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> The biggest draw in listening vinyl is the experience itself.

That's kind of the thing, and why record companies have no need to please the author of this article -- developing better tech would be pointless. People are into it for the experience/nostalgia, not for the sound quality.

> Yes, and it's not pointless. The higher resolution music shows itself as soundstage, not details. It's as pointless as saying, eyes can see 60FPS at most anyway, so higher frame rates are useless.

Bit depth manifests as dynamic range. Unless you need to reproduce accurately a recording that both contains the faintest buzzing mosquito, and a jackhammer right next to your ear, it's got plenty dynamic range for anyone's listening needs. Having more is useful for audio editing, not because it sounds better.

Low bit depth audio just sounds noisy, otherwise it's understandable just fine. I think the early Game Boy Pokemon games had 1 bit audio for the cries.

High frequencies are IMO mostly pointless for anyone with the money to spend on audio hardware. We have the best hearing as children, so unless you're a wealthy 12 year old you probably won't benefit from anything above 20 KHz. I've had my hearing tested and they don't even bother going much higher than somewhere around 12 KHz which I already perceive very, very faintly.

Sure, Bluetooth audio can be noticeably bad, but that's because Bluetooth just wasn't made for that and it was shoehorned in later.

> I've had my hearing tested and they don't even bother going much higher than somewhere around 12 KHz which I already perceive very, very faintly.

There's also a difference between still being able to hear a single pure tone, and being able to discern the presence or lack of high frequencies in a more complex bit of noise.

Developing technology to improve audio quality would be useless, but improving the vinyl manufacturing process to reduce cost and increase capacity would be worthwhile, as it could expand adoption.

> High frequencies are IMO mostly pointless for anyone with the money to spend on audio hardware. We have the best hearing as children, so unless you're a wealthy 12 year old you probably won't benefit from anything above 20 KHz.

You can be the most pristine kid in the world and you are still better off without excessively high frequencies.

https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

> Reducing music, listening and being an audiophile to numbers and formulae is great disservice to all. One may not like or prefer vinyl, this is OK, but calling it a gimmick, ah no.

Well it’s objectively a gimmick. You get poor quality and sometimes a better mastering which you could and should have on the digital file anyway. At this point what vinyl has for it is the “joy” of moving a large disc of plastic and a player arm. You are selling the format by the one minute of theatric at the beginning of a listening session. At this point, I’m personally convinced from what I have seen that most of the people who listen to vinyl do it for the snobbish pleasure of being vinyl listeners.

It is a gimmick, and it seems like you bought it, hook, line and sinker...but it wasn't always a gimmick. At some point, vinyl was the standard. It has lost that position since, but to not admit that these record producers are capitalizing on nostalgia (both real and fabricated) is folly. You can easily have some 'me and my music' time with superior digital mediums without the need to get up every ~16 minutes and deal with a mechanical limitation that can break immersion. It's fine to like a gimmick, but don't dismiss a reasoned explanation of why vinyl is not superior just because you got sold on something the rest of us left behind.

> It is a gimmick, and it seems like you bought it, hook, line and sinker...

Well, I started listening music with open reel tapes, cassette players, vinyl and CD at the same time. So, vinyl is not something I discovered recently.

Same here. In fact, I still repair record players, cassette decks and 8-track units as a hobby. That said, I'm not about to sit here and say the modern vinyl thing is anything but a gimmick. As I said further in my reply, it's fine to like the gimmick, but let's not sit here and pretend something is somehow being kept alive or pure by particiating in it. Vinyl had its time, and that time has passed. There are better ways to listen, now.

> ... without the need to get up every ~16 minutes and deal with a mechanical limitation that can break immersion.

I'm pretty sure bayindirh wants to do exactly that. Whether it breaks their immersion, or even what immersion means to them, is completely subjective. For them, it's intentionally tactile.

Yes, yes & yes. :)

Have ever even held a vinyl record? My nice vinyls, think like the Fragile by NIN, are orders of magnitude beyond their CD counterparts.

Vinyl has a feature digital music does not: Lack of instantaneous random access.

This lack fundamentally makes vinyl an existentially (as in Sartre) different listening experience.

> The higher resolution music shows itself as soundstage, not details.

