Wait, what? There are good, fun reasons to be into vinyl, but “vastly better specs than CD” is not one of them. With respect to specifications, CD blows vinyl out of the water - there’s just no comparison. See, e.g.:
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So the music industry is back to about 50% of peak revenue. I don’t think musicians are making 50% of what they did back then.
Vinyl is making a comeback but assuming 1/2 billion for a full year it’s about at 5% of its disco era peak.
edit: removed inflation adjustments as (remarkably!) the data i referenced was already inflation adjusted
Straying OT, but I really miss Agfachrome RSX II. Cross-process for a grainy and saturated punch in the face.
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Thanks for the article. Although it covers most issues it fails to mention that at 44.1khz a 20k sine wave is essentially clamped to a square wave, even with anti-aliasing (yep the same tech to smooth pixels from jaggeys), so a significant amount of upper frequencies are distorted. The upper frequencies will be distorted on vinyl as well but this is analogue ‘rounded’. The standard for video and the minimum recommended recording sample rate is 48k to account for this distortion. Studios will often work in 96k and television standards are recommending this as best practice.
As the article says vinyls frequency response is determined by the amount of audio time printed as well as playback speed which is why the EP was a big deal and the format used by DJ’s.
The noise floor of vinyl is preferable to electrical or digital machine noise that is revealed by the ‘quietness’ of CD’s which is why audiophiles (or people who like to crank the volume) spend thousands of bucks on Digital to Analogue Converters.
To be perfectly honest I think that both are level pegging as most peoples ability to hear 20k starts deteriorating at the age of 20. Psycho acoustics or what happens with the way the brain interprets sound is a whole other ball game, for example an earbud speaker has no way to move the air to produce the fundamental note of a kick drum but the brain is able to extrapolate the fundamental from the upper harmonics!
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Can you you post a reference for this? I’ve never heard of such a thing. By the Nyquist theorem, a 20kHz sine wave should be perfectly reproduced at or above a 40 kHz sample rate. With a sample rate of 44.1, everything up to 22 kHz should be flawlessly reproducible. Is what you’re talking about some artifact of the pre-sample filtering?
Preferable to whom? I’m not sure that a format’s being so inherently noisy that it obscures the noise floor of the amp is exactly a point in its favor.
Agreed. I have to roll my eyes at my middle-aged audiophile friends (figuratively - they are my friends, after all) when they claim they can hear a difference between e.g. cables - dudes, you blew out your hearing standing next to that speaker at Lolllapalooza in '91. There’s no way you can tell the difference.
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A smaller percent of a $10 or $20 album is a hell of a lot more than a bigger percentage of half a cent or whatever a stream goes for these days.
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This Wikipedia page seems a pretty good coverage of analogue v digital audio. The sections on Aliasing, Sampling Rates and Quantization cover the subject. Particularly the concept of “folding over” in the Aliasing section. After reading the page, gotta admit I was wrong about the type of distortion as being square.
Thanks for the discussion because if you hadn’t pushed me I wouldn’t have discovered what ‘folding wave’ distortion actually means… have been getting back into synthesisers during the lock-down.
Must admit I was pocking the hornets nest by using the hyperbole “vastly superior” 
Just get a bit frustrated by the noise of subjective opinion against critical understanding. Also there is i smidge of disrespect for audio professionals that dedicate their lives to creating the best musical experience they can.
Having said that, as an electric guitar player I will sometimes choose very long cables to roll off frequencies above 14k before it hits a pre-amp. Yep you can hear a difference with cables.
I believe that if your over 30 you won’t hear a difference except on poorly configured and maintained domestic audio gear. I kinda sympathize with the audiophiles as they are honoring the craft of audio production. Frank Zappa once mixed and recorded an album using a particular set of JBL speakers that were common domestically so that his audience was hearing what he heard in the studio (or close to).
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Yep, I thought that’s what you might be referring to, since there’s always a transition band in a real-life low-pass filter that could introduce aliasing problems. With a properly chosen sample rate, though, it isn’t an issue. Good article, thanks!
Pretty much my exact feeling on this. I don’t understand the point of CDs anymore, they don’t serve any purpose for me. Not when FLAC and ALAC files exist… I also have no problem with buying MP3 albums. I also enjoy getting things on vinyl as well. Particularly when new and they include a download. It’s fun to scour the bins at a used record shop, too.
CDs are still easier to find than FLAC or ALAC files in a lot of cases, and CDs convert to them easily.
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