Why do records sound so much better than digital?

[Snoopy]

It must be nice to like only modern music.
However I have a fair amount to stuff where the tape hiss is apparent just before the music starts… or apparent just before the blank space before the next track… So the album is quieter then the tape hiss of nothingness.
But the music is worth it.

I suppose if I were to just listen for quiet, then I can just turn the phono stage off, and enjoy the silence.

Basically a lot of music that was pre ~1990s was on analogue tape. Digital mastering was not ubiquitous until around then.
Bascally Digital Audio Tape (DAT) showed up in 1987, so one can use that as somewhat a marker.
And the higher end Vinyl systems were better than the average tape recorded albums… Some albums were recorded on better tape sytstems, and a limited few digital.

Downloading vinyl versus digital recording sounds a lot like a form of vinyl fetishism.

I listen mainly to the Beatles, pink Floyd, David Bowie, Johnny Cash, nick cave, Neil young.

But most of that stuff is probably modern masters. What I never liked was the vinyl (needle drop rip) of the original vinyls.

I can still hear the hiss from the tape recording in some stuff on qobuz (Neil young) or there are a bunch of John Lennon songs where I first thought something is wrong with my gear.

But I prefer clean sound , dead silent background when possible.

Just the amount of money that you got to spend on vinyl to even kinda get close to cd quality seems crazy.


Edit: as a teenager I obviously listened to my dads vinyl, and I had a collection of tapes before I got into CDs.
But I wouldn't want to go back to that hissing by choice

 

[Holmz]

I listen mainly to the Beatles, pink Floyd, David Bowie, Johnny Cash, nick cave, Neil young.

But most of that stuff is probably modern masters. What I never liked was the vinyl (needle drop rip) of the original vinyls.

I can still hear the hiss from the tape recording in some stuff on qobuz (Neil young) or there are a bunch of John Lennon songs where I first thought something is wrong with my gear.

But I prefer clean sound , dead silent background when possible.

Just the amount of money that you got to spend on vinyl to even kinda get close to cd quality seems crazy.

You are sort of ignoring history though…
We can have a debate about vinyl versus LP, and yeah… CD quality now is better.
Up to the early 90s, or maybe later, vinyl was better.

It has been 30 years of digital players, and it seems like only relatively recently where the DACs have gotten to the point where they generally very good. If you mention a name brand CD player from the late 90s, many people laugh at you for using crappy gear. And they often say I need some kilobuck transport, and another kilo-bucks of DAC, and some (maybe sub) kilobuck USB cable to connect it all.
(Ok then, I’ll use the TT…)

And most decent phono stages have a mute button to avoid the initial drop.
One either like listening to those albums, and on nice systems or they do not.

No one is suggesting that people with CD, streaming, or other digital based systems should go out and buy turntables.
They can if they want to, no one will stop them.

But most people got their vinyl systems to listen to music on. And it was pretty much the only game in town.

 

[Newman]

You are sort of ignoring history though…

And you are sort of re-writing it.

CD quality now is better.
Up to the early 90s, or maybe later, vinyl was better.
It has been 30 years of digital players, and it seems like only relatively recently where the DACs have gotten to the point where they generally very good.

None of that is true. It is more like regurgitation of the audiophile anti-digital agenda.

This is what really happened, see post #742. (Which you surely read, given that you posted on the same page.)

 

[Leporello]

You are sort of ignoring history though…
We can have a debate about vinyl versus LP, and yeah… CD quality now is better.
Up to the early 90s, or maybe later, vinyl was better.

This is just audiophile folklore, not supported by any kind of evidence.

 

[Holmz]

And you are sort of re-writing it.
…

How so?

…
None of that is true. It is more like regurgitation of the audiophile anti-digital agenda.

This is what really happened, see post #742. (Which you surely read, given that you posted on the same page.)

It is true, and so was post 742…
You Ray Cooder was one of the first to use digital and also the ones posted in #742,
However much of the new wave, rap, and punk was all tape… I know Pink Floyd (and other big time bands) was digital, and i know this because I know a fellow that saved their hard drives back in the day.

