Vinyl Vs Cd Vs Digital

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 naturally should.

Vinyl vs cd vs digital.

For doing this test i recorded the same song three times with this gear. Cds and vinyl records are both audio storage and playback formats based on rotating discs from different times in music history. Digital got its act together but not until the death of the cd. The problem here is that it had a tremendous result on the audio quality.

Take a look at the graph below. I can go on but you get the point. There s another far superior reason why vinyl is better than lossy digital formats. Yet there seems to be a large revival of vinyl records mainly due to either the hipster crowd or nostalgics.

Original sound is analog by definition. 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. In this video you can hear the real difference between a cd and a vinyl. A vinyl record is an analog recording and cds and dvds are digital recordings.

On a cd the separation between the left and right channels used in recording is over 90 db. Some may argue about quality but there s no doubt that having a vinyl of your favourite. Maybe it was coincidence but vinyl began its resurgence at around the same time as recordings started this trend. Cd players because they use super accurate digital buffers are immune to this.

Comparing compact discs cds to vinyl or gramophone records is the musical equivalent of comparing digital photography with film photography. 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.