Listening To Vinyl Compared To Cd

Comparison of a raw analog audio signal to the cd audio and dvd audio output.

Listening to vinyl compared to cd.

Comparing compact discs cds to vinyl or gramophone records is the musical equivalent of comparing digital photography with film photography. In fact vinyl outsold cds for the first time since the 1980s according to a recently released mid year report from the. If you re listening to a vinyl record cd or high quality digital file of the same song on a good stereo system you probably won t notice a lot of difference between what you re hearing unless. Original sound is analog by definition.

The rest of it dates back to sometime in the 1990s when the cd all but killed off vinyl in the first place. However that s not the whole story. It s listening to music is an experience and a full experience includes putting on the record moving over the needle and sitting back and. The cd versus vinyl debate and by extension the debate over digital versus analog sound has only grown.

Why vinyl sounds better than cd. Vinyl always sounds better than cd. A vinyl record is an analog recording and cds and dvds are digital recordings. The answer lies in the difference between analog and digital recordings.

Taking both actual albums and track sales into account the equivalent of 243 5 million digital albums were sold last year compared to 165 4 million cds and 6 1 million vinyl records. One vinyl record may sound better than its equivalent cd for extremely specific reasons. Cds and vinyl records are both audio storage and playback formats based on rotating discs from different times in music history the cd audio is digitally encoded and read by a laser while analog vinyl audio is physically read by a needle. Sure a lot of people simply enjoy the ritual of thumbing through physical media setting up the turntable and listening to a whole album.

As described below despite decades of arguments there is no technical proof of the sonic superiority of the vinyl medium compared to cd. That does not mean the medium as a whole is superior.