You can look at wiki pages on it/

 

[tmtomh]

I'm downloaded a whole bunch of needle drop rips by people that did spends thousands of dollars on the equipment to do that and are very popular in communities for that stuff.

So I compared a bunch of these vinyl rips and a variety of different cd versions and qobuz versions.

And not once.. did I prefer vinyl or tape rips that have background noise and the slightest hiss.

When there is no sound during a song I want it to be absolutely dead silent.


Vinyl seems so inconvenient.. you need these 45 rpm discs that are 50% empty to avoid problems with the last tracks.. get up every 15 minutes .

And probably order 3-4 Vinyls of the same album to just get one version that is "good enough" but probably still far from being perfect.

My views on this have changed over time. Like you, I used to collect needle drops, and like you I tended to gravitate to those done by the small community of folks who do them very well. And I enjoyed a lot of them.

The trouble, though, is that as I gradually upgraded my system - and especially when I moved into a new house 2-3 years ago with a larger, acoustically better listening room - I started to hear a lot more of the detail in all the music I played, and all of a sudden the surface noise, small speed variations, distortion, and many other telltale aspects in even the best vinyl rips became more audible. As time went on I started deleting vinyl rips from my streaming library, and then from my backup archive. Now my streaming library has only a handful of vinyl rips, of albums or material that is not available in digital format. Plus of course a couple of nice rips of the Robert Ludwig cut of Led Zeppelin II because, I mean, come on!

Seriously, though, I just played my favorite vinyl rip of the vaunted Canadian red label pressing of Led Zeppelin III for the first time since I moved into my new listening space, and my jaw dropped at how bad it sounded.

As for @Holmz 's comment about analogue-sourced recordings, yes of course, I would part ways with Mansinthe86's claim that one can hear pure silence in the quiet parts of older recordings, But I would also say that in my experience vinyl noise vs tape hiss is not just a matter of amplitude. They are different types of noise and when comparing vinyl rips with digital versions of recordings originally made on analogue tape, I have rarely if ever found the vinyl rip to have a noise floor equal to that of the digital version - in other words I pretty much always find that the vinyl rip had some noise component that was instantly detectable regardless of the noise floor of the original analogue tape.

Again, I did not always find this to be the case in the past - but when my setup become more revealing, it became the case.

Just my experience of course. YMMV - and as always, live and let live and enjoy what you enjoy!

 

[Holmz]

My views on this have changed over time. Like you, I used to collect needle drops, and like you I tended to gravitate to those done by the small community of folks who do them very well. And I enjoyed a lot of them.

The trouble, though, is that as I gradually upgraded my system - and especially when I moved into a new house 2-3 years ago with a larger, acoustically better listening room - I started to hear a lot more of the detail in all the music I played, and all of a sudden the surface noise, small speed variations, distortion, and many other telltale aspects in even the best vinyl rips became more audible. As time went on I started deleting vinyl rips from my streaming library, and then from my backup archive. Now my streaming library has only a handful of vinyl rips, of albums or material that is not available in digital format. Plus of course a couple of nice rips of the Robert Ludwig cut of Led Zeppelin II because, I mean, come on!

Seriously, though, I just played my favorite vinyl rip of the vaunted Canadian red label pressing of Led Zeppelin III for the first time since I moved into my new listening space, and my jaw dropped at how bad it sounded.

As for @Holmz 's comment about analogue-sourced recordings, yes of course, I would part ways with Mansinthe86's claim that one can hear pure silence in the quiet parts of older recordings, But I would also say that in my experience vinyl noise vs tape hiss is not just a matter of amplitude. They are different types of noise and when comparing vinyl rips with digital versions of recordings originally made on analogue tape, I have rarely if ever found the vinyl rip to have a noise floor equal to that of the digital version - in other words I pretty much always find that the vinyl rip had some noise component that was instantly detectable regardless of the noise floor of the original analogue tape.

Again, I did not always find this to be the case in the past - but when my setup become more revealing, it became the case.

Just my experience of course. YMMV - and as always, live and let live and enjoy what you enjoy!

I few glasses of the Sangria de Cristo, raises the noise floor tolerance, forgiveness, and trespass for me.