Hogwash that doesn’t stand up to A-B testing. What does “soundstage” even mean in this context? Soundstage at least as commonly used is going to be overwhelmingly controlled by speaker design, placement and room acoustics (something that “audiophiles” tend to ignore - it is both the least sexiest and yet most important issue).

Of course if someone tells you are listening to a 192 kHz recording you are likely to perceive it as better - humans are very prone to suggestibility.

Once you are over 35 you’ll also find out that your high frequency perception rapidly drops off a cliff as you age and sample rates at <30kHz are more than enough. It’s a bit sad when you realize you’re no longer bothered by coil wine in the 10s of KHz.

As an ex-orchestra player I won't call it hogwash.

Soundstage means the size of the stage you can envision and the distance between instruments you can place them in your mind while you're listening the sound source your eyes closed. It's best envisioned with nicely mastered albums, and good recordings of symphony orchestras.

Considering you mic a 100-person orchestra from above with 8-10 mics, via a nice digital and lossless path, you can create the same vision of size in your mind just with two, reasonably priced, high resolution bookshelf speakers (Heco Celan GT302, or even Creative GigaWorks T20/T40 works well), run via a half-decent full resolution AB amplifier.

As you introduce lossy algorithms and increase compression, the high-frequency hints start to get clipped, and the sense of atmosphere transforms to a smaller, flatter room. It doesn't sound bad per se, but if you know how the original sounds, you can say something is amiss.

You don't need $10K systems to experience this. Just a good amp, a pair of good speakers, and a well mastered album. That's all.

The thing is, almost every digital format will have better stereo separation than Vinyl will (and by extension a larger soundfield).

The shallower dynamic range of vinyl means you must mix much more conservatively, you cant make as loud, you cant transition from quiet to loud as quickly, your high and low levels must be closer together.

Those limitations however, perhaps surprisingly, can actually can make for a better sounding mix.

However a lossless digital format will always exceed vinyl in every technical characteristic, however because of quantization it may not sound quite as good, particularly if the entire recording chain was analog.

That all said, an mix intended for vinyl may indeed sound better than one intended for digital, because the inherent limits of vinyl produce mixes that sound more 'natural' to people, albeit one that is not strictly transparent.

> The thing is, almost every digital format will have better stereo separation than Vinyl will.

My initial comment about wider soundstage was for 24bit/192KHz and above sound carriers, carrying lossless audio from the source, not for vinyls. :)

I listen vinyl not for the detail it provides.

I actually generally strongly prefer the quieter mix on vinyl, I also like vinyl for that certain... texture? it has.

The only time I ever want a very high dynamic range is when I'm listening to orchestral music. Otherwise for casual listening, I prefer the quieter mix of an album intended for vinyl.

In your fourth paragraph you refer to digital quantization, which I imagine is you referring to the idea of digital "stair steps" in the wave form's sampling.

In reality that's not a thing that actually happens. This stair step visualization is an abstraction that is used to illustrate sampling theorem. The reality is that digital wave forms replicate as perfectly smooth waves when they are converted back to an analog signal, as demonstrated here: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

That said, I agree with all of your other points.

What does any of this have to do with 192khz vs 48 and 24 bit vs 16 bit mastering and reproduction?

You completely ignore everything relevant stated about the psychoacoustic performance of adults.

> high-frequency hints

Unless you’re 10 years old I’ll assume the upper frequency range of your hearing is no more than 22 kHz and that is pushing it. Hearing above 16 kHz becomes heavily attenuated in adulthood.

When people talk high frequency they really mean stuff in the 2 to 6 kHz range.

In any event 48 kHz sampling for reproduction/storage is beyond plenty.

> Just a good amp, a pair of good speakers, and a well mastered album. That's all.

And ignore room acoustics.. sure that doesn’t sell speakers and amps. It’s much easier to say use this expensive power cord which has no effect on anything then make people have to think about engineering.

The interaction of harmonics and how it affects sound perception is a highly debated subject, but it’s same for every sense. Both eyes and ears have practical limits on what it hears, but even with that limits, brain can distinguish details so small, we have no ways to describe them.

Some people will describe higher bitrate, higher sampling rate sound to be smoother, even if they can’t tell what is the difference. Similarly, some people will describe same higher bandwidth signal to be more airy or open. Hearing tests do not quantify these details.

