Chat: I Can't Believe The "CD vs. Vinyl" Controversy Is Back

[@dylanwilkersonable]

I love to collect old classical records because they are affordable and there are still many recordings that have not been transferred to CD. I buy new CDs because they sound amazing. Both are fun parts of my collection. I enjoy both media

[@EElgar1857]

@@poturbg8698 Actually, a lot of organ recordings that I've loved for decades have never been re-issued on CD, because there wouldn't be enough market to make it worthwhile for a company. I now play them into a USB phono stage, and process them in software, removing clicks and pops, and often re-equalizing them, to make them sound better than they ever did!

[@robertnicolay8327]

I find CDs sound great at first but after a few minutes start to sound harsh. Vinyl I can listen to all day.

[@UberPilot]

@@robertnicolay8327 Ecactly.

[@UberPilot]

@@poturbg8698 Have yet to find one that’s not harsh after extended listening.

[@vinylbuzzard9709]

@@poturbg8698 it's harsh on the CD,be honest with yourself.

[@DFDalton1962]

This claim of vinyl sounding "warmer" started when CDs were first coming out in the early 80s. Record companies were putting out recordings equalized for lp onto CD without re-equalizing them. And the original CD players had inferior digital to analog converters that made these recordings sound even more shrill in comparison to vinyl lps. So it wasn't so much that vinyl sounded "warmer", it's that early CD sounded harsh. But that was resolved decades ago. Unfortunately, the early impression took hold in the stubborn audiophile community and has stuck ever since.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Bingo!

[@OuterGalaxyLounge]

Excellent points.

[@horrortackleharry]

That's all true, but there was always a more fundamental problem. A record player's phono output signal has a voltage level that can range from 0.0002 to 0.007 volts; for most CD players, it's 2+ volts. So a traditional amplifier often gets 'overloaded' by CD output and can produce a harsh, 'brick wall' sound, no matter how good the mastering and equalisation. That issue can certainly be overcome, but I wouldn't say it was 'resolved decades ago'.

[@youmothershouldknow4905]

Spot on.

[@2leftfield]

Most competently designed hi-fi amplifiers will not be overloaded by the output of a CD player. When CD players were introduced, the input characteristics of good amplifiers were a known quantity, and CD players were designed to work with those amplifiers. The fact is, when you hear a CD and it sounds harsh or otherwise unpleasant, that is either a problem with the original recording, or the mastering of the CD was done badly. There are CDs that sound quite bad, and others that sound marvelous, when played on the same equipment. This shows that the CD playback chain is not at fault, but that some CDs are poorly engineered, and others are not.

[@kenwuesq]

The low cost of classical music on CD is by far the best argument for the format. For the cost of 3 of the reissued DG "Original Source" LPs, I purchased Leonard Bernstein's ENTIRE catalog on DG. I could say the same for many other artist box sets. Additionally, classical music on CD was never a victim of the "loudness wars" because they were recorded without compromising dynamic range.

[@jorgereynosopholenz2865]

For my audiophile father, all the paraphernalia necessary to play a vinyl record or an open-reel tape was part of a ritual that was worth witnessing (it was part of the Gentleman´s practices back in the 70´s, like to know how to prepare a good cocktail). I was part of the Walkman generation, and perhaps my ritual was making compilation cassettes. Perhaps the CD has never had that ritual romanticism, but it has been enormously practical, although it is possible that those who resort to streaming services now see the act of using CDs as something atavistic (the fact is that they sound better).

[@redwithblackstripes]

Warmer most of the time means compression/distortion which tends to bump the lower midrange frequencies.Its not from the vinyl itself but from the amount of compression needed to master for vinyl. You could get the same exact "warmth" with the same master on CD, if you have good enough sampling rate and bit depth that is.

[@kirkhilton3798]

Vinyl advocates say there is no compression on a LP but that’s simply not true. A significant job of the mastering engineer is to manage the sound to be acceptable within the dynamic and physical constraints of the format. The phono stage of an amp attempts to compensate by boosting the high/lower frequencies of the compression but it’s a compromise that colours the reproduction.

[@arvidlystnur4827]

I suppose one could get a similar copy on vinyl and CD and modify the CD to sound the same with a parametric or thirty band EQ.

[@redwithblackstripes]

​@@arvidlystnur4827 not the exact same but you could absolutely get close enough, in fact there is tons of music available on cd that has been mixed and mastered with fairchild type compressors/tape machines to get that old school warmth, it's a sound people like. A the end of the day it's simply a matter of taste, there is nothing wrong with the sound of anything that sounds good to you, listening to diferent mixes and masters on different speakers/headphones/rooms can be a lot of fun and a way to experience the music you like in different ways.I understand wanting to get the "exact sound of the performance" but i also understand that it's gone the second the sound hits the microphones, you may have high fidelity but you'll never have perfect fidelity.

[@postmodernrecycler]

My favorite about vinyl is forgetting them in your back seat and they melt in the summer heat (how's that for "warmth"?); people you don't even know spilling drinks on the turntable at a party; scratching them just by trying to put them back in the jacket; teeny tiny spines you can't read and can never find what you're looking for.

[@TheAboriginal1]

😂 truly a joy

[@anthonyrowland9072]

You also just wear one out. Even cassettes don't wear out. "Every night I run the needle through Walkin' the Floor"

[@abdon1964]

I got over the problem of LPs warping in the car by not leaving them in the car. Don’t ever have parties as drinks on any of my HiFi is a real no no. I’m amazingly careful with them when I take them out and put them away and I’ve trained kids to do it as well. I find the teeny tiny spines on LPs and CDs just about the same so I utilise a sort of ‘alphabetical’ order system to help with that! Don’t think LPs are warm I think they sound bright and detailed to me CDs sound fine if a bit clinical and dull however it’s what goes in that makes what comes out good or bad. So what ever format you choose enjoy the music it keeps musicians in work too (added bonus!)

[@greyhoundude6112]

I love all formats of physical media. I've been a music collector since the late 1960s. These days, however, I mostly pick up CDs because they are insanely inexpensive. The vinyl hipsters are dumping their CDs which I am now picking up for $2 to $5 each, which is a fraction of what LPs cost these days. I'm very, very happy with the sound quality of compact discs. But you have to hand it to the music industry, especially the major labels. They needed some sort of a gimmick to make folks purchase music they already have once again. Hence the vinyl revival. The nicely remastered 2009 CD of The Beatles Abbey Road is no longer good enough, and it certainly isn't "cool" enough. Sell it to a used record store for $2 and buy the vinyl for $32. Astonishing.