Plus the ~11 minute side has about the same number rotations as the Earth does in a year, so it is symbolic as well.

 

[Sal1950]

We can have a debate about vinyl versus LP, and yeah… CD quality now is better.
Up to the early 90s, or maybe later, vinyl was better.

Total BS. CD had better SQ from the very first pressing.
The numbers don't lie and there is just no debate to be made.
16/44 is far superior than dragging a rock thru a ditch,
Always has been.

 

[Holmz]

Total BS. CD had better SQ from the very first pressing.
The numbers don't lie and there is just no debate to be made.
16/44 is far superior than dragging a rock thru a ditch,
Always has been.

CDs did not arrive until the well into the 80s.

Maybe we need one of those earlier CD players, and get it tested for SINAD.
(If there are even any around.)

Before CDs there was only vinyl and cassette tape (if we discount 8 track).
That was my point, what is so difficult and BS laden of a topic as to the history when CDs arrived on the scene?

It had to have been like 83, 84 or 85 when the local “Licorice Pizza” store added CDs to the tape and vinyl.

 

[tmtomh]

I few glasses of the Sangria de Cristo, raises the noise floor tolerance, forgiveness, and trespass for me.

Plus the ~11 minute side has about the same number rotations as the Earth does in a year, so it is symbolic as well.

Fair enough!

 

[Holmz]

I listened to McCartney and and Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony and Ivory” on a digital remaster.
The Tracy Chapman “Revolution” is much better, and that is on vinyl.

Obviously the content could play a role in it

 

[Sal1950]

It had to have been like 83, 84 or 85 when the local “Licorice Pizza” store added CDs to the tape and vinyl.

That's about right, No debate over when CD's came to market.
I bought my first one somewhere in the late 80s when the prices finally came down.
I got a Magnavox CDB 560 for somewhere around $200 IIRC.
Best I remember my first CD was Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms.
It sounded so superior to my LP (and I had VERY good vinyl gear) that I never purchased another LP.
YMMV

 

[Galliardist]

You are sort of ignoring history though…
We can have a debate about vinyl versus LP, and yeah… CD quality now is better.
Up to the early 90s, or maybe later, vinyl was better.

I've pondered this idea over the years myself (I stayed with vinyl for longer than many, because the music I was listening to at the time was largely only on LP - sound quality was a mystery to me at the time, I heard different results in different places at different times).

My take on this one is slightly different. I remember different reviewers and store staff switching from the vinyl to the digital "camps" over the decade, and that had me wondering. It's also interesting to consider that people have switched back to preferring analogue over the last 15 years or so - if you read early posts in the long standing forums, digital was the thing and you can see LP slowly coming back into favour, often accompanied by other major changes in those people's systems like a move to valve amplification and more esoteric speaker brands.

Are the CD myths, actually a byproduct of the rest of the system in use? Certainly, in that first decade, people were bolting CD players onto existing systems, and that may have led to problems. CD players output a higher voltage signal than previous line level devices, and produced more and different bass and sibilants. There was a tendency, in the UK at least, at that time towards smaller speakers and MC cartridges that did less bass and bright treble, and amplifiers were kept for a long time as the dedicated audiophile moved up the turntable chain before replacing either amp or speakers. So, rather than CD being worse, the rest of our systems took longer to catch up. And dealers with an interest in selling esoteric turntable systems probably wouldn't have helped.

it's also likely that once vinyl started to be revived, that new components may start to be "tuned" to work with current LP playback, at the expense of digital. I'm not too sure of this last statement with respect to amplification, but it does appear that speakers with midbass humps are making a comeback, and that is about strengthening second third harmonics of reduced level low bass notes, a trick that works better with the mono'd and less defined low bass found with LP.

Revisionist history, I know.

 

[tmtomh]

You are sort of ignoring history though…
We can have a debate about vinyl versus LP, and yeah… CD quality now is better.
Up to the early 90s, or maybe later, vinyl was better.

It has been 30 years of digital players, and it seems like only relatively recently where the DACs have gotten to the point where they generally very good. If you mention a name brand CD player from the late 90s, many people laugh at you for using crappy gear.

