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Answer for: What's Your Favorite Recording Format for Music?
#3 Vinyl
5 votes
![American VI: Ain''t No Grave [VINYL]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51YdtYrpejL._SL75_.jpg)
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Mmmm... the warm, characteristic sound of vinyl.
Like coming home to an old friend.
Just can't beat the analog grooves.
Isn't this akin to saying that you prefer the way your old truck rumbles over potholes as opposed to how all these newfangled cars glide smoothly over them?
It seems to me that what people enjoy about vinyl (what most refer to as a "warm" sound) is the reduced frequency response and resulting quantifiably lower quality sound that comes from ancient analog technology. Wouldn't you be better off having the entire audio spectrum available via digital audio and then just emulate the "warm" via EQ and pop / click / hiss software?
http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/vinyl/
*ducks*
Yeah, you better duck boy!
I think you have a fundamental misconception here. It's digital that has a reduced frequency response compared to analog. Analog is a continuous representation of audio, where as digital must "pretend" that it has all of the sound information with it's 1's and 0's. As far as I know, digital has yet to provide the fullness of analog. You can really notice this with a nice stereo receiver playing one vs. the other.
But, sir, this is not why I myself enjoy vinyl more. It's the complete package - the album art, the large physical format, the production. And not to mention, there's a ton of great music that can only be found in analog grooves as of yet. And you digital weeners must wait until someone converts those rare tracks for you so you can feed off of free distribution sites (ahem, like my own, http://vintagevinylrevival.com).
PS, that izotope software is novel, but would be a ridiculous attempt at a substitute. Like putting dirt on your GMO vegetables or something.
From http://en.wikipedia.or...gital_sound :
"Accurate, high quality sound reproduction is possible with both analog and digital systems. The principal advantage that digital systems have over analog systems is lower costs for end users. With analog recordings, consumers must use high-quality playback equipment to accurately separate the signal from the background without picking up noise or distortion. With digital, only the signal is encoded, so playback equipment can be much less expensive for a given quality. (Incidentally this same principle applies to digital video and still photography.)"
The article also goes on to note that digital is inherently better in the sense that medium resiliency is no longer an issue; Every time you play that tape or spin that record, a bit of the quality is lost. Digital retains its exactly quality time after time and through unlimited generations.
It is true that analog audio is unlimited in its possible frequency response - The medium the analog signal is recorded TO, however, isn't even CLOSE to capable of capturing the full signal.
In short, you may be able to make the argument that a never-listened-to studio master analog recording MAY be as high quality as its digital counterpart (provided you have a as-yet-theoretical perfect medium to record to), but as soon as it comes out of this vacuum in space and time, it's all downhill from there.
This very argument is why I posted the link about the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem.
http://en.wikipedia.or...ing_theorem
It states:
"Exact reconstruction of a continuous-time baseband signal from its samples is possible if the signal is bandlimited and the sampling frequency is greater than twice the signal bandwidth."
Discuss ;)
Yes, good info on those links. Like I said, the sound quality isn't the reason I listen to vinyl. A fidelity snob might want to take up the argument, but I'm willing to recognize the advantages of digital. However, there are advantages of analog as well, and in the end it's just a matter of preference.
I prefer vinyl to anything else due to the overall experience. I enjoy listening to music at home. I enjoy pulling out a record, placing the needle in the groove, sitting back and enjoying large format album art and reading the liner notes. The process of collecting is much more rewarding too. It's about the hunt, and the payoff of finding a rare or highly sought after album. You won't find the same feeling downloading a track online as you will digging through racks of vinyl or discovering an uber rare record in some dingy corner of some backwoods antique shop. There's many reasons people are attracted to vinyl. It has lasting qualities that surpass tape & CDs, and characteristics that digital files will never match. I can't say it is by far better - it's merely preference, but I will say it will always have it's place among serious music aficionados, even in the digital age.