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Comment by ryandetzel | Hacker News Reader

Interesting enough I went over my brother in laws this weekend and sure enough he has a brand new record player with fancy balancing and strobe speed selection and a whole bunch of new and old albums. During our meal we listened to a 40 year old Elton John album which didn't sound horrible but wouldn't hold it's weight next to its digital counterpart.

Some people say vinyl sounds "warmer" or better and if you're a professional and you have the right equipment that might be true but for the average consumer that owns the average consumer electronics in their square rooms with no sound absorption you'll hear no difference over 192 (or even 128) mp3.

Cal me boring but I'll stick with my Sonos with it's never ending Google Music playlist over clunky vinyl any day. ;-)

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"Some people say vinyl sounds "warmer" or better and if you're a professional and you have the right equipment that might be true (…)"

Most likely it is the other way round. A nearby record store made a test a while ago. They invited an audience and compared vinyl with digital on three different pairs of equipment. In direct blind comparison, the audience rated digital better only on the most sophisticated systems (> 10.000 dollar DAC/record player).

Their result is: if you spend less than 4000 for your player and care for best sound, go with vinyl. I guess that applies to most of us ;o)

You don't need a 10k DAC, I suspect something a hundredth of that would still have been well rated. DACs aren't complex equipment.

Stick the money on an amp and speaker set that sounds good (that still doesn't require 10k btw).

Well, honestly said, the 10k was reported from my memory. The SACD player in the test was indeed a 10k player.

You are right that good dacs are available for less (a few hundreds). But my points were the results of the test. I tried to keep out my personal opinion. Opinions about vinyl or digital usually end in flamewars.

I am interested in learning more about this test. Which record store performed this test? When? I guess record stores don't normally publish their experiments, but it would be nice if they did.

Here is the link to phono phono in Berlin: http://www.phonophono.de/blog/2013/07/technikabend-analog-ge...

google translator is your (pidgin-english-)friend, if you shouldn't be fluent in german ;o)

Yeah, was it a cd or mp3? 128kbps or 192? There are so many "studies" that say one or the other but my assumption is most people would know or even care about the difference. The best music is the music you have access to and can enjoy and for most people that's the music that fits in you pocket or can be streamed anywhere at anytime.

If you want to say you like vinyl because you like the feel, the blowing the dust off, the setting the needle, the flipping to side B then I'm fine with that but to say it's a better sound (that is noticeable to make it worth the premium and hassle) that's just silly. Hipsters will be hipsters though.

For me it's a lot less about the "warmer" sound. It's about the availability of prep loudness aware mastering and the fact that I actually own the copies. Everything available digitally has a weak dynamic range. Everything available digitally is restricted by an end user license agreement - and can be taken away from me without my consent.

I still spotify, by I vinyl too :)

You have a good point. The quality of the sound pressed to vinyl is very high and less compressed currently, because of the target audience. But I guess, most of 24/192 downloads and SACDs are also mastered well for the same reason.

    Everything available digitally has a weak dynamic range.

Really? I can't find the figures right now, but as I recall the max dynamic range available to vinyl is about 40db whereas for a standard CD it's about 96db, so in the hands of a good mastering engineer, even standard CDs should be superior.

Having said that, most pop music is compressed for radio or jukebox these days where all dynamic range is killed in the pursuit of loudness.

    Everything available digitally is restricted by an end user license agreement

Yeah, I still buy hard copies for the same reason.

AFAIK, theoretical dynamic range these days is something like 50-70db depending on the vinyl.

..But, as you said the actual dynamic range is down to the original source and the whims of the mastering engineer.

"Really? I can't find the figures right now, (…)"

A good dynamic range for a rock music recording is 15 db. Some of the really badly compressed recordings have only 5 db or less.

The best classical recordings come close to 20 db, but that usually involves speech.

None of the available formats has a problem with any of this.

Here is a link with dynamic range measurements for countless albums, if anyone wants to check: http://dr.loudness-war.info

Keep in mind I was talking about the media available, not the medium. As you point out, while CDs have a higher theoretical dynamic range, nearly everything available after the late 1980s is compressed to within 10 - and sometimes just 5 - decibels.

Vinyl can be taken away too, not by revoking a license agreement but simply by technological changes (nobody makes turntables, cartridges, stylus, etc. anymore). We're not really there yet with vinyl but there are certainly a lot fewer choices than there used to be, and what remains seems to be trending to choices only in the low end or audiophile-grade high end.

Well sure. 5 1/4" floppies have been taken away by technological changes. There are almost certainly file formats that are unreadable without some serious archeology.

The technology required to listen to a record is stone-age simple compared to even a magnetic cassette, though, let alone a digitally compressed .mp3.

The point being that if you own a hard copy of media, that media can always be read (if the hard copy is still viable), given the right technology. If you own a license to stream a piece of media, as soon as that industry actor goes belly up so does your license.

Given vinyl records last longer (when properly cared for in an archival setting) than a hard drive or magnetic tape does, I'm pretty certain neither you, nor I, nor our great-grand-children will live in a world where you can't gain access to a turntable.

There may be fewer manufacturer choices than there were four decades ago - but there are also more (and more labels pressing for) than there were only a decade ago.

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