.html

Ugh.

Of special note is the 5th paragraph where she basically shoots herself in the foot:

"Now I don't pretend to be a tech whiz by any means and I am sure I know absolutely nothing about how it all works and why, but the one thing I know for certain though is that music sounds better on vinyl."

If they approve my comment, it should be the first one.

[Gretschguy]

I think I'm in the minority on this thread.

I can give you the perspective of someone who loves both digital and analog music music which has been properly recorded, mixed, and mastered with loving care -- but vinyl wins over CD, no doubt in my experience.

And I'm not in love with vinyl over the darn cover art as some would suggest -- furthermore I'm certainly not a hipster although I grew a beard once in my life.

I returned to vinyl about 1 year ago afters decades of CDs and a collection in the thousands, the horrific over compressed sound of modern CDs sent me running back to vinyl. Once I started ripping my vinyl and listening back on digital equipment, I was blown away by how much better (natural, open, dynamic) it sounded.

Most of this was due to differences in mastering and perhaps a bias towards the frequency content of LP (I grew up on vinyl).

BUT, I also noticed something interesting in my return to vinyl:

16 / 44.1 is NOT enough to fully capture the content of an LP when ripping the LP and playing back on good equipment.

I've convinced myself that vinyl carries more information that 16 / 44.1 simply by ripping the same material to both 16 bit and 24 bit and comparing. The 24 bit vinyl rips of the SAME material sounds better -- more punch, smoother, more natural -- I realize these are all subjective but I did this test with no axe to grind and I was actually hoping 16 bits would be enough since I could then move these also to my iPod for convenience -- however, the comparison was convincing enough that despite less convenience (must dither the files to play on iPod) and more storage space needed, I settled on 24 bit for my ripping process.

This suggests to me that vinyl has more to give than 16 / 44.1.

My equipment is very good -- Thorens turntable, Delos Cartridge, Burl ADC, Lynx AES card, Pure Vinyl software, and a Burmester system for playback including Burmester DAC.

Has anyone else tried this experiment?

I love the convenience of digital -- it has allowed me to carry around 100's of LPs ripped at 24 bit which I can play back instantly with a good DAC. So, I'm by no means "anti digital", its just clear to me that vinyl has more fidelity than 16 / 44.1 can reproduce. Especially old vinyl just sounds incredible -- clear, wide and deep sound stage, realistic, open.

On a practical level, my LPs destroy my CDs of the same material (I have thousands of both CDs and LPs). The dynamic range (peak to RMS) is almost always measurably better for both old and new vinyl than CD counterparts. I realize that this is mainly due to mastering differences, which is why I qualify this point with the word "practical".

The frequency range of LPs that I rip is far superior (out to 48k when ripping at 96k) than CD counterparts -- this is obvious but I don't really know if this matters -- although I'm not a bat (or a hipster) I tend to think it probably does matter in ways that we don't fully understand quite yet, but I've not proven it to myself.

My point here is that I've proven, at least to myself, that LPs not only practically sound better than CD counterparts but also carry more than 16 bits of information.

I'd be really interested to hear from others who have done a similar experiment using good equipment with an open mind, what have you found?

[cliveb]

I've convinced myself that vinyl carries more information that 16 / 44.1 simply by ripping the same material to both 16 bit and 24 bit and comparing. The 24 bit vinyl rips of the SAME material sounds better -- more punch, smoother, more natural

I have also compared 16 and 24 bit rips of vinyl and I hear no difference.

There are other possible reasons why 24 bit sounds better than 16 bit to you:

1. Expectation bias. It's no use saying that you had no axe to grind and were hoping 16 bit would be good enough. If you did these comparisons sighted, then the results are not trustworthy. You need to repeat the comparison blind. Using Foobar's ABX comparator is very easy, so there's no excuse not to do a blind test.

Let's assume you do a blind test and still hear a difference between 24 and 16 bit rips. If you made the two recordings in separate runs, then there are possible reasons why the results may sound different:

2. Vinyl is an analogue medium and is not 100% repeatable in playback. The two recordings *will* have delivered different signals. For example, the first play of an LP typically cleans the grooves out a bit, so a subsequent play might deliver slightly less surface noise. Or particles of dust may fall onto the record prior to the second play, resulting in additional minors ticks.

3. You got the gain staging slightly different so that the levels are not precisely matched. Even if you don't consciously notice a volume difference, small level differences can still alter the way things sound.

4. Perhaps your A/D converter happens to operate better at 24 bit rather then 16 bit.

If the goal here is to discover whether vinyl contains more information than can be captured at 16 bit, then the correct methodology is to record once at 24 bit, then convert that same recording to 16 bit and do an ABX comparison. In principle you should add dither when converting to 16 bit, but IMHO the vinyl noise floor is so high that you can probably afford to just truncate the bottom 8 bits.