Vinyl is equivalent to which digital bit-depth and sampling rate? Options

[KMD]

What sample rate and bit depth , dithered, would create a digital recording with the same bandwidth and signal to noise ratio as vinyl

[Arnold B. Kruege...]

What sample rate and bit depth , dithered, would create a digital recording with the same bandwidth and signal to noise ratio as vinyl

Maybe 11 or 12 bits, and maybe 35 or 40 KHz.

This is a little hard to say exactly because the digital performance limits implied are hard walls, while the limits of analog are sort of like padded walls. However, the analog room is very much smaller and can never be enlarged. The digital room can be made as large as you want to pay for.

For example, while a LP can be made with 35 KHz bandwidth, it can't carry much data at that frequency and the data is highly corrupted not to mention difficult to play usefully and easy to destroy during playback. The LP format starts loosing dynamic range and adding audible distortion beginning around 5 KHz. Vinyl has severe power bandwidth problems at both ends of the audible spectrum.

Vinyl also has massive inherent jitter, and is typically made from analog tape recordings that have relatively massive jitter. The best analog tape recorder ever sold as a commercial product has about 1,000 nanoseconds or a million picoseconds of jitter on the best day of its life, and needs frequent (weekly, daily) maintenance to perform that way. Every recording that any regular consumer ever listened on vinyl was much worse.

A comparable digital recording is scrupulously clean very close to Nyquist, has full bandwidth at high levels, is very easy to recover fully, does everything right down to DC, has inherent jitter that can be reduced arbitrarily, and is very durable.

[Porcus]

jitter

Is that synonymous to what we used to call wow & flutter, or is there more to it?

[Arnold B. Kruege...]

jitter

Is that synonymous to what we used to call wow & flutter, or is there more to it?

Wow, flutter, and jitter are all examples of FM distortion.