HIGH FIDELITY - Vinyl LPs vs. Digital CDs

[StevenKay]

HIGH FIDELITY - Vinyl LPs vs. Digital CDs

In terms of high fidelity, overall better quality reproduction of recorded music, which of these two technologies has an edge over the other? To me, an LP has always sounded more real, with more depth, clarity, separation and life-like than a CD. What goes missing in a CD? Would be great to hear what the experts and audiophiles have to say about it.

Steven Kay

 

[plastic penguin]

Both are very different: CD replay is more analytical and detailed but vinyl exhibits better timing and a more organic sound. Both are heavily dependant on the CDP and TT used.

Some CDPs can sound clinical, lacking any realism... there are makes that buck the trend such as Arcam, Roksan, Marantz, Exposure etc. Likewise with TTs some can sound muddy while others sound sublime.

At the end of the day, it's down to personal taste. What I say maybe clinical others may disagree.

 

[manicm]

I don't think it's as straight cut as that. For modern recordings - and this could include anything since the mid-80s that were digitally mastered or recorded, CD could show the equivalent LP a clean pair of heels on a good player.

On other recordings it could be the other way around - most of Pink Floyd stuff for example to my ears hasn't been bettered on vinyl.

 

[plastic penguin]

I don't think it's as straight cut as that. For modern recordings - and this could include anything since the mid-80s that were digitally mastered or recorded, CD could show the equivalent LP a clean pair of heels on a good player. On other recordings it could be the other way around - most of Pink Floyd stuff for example to my ears hasn't been bettered on vinyl.

I find remastered cds to be too analytical, in the main, although there is the odd exception. As mentioned before this can be influenced slightly by the choice of CD player or TT you choose.

 

[manicm]

I meant in general, but I agree remasters have time and again proved a waste of time and money. In most cases the original CD print was the best-sounding.

Ironically Phil Collins also doesn't believe in remastering, if only for the noble reason that he 'doesn't see why a customer should pay twice for music'. Indeed No Jacket Required, love or loathe, has never been remastered.

 

[CnoEvil]

For me, the only time that I've heard CDs get close to vinyl, was in an expensive all Audio Note system.

24 bit helps close the gap though.

 

[smuggs]

I have budget kit and the turntable wins but only cause i clean all my records and keep everything in tip-top nick so with vinyl you seem to rewarded for being a good house keeper which i like others might want it easy after work.

some of my thoughts are

cd-faster pace,cleaner,punchy bass,stereo imaging easy to spot (which is good and bad at times),a 2d sound stage and more forward in the apperance with for dance/crum and bass can be want people want.more flexable format,trust my lad to put a cd in. vocals i feel take over the music on the odd recording which maybe called timing not sure how to say that.

turntables- softer top end and smoother mid ,deeper and more room filling bottom end, vocals seem on par with the music,laid back so i can play it louder without being in my face, wider soundstage with a 3d type apperance. AND MORE FUN IMO

but i feel like im sure alot do that i need and want both formats in my life vinyl and a computer with all the cds stored in flac/wav.applelossless something on them lines.

 

[the record spot]

Have to say I find the best recorded and mastered albums shine on both formats. CD can be as exhilirating so it's a no-brainer for me. Experience to date finds plenty of good things to say about both formats - there is no best beyond what your personal preference is.

 

[DIB]

but i feel like im sure alot do that i need and want both formats in my life vinyl and a computer with all the cds stored in flac/wav.applelossless something on them lines.

Certainly I'm in that camp. I listen to a lot of vinyl, because I own a lot of vinyl built up over the years. I listen to a lot of CD's for the same reason, and I listen to a lot of PC based music (Spotify/Internet radio). I don't particularly favour one over any other, I just don't get hung up on all the differences between formats (if any

) .

Play and enjoy.

.

 

[Anonymous]

To quote a famous TV personality.

"Which one is better...CD or LP...There's only one way to find out... FIGHT!"

