Vinyl Sound Quality Vs Digital

The results may surprise you as they did us.

Vinyl sound quality vs digital. But the majority of today s new and re issued vinyl albums around 80 or more several experts estimate start from digital files even lower quality cds. Digital music as source for vinyl. It caused songs to sound distorted and unpleasant and removed their depth and texture. Cd quality sits somewhere in the middle with 44 100 samples per second at 16 bit accuracy.

With the rise of digital music cds included it s possible to make a track sound louder than it naturally should. Lots of audiophiles say that when it comes to sound quality nothing beats vinyl. The quality of a digital reproduction is dictated by how many of those samples of the original are made. Dvd audio discs and players are rare right now but they will become more common and the difference in sound quality should be noticeable.

We compare the sound quality of analog vinyl vs digital audio cd flac on a 100k stereo setup. Still as artists and labels hop on the vinyl trend some new vinyl releases may be mastered from cd quality audio not the high resolution formats audiophiles and folks like neil young adore. That s why snare drums cymbal splashes and other loud instruments have so much more punch in vinyl recordings. See our youtube debate.

The problem here is that it had a tremendous result on the audio quality. There s very little compression so the loudest parts of those sounds often. Writing for the wall street journal neil shah reported in his article why vinyl s boom is over that. No one s arguing that turntables are more accurate than digital audio just that vinyl aficionados love the.

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. Since vinyl is an analog format it can suffer from the same problems. Most dvd players only have a 96khz 24 bit digital to analog converter. Vinyl can still push music to the limits of its dynamic range 55 70db but it often shies away from doing so in order to maintain sound quality.

Old lps were cut from analog tapes that s why they sound so high quality. To take advantage of higher quality dvd audio discs however you will need a dvd player with a 192khz 24 bit digital to analog converter. Check out our listening results. Sound quality depends on a lot of factors and it is impossible to.