[@abc456f]

I'm 67. Grew up with vinyl. Made the switch to cd when it came along. Recently I took my 30 year old Technics SL-QD2 turntable out of the closet and got it up and running. My old albums are in pretty bad shape so I got some new albums, put a new stylus on my cartridge and started to play. Now I'm not going to say it sounded better than cd, but it sounds different in a way that I really, really like. So for now, I'm on a vinyl trip. Tomorrow, my new Fluance RT-85 turntable is coming and I can't wait to hear it. Playing LP's is a whole tactile experience. Handling the album, cleaning it, dropping the tonearm down, etc. Maybe I'll get tired of it but I'm enjoying it for the time being. I have a load of cd's and I'll still listen to them but it's nice to have another medium to derive pleasure from.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Licking it, petting it, swooning over it...

[@abc456f]

@@DavesClassicalGuide I wouldn't go that far. Why do you feel that enjoying vinyl is something to mock?

[@TheOneAndOnlyZelenkaGuru]

@@abc456f Because Dave is two-faced, says "more power" to people who like vinyl then shits on them... get it?

[@abc456f]

@@TheOneAndOnlyZelenkaGuru Guy's a jerk.

[@vincentzincone8012]

@@abc456f You'll be back to CDs when you get tired of listening to the clicks and pops in the slow movement of Dvoraks "New World Symphony".

[@vincentzincone8012]

I don't know how many times I had to return records because of various defects. In 35 years I don't think I needed to return a CD. CDs usually have more content, sometimes twice the amount that's on a record.

[@PaulBrower-bw4jw]

I can count three times in which I ever returned a new CD for well over 1000 disks for various defects, including pops and skips.

[@tmorganriley]

Not counting several times I got sent bootlegs or iffy CD-Rs, I did once have to return one due to a factory-error where disc 1 was pressed onto disc 2. It still played; it just was a bit-for-bit dupe of the first---which could happen with any multi-disc set, be it CD, vinyl, DVD, BD, etc. And that was out of hundreds I have added to my library. Otherwise, they are about as plug-and-play as any tech created.

[@user-zx1ir7jt4c]

Yeah you need to stick to cds if perfection is your thing...

[@keithwiebe1787]

Not for me. I sold off my turntable a year ago thinking I would get into when I retired. Couldn't stand it. Collecting CDs again.

[@VTownGregory]

Half of my musical education came from the liner notes of LPs checked out of my public library. Though a blue collar town, a librarian who loved classical music filled the bins with great music. I was a teenager and ready to absorb anything I could take home and play on the family's crappy hi-fi.

[@jegog.]

These days there is the internet.

[@cwhawes]

I loved CDs when they came out because I hated the pops, clicks, scratches, and whatnot of vinyl. The sound of a CD was just so much cleaner.

[@TheAboriginal1]

Agreed. Especially for classical music where detail is so important I find vinyl to be a fairly poor medium. Vinyl is great for rock and jazz and that makes up the majority of the my record collection. I've owned a lot of classical on vinyl but the number keeps coming down.

[@varelion]

And if you dared to put the pick-up on your favourite musical piece on a vinyl you were never sure if this would cause another of this annoying clicks.

[@TheAboriginal1]

@@varelion Yes, you must ever so gently place and not drop, or just listen start to finish.

[@franklinhankel6168]

You read my mind!

[@michaelrossmaessler200]

Don't forget groove echo I don't miss that either.

[@karenbryan132]

I can add one inarguable fact: if you need to move a record collection, CDs make your life a million times easier. I speak as one who has actually done this. When my late friend the demon record collector had to go into supervised care, I took on the task of boxing up his LPs (and most of his CDs; there just wasn't space for all of them) for sale. The vast majority of these went to our local public library system. They have an annual book-and-record sale. Now this is a guy who started collecting back in the early 1940s, and had a bunch of 78s! Yes! Wagner on '78s! There was actually a demand for these (even the enormous multi-disc sets), and the sale benefits the library. And oh boy, do I remember the Discwasher, and the little cylindrical thing you cleaned the LPs with, and the spray cleaner we used along with it. (My friend the collector always had cats--sometimes as many as four. Somehow the cat hair crept its way into even the ones he didn't play very often.)Yes, like you, I miss the liner notes. I think I got more of my musical education from reading those than I did from my college music classes. I relished the RCA Soria series, with their elaborate cases and pages of color photos. I even remember with fondness the opera symopses by Peggy Cochrane, in her deathless flowery prose. When CDs came along--what a relief! Even a classical-music radio station only has so much space. I was born back in the Truman administration, and I remain clueless about much of digital tech, so I don't do downloads. It's CDs for me. Add to that the fact that I can pick them up for pennies on the dollar today, and it's no contest at all.

[@user-zx1ir7jt4c]

WELL if convenience is your thing why not go with streaming?

[@karenbryan132]

@@user-zx1ir7jt4c Reason 1: Techno-ignorance. Reason 2: I like something I can hold in my hand and carry around. No e-books for me either. (Yes, I'm old. 78, to be exact. I still have a set of 78s I got when I was five.)

[@dmntuba]

I'm waiting for the $300 each 8 track tapes to return 😂

[@stevemd8947]

The discussion never ended in the high-end. I sold my Classical LP collection 38 years ago. I have only CD's. I listen to piano 99% of the time. I do not miss the LP pop's, ticks, etc.

[@TheAboriginal1]

Yes! In most cases I think the instrument sounds better on a vinyl record but in almost no cases do you get a pristine playback.

[@robh9079]

Sold my LPs 25 years ago - never looked back. (aside from wishing I had kept a few rarities to flog for silly money...)

[@mike_burke]

@@TheAboriginal1Yes, analog instruments generally sound fuller and more natural when recorded in an all-analog domain. Mostly. But that is one of the only 2 or maybe 3 reasons I still own and sometimes still buy vinyl records. The rest is really just a story of expense, headaches and inconvenience. CD - when done right - has way more upsides in my book. I have a few SACD’s and those are a dream. I only wish they had become the mainstream and at affordable prices. Best of both worlds - amazing sound, rivalling, often beating, vinyl - and with the convenience of a CD.

