Cd Vs Vinyl Sound Quality

Still as artists and labels hop on the vinyl trend some new vinyl releases may be mastered from cd quality audio not the high resolution formats audiophiles and folks like neil young adore.

Cd vs vinyl sound quality.

A turntable with a worn out needle won t be able to accurately convey the music within the grooves just as a stereo with blown out speakers won t properly deliver the data on a cd. We compare the sound quality of analog vinyl vs digital audio cd flac on a 100k stereo setup. Having a proper sound system to play your cds or vinyl records through greatly affects the quality. The table below lists the sampling rate and the accuracy for cd recordings and the maximum sampling rate and accuracy for dvd recordings.

Even as cd sales eclipsed and nearly exterminated vinyl the format was plagued by accusations that its sound was inferior that it was merely a convenient alternative to the lp. Cd quality sits somewhere in the middle with 44 100 samples per second at 16 bit accuracy. Check out our listening results. Why vinyl sounds better than cd or not according to rolling stone magazine sales of vinyl albums continue to grow setting a new record in 2010.

There s very little compression so the loudest parts of those sounds often. Vinyl can still push music to the limits of its dynamic range 55 70db but it often shies away from doing so in order to maintain sound quality. The results may surprise you as they did us. See our youtube debate.

From a technical standpoint digital cd audio quality is clearly superior to vinyl. Does vinyl reproduce sound better or is it just. There is less interference from hissing turntable rumble etc better stereo channel separation and have no variation in playback speed. Vinyl is great but the idea that its sound quality is superior to that of uncompressed digital recordings is preposterous.

Playback and inconsistencies though cd s sample rate is high and we re all well aware how good they sound the idea of its being converted once into digital and then back to analogue losing and approximating information seems to infer it will. That s why snare drums cymbal splashes and other loud instruments have so much more punch in vinyl recordings. Cds can also hold 74 minutes of music. They sound different and that s exactly the point.

What vinyl can t do.