Sound Quality Vinyl Vs Digital

Cds have a better signal to noise ratio i e.

Sound quality vinyl vs digital.

By every measure digital audio is superior to analog. Lots of audiophiles say that when it comes to sound quality nothing beats vinyl. These purists wonder if digital files can really give you that analog sound of our youth. Digital got its act together but not until the death of the cd.

A vinyl record is an analog recording and cds and dvds are digital recordings. There s another far superior reason why vinyl is better than lossy digital formats. It is why mp3 with relatively few samples is so poor and hi res audio with far more is the closest we have to a studio recording. The answer lies in the difference between analog and digital recordings.

The vinyl lp is a format based on technology that hasn t evolved much over the last six decades. Sound quality from a technical standpoint digital cd audio quality is clearly superior to vinyl. Take a look at the graph below. Playing audio files is gigantically more convenient than playing an lp digital converter technology is getting better every year and high resolution files are clearer than the best lps.

Original sound is analog by definition. These days many records are made using playback of a. And when cds first. Sonically vinyl has both strengths.

Sound quality depends on a lot of factors and it is impossible to definitively state that either analog or digital is fundamentally better. The quality of a digital reproduction is dictated by how many of those samples of the original are made. Maybe it was coincidence but vinyl began its resurgence at around the same time as recordings started this trend. There is less interference from hissing turntable rumble etc better stereo channel separation and have no variation in playback speed.

Cd quality sits somewhere in the middle with 44 100 samples per second at 16 bit accuracy. In some ways it s the audio equivalent of driving a ford pilot. It wasn t long before vinyl recordings of the same content often had better sound quality at normal listening volumes simply because they had higher dynamic range.