[@dtz1000]

​@@mike_burke Like vinyl, SACD includes the ultrasonic frequencies that are missing from CDs. That's why it sounds so good.

[@allegrobrio968]

I could not agree more. I started collecting recordings in the late '70s and amassed over a thousand LPs in about a six year period. I quickly became frustrated with poor pressing quality, surface noise, warpage, off-center spindle holes, end-of-side distortion and on and on. Add to that susceptibility to wear, dust and scratches; frequency nonlinearity (which is "corrected" via RIAA equalization); tracking error (inherent in any playback system that uses a pivoted tonearm) and limited frequency response. As a result, I could not wait for the CD medium to take hold, and by the mid-80s I stopped buying LPs. I am not suggesting that CDs and other digital media are flawless, but they're FAR superior to LPs.

[@dennislovinfosse6293]

You navigated this Pandora's box really well. I'm in my 70's and I lived through the transition from mono to stereo. Then the transition to quadraphonic. Then the transition from vinyl to CD. I agree that the bottom line is that there seems to be a conflation between audiophile equipment and the recorded music and performance. Many times I would be excited about a new recording as I listened to it on my god but modest budget equipment. Then I'd take it my rich friend's house to listen to the album on their very expensive state-of-the-art equipment. I got excited but this time it was about the equipment. I was already excited about the performance. That taught me something.

[@dannycarrington1601]

Audio engineers had years to learn how to compensate for the limitations of vinyl records. When CDs premiered, they needed time to learn how to make recordings suitable for the new format. This is why there were some recordings that were "cold" or "harsh" compared to "warm" vinyl. This was remedied quickly, and since then, there's no comparison between the pure music heard on CD versus the music and surface noise heard on vinyl.

[@kirkhilton3798]

This is one ( of many) of the reasons I dislike the vinyl resurgence. Today Recordings are being made for “cash cow” vinyl again and the “poor” CD is getting whatever’s created rather than for its own characteristics. Like only 45 minutes of music.

[@steve-4045]

What people experienced as “warmth,” particularly in string sounds, was in part measurable intermodulation distortion, according to tests during the early days of CDs. And early CDs sometimes did sound strident, or at best “cold” by comparison. Technology soon improved both the ADC processing and the DACs of players. With my first CDs I found two particular benefits of even more importance to me than getting rid of pops and clicks: dynamic range and the sound of pianos. Analog piano recordings to my ears have something akin to wow and/or flutter that goes away with DDD recording. It is usually subtle, most obvious when you don’t hear it any more. I don’t think it is just my imagination. It is not the same thing, I realize, but my occasional A-B digital vs. analog comparison come when listening to FM radio in the car. Our local classical station had lightning damage to its transmitter, and for the long stretch it took to get the replacement parts installed, we got only the analog signal. Now that the digital is working, I’m more conscious of the difference. In different driving conditions sometimes I lose the digital signal and still get the analog. When the digital comes back, it is like the sound opens back up. I realize there are high frequency limits on analog FM broadcasting, so it is not just an issue of analog vs. digital.

[@metaljay842]

A lot of the vinyl vs. CD stuff is also due to nostalgia for the generations that were there for vinyl, especially when it comes to pop and rock music. And people tend to forget that many kids and teens who listened to the classic hits of their day (generally meaning the era of the LP and the 45RPM record) were listening to them on substandard equipment. Whatever physical and/or pressing quality may have existed upon initial release was immediately gone thanks to those lovely heavy tonearms on the cheap turntables of the day, and pop and rock records were not pressed on the highest-quality materials. Combine that with the fact that pop and rock records of the time were pressed to sound good on AM radio, which is by no means a "high-fidelity" listening experience. The "warmth" comes from the compression involved in squeezing the sound down into a form that would sound amazing on AM radio and thence on the substandard equipment that kids and teens listened to pop music on. And then the records were cut loud so they would stand out on a jukebox. Granted, one's parents probably could afford a better quality system but they weren't playing pop and rock music on it. They were playing the classic crooners, show tunes, musicals, jazz, and classical music. It's also no surprise that those types of records found in secondhand stores tend to be in much better shape and cheaper than their pop and rock counterparts from the same era. They also tend to sound better than the pop and rock records of the day because they were considered to be products for the discerning connoisseur of music at that time. And of course, the reel tapes of the same era were also, for a time, considered to be truly premium products.

[@karenbryan132]

Radio stations used to get concert recordings on reel-to-reel. Once you'd played them, you'd mail them to the next station on the prepared list. What fun dealing with all that, and with the failed tape splices the previous station had made. Good times.

[@vdtv]

Nostalgia is the ONLY valid argument for LPs and singles.

[@maudia27]

I use to have more than 4000 CDs (still have because I dont know what to do with them). But dont play them for 20 years. The optimal approach to enjoying classical music is to store it all on a hard drive, catalog it using an Access Database, with every interpreter information and the booklets, and then select one piece by a composer. This allows for loading various versions into foobar and playing any track with just a click from a remote keyboard control - allowing me to compare different versions as easy as possible. Or, if I want, load all pieces of a particular CD only. No space, very easy to find the music in any album, same sound of a CD etc. And the booklet could be read on my big TV - while I am listen to the music if I want

[@eddihaskell]

Too much work. I could do that, but I might as well store my 1,200 CD's in pretty wood CD cases and be done with it.

[@JonathanSacks-ju8xt]

Agree

[@maudia27]

Cataloging a CD is quicker than one might assume; it only takes a few minutes. By cataloging four CDs daily, you can have a complete archive within a year-voilà! Plus, it's quite enjoyable to alternate between the movements of Mozart's Requiem performed by various orchestras for comparison, for example. Or any Piano Sonata...But I assume it is not a everyone game.

[@dem8568]

This sounds exhausting.

[@maudia27]

@@dem8568 I store each music in a directory in a tree format - Composer/Genre/Music/Conductor (or main performer). Then, with one click in the database- the program includes the music of the composer - and the tracks. The only work is to input the performers. But, for names who are repeated, I just need to type the first letters and the program fill the rest of the name and find the related "instrument" (like conductor, soprano, piano etc.). For the cover is a simple matter of copy/paste from internet (Amazon for instance). Or, for a complete booklet - than is more complicated - and it is easier to download it from a pirate source or the recording company when available.

[@nk-gp1ml]

Sold off an expensive turntable setup and my vinyl collection four years ago. Sounded incredible despite the hassle. Now listen to CDs and stream. Don’t miss vinyl at all for classical, but I do for rock and pop.

