Idolator

I've probably attended too many live shows sans earplugs, but I don't really notice a difference between CDs and vinyl. I also tend to convert my vinyl to .mp3 almost immediately as carrying around a turntable is cumbersome at best. Still, I really like buying albums in actual album form, especially if said album has particularly awesome artwork. Mastodon's Leviathan is a good example.

The big difference between vinyl and CD comes down to, as you noted, how the source is made, then more importantly: sequencing/song assignments, how the mastering process is done, who does the mastering, who manufactures the media, how the sleeves are made, who makes the sleeves, shipping, and much more.

There's a lot that goes into both.

The intrinsic pros and cons of vinyl vs. CD are so overstated and overrated. CDs, being digital, have a finite sound quality resolution. Vinyl is theoretically infinite. However, most vinyl's frequency range doesn't extend beyond 10khz, whereas CDs go up to 22.05khz. In briefer terms, vinyl has a somewhat smaller but more rich sound spectrum, whereas CDs have a slightly sparser but wider sound spectrum. However, the low and high ends on both are pretty much the same spectrum the human ear can detect or more.

Over time, the medium has mattered less for a bigger problem that's affected both vinyl and CDs... brickwall normalization/compression, something that cheapens both the vinyl and CD experience.

Basically:
* there are excellent vinyl mastering jobs
* there are shitty vinyl mastering jobs
* there are excellent CD mastering jobs
* there are shitty CD mastering jobs
* Many people love vinyl just because it's like rad.
* Many people don't care about vinyl
* Many people like both
* Many people are like "i can hold music? lol"

Result:
* Science doesn't mean shit. Many people will acquire and defend the format they like.

Combine any of the above statements in any combo you want, and voila, the perpetual vinyl vs. CD vs. Mp3s Until Yer Grave.

Stuff sounds better on vinyl for the same reason stuff sounds better on the radio: because a teensy bit of distortion makes everything sound warmer. That's my theory, and I can't be dissuaded.

i don't think that audio quality is the only reason that people buy vinyl.

i think it's many other qualities about the package - the size of the art, how it looks on a shelf with other pieces and the process of actually buying it. you really need to go to a store and hold it, inspect it and get that nod of approval from the clerk at Other Music.

i love playing records when i am at home alone but i'd be lying if i said that i don't get some kind of joy when playing records when i have guests over.

like any consumer good, it's as much about the social nature of it and "showing it off" that is the pull of vinyl.

I started buying vinyl when I got fed up with the over-compression and other nastiness brought on by the Loudness Wars. While songs might be recorded and mastered digitally, if they're going to press a functioning piece of vinyl, there's a physical limit to how much they can compress it. Now, I'm sure I'm oversimplifying this, but the depth of a vinyl groove determines the amplitude of the signal output - the shallower the groove, the more the needle presses, the louder the output. Cut the groove too shallow via compression or master the record too loud, and the needle will actually skip out of the groove. There's a story floating around about the first masters of Led Zeppelin II skipping on Ahmet Ertegun's daughter's record player, resulting in a hissy fit that led to the re-mastering of the record prior to pressing. Digital formats don't have this physical limitation, so there's nothing stopping mastering engineers from having everything peak at near 0 dB, which results in ugly, ugly clipping. Wikipedia has a good round-up of the Loudness War here.

Anyway, my point is that while the music on a modern vinly disc might be horribly, horribly compressed, at least it won't have the clipping that makes listening to CDs physically painful. PengIn mentioned Leviathan as being an awesome piece of vinyl. Blood Mountain is similarly awesome, not least of which because it doesn't clip like the CD.

@mackro: "However, most vinyl's frequency range doesn't extend beyond 10khz"

I'm not sure where you got that info, but I'm pretty certain that's not the case. A dramatic drop at 10kHz and above would sound like a worn out cassette. However, I do agree with most of the rest of your points.

To answer the question at hand, the only thing I can think of is to have a cooler artifact. I think fogsnob nails it. I think it has so much more to do with the record itself and the hipness factor than anything else.

