Plus, Bandcamp is nice. Artists I've discovered through there frequently have a vinyl pressing available, which entitles me to download the lossless digital version as well.
Yeah that's crazy. CD (when appropriately mastered) is as good as it gets (unless you're looking to make remixes or something): perfect sound reproduction as far as human ears are concerned, and losslessly copyable. Vinyl you wear away slightly every time you play it.
I hear the different of flac vs mp3 on my Shure SRH 940 and some other high quality headphones. On medium quality speakers I don't.
A properly mastered CD can represent the whole audible range; to properly represent the very quietest sounds (mosquito-in-an-empty-room level) requires doing dithering as part of the mastering process, but any competent masterer should be able to do that. AFAIK no properly blinded (ABX) listening test has ever shown a human-detectable difference between 24-bit and correctly mastered 16-bit.
> I hear the different of flac vs mp3 on my Shure SRH 940 and some other high quality headphones. On medium quality speakers I don't.
mp3 is a long long way below CD quality.
I think people who like vinyl more the CD just like the noise floor on top of the music and not that vinyl actually has higher quality. Everything before the pressing is digital anyway these days, just with higher resolution. And that's what I meant, your sound can't get better then the 24 bit releases used for mastering. You may like the sound more, but the quality is necessarily worse then the digital original.
My point is that a correctly mastered CD will be perceptually indistinguishable from that digital original.
The few vinyl rips I have seem to have issues like a high noise floor (hearing the amplified sound of the needle pushing the vinyl during supposed silence, as well as random pops).
I am curious to know if that's seen as a feature and not a bug.
Many CD are remastered if not remixed, so they aren't perfect equivalents of the original vinyl; they usually also add compression to raise the perceived average volume (sometimes beyond clipping!), which kills the original dynamics and quality of the media. Some early CDs may have been direct conversion of the master into digital form, but if we take an old record and the equivalent CD issued recently, they're not the same thing anymore.
"The few vinyl rips I have seem to have issues like a high noise floor"
That's because of the needle friction and other interference by motor and other mechanical parts etc. all noise which is getting amplified. They've made miracles with pickups, RIAA preamps and other stuff, but we can't make a mechanical device that doesn't generate friction otherwise we would have invented perpetual motion. So yes, records are more noisy and have a much smaller dynamic range, although most modern overcompressed music would falsely suggest the opposite. A search for "loudness war" can bring some interesting information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Vinyl, like CD, has format limitations that need to be overcome. Most notably with vinyl, bass has to be converted to mono and high frequency content needs to be heavily EQ'd.
Vinyl isn't the "original" sound, and you should never mixdown a CD from a vinyl source (since in most cases you have the original master or a tape copy of it) unless you have absolutely no other choice.
1. stereo master tape, not the record press 2. from the same multitrack tape (often transferred onto digital) and sometimes with other audio added.
So it is possible to sound differently to the digital signal. The phono amplifier has to do some filtering, so this influences the sound too.
All in all records are a pretty bad medium for conserving music nowadays.. but for many people the experience is the most important thing.
I wonder could a make an needle that only works with specific records now..