Quality of Analog (Vinyl) vs Digital (CD) in Music

[WedgeStratos]

With Jimmy Eat World announcing their Futures 10th Anniversary Tour and the release of three remastered LPs including Futures, I'm curious to ask some of the oldbies and music aficionados...

What's your take and opinions regarding analog formats like vinyl compared to digital formats like the CD or MP3?

In my opinion, both have strengths and weaknesses.

For Vinyl...
It's great to have a physical copy, and to see it so large ensures you KNOW you've got something packing.
There's some satisfaction in slapping it on the turnstile and putting that needle down, the stereo emphasizing those crackles before the music kicks in.
Though, it's a bit bulky, the needle can scratch the record, and vinyls tend to be expensive if you want the original recording.

Digital, however...
It's more compact (heh, compact disc) and can fit in usually a little disc caddy that sits on your car's sun visor.
You can get music in several formats, including FLAC/ALAC for lossless music quality, or shrink it down and fit it on the smallest of MP3 players.
Most devices can play music now from the tried-and-true iPod to even your phone nowadays.
Though, shrinking means compression or lowered bitrate, which can cause scratchy and lossy sound, plus you need a good music device, and good headphones and of course, it's digital. It's basically like having a license to have your music (hi, Steam.)

Of course, a lot of people can say there's a massive difference in the sound quality of the two, though there's perks for each. Physical with some small issues, or digital non-entity with the highest quality around.

What do you guys have to say about it?

 

[Jellybones]

Owning a vinyl player and a record or two myself, I can say it's certainly novel and charming. That much is undeniable. However for sheer convenience digital is the best, because music is on the go and often in perfect quality if you're listening to FLAC. Storage is non-issue.

 

[Kitoko]

Since you're feeding realtime signals from vinyl, it technically can produce the best sound quality, because it works on the bare molecules and electrons. But that quality will deteriorate on the first play, and nothing back then is accurate enough to make use of the precision of sound it can offer. On the other hand, digital music has a quality limit, as small as you can cell on the CD, but in turn what you see is what you get, it doesn't deteriorate easily at all.

I still love the output of vinyl to this day.

 

[Shane]

One thing to consider is a lot of productions are shifting away from digital toward analogue, at least (or especially) in my area of production, metal. For example, a lot of producers are shifting away from using real amps and drums using amp sims and samples. While it's not inherently a bad thing (I'm all for the evolution of music technology) it brings to mind how relevant vinyl will become in terms quality.

If all productions are being done digitally, will there really be a quality gain when converting it to an analogue format like vinyl? This isn't meant to be entirely rhetorical, because I honestly don't know. I don't claim to be an audiophile.

I don't think vinyls are going to go away due to analogue enthusiasts. In fact, they have caused a resurgence of vinyls, as the whole topic of this thread came about that way.

...maybe I'll just end my thoughts before this becomes nonsensical. :P

 

[Metal96]

I must say, digital audio is best. A CD, though; mp3 is crap, OGG is shiny crap, and AAC is proprietary crap—for computer files, I'm talking about lossless stuff played through a competent soundcard (I've got a USB one for when I need the fidelity). In theory, FLAC/etc is better than a CD (greater bit depth) but both are far superior to vinyl in every way. With an analog recording like that, not only does the sound quality decrease every time you play it, all that "warmth" and whatnot that the enthusiasts love is really just signal distortion from a fairly primitive transfer system combined with feedback from the speakers. It might "warm" the sound, yes, but it's doing so at the expense of actual fidelity as accuracy to the source. If the producer wanted a warm sound, they'd do it during mastering (I throw a bit of a saturator on my tracks and a mild lopass, for example).

[/rant]

Also, I'm a fan of using analog during production, though. Using analog amps and whatnot beats sims in terms of quality any day. Good analog equipment is typically superior in terms of processing fidelity—it's just that vinyl really sucks as a storage format.