And let me give you an example on the sound quality thing. I bought the Amy Winehouse album on vinyl as I thought the CD sounded like overloud shit. Well, guess what? So does the LP. Similar damn mastering job as best I can tell.

Vinyl can sound great, when the care is put into it. As I've bitched here before though, it happens so rarely these days. Of course, CDs can also sound great and anyone who doesn't think so is fooling themselves.

And oh mah gawd can we put the old "vinyl sounds warmer than CDs" chestnut out to pasture please. I have plenty of records that sound tinny and nasty while the CD reissues sound lush and "warm."

I agree that digitally recorded songs are meant to be heard on CD. I've heard plenty of digital recordings that lost quite a few details when I listened to them on vinyl. There are also cases where labels were unwise enough to stuff too many tracks on one side, therefore watering down the sound quality. Analog recordings are generally best heard on vinyl -if the disc, the stylus and the hi-fi are in good shape.

what if that "sonic information" wasn't there in the first place? Isn't everyone using ProTools now?

Drum and bass and dubstep are nearly entirely digital compositions done in protools and the like, and have been for years, but these sound better when pressed onto vinyl, especially when played on big systems.

I recall an interview with Zappa sometime in the 90's where the interviewer--apparently a vinyl fetishist--tried to get Zappa to agree that vinyl had a better, "warmer" sound. Zappa was having none of it. He said something to the effect of "what do you mean by warmer? a frequency bulge inserted at [some specific range I cannot for the life of recall]?" That is, such a bulge could be engineered either in the vinyl or digital mastering process, and most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

I like vinyl for a random reason--one side of an LP is a nice slice of music, time-wise. I tend to get bored listening to a whole CD, especially if it runs over 60 minutes. And the one-side play gives a great reason to switch out to something else.

According to Augustus Stanley Owsley (a guy who knows a lot about a lot of stuff and is pretty well known for some other stuff):

"You have a choice of two traditional stylus shapes to use for recovering the audio information from the grooves. One of these has a conical shape, and is usually called "spherical". after the shape of the tip. This shape cannot come very close to following the movements of the cutter at any but the lowest frequencies. The other shape is a stylus which has an elliptical cross section, used with the major axis placed across the groove in an attempt to follow the cutter a bit more closely, but still quite inaccurate at the higher frequencies as well. Worse yet, both styli cause serious damage to the surface of the plastic inside the grooves. The friction of the stylus in the groove, exacerbated by the downward pressure required to keep it in the groove melts the plastic and so destroys the information on the sides of the groove. The damage is so severe (I've examined a lot of records under the microscope in the days when I produced the Old and In The Way LP) that you can only play the record once with any sort of fidelity with the elliptical point, and no more than 3 times with a spherical/conical.

"In absolute terms the reproduction of even the best set-up has differences with the original recorded tape as much or more so than digital, only of a different kind, and somewhat "sweeter" in the ear--but inaccurate nonetheless. Perhaps these people would be happier with a cassette made directly from the analog master, if such exists. In that case be sure that the cassette is either metal or genuine CrO2 tape, as the ferric formulations including high bias types won't hold the highs for more than a few months."

I think the radio comparison is a good one, some people just like a bit of imperfection to their music, it's closer to the live experience in my opinion. Plus listening to vinyl is just more of an event, you could compare it to going to the theatre to see a movie versus watching at home. Because:

1) Like being at the theatre playing a record demands your attention, even if only for the sake of listening for the last song before you flip it you have to pay more attention to it.

2) You're not going to play Xbox at the theatre while the movies on or pause it when the phone rings... pick up a magazine when the plot slows down... much the same you'll probably play MP3s or CDs on shuffle if you're doing something else but like the theatre the music often becomes the sole source of your attention.

3)Going from digital to analog in the film analogy is to compare digitally recorded music on vinyl to seeing a digitally recorded movie like say Blair Witch Project in the theatre... does the quality get better? No. But the experience changes tremendously and the occasional defect on the film adds (to some like myself) the same charm of the occasional pop or crackle on an LP.

@Cam/ron: Analog recordings are generally best heard on vinyl -if the disc, the stylus and the hi-fi are in good shape.

