CD or Vinyl?

[Stephen Coates]

I just bought two new vinyl records ('Mika - Grace Kelly' and 'Calvin Harris - Acceptable in the 80s') and wondered what you all prefered.

After having listened to many record and many CDs, I think that the sound quality is about the same on both, therefore due to the ease of use of a CD I am going to have to vote for CD. Although vinyl records are good as well.

[J T]

A lot of people prefer vinyl because it sounds 'warmer' and say how the analogue nature of the recording reflects the analogue nature of music without introducing flaws from digital coding-decoding.

Personally, I've never really used records, and as such don't care for them at all and can't offer much of an objective view.

CDs all the way for me. Plus the ripping and burning aspects

[Teho]

For sound quality and ease of use, it's definitely CDs.

For some people, nostalgia and collectability is where CDs will never beat vinyl.

I don't care much for vinyl myself. I did use them when I was young, but I don't feel particularily nostalgic about them.

[Stephen Coates]

A lot of people prefer vinyl because it sounds 'warmer' and say how the analogue nature of the recording reflects the analogue nature of music without introducing flaws from digital coding-decoding.

Personally, I've never really used records, and as such don't care for them at all and can't offer much of an objective view.

CDs all the way for me. Plus the ripping and burning aspects

I think you only end up with problems with sound quality when you start to use crap like MP3s. Some MP3s can be good, but I find CDs much better.

[TiredOfLife]

Mp3s save lives, other peoples anyway.
If I didn't have my mp3 player for the trip to work and back, I would end up murdering half the bus.
Especially noisy brats.

I can encode mp3s from vinyl or cd so thats not a deciding facter.
Prefer to have my music without the background hiss and jumping of vinyl.
CDs for me.

[Submeg]

Ok, I would have to say, if you listen to 'new' vinyl records, they are produced using a different resin than they were back in the day, so they actually sound better than cds. I know, its impossible to believe.

For me, I am currently becoming extremely obsessed with music, and I am looking for some specific songs, check My Music search. So I will probably have to start a vinyl collection too.

[Stephen Coates]

Something I'm not sure about.

Was the sound originally recorded into a digital format?

i.e. When someone is actually singing, how do they record it? Because if they record it in a digital format, e.g. DAT, then copying that onto vinyl can't make it sound any better.

[AlexJ]

CD's for me - ease of use and not too much degredation.

Track selection can't be done on a record, a CD can be scratched (up to a point) and no loss of quality experienced and they are largely immune to dust whereas some of the records I've got sound like a warzone when they're played despite my best efforts to keep them clear of dust.

Having said that, I mainly play my music collection from MP3 (ripped at a high bitrate of 320kbps or 'acquired' from the highest bitrate source available (usually at least 240kbps)) because I can play any track from my collection at a click of the mouse.

[Harrison]

Something I'm not sure about.

Was the sound originally recorded into a digital format?

i.e. When someone is actually singing, how do they record it? Because if they record it in a digital format, e.g. DAT, then copying that onto vinyl can't make it sound any better.

This will completely depend on each recording. You can normally tell easily on the back of a CD as it has a small 3 letter code in a box somewhere that will look like AAD or DDD. Not all CD's will have this code, but a lot of them will. The code means the following:

DDD = digital tape recorder used during recording session, mixing and/or editing, and mastering of the tracks.

ADD = analogue tape recorder used during recording session, digital tape recorder used during mixing and/or editing, and digital tape recorder used during mastering.

AAD = analogue tape recorder used during recording session, analogue tape recorder used during mixing and/or editing, and digital tape recorder used during mastering.

In all cased you will always see a digital recorder being used at the mastering stage, otherwise the CD would not be possible.

Some people argue that Analogue is better than digital because it captures the true audio wave forms, whereas digital breaks the audio into chunks of data and recorded the lengths of the audio waveforms at set intervals. Obviously when the data rate is low for digital recording this can be the case so less chunks of information about the original audio waveform are digitally captured each second, and so the audio degrades, but as the data rate is increased digital recording can easily surpass analogue recording due to other limitations that effect analogue recording.

With analogue, each time a recording is played the recorded information gets slightly degraded. The first playback may in fact sound even better than a digital recording, but 3 or 4 plays and it will have started to degrade. Digital on the other had remains exactly as it sounded the first time, and will continue to without any degradation.

This follows through to the whole process of recording, not just the media the final recording is put onto. Many CDs do start life as an analogue recording session because the studio knows that an analogue recording can still capture more warmth and range than digital recordings, and they know that it won't degrade because they will only need to play it back once to lay the audio off to digital for the mixing and editing. Doing the mixing and editing digitally will stop any further degradation of the audio as each edit will be using the original digital data. In contrast if they did an analogue edit and mix, each pass through of the audio would degrade its quality.

You could easily test analogue degradation using two VHS recorders. You can instantly see some degradation in the picture quality when you view the first copy doing tape to tape via VHS. But to show how quickly quality degrades, if you did a tape to tape copy, then did another tape to tape copy using the copied tape from the first copy, and then finally did another copy using the copied tape from the second copy the quality of the image and audio on the fourth generation copy would look really bad. In contrast you could copy a CD or DVD and make a copy from the copy and their would be no difference.

So basically, some studios prefer to do ADD for CD recording these days and other DDD. You will see a lot of AAD due to the reduced costs of recording this way, or because many of the AAD CD's were originally from recordings made many years ago. DDD does tend to only be used mainly for classical and Jazz music though.

[Demon Cleaner]

The only thing I preferred on vinyl were the covers. When you bought f.ex. an Iron Maiden album back then in the early 80s, the covers looked quite amazing, with those bright colors and mean Eddy. It doesn't have the same impact on the CDs booklets.