Hacker News Reader

There's two different arguments being conflated:

- Vinyl is higher fidelity (yourself, and the article).

- Vinyl sounds better.

Vinyl colors sound, in the same way that some Vacuum Tubes color sound, which is a roundabout way of saying: They objectively make it less similar to the reference material than straight digital. But even though Vinyl is objectively worse at reproduction, some people prefer it (i.e. it subjectively sounds better to them).

Why might that be? And that question itself is when you go down a rabbit hole (e.g. Does playing a Vinyl album twice ever sound identical? And is this imperfection more pleasurable to some people than a perfect one? Etc). I don't own any Vinyl nor am I a big Vinyl aficionado, but there's undeniably a colorization when listening to a song in Vinyl Vs. digital, and then we get into the subjective realm of if this is "better" or "worse."

PS - This is true all across the audio reproduction realm. For example horn Vs. reference-style speakers, horns also heavily colorize and are quite popular (particularly for Home Theater), but are also divisive because it is objectively "worse" (but subjectively "better" for some).

One other reason why vinyl sounds better is that how it’s mastered. For streaming, tracks are optimized for low quality headphones and phone speakers. Loudness is all that is required.

Mastering for vinyl, however, takes effort. Do it wrong and the record becomes unplayable. So when you have to put in the effort anyway, might as well make it sound good at the same time.

A/B some tracks some time. Chances are the vinyl version sounds more polished with a bit more dynamics instead of having everything slam into a limiter. This has nothing to do with sound coloring or “warmth”.

To add on to above, the Wikipedia article on the Loudness War is an interesting read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Yeah, the Loudness War is why (new pressings from) old 1970s and 1980s masters sound better to many people. (Me included.)

To add to the differences, technological limitations of vinyl (inability to handle heavy bass) possibly affected the music that was made and published. Maybe it had to be more melodic, or something.

Yes, bass is harder to reproduce on vinyl - RIAA equalization is applied in the mastering process to help with this.

Some "sss" sounds are prone to producing sibilance, which can be filtered out during mastering or avoided at the recording stage.

I mean, compared to the majority of streaming platforms (YouTube, Spotify), sure. But there's the entire world of lossless music that just outperforms vinyls in every way.

But yeah, in both cases, you'd need to shell out at least a couple of hundred euros on speakers to fully experience either vinyls or lossless, and that has proven to be not important to the vast majority of the people.

I have a pretty large collection of lossless files, a record player, some vinyls, and speakers that allow me to tell the difference, but I still play Spotify on them like 95% of the time.

> you'd need to shell out at least a couple of hundred euros on speakers to fully experience either vinyls or lossless.

A pair of Sony MDR-7506es would do it. The workhorse cans of the recording industry.

Don’t forget the converters. A lot of people get crazy headphones and connect them to their laptop headphone jack or a cheap Focusrite interface where poor design and pcb layout mean you can literally hear the power section.

Lots of CDs and lossless digital is mastered like shit, for whatever reason. My fav to hate is Depeche Modes “Playing the Angel”. I was given it at release and couldn’t at first understand why my (very humble, late 80s) set played it so bad. Well, it’s clipped to hell.

Some vinyl releases seem to be just copy paste of a shitty digital master, but most vinyl is mastered well. This HAS to be a big reason many prefer vinyl.

Older vinyl also often has less range, but no clipping, which can make them soothing to listen to. I suppose automatic gain adjustment in Spotify gives the same result, so there’s that.

But the thing with vinyl for me are the physical things and the ritual. It’s sheer joy. I don’t have many records, maybe 30, but it’s a fun thing.

For another example of objectively worse at reproduction but subjectively better for some people, don't forget "the Bose sound".

> There's two different arguments being conflated:

> - Vinyl is higher fidelity (yourself, and the article).

> - Vinyl sounds better.

> Vinyl colors sound, in the same way that some Vacuum Tubes color sound, which is a roundabout way of saying: They objectively make it less similar to the reference material than straight digital. But even though Vinyl is objectively worse at reproduction, some people prefer it (i.e. it subjectively sounds better to them).

It's a little more complicated that that. The technical superiority of digital audio enables mastering techniques that can make the music sound worse: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war:

> Modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness therefore can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as "victims of the loudness war."

Vinyl recording technology has technical limitations that make it far less suited to dynamic range compression (IIRC, something with groove spacing). I've read there have been some recent dual vinyl/digital releases where the vinyl version sounds objectively better because it was mastered for its medium and the digital version sounds shitty because it was mastered for loudness.

I believe a huge part of it is the actual hardware of the turntable, right? People attribute a lot of the character to the medium itself, but it is of course possible to have an extremely “clean” master on vinyl. If the characteristics of the vinyl itself are changed by playing, or if the vinyl changes between plays, then yes, you would likely be providing different input to the read/amp system than before.

Even a lot of relatively cheap record players have adjutable tonearm weights. But it's not just the vertical needle force that wears out the records. The other issue is lack of adjustable (or any) anti-skate force. This keeps the needle from being forced to one side of the groove.

I stumbled across the article recently where someone set up an A/B test to try to observe record damage from these cheap turntables. While there are some limitations of the experiment, I thought it was a good idea. There are too many "facts" that are just accepted as true without any emperical observation (not just in the audio community).

https://www.audioappraisal.com/will-a-cheap-turntable-damage...

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply you had to break the bank to avoid damaging your records. And good note on the anti-skate tracking as well!

> I enjoyed this post, and more or less agree with the author's opinion that claims of superior vinyl audio quality are bunk - and particularly meaningless in a world where most new music is recorded or produced digitally in the first place.

Exactly, at least for me as well. Perhaps older music, mastered in analog and later put out for radio airplay (or converted to digital) by slamming all of the levels as high as they'd go, sounds better on vinyl insofar as vinyl is as close to "original" as you're going to get. The "loudness war" is a thing, for sure.

But for me, it's a hobby, and hobbies need not be completely efficient. I like fiddling with my mid-range record player, digging for albums I like, finding the one copy of a Broadway soundtrack of a wildly popular band's album that got made once and wasn't very popular[0], and just watching the record go round while I listen with decent headphones.

And, especially, reading articles like this that take a lighthearted view of taking apart a piece of kit.

0 - "American Idiot, the Musical"

As a newbie to vinyl, I had no idea about tone arms. Part of my intention with this was to replace all the guts with a Raspberry Pi and control things like the arm digitally.

As for the wear on the vinyl - there are quite a few original pressings of Sgt Pepper. I don't mind scratching this one to hell and back!