[@MartinL.A.]

I only buy old second hand vinyl. Last time I visited Academy records on Manhattan I spent 300 dollars on second hand vinyl opera boxes. Not because of quality, but rather nostalgia and not at least the large booklets, which I look at when I listen to the music on Spotify.

[@trialman121950]

There’s a caption to New Yorker(?) cartoon: The two things that drew me to vinyl were the expense and the inconvenience.

[@josefkrenshaw179]

I inherited my grandfather's reel to reel. Vinyl wasn't king even before CDs, It was the mid movment side flips and that horrible end of side distortion that bothered me the most. That "moment of chaos" at the end of Bruckner's ninth was always too congested on vinyl.

[@MD-md4th]

Nothing sounds better than a well-recorded CD played on reasonably good equipment.

[@eddihaskell]

I used to own a very expensive British turntable deck and cartridge , and all the related paraphenailia. I used to clean (I still have the record cleaning machine) my LP's to remove dust before every play. It sounded wonderful, and was able to pick up the analoque nuances in old vinyl that CD's cannot capture. I got rid of the old analoque equpiment, and took Dave's advice, and have gone to CD's only. Does it sound as good? Well, you get rid of the occassional snap, crackle, and pop and pick up more detail and atmosphere. Is it worth it? NO! As someone here says, I don't have the time or parience to go through a religous ritual before listening to music. As I get older, I am losing my highs anyway (we all do pretty much) and don't need the neighborhoood to rock because Klemperer's Bach Mass analoque recordings can make my foundations shake. I have switched to CD's, and just pop one in at a time in my compact disk deck and not be worried about it.

[@helmutsimon8788]

Well, have a try with SACD… if you have good equipment (esp. speakers) you may hear a difference/improvement - esp wrt stage/space.

[@RocketRon7779]

I'm old and remember the change over. The CD sound was so much better, so much better that I stopped purchasing vinyl and put the turntable away right away and replaced every vinyl album. I'm a drummer and I could finally hear cymbals the way they really sounded. Vinyl is lower quality, yes some may pine for it etc but it is lower quality.

[@dtz1000]

Vinyl is lower quality in some ways but higher quality in others. Vinyl emits ultrasonic frequencies up to 60khz while CDs only go up to 20 khz. Most real musical instruments emit these ultrasonic frequencies so as a musician you should appreciate this more.

[@VinylBliss]

A lot of great points here. Whatever works for the listener and absolutely some pieces sound better on CD and some better on Vinyl depending on the piece. The only thing I would object to is vinyl being noticeably degraded from the first time it is played. I have many records that have been played 10's of times and still sound brand new. If the stylus is set up correctly and with the correct tracking force (1-2g usually) then record will not degrade over many plays.

[@sprachnroll]

I buy both CDs (classical and pop) and vinyl records (jazz and some pop) and would be the first to admit my ears don't hear a difference, though I would say the expensive vinyl I'm buying these days does seem better made than what I was buying when vinyl was the only option. The reason I and others buy vinyl is, I believe, mostly extra-musical: the act of placing a record on the turntable and having to turn it over again in twenty minutes means I almost never treat music on vinyl as background music, whereas the temptation and ease of doing so with a CD is much greater.

[@RudieVissenberg]

In the previous apartment block I lived in a neighbour invited me to listen to his high end stereo set. He was a big fan of vinyl and at my request he put on a Beethoven string quartet. I had the same recording on CD so I could compare. I was shocked, it just sounded dreadful. It sounded muffled and dull. Then he put on the digital version and it sounded just much better but he insisted that it sounded worse. Both he and I had been regular visitors to the Concertgebouw so we both should know what it should sound like. Then he put on an extremely high sampled audio file. That was it, it sounded so bad, like screeching that I had to leave. Someone who spent so much money on his stereo could not hear the difference.

[@jaystone4816]

Not everyone who spends a lot of money on stereo components and speakers knows what they're doing. Above a basic price level, each component of the system has to be carefully matched to every other component. Some very expensive speakers will not sound good with some very expensive amplifiers for example. Sounds like your friend may have assumed that an expensive system alone guarantees good sound. Many stereo dealers - but not all - are more concerned with sales than helping the buyer put together carefully matched component systems. Sometimes buyer remorse gets hijacked into "isn't it wonderful?"

[@jonathanhenderson9422]

@@jaystone4816 Any good amplifier will be linear in terms of frequency response so will "match" fine with any pair of speakers. The only thing you have to "match" with amps is making sure the amp will deliver enough power to get the speakers to play at a certain decibel level. The less sensitive the speakers and the farther away you sit, the more power they need to get loud. You also need to make sure your source/pre-amp can deliver enough voltage for the amp to reach its full power output, but that's rarely an issue. Now, while I say this is true of any "good amplifier" there are plenty of bad amplifiers out there. Tube amps have the same allure as vinyl in that you pay more an objectively inferior product, and tube amps are much more finicky about "matching" with speakers and sources due to their various limitations.

[@stephengould4343]

FWIW I think that in general "audoiophiles" are into the "gadgetness" of their equipment. That much high end stereo and accessories (like speaker wire...) can't pass A/B tests doesn't matter or even occur to them

[@james6039]

Remember trying to listen to the 9th on LP. You had to switch sides 2 times. And the orchestra making popcorn doing the quiet parts. And INNERGROVE DISTORTION during the Crescendo.

[@JimJimJimJim99]

I had many LPs and got rid of them all when CDs first appeared. I had many CDs and disposed of them when music streaming came out. I can now listen to virtually any recording of any piece within about a minute of deciding to do so. The sound quality is, to my ears, compromised only by the audio engineering, not the medium. No storage space is required. It costs about £10 a month. The only downside for me is that it's all seems just a bit too easy now...I used to quite enjoy going to the record shop and deciding what LP to buy this month with my hard earned cash. Of course, I didn't like having to go back to the shop several times to get a non-faulty copy!

[@johnh5958]

I grew up with vinyl, but I prefer CD's. We live in a converted house trailer with as many as 1,000 CD's that we got in library sales for dirt cheap, and we have a couple thousand books in over a dozen languages that take up even more space. They have overflowed into our garage and into a small storage building. We couldn't possibly store records in our cramped space.

