Does vinyl really sound better?

[Q91]

you bunch don't get it
vinyl physical properties are infinite, like the universe
ERGO
anything engraved in that substance has infinite bandwidth !!!
capito?

Try playing a MP3/Flac a thousand times aswell as a Vinyl. Lets see what erodes first, the harddisk/ssd or the vinyl?

[politux]

Ha Q91. True, never said records don't wear out.

[GeyGray]

according to my friend it's do sound better

[spikelee]

Yes, nowadays vinyl does sound better and you can even measure this. I was an audiophile back in the days of analog equipment that includes vinyl records. Back then, the main goal was to produce exactly the same as the recording; nothing more, nothing less.

We use to avoid holding the middle of the vinyl records and hold it with our pointer finger on the hole in the middle of the vinyl and our thumbs on the edge of the vinyl. Because any scratch on the grooves, that are analog pits that is read by the diamond stylus, would sound awful as pops and cracks when you play the song. The stylus, being made of a diamond tip, will in time cause the recording quality on the vinyl to deteriorate.

The promise of digital recording mediums was that you can have an exact copy of the "master" recorded from the studio. This was made possible with the Compact Disc. Where the analog signal transmitted from the mic to the studio mixer to the DAC recorder was digitized into a master record that was then mass produced via CD's.

That was an audiophile's dream. Playing CD's was like playing the original master created from the studio. There was nothing physically touching the CD inside the player that would cause the recording quality to deteriorate. As long as the laser can read the digital recoding on the CD it can last forever.

This however changed when file compression was introduced. Remember your first CD? It had what; like 20 songs the most? Then suddenly MP3 CD's came out with hundreds of songs in 1 CD. Then the DVD came and you can have hundreds, thousands of MP3 songs in 1 DVD. This was made possible by compressing the original WAV file into MP3.

Depending on the amount of compression, the recording quality is reduced and the bigger the compression the smaller the size of the MP3 file gets and the greater the loss in sound quality.

A song has dynamics in frequency that make it sound good to listen to. From the low notes (low frequency) and high notes (high notes) that creates a waveform of highs and lows. When you compress a song, those highs are not as high as the original recording as well as the lows.

This will not be that obvious if you are listening to the song with headsets or headphones on a high volume. But when you listen to it through loudspeakers, especially in an open venue, you'll definitely notice the difference.

That's why vinyl records sound better nowadays.

[Mr.Masami]

I think the answer is very simple.

Everything can be written in 0 and 1, even stuff "between" 0 and 1 can be wrote in longer notation, it will just occupy more space.

That's why digital is the closest to true lossless and nothing(?) will beat it. Of course we're talking no compression.

And the medium type that data is on is not important at all to the quality in terms of what's its made of, until it deteriorates of course as with magnetic tapes. It's all about the space.

If you have enough time you can rewrite whole bluray movie 0 and 1 using stone writing and it will have the same quality. (if you find enough rocks on the planet)

True real life visuals and sounds weight so much that we probably couldn't fit 1 sec on a 1 TB drive, more space = more quality with better recorders.

Back in the days we had VHS tapes, then various types of CDs, DVDs, BluRays, all comes to more space = more quality.
I bet we could fit couple seconds of bluray to VHS then playback it using specially modified VHS player to read ahead (buffer) and play it

So in the end we need better recorders(optics/sensors/algorithms to catch more of the real life FX) and more space.

Is the vinyl better ? no. It's just an old medium with lower space.

We're talking only about the medium here, but of course we need more advanced processors that can handle more data in real time and better displays/sound systems to get closer to real life feeling.
But it will always be only synthetic, nothing will ever(?) be 1:1 unless you have time machine to play it back again (listen to real musicians / see real images).

True lossless do not exist.

Hope you get my point.

*I am not an expert in this field, far from that. This is just my point of view that may be wrong.*

[joew771]

Is the vinyl better ? no. It's just an old medium with lower space.

That's not really true. Analog's whole reason for still existing is that it has 'no spaces', as long as you are listening to vinyl with a record player. But any digital recording, even a flac recording totally destroys that 'no spaces' thing, and it becomes what you talked about, a recording trying to fill in those spaces with smaller and smaller pieces of digital data.

There is a point where the digital data is indistinguishable from analog. I think we already reached that point, but there are a lot of people that disagree, but they are deluding themselves.

The major difference between digital and analog nowadays is that the vinyl has a 'hiss' that digital doesn't. Otherwise digital is better in almost every way.

[politux]

Clean, mint records played on a high-quality turntable with a good cartridge through a quality amp and speakers don't have a "hiss." Maybe you should upgrade your setup that you are too ashamed of to admit what it consists of...

[Mr.Masami]

Is the vinyl better ? no. It's just an old medium with lower space.

That's not really true. Analog's whole reason for still existing is that it has 'no spaces', as long as you are listening to vinyl with a record player. But any digital recording, even a flac recording totally destroys that 'no spaces' thing, and it becomes what you talked about, a recording trying to fill in those spaces with smaller and smaller pieces of digital data.

There is a point where the digital data is indistinguishable from analog. I think we already reached that point, but there are a lot of people that disagree, but they are deluding themselves.

The major difference between digital and analog nowadays is that the vinyl has a 'hiss' that digital doesn't. Otherwise digital is better in almost every way.

So the digital steps or spacing as you wrote compared to analog smooth wave in today times are very hard to notice because of "density" of those steps / spacing.

That makes sense, but I think even 1:1 sinusoidal smooth wave can be translated to 0 and 1 binary code and vice-versa without any sacrifice.

I don't know if such fine digital quality exists in commercial music sound tracks and hardware that we can buy to play it.

If so, it's not gonna be cheap, even high-end hardware for old vinyls I've seen couple years ago in some magazine was priced like a NASA space ship program.
As politux said, good hardware is very important.

[joew771]

What? You said 2 things. That an analog can be translated without any sacrifice, but then said you don't know if the quality exists to do that.

I say it does already, but maybe I misunderstood you.

[Mr.Masami]

yes sorry i was writing in a hurry because I was going out and couldn't find words to describe what I was thinking about it.

I was wondering how far from perfect 1:1 analog to digital conversion we are in commercial CDs they are selling because it's obviously truncated because of low space of that old medium as well.
and is the tech on commercial grade equipment good enough or only hollywood multi million dollar hardware can be that precise to play it in such fidelity if they produced it.

I am just theorizing things here as you see, no actual numbers / specifics. I am just wondering what you have to say about it because it's interesting.

*sleep mode*

@edit:

Found this interesting video about reel tapes, nice history lesson about them. I think it will add some spark to this subject.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KHSz9Gi-II