 

[StevenKay]

Hi Everyone

Very interesting thoughts on the issue. I do agree that so long as you enjoy what you are listening to, it does not really matter whether it is coming from a CD or an LP. Without any doubt the HiFi components (CDP, TT, Amp and Speaker combination) one is using, the particular CD or LP being played, room acoustics etc can make a lot of difference on the quality of reproduced sound one hears.

However only sound recording engineers / experts can tell if there is a major or minor advantage / disadvantage that one technology has over the other in terms of fidelity. LPs somehow do sound more natural (closer to reality) compared to a CD which seems to a have an overall mechanical feel - all things such as playing system, acoustics etc being equal.

Thank you so much for your inputs. Look forward to many other views and opinions of this intriguing issue.

Steven

 

[Anonymous]

You have to throw a lot of money at vinyl before you get decent performance, whereas even the most budget CD players produce good sound.

There's also the opportunity for far more difference between turntables, cartridges, tonearms and preamps than there is with CD or DAC as a source.

 

[Anonymous]

Technically this is a no brainer in that you can take the output of a well recorded LP with a good turntable/preamp, record it properly to a CD and hear no difference when replaying the CD (except perhaps the elimination of acoustic feedback via the turntable). CD has a much wider dynamic range than LP, a much flatter frequency reponse and much less distortion at all levels.

However in practice the devil is in the detail - there are plenty of ways to muck up CD recording/replay and make it sound unpleasant. In particular the current fashion for mastering to 0dBFS (i.e. flat out) with heavy compression across the frequency spectrum is IMHO a disaster and this seems much more prevalent on CDs made in the past few years than on those nearly-always-much-older LPs. Blame recording studio executives (and sometimes artists) who want to sound louder on the radio than all the other bands! On the other hand you need a pretty decent (read expensive) replay system for LP before it gets half decent.

Put another way, whenever we compare LP and CD we should ideally start with the same recorded signals on the storage media - in practice this is almost never the case - usually one is comparing apples with oranges.

John Dawson (Arcam)

 

[Frank Harvey]

You have to throw a lot of money at vinyl before you get decent performance, whereas even the most budget CD players produce good sound.

There's also the opportunity for far more difference between turntables, cartridges, tonearms and preamps than there is with CD or DAC as a source.

I disagree. I see what you're saying and understand where you're coming from, but having compared CD and vinyl directly on many occasions, and at all price points, a good quality budget turntable, even though technically it might not measure great against a budget CD player, just sounds so much more involving and three dimensional. Many of us here have found that.

 

[manicm]

wider soundstage with a 3d type apperance. AND MORE FUN

A massive and inaccurate generalisation.

 

[johnnyblue]

W

When I bought my first cd player, a secondhand Sony, I compared the cd of Happy Mondays Pills, Thrills etc. against the lp, played on a Dual cs514,both through a Denon amp, can't remember which one, but cheapish, and neither my wife nor I could tell any difference at all. I think there is little difference between lp and cd in stuff recorded digitally,or at least since the introduction of cd,but I think there is often a noticable difference in pre-digital recordings. In my opinion a lot of Twenties to Sixties stuff can sound pretty awful on cd , very shrill and toppy,although not all. On the other hand a lot of Seventies stuff sounds great- to me,anyway - because of the higher production values.A lot seems to depend on the original production, for example a lot of jazz also sounds great on cd, and also the style of music.

 

[CnoEvil]

wider soundstage with a 3d type apperance. AND MORE FUN

A massive and inaccurate generalisation.

A little harsh.

Smuggs gave his thoughts, which by their nature, are subjective and quite correct for him.

I have seen very few topics where there has been total agreement.....everybody thinks they're right, hence the healthy debates on here....and of course it's your preogative to disagree with me.

 

[smuggs]

im sorry if anything i say seems to be with no back up are seems narrow minded i must street that i only comment on my own findings at demos or on my budget kit so i guess when you start talking about 6k pre/power combos and various fancy stuff im sure what i say is far from the truth. as a 3d tern i used i should of use the word depth and does not sound like its coming out of my speakers, instead i used wider sound stage and 3d sound which i used as its the in word. I also must say i try and always put imo so i again im sorry if i offended anyone.

but the main thing on this thread is one does not win really, hifi should be finding the best kit to get the music you like in the format that is best suited to your lifestyle. ie if you work from home 70% of the time your likley to own some good cans and have digital music on a laptop/ipod.