[@samuelheddle]

also the thing about vinyl is that every single one of it's inherent limitations is especially bad for classical music. Surface noise is very bad for music with significant quiet sections. Limitations on dynamic range is very bad for the genre with possibly the most dynamic range. The inherent distortion in the inner grooves is especially bad for music which tends to end loudly and spectacularly. Some of these problems are just far less noticeable in popular music, but really bad for classical.

[@Taosravenfan]

When my father died in 1980, he had a collection of well over 100 operas and innumerable LPs of orchestral music. I donated all of it to the Baltimore County Public library. I can’t imagine what they would be worth now. I collected CDs for years. And now we are in the streaming and download era. And while I miss those old LPs, I realize the download era is here to stay.

[@eddihaskell]

Vinyl ain't worth that much. Unless you have a few choice recordings, people just don't pay for them anymore. Dave went over this. I ended up donating about 2,000 60's - 80's classical LP's to my local high-send charity shop- I spoke to some people who buy entire collections -- they simply were not interested in the stuff I thought would be collectible.

[@benjaminlin6524]

I started collecting my music collecting with LPs but since I have OCD tendencies, I remember always being bothered by the clicks and pops , which I could never perfectly remove. Cassettes were an alternative, but the sound quality was worse and they tended to slow down or speed up depending on the cassette player. When CDs finally became available, I couldn’t go back. I still can’t go back.

[@jegog.]

By the time CDs came out I had an LP collection of about 1000 discs. It took up half my living room. I distinctly remember the first time I heard a CD. I went to my local stereo shop (Tweeter in Cambridge Ma) and they put on a recording. I remember what it was, Mozart's violin concertos #3 and #5 with Perlman and Levine. I was totally transfixed. Not only did it sound better than any vinyl recording I had heard, it sounded better than most performances I had been to. It was if they were right there in front of me, I had the best seat in the auditorium and I was the only person in the audience. I was literally entranced. After a few seconds I wasn't thinking about the quality of the sound of this new medium or how it compared to LPs. I was totally absorbed in the music in a way I had never experienced with vinyl. After a few minutes the store's salesman stopped the CD. I looked at him with an incredulous face thinking "how can you do that!" He had broken the spell that the music had placed on me. Needless to say, I bought a player as soon as I could afford it, and I also bought the Mozart CD. Within a few years I sold my LP collection. I now have about 10,000 CDs all losslessly ripped to an 8TB SSD that is the size of a small paperback book. I still have the Mozart CD and it still sounds as good as it did the first time I played it about 4 decades ago. Early on, the first CD players had some faults as did many of the early digital recordings. By the 90s these problems were resolved. Many re-masterings of old recordings have stripped out too many high frequency details while trying to remove noise. Tube amplifiers and phono pickups add even harmonics when there is distortion while transistors add odd harmonics. Even distortions add warmth, while odd distortions sound harsh. CDs have much, much less distortion overall, so perhaps vinyl enthusiasts are reacting to to the distortion that was not part of the performance. The warmth from distortion can be added digitally. I don't see the need for that. I enjoy hearing recordings that sound like what the engineers heard in the studio, without clicks, pops, scratches and added noise, and without wearing out.

[@arvidlystnur4827]

Great explanation about vinyl warmth. They tricked people with a test. The told them as they switched from A to B that A was digital and B was vinyl. The vinyl enthusiasts preferred the detail and warmth from B. Both signals were the same digital signal, except B was digitally processed to SIMULATE vinyl.

[@dtz1000]

The fact is the CDs only emit sound up to 20khz because they chopped off most of the ultrasonics. Vinyl goes up to 60khz. Most musical instruments emit these ultrasonic frequencies. Both formats are flawed but in different ways.

[@jegog.]

@@dtz1000 Phono pickups can't do much if anything over 20khz and people's hearing which can't hear over 20khz. If the flaw of CDs is that they can't produce ultrasonics, then that is a flaw nobody will notice.

[@dtz1000]

@@jegog. The ultrasonics on vinyl have been measured at up to 60khz and they do have a relaxation effect on the mind. That is something you don't get with CDs but you get plenty of with vinyl.

[@jegog.]

@@dtz1000 I'm not familiar with the effect you mention. Can you link to any scientific analysis that demonstrates that frequencies over 20khz in recorded music are reproduced on vinyl? I suspect that the only signals in that range are from the harmonic distortion of the recording and playback system, and that distortion might be more pleasurable in an analogue system if it is in fact actually perceived at all by the listener. Can you cite any science that shows this "relaxation effect"?

[@flyingsomm]

You are directly responsible for me now owning some large CD box sets, and I love them and thank you for that. That being said, I own several Large Vinyl Box Sets and the new DG Original Source Bruckner/Karajan set and after some streaming with my Node2i streamer vs playing this vinyl set I do find the Vinyl more open and transparent vs the streaming sounded more closed and closed in. I'm aware this all depends on the stylus, turn table, cables the list goes on but I do have to say objectively, very happy with the purchase. I love the insanity and never ending mental anxiety of wondering if our thousands spent are the right thousands spent in the right place. I tell anyone interested, get apple music and you'll be set...or spend thousands like us.

[@catchmywhiff]

I used to subscribe to the vinyl is better argument but as I learned more I learned that it's just a choice. Neither format is perfect and one is better for a person than another based on how it sounds to that person AND what the interaction experience is for each format. I'm now a bit indifferent sonically, though I now know that a well engineered, high quality CD is likely to sound better than a record. Just make sure that whatever your chosen format is . . . you must use good equipment or none of it matters!!!!! Side note, I still love cassettes too!

[@stangibell4274]

This discussion has me considering playing some vinyl recordings I haven't heard in years. However, while the music is the most important element, mobility matters, too. I may not be up-to-date on what is out there, but CDs do play longer than vinyl without having to turn or change the LP. Or, gasp, have one vinyl drop on top of another. There are multi-disc CD changers that give listeners hours of music without needing to reload. I am in this bind because, as Dave does, I also like physical product. With the amount DH discusses, I am often inspired to listen to the music of the day if it's in my library or buy it on CD if it's not. Convenience enables me to keep on listening and take care that I do not too many opportunities to fall.

[@skeptical_Inquirer200]

I didn't realize vinyl still has fans. I do remember that maybe 30 years ago people kept telling me about "warm tube sound". They were saying how much better their vacuum tube amplifiers sounded than transistor based ones. I never believed them.