A solid example is Foo Fighters’ album, Wasting Light. Recorded and mastered on analog equipment, the album has sound qualities hard to describe. Yet it feels full, satisfying to listen, and doesn’t fatigue the ears. Maybe you can point a difference with a spectrogram, but the difference can be highlighted by your ears and brain in much more detailed manner.

Another example is how people listen to higher bandwidth music. People are more engaged with higher quality, higher bandwidth sound. They concentrate for longer periods and listen more intently. Again, the brain can notice something or hearing tests can’t quantify.

Lastly, people find images taken by cameras with Foveon sensors more appealing from color perspective, because the color resolution is much higher. While Bayer sensors’ color reproduction is both true and high resolution, brain can detect higher color resolution with ease.

All senses are trained on real world over the decades, and know how to distinguish between real and fake. So, it’s no surprise that brain can detect things which we can’t put our finger on squarely.

My rooms are not acoustically special. They are pretty standard, if not mundane. The equipment I use is high end, vintage stuff; but they are not exotics. Cabling is done per manuals of components.

The only power conditioning I have is a surge protector which claims to have line noise filtering, but this is not why I got it.

However, all the qualities I discussed here is audible on that set. The interesting part is, I’m using the same set for 30 years, and I know its sound character like my name. I can hear the same details and get the same atmosphere when I listen to the same albums (mostly CDs), so brain can reconstruct something we can’t describe from how sound interacts with both air and our ears.

Lastly, I can still easily hear switch mode power supply noise, without even trying.

> The interaction of harmonics and how it affects sound perception is a highly debated subject,

Non sequitur. These harmonics of interest are still all below 24 kHz.

> Hearing tests do not quantify these details.

A-B testing doesn’t have to quantify anything to prove that these differences are imperceptible and you are mainly cueing off suggestion. 24/192 might make you feel better and that is fine, but someone could switch it surreptitiously and you would quite likely never know the difference.

I’ve heard all the dumb bullshit why A-B testing doesn’t work (ironically often from idiots that will also proclaim to “trust the science” on popular topics including everything from COVID vaccines, medicine and global warming - but they will reject straightforward scientific experimentation). Somehow when their sacred ox of golden ears is gored, science is useless.

> Wasting Light. Recorded and mastered on analog equipment, the album has sound qualities hard to describe. Yet it feels full, satisfying to listen,

Nobody claimed there’s no differences in recording and mastering - but that these differences exist well within the typical limits of human hearing - far below 24 kHz and far far above the noise floor. This is especially the case if you can hear it on vinyl since the SNR of vinyl is a joke compared to 16 bit reproduction - it’s more like 10-11 bits - this is a fundamental limitation of the medium.

Maybe someone else can take that information and learn something, but I’m not stupid enough to think I’ll sway you from your woo of course.

Recording and mastering on analog equipment can have a HUGE impact on the recording - and it has nothing to do with quality, bitrate, frequency and all that stuff.

It's much simpler than that - it's not likely to be "on-grid."

Modern music is tracked and mixed in a DAW (digital audio workstation). In that DAW you specify the BPM. Artists and producers work hard to keep the music exactly in that BPM. The result is the music sounds dead and lifeless - it can't "breathe." They even have tools that can take performances that were tracked and align them to the beat (they do this for guitars, drums, pretty much everything).

Rick Beato did a video on this subject and chose Led Zeppelin and remastered some tracks to align to the grid and played the result. It went from sounding good to sounding awful. Here's a link - https://youtu.be/hT4fFolyZYU.

Note - there's nothing wrong with digital recording and playback. They're great, in fact they're better than anything we've ever had. The problem is computers make it tempting to make everything "perfect" and it's the pursuit of this perfection that's destroying the soul of music.

I mean, you just described a gimmick. There is nothing wrong with it being a gimmick, to be clear. I get the ritual part of it, but it's still a ritual, not an objectively better-sounding product.

Well, I think I never said that Vinyl is the best sounding medium. Did I? :)

It's a different experience, but not a superior method of data transfer.

It's like the difference between a kindle, a book, and your grandfather's copy of the same book. Three very different experiences, without fidelity being part of the question at all.

You are defining gimmick as any property that does not make the sound better. That may be a common opinion, but it's entirely a subjective judgement. You value sound quality. Maybe someone who values the physicality of vinyl would call 192kbits a gimmick!