 

[Greenwich_Man]

I'm very impressed with my new CDP (Marantz CD6003) it's much better than the NAD C541i that I had.

However it still doesn't compare to the Project Debut with the OM10 stylus and acrylic platter

Now I know some folks here think the Debut is not HiFi - but there must be reasons it got 5 stars in the mag for so many years in a row

 

[smuggs]

greenwich man im sort of with you alittle i have genie2 and stuck a 2m red on it and have bought a lid for £60 from superfi so in all i have spent near £300 on my deck and all you hear is people pushing rega decks are no doubt class. but i cant afford loads at the minute and ive hear the the words like not hifi but if you go round your 20 closest houses i bet there are more worse than better hifi set-ups. this is were you have to find you limit and enjoy. like i read a post last week and some bloke has spent 3k on his hifi and he says he shes his 12 year daughter singing along and far more enjoying her £150 ipod with the bundled earphones so its a fine line between worries about your set-up and enjoying it.

 

[chebby]

With the sheer 'acreage' cleared - by my recent system change - I was briefly tempted to get a Rega RP1 with Performance Pack (I still have all my records and they are all in superb condition) but I remembered my last foray into turntables - Rega P2 with Ortofon 2M Blue - and what a 'faff' vinyl can be at times even with a famously faff-free deck like a Rega.

Yes vinyl sounds better (to me) most of the time, with most LPs when comparison is made between good turntables and good CD players of similar price.

However, despite having enjoyed good turntables from 1980 to 2010 (and despite having preferred the sound of vinyl to CD for most of that time) it has no place in the way I enjoy my system anymore sadly.

If Panasonic were to resurrect the fabulous Technics SL-10 then I would change my mind. (Cast metal case, great sound, great build, smart looking - even today - automatic and very compact having a 'footprint' only marginally bigger than an LP cover!)

 

[Craig M.]

pretty sure i've seen results of listening tests where some vinyl was played and the output went through a ADC (analogue to digital) and was recorded onto a computer. then a cd was burnt of the newly digitised 'vinyl rip' and played on a cdp in comparison to the original vinyl on the t.t. - no-one could tell the difference.

 

[Frank Harvey]

But then you're imposing the restrictions of CD to vinyl replay. If people can't tell the difference between CD and vinyl recorded onto CD, then something in the digital process is robbing the analogue source of everything it's about. I've never understood why the comparison of two sources has to involve recording one of them to a different source. Pointless.

 

[the record spot]

It's just a preference in the end - particularly when one hears recordings that do either medium justice. However, I'm really thinking of recordings that I found a revelation when I heard them on CD - The Yes Album, or Genesis' Trick of the Tail, Keith Jarret's Koln Concert, some of the RCA Living Stereo CDs...there's an extensive list where the digital version is as good if not better. In fact, with the Trick of the Tail album, it wasn't till I finally heard it on CD that I really enjoyed it - the LP version always sounded quite thin.

So it's not so simple as to say that vinyl is better than CD simply by virtue of being it being vinyl! I love both formats but the greater surprises and most impressive performances have been using CD in recent years, but those "greats" tend to be the ones that've been mastered with care.

 

[Anonymous]

David - the poster didn't say that. He said that he had read somewhere that if you record the output of a turntable onto CD and compare that with the original turntable sound you don't hear much if any difference. This is also what I asserted a few posts earlier.

This comparisondoes work and suggests that the colorations introduced in vinyl are reproduced when played through a (clean) digital record/replay system of reasonable resolution, showing that the CD system itself is not inherently flawed. Of course it does have limitations but I would assert that these are quite small when compared with those of vinyl.

None of this means that vinyl can't be hugely enjoyable, it just suggests that the unpleasant sounds we may hear via a 16-bit 44.1 or 48 ksamples/second digital record/replay system are not due to the system itself when it is properly implemented.

The last five words above are hugely important of course

John