DING! DING! DING! Thank you. This has been my argument for years.

Can an LP blow the same CD out of the water? Definitely: if you have a decent turntable (belt speed matters), with a good, clean, decent-quality needle and a reasonably good soundsystem. None of the above components have to be super-fancy or expensive, but you'd be surprised how rare they are the average American household.

What I hate about vinyl snobbery is it's spreading this gospel that you, Joe American, are going to get a better audio experience just by buying the LP and playing it on your parents' old rec-room turntable or the one-piece Emerson plastic job you bought at Sears in 1987. The vinyl snob often fails to mention the key tidbit about how much his gear cost and how lovingly he maintains it. I'm telling you, even if that gear only cost $500 total, that's more than most people ever spent on their last turntable.

What made the CD revolutionary in the '80s is it made achievable high-quality sound available to the masses. I guarantee you a $50 drugstore discman offers better sound to the average joe than the equal-quality turntable they've got collecting dust in the basement.

@Chris Molanphy:

Re: $50 discmans - Apparently, some folks with a particular version of the old Playstation 1 laying around in their garage might have their hands on a pretty solid CD player.

Good point, SpankyJoe - the loudness war is out of hand. I've noticed excessive compression and clipping leads to albums that are physically wearing and outright annoying to listen to. All the clipping basically creates harmonic frequency responses that fatigue the ear, and the louder you play it, the more of them appear and the worse it gets. You can't physically listen to loudly mastered cds at an enjoyable enough level to lose yourself in them.

The reduced dyanmic range of vinyl means it can't create the frequencies that fatigue the ear, so you can listen to it without growing tired.

It also leads to lack of instrument definition and separation - bass becomes muddy, pianos lose their high end, drums lose their snap. Vocals tend to drop back into the mix and become ignorable.

Anyone heard the new R.E.M. album? So loud and flatly compressed it sounds like it's coming out of a 60's transistor radio. Even vinyl on a cheap system is preferable to that.

Unlike most of your commenters I have actually made and sold vinyl records. I've been in the room with the late great Ron Archer as he cut my first record.

First point: to cut vinyl, you need to have a deep understanding of what a vinyl record can successfully reproduce. It is best at reproducing frequencies up to about 1KHZ. After that there's a comprimise between reproducing high frequencies and introducing distortion.

So a properly mastered vinyl record tends to have an EQ tilt, where the bass is slightly louder than the treble. Hence warmth.

Second: It depends a lot on the mastering engineer, but in general they will allow for a broader dynamic range, because low level signals, so long as they're above the noise floor, are every bit as detailed as loud sounds.

Digital recordings, on the other hand, use fewer bits for quiet sounds than loud sounds. A signal from a CD that peaks at 0dB full scale uses all 16 bits of resolution. A signal that peaks at -24db full scale is only using 12 bits. Digital signals tend to start sounding grainy at lower levels. The loudness wars start with that pheomenon. Even at the mixing stage, engineers are always trying to record as close to 0dB as possible, and then when it's mastered it gets squished further.

But there is no reason that CDs can't sound good -- other than the way music is recorded, how it's mixed, and how it's mastered. LPs sound good because their dynamic range and frequency characteristics are constrained to fit what's comfortable for human ears.

It's important to keep in mind that the weak link in the system often is at the end user, anyway, who buys crappy stereos with overhyped speakers that only sound good at the big box store. And you don't even have to spend a lot of money to get decent sound, but most people don't really care.

Vinyl is great! Cd's are great and hell even mp3's are great just because music can be great. On what carrier did you hear your music on when you were 12 and does your fancy equipment you have now help to regain that sentiment? Anyway, just a little correction. The needle doesn't skip out of a groove because of too loud pressing. It does so due to too much stereo in the bottom end. Don't recall but thought ir was below 1000hz. Digitalizing my vinyl.... spent SO much time with my fancy riaa amp and soundcard but feel I just can not get the result like... a pulp fusion cd. TIPS? Listen to the music, not your soundsystem or carrier... but if i only.....