> The biggest draw in listening vinyl is the experience itself. Large album covers printed with intricate detail, the manual effort you give to cue in the vinyl and changing sides. Adding coffee, tea, a book or a couple of friends into the music itself. The atmosphere all it creates and the experience revolving around is driving the vinyl.

I think that statement supports the grandparent post saying that vinyl is a gimmick.

I don't think so, because the music wants attention from you, and you stay more focused to the music itself. When combined with people into the music you're playing, it leads to nice discussions about photography or design of the cover, and these qualities fuel the social atmosphere in the room.

Having the same friends over with music playing over different mediums never resulted in the same vivid atmosphere for us.

Maybe this is because of us, but vinyl definitely has its own irreplaceable function for me and us (as friends), no it's not a gimmick.

I collect music on all formats, usually targeting the rarity of tracks or the issue. I favor digital, due to the ease of archival. However, the cold/warm sounds of digital/analog is very obvious to me, and I don't see how anyone could claim it isn't there. I have a few albums on both formats, and the distinctions on certain notes are clear. Maybe its like the FPS thing you mentioned, but I'll definitely agree that vinyl is not a gimmick.

The difference is in how they are typically mastered. You can take a vinyl record, digitize it, and put it on a cd, and it will sound exactly like the vinyl.

> Large album covers printed with intricate detail,

just distribute CDs in vinyl-size containers

>the manual effort you give to cue in the vinyl and changing sides

this only happens if you also go with old school vinyl players and not the automated ones. also, lifting an arm to compensate for the lack of technology is not what I'd consider a meaningful experience

>Adding coffee, tea, a book or a couple of friends into the music itself

a vinyl is not a live concert, there is nothing in the tech that intrinsically lends itself more to those situations. I can have friends listen to a CD, I can drink a coffee or read a book listening a CD.

>It's as pointless as saying, eyes can see 60FPS at most anyway, so higher frame rates are useless.

We know how many frequencies our ears can perceive, and the Sampling Theorem doesn't lie

>Reducing music, listening and being an audiophile to numbers and formulae is great disservice to all.

vinyls only exist because of maths and physics, analog stuff is not voodoo magic. listening to a CD while forgetting the technical specifications is exactly the same as listening to the vinyl. as long as I know the CD is a >44.1KHz and was recorded and mixed properly by competent audio engineers I don't see how it could be any more "reductionist" than making sure your vinyls also were well recorded

>> Vinyl is a gimmick.

> I disagree. Because most vinyl listeners (incl. me) doesn't listen it for the sound quality itself.

> The biggest draw in listening vinyl is the experience itself. Large album covers printed with intricate detail, the manual effort you give to cue in the vinyl and changing sides. Adding coffee, tea, a book or a couple of friends into the music itself. The atmosphere all it creates and the experience revolving around is driving the vinyl.

You said you disagreed, but then you described a gimmick.

The only part of what you described that wouldn't work just as well on a CD is changing sides. In fact, they're all things that people actually did with CDs, because CDs were superior to records in every conceivable way, but people still wanted to spend time with their friends. There's nothing about a record that makes you more likely to listen to it with your friends. There's nothing about a CD that says you can't fit it into a pocket in a much larger display envelope.

If you think the ritual of sitting quietly and listening to music is dead, that's because people stopped wanting to do it, not because they stopped buying their music on records.

> If you think the ritual of sitting quietly and listening to music is dead,...

No, I don't think it's dead, and if it's dead, it's not because vinyl is not the dominant format anymore. It's just a catalyst for me, for that atmosphere.

> You said you disagreed, but then you described a gimmick.

As I described elsewhere, vinyl has a unique function for me, and friends I have. So it's not a gimmick, in my book.

> There's nothing about a record that makes you more likely to listen to it with your friends. There's nothing about a CD that says you can't fit it into a pocket in a much larger display envelope.

Some people dig the sound dynamics of the former strongly (which is not me, btw), and I have never seen the latter one.

I can argue all day everyday about how CDs can accommodate much better sound but record labels and the strive for reducing studio costs ruin the format by stone-wall normalizing these things in the name of loudness, and how analog sound paths sound warmer, and you don't need resolution to love some audio, but I have no time for that, at least today. Let's only say that I'm an ex-orchestra player who's listening to both vinyls and CDs for more than 30 years, and know some stuff about sound.