[@jdoc1357b9g]

I think with classical it would be case by case, and most of the time CD would be better. But if you were talking about rock or other pop musics, and even to some extent jazz, the point would be the CD/Vinyl masterings. A nasty trend, not adopted with classical CDs for the most part, is to absurdly amplify the "re-masterings" so that the CD is as LOUD as possible, which ends up compressing the dynamics out of the music. This has become so pervasive that for most cases if you want to hear dynamics in your recording you have to get it on vinyl (or at least find an old non-'remastered' version of the CD from the early CD days before they started doing this). Vinyl inherently requires a 'softer' mastering and they can't compress the audio as much, so it forces some sanity back onto the mastering and most of the time will sound better. But classical CDs have mostly never done LOUD masterings to begin with. I suppose the audience just would not accept all the dynamics being squeezed out of their music in favor of loudness, so classical CDs just never followed this trend (for the most part), and the appeal of going back to vinyl in other genres today doesn't hold so much with classical.

[@SteveWille]

I’m in agreement. Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of analog and digital debate is egalitarianism. [Importantly, what follows is *not* intended as vailed support for stealing music.] Setting aside variables that *can* be controlled like technique, the resultant quality of a recording is an unavoidable stacking of duplications from recording, to mixing, to mastering, to producing media. Since the act of duplicating analog is inherently imperfect and, worse, damages the source each time it is duplicated, the highest quality analog representations are those duplicates made early and with shallower duplication stacks. Shallow stacks can only support the production of limit quantities and their economics are driven by this scarcity. Cost aside, the fact that analog duplication is inherently lossy means it simply is not possible for everyone to enjoy the same high quality analog recording. In this zero-sum game, my ability to listen to a high quality analog recording means that I’m depriving someone else of that same privilege; analog does not scale gracefully. Digital’s inherently perfect duplication makes it a non-zero-sum game. Egalitarianism is an important advantage to digital.

[@jg5861]

Thank you for saying what should be obvious but apparently is not. Sense matters!

[@bakeone4406]

As expected this is a well informed breakdown of audio recording formats and Dave accurately describes many of the pros and cons associated w/ cds and w/ vinyl. He's wise not to talk about playback equipment. This is where another level of insanity lurks around every corner waiting to enter the head of anyone intoxicated by records, cds or file streaming. Some recordings have narcotic qualities that become addictively more tangible when played through very high quality components in acoustically optimized rooms. Be smart and don't look for those tiny sonic differences that separate a well put together $100k system from a well put together $70k system.

[@timbaurle852]

Great discussion. I will only purchase the vinyl if the entire piece fits on a single side. Flipping the record in the midst is such a downer on the experience.

[@mondostrat]

The vinyl 'warmth' is just an added layer of distortion.

[@Leo_ofRedKeep]

Yes it is. The fallacy of the "warm" sound is late inheritance from justified preference for the softer tone of a learned violinist to the screechy sound of a beginner. But what is a quality of violin playing is a limitation of a recording.

[@kirkhilton3798]

I call vinyl “warmth” mud. I want clean, clinical recording with a dynamic range design for recording classical music. If you listen to classical music with a large dynamic range on vinyl you soon realise how the CD is superior for this genre of music. Advocates of vinyl never qualify the genre of music; it might acceptable for jazz, rock ie music with a flatter dynamic range.

[@kgeo753]

It may be but that doesn't mean that it doesn't sound better to some people. I don't listen to much classical music but the mastering of popular music on vinyl lends bass and drums a quality that I like. That same music is over-compressed for digital formats and loses it's nuance.

[@GeneSavage]

...and a high frequency roll-off. Heaven forbid we get a flat and accurate frequency response from our sources! CDs originally sounded "hash" to some because #1 they'd gotten used to generational treble loss, and #2 they'd boosted the highs because they knew the loss was coming. A CD through an equalizer (if required) always, always, always sounds better than vinyl from the same master, for exactly the reason you listed.

[@charityshopguitar8790]

CD is the best of all recording formats. I have some vinyls too and the main advantages are: 1. you can pick up second hand records very cheaply and 2. when you buy a boxed set e.g. of an opera, you usually get a really good booklet with it. I have a booklet with my vinyl of Boito's Nerone that is nearly half an inch thick.

[@chrisrees7054]

It's a jumbled mess, half the recordings nowadays are recorded on digital equipment so it doesn't matter what format you get it on!

[@4034miguel]

I agreed completely with you. I do not have patience for vinyl. I am 63, so I really know what it was taking of them or buy them. With the CD I just enjoy the music I love without any other of worries.

[@smithpm81]

indeed my friend, i am 59 and agree

[@duncanrichardson2167]

Agree. Vinyl is fragile and a pain to keep clean and the player suffers from the same weaknesses. Tape was even worse for fragility. For me CD rules playback of opera because , if you buy carefully*, the CD/s comes with a libretto booklet * if you dont you may be saddled with a "bonus disk" aka print your own libretto - aaaarrgh

[@04EbonyLTD]

Almost 63 myself. switch to CDs when they came out and haven't looked back. What I like about digital is that I can download CD onto computer, put music on CDR or Flashdrive, and take it to my vehicles and away I go listening to what I want without commercials or subscription service.

[@robhaynes4410]

I'm a vinyl enthusiast. I have lots & lots of vinyl. Many hundreds of LPs, if not thousands. I have an excellent turntable, & a higher-end stylus than 95% of vinyl enthusiasts will ever hear. I love vinyl. As a medium, in no way does vinyl sound better than CD. Vinyl is especially suboptimal for classical, where the extreme dynamic range frequently reaches quiet levels that reveal surface noise, static, etc. Yes, there are things you can do to minimize the noise, & I do several of them. It's always a battle to get the LP as quiet as you can, but it's almost never a winning battle. There are lots of things to like & love about vinyl. As a general proposition, superior sonics isn't one of them.

[@OuterGalaxyLounge]

Good takes. I think vinyl is more or less fine for most genres of music but for classical (at least when mastered and transferred properly and played on good equipment) the CD cannot be beat. A good Reference label recording on CD for natural sonics can't even be approached by vinyl, for instance.