I don't think your claim about vinyl being better up until the early '90s is factually true. While inexpensive DACs have reached new levels of excellence in recent years, there were plenty of CD players as early as the mid to late 1980s that offered excellent performance and avoided or had ironed out some of the sonic kinks that occurred with some of the earliest players. And the fact that "many people laugh at you for using crappy gear" if you have a '90s CD player, tells us nothing about this - except perhaps about the ignorance of the people doing the laughing.

 

[Holmz]

I don't think your claim about vinyl being better up until the early '90s is factually true. While inexpensive DACs have reached new levels of excellence in recent years, there were plenty of CD players as early as the mid to late 1980s that offered excellent performance and avoided or had ironed out some of the sonic kinks that occurred with some of the earliest players. And the fact that "many people laugh at you for using crappy gear" if you have a '90s CD player, tells us nothing about this - except perhaps about the ignorance of the people doing the laughing.

You’re probably right...

Maybe I am thinking early to mid eighties when there were effectively not many DVD players.
I am pretty sure that the CD started appearing in the 83-85 range, so the players must have been appearing along with the media.

 

[tmtomh]

You’re probably right...

Maybe I am thinking early to mid eighties when there were effectively not many DVD players.
I am pretty sure that the CD started appearing in the 83-85 range, so the players must have been appearing along with the media.

The first commercial CDs and consumer CD player both came onto the market in October 1982. DVD players didn't come onto the market until about 1996.

 

[billyjoebob]

That's about right, No debate over when CD's came to market.
I bought my first one somewhere in the late 80s when the prices finally came down.
I got a Magnavox CDB 560 for somewhere around $200 IIRC.
Best I remember my first CD was Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms.
It sounded so superior to my LP (and I had VERY good vinyl gear) that I never purchased another LP.
YMMV

Brothers in Arms I believe was the 1st (or close to it) album to be recorded digitally.
There is no comparison to its vinyl counterpart, but the same cant be said for the 1st Dire Straits album.
Man, there is something special about that one on early vinyl.
My thoughts "like anyone cares" is i am format agnostic. I listen to the format that the record was initially released on.
Post 1985 its all cd for me.
Anything before that vinyl for me.
Pops and all!

 

[Holmz]

…
And the fact that "many people laugh at you for using crappy gear" if you have a '90s CD player, tells us nothing about this - except perhaps about the ignorance of the people doing the laughing.

They are the ones who say I need a 10 k$ system with the AQ USB cable to connect the transpost the DAC, special feet and tables, and that it sounds way better than my iPad with the Etymotics ear buds.
And… that I need to experience it to understand.
(It seems like a personal relations ship with my DAC.)

Or it could also be that I somehow funny, and they laugh in response to that? With nothing to do with the gear.

 

[dougi]

CDs did not arrive until the well into the 80s.

Maybe we need one of those earlier CD players, and get it tested for SINAD.
(If there are even any around.)

Before CDs there was only vinyl and cassette tape (if we discount 8 track).
That was my point, what is so difficult and BS laden of a topic as to the history when CDs arrived on the scene?

It had to have been like 83, 84 or 85 when the local “Licorice Pizza” store added CDs to the tape and vinyl.

Hifi News has tested a number of early CD players recently. Their latest vintage review is also of one. The SINAD is perfectly OK and the SNR alone is very good.

 

[dlaloum]

I had a Revox B225 CD player the very best of the 1st generation of players - 14 bit chips (yep not even 16bits) - but it sounded great - still sounded up with pretty much anything circa 2010, when I finally moved it on to a new home.... Built like a tank, quality throughout.

But in the meantime, I have moved on - all my CD's are ripped to my server, they are decoded by my AVR's DAC's, I have little use for a CD player any more.

In theory - if I had the time for it - I would do the same for my LP collection - it is a non-trivial exercise, and I have not settled on what would be an adequate an definitive archival method that would get the best from the vinyl records....

And yeah I still think the original early pressing (vinyl) of Brothers In Arms sounded better than any of the CD's (and I am sorry I traded it in the late 80's).