From a technical standpoint digital cd audio quality is clearly superior to vinyl.
Vinyl vs cd quality.
Does vinyl reproduce sound better or is it just.
There is less interference from hissing turntable rumble etc better stereo channel separation and have.
A digital recording takes snapshots of the analog signal at a certain rate for.
Vinyl for the most part avoided the loudness war with the rise of digital music cds included it s possible to make a track sound louder than it.
Therefore the details of a performance aren t fully articulated in.
When an analog signal is captured digitally on a cd it loses its wide range of frequencies.
Even the standard redbook cd 44khz 16 bit resolution has about a 26db advantage to vinyl with respect to dynamic range and at least a 40 50 db advantage in stereo separation as well as unmeasurable wow and flutter.
Because vinyl s restrictions do not permit the same abuse of audio levels as the cd mayo says that listeners might hear a wider dynamic range in an album mixed separately for vinyl over a compact.
Take a look at the graph below.
Cds are digital recordings whereas vinyl records are analog recordings.
Original sound is analog by definition.
Why vinyl sounds better than cd or not according to rolling stone magazine sales of vinyl albums continue to grow setting a new record in 2010.
Cd quality sits somewhere in the middle with 44 100 samples per second at 16 bit accuracy.
Given that compressed digital audio is considerably lower in quality than either cds or vinyl consumer certainly seem to care a lot less about audio quality than convenience.
To many the superior sound quality and physical collection are enough to justify the investment.
There s another far superior reason why vinyl is better than lossy digital formats.
However that s not to say there aren t.
Cds have a better signal to noise ratio i e.