[@chrisd9793]

Yes this is a good point. Our view at home is that there is often a sonic advantage of vinyl recordings over digital for non-classical recordings, but that is a different thing from vinyl being fundamentally superior - it depends on how transfers have been done for particular recordings. I can think of spectacularly good and bad HD transfers of analogue recordings, and for my money about the best sound I can think of is IMHO the HD transfer of Markevitch's Rite (from 60 years ago)! Another factor is that with classical music I listen through to albums anyway, but with non-classical vinyl tends to lead me to listen in a different way as digital makes it easy to skip around tracks. Of course this (like the different view of "album covers as art" with vinyl vs CD) is nothing directly to do with audio.

[@arvidlystnur4827]

Thanks, A vinyl enthusiast that's honest! I'm going to get a new cartridge for my turntable, if only to improve the sound of my records.

[@zundap100]

Rock guitar sound has always been best on the vinyl. Just take old AC/DC albums with Bon Scott and listening to it.

[@leeparsons-qu6yv]

Your absolutely right david! I'm with you on that. Same goes for the whole digital vs analog film arguments as well

[@TrueStereo-]

Go to thrift stores or library sales for classical LPs for no more than $3. Sometimes $1 a bag. You will find interesting stuff not on cd or streaming for nearly nothing. CD/LPs SQ “case by case”

[@ericakilian3]

I love this idea. When occasionally I find interesting old vinyls this way, I rip them into Audacity, clean them up as much as reasonable, and burn CDs!

[@samuelheddle]

This year I found a Lou Harrison LP with a performance of his concerto for violin/percussion that I'm pretty sure wasn't ever reissued on CD. Really fun stuff!

[@Lohensteinio]

All good points, Dave! I began collecting in the early 1990s, and it’s been CDs for me from start. Many of the recordings and performances I love were never even available on vinyl. Sure, it would be interesting to hear a proper comparison sometime on a well set up, high-end system, or simply to hear a wonderful all-analogue system without making any comparison. But to add vinyl to my listening routine now would be completely impractical, for many reasons.

[@benrlego]

Excellent chat. Some fanatics are probably frothing at the mouth listening to this one. I’ll never understand why people come so unhinged over something so trivial and something so based in individual preferences, but that’s much of the internet isn’t it? No need to waste time bickering and A/B testing 1000 albums, I’ll just take the format that sounds identical bit for bit to how it did 40 years ago. I want to listen to the music, not the ‘noise’.

[@bjornjagerlund3793]

CD can’t produce surface noise so beautifully as vinyl.

[@spqr369]

Hahaha!

[@2leftfield]

Yes it can. Just take an LP and transfer it to digital format, then burn a CD from it with no noise reduction. You will hear the clicks and pops just fine.

[@sbwlearning1372]

But that laser can skip and jump 😂

[@bbailey7818]

​@@sbwlearning1372True but much less so than the early days of cd. All that business then of dustless manufacturing facilities and employees wearing masks, blah blah. Now we can make perfect cds at home.

[@bjornjagerlund3793]

Early CDs often didn’t sound very good. The early digital recordings and transfers were made with a 16 bit system and to have enough dynamic headroom often only 14 bits came to use. I have Karajans Vienna recording of the Planets as an example, the strings sounds like a cheap synth. Just weird. I later bought a new digital transfer of the recording done with much higher resolution and i sounds wonderful. I believe the early bad recordings gave cd a bad reputation. When they started to use more bit depths in the recordeings in the late eighties and early nineties, the sound improved much. Tne cd players got better as well. But the bad reputation hanged on I think to the end of the nineties when the tide turned. But pop and rock got another problem, the loudness war that started to make the sound worse. I have example of old LPs sounding better than new CDs with the same music because of this. I believe this can be the cause why some people prefer vinyl over CD. This does not apply on classical music though, and we should be very happy about that the loudness war never entered into the classical music. I nowadays buy my classical music though downloads, often with a higher a resolution than the cd format. I have also ripped all my CDs and listen to the music through a streamer using an iPad as the control unit. Very convenient and I no longer have CDs all over the room, they are nicely locked in in cabinets and cupboards. I only occasionally bring out a cd when I listen to opera to read the libretto.

[@PaulBryant-cc8ox]

I systematically upgraded my receiver (Marantz 2270), CD player (Marantz CD 60), loudspeakers (refurbished stacked Original Large Advents), cables (various Morrow products), and speaker wire (using 10 gauge due to lengthy speaker cable runs). Each of these made an improvement to the sound. The last thing I did was start to experiment with external DACs that might be better than what was supplied in the Marantz CD 60. The first Geshelli DAC I got (JNOG2) was a huge improvement. I recently upgrade to their flagship DAC, the Day Zee (with Sparkos Op amp upgrade), and now I am starting to see what my system is really capable of. I have a decent reference TT (Marantz TT-15), and very few of my vinyl recordings can compete with well-recorded CDs played through the Day Zee. My advice would be to spend that $500 - $1K on a really good DAC. You won't be disappointed. (And if you go with Geshelli, definitely go with the upgraded op amp option instead of the stock op amps -- that is key!)

[@mikaelbeskow9221]

CD has all the measured objective data talking for it, of course. It is superior till vinyl, period.

[@user-zx1ir7jt4c]

Dude I hope you're successful in convincing people to swap back to CDs. Then maybe my vinyl prices can come down. Keep fighting the good fight sir!

[@farquell5782]

I am one of those who never left their vinyl. That said, I usually listen to classical on CD because of the pops and clicks on vinyl which are very frustrating.

[@dwmj1010]

Love your videos, Dave. I've learned so much from you and I'm grateful. I would love to see a chat on your current playback system. Music comes first, but I have to admit I love the gear too.

[@jazzlouise]

Dave, you absolutly right. I have been an audiophile since the late 70's so I still have LP's and jumped on the CD bandwagon. In the early days of CD's, there were good sounding ones and others not so good. I have stuck with CD's and away from vinyl for several reasons. I go't tired of the pops, clicks, and warpped records and now prices. The record stores got tired of me returning defective records. My general observation is that you need a really top notch analog system to compete with digital playback these days (turntable, arm, cartridge, preamp and setup). The digital environment relative to digital to analog converters has improve by leaps and bounds, and yes CD's on a good player sounds better than streaming with the exact same version of the recording. Your comments on "re-masters" is well taken. You can only do so much in that environment. The real way to possibly fix bad recordings is to re-mix them which would never be allowed by the artist or record company. Finally, current recordings are not being done on tape (mostly). ProTools is a digital favorite by recording engineers. As the famous mastering engineer Bernie Grundman stated why would you think that taking a digital recording and pressing it on a foreign medium (vinyl) would sound better than it's native format? Answer, it doesn't. Always enjoy your comments!

[@varelion]

At the end of the 80's I went to a HiFi store to buy my first stereo system from my hard-earned money in a stinking factory. And I became victim to a vinyl cultist. Though I wanted a cd player, the shop owner and his assistant insisted on selling an expensive turntable: 'This is the most important part because this is where the signal comes from.' The amplifier and boxes were neglected so that later when I had an apartment with bigger rooms, the boxes were too bright and without natural bass. This experience and the scratches and the crackling dust on the vinyls ruined my audiophile experience since I came from smoothly working radio recorders. Today I prefer to hear and compare music on youtube, downloads and cd's since the recording must not be 10000 percent perfect but it is the music or interpretation that gives you chills or not.

[@daigreatcoat44]

I agree completely. Two friends of mine - a musician with a keen interest in recordings, and the owner of a small record label, both agree also. The latter's stories of his early days, when good vinyl pressings of his recordings were hard to get, are most persuasive. Another great advantage of CDs is instantly obvious to any fan of Morton Feldman. In the days of vinyl his music could be drowned out by surface noise. And as for his late, long compositions: try to imagine listening to his second string quartet on vinyl - seven or eight LPs?

[@BobTaylor-tx6ql]

I wanted to do a price comparison between today's LPs and the same ones I bought back in the 60s, but couldn't find any. So here's one by Herbie Hancock--Maiden Voyage--which I paid 4.95 for back then, and now it's 44.77 on Amazon. Quite a price increase for the same music. No idea how it sounds.

[@bradgiesbrecht6543]

I currently have over 4000 CD's in my collection and it's growing weekly. I pulled out my turntable that was stored away for many years as I still had about 200 records in my collection. After the first listen it was all over. I packed up my turntable and back into storage it went. There is a reason many replaced their record collections with CD's 40 years ago. Nothing has changed since. I will do my part to keep the CD alive. They put a smile on my face every time I listen to one.

[@philpembroke5373]

What was heard in the space where the recording took place is essentially the sound of that space.

[@culturalconfederacy]

Food for thought: a phonograph record in the 1920's cost between .85 cents and $1.25. That equates to $12.83 and $18.86 in today's money. In the late 1950's, one reel to reel tape was the same price as three vinyl discs. The average price for a CD in 1995 was $16.98. And as Dave mentioned, some recordings may or may not sound better regardless of the format.

[@mikeleghorn6092]

I’ve digitized all my CDs. I use Roon for playback. Roon seamlessly combines my personal, digitized collection with my Tidal favorites, making one giant collection which is organized just the way I want it. As for vinyl vs. CD, the main drawback in CDs was flaws in the digital to analog conversion (performed by the DAC). DACs are way better quality these days, plus we now have higher resolution formats, which are available via streaming (e.g. Tidal). Tidal has in its catalog virtually every recording ever made.

[@mparento]

@mikeleghorn6092 - Aren't CDs already digital?

[@mikeleghorn6092]

@@mparento by “digitize” I mean that I copied all my CDs to a hard drive.

[@robtberardi]

I like vinyl for certain genres. Some music has a wonderfully dirty sound.. Rolling Stones, Robert Johnson, Wu Tang Clan, Velvet Underground... These sound better on vinyl, and somehow even better as time goes on as clicks & pops (but not skips!) become part of the listening experience. For classical I prefer CDs... clean & quiet. Jazz or House music I can go either way.

[@abzulooks6012]

One thing you touched on is the "remastering" fad (which is endemic in the pop/ rock world, sometimes with good results, sometimes not). All I ask is that, when I play a recording at home, it sounds the same as it did when the musicians/ conductor/ producer listened to the final version and said "yep, that'll do." If someone wants to tinker with it, at least make the original available. I realise there may be honourable exceptions (eg the Karajan "hearing loss" remixes).

[@katoness]

Was in HMV the other day, 75 pounds for the Red Album by The Beatles. Insane.

[@arthurgoodman2531]

The previous medium (said McLuhan) becomes an art form -- and snobs pay a lot of money for art.

[@ernstbrubaker]

I generally hated the sound of vinyl, with its lots of scratches. Especially bad was my copy of Beethoven's Eroica symphony on a vinyl disc that had a scratch in a very inappropriate position in the second movement. This caused a loud POP every time I listened to it. When I first heard this symphony on CD, I noticed that I physically anticipated that POP... What a relief it was no longer there! I started my music collection anew and, in due time, threw away all my vinyl discs. Thank God I will never listen to a vinyl record again.

[@ilunga146]

I got into classical in 1987, and realized within a year that Bernstein's Mahler was my very favorite thing on CD. Fast-forward to the '90s, when I bought an audiophile vinyl setup, which I loved for pop and rock. I wanted to hear my favorite classical on LP too, so I bought the CBS box set of the same Mahler Symphonies conducted by Lenny B. WORST SOUND EVER. Surface noise killed it. For me, classical is the perfect medium for CD. Listening now to Mahler 6 on DG.

[@chrisguygeezer]

@ernstbrubaker look after the records well, and it'll sound great still, 50 years on. I've records going back 60 years and they still sound wonderful.

[@TrudyTrew]

@@chrisguygeezer yep. Me too

[@garyfoster3854]

I own vinyl from the 50s and 60s that are in pristine condition because it was well taken care of.

[@ernstbrubaker]

@@garyfoster3854 I understand that, after reading my comment, many people will think that it was my fault for not caring properly for my vinyl records, but it's not the case. Not every vinyl disc in my collection was bad, there were a few listenable ones. Usually, all the scratches were already there when I came home from the shop and played them for the very first time. The really bad ones were all new, my whole collection wasn't old - I was very young at the time and collected vinyl for quite a short time before CDs were available.

[@Psalm1267]

The cleaning brush and careful taking out and putting on the turntable - that was all part of the experience. Surrounded by the aura of a high-end system with a sonic hologram generator, and the fragrance of a new record, there was a certain joy in all that. You have a different experience with CDs of course, which brings its own kind of joy. In any case, the liner notes are an important part of the product for me, and I have absolutely no use for downloaded mp3s.

[@michaelrossmaessler200]

It's important to hear live acoustic music to have something to compare any recording to. And warmth does not equal truth.

[@winslowrogers2026]

Excellent talk, Dave. Like you I regretted the loss of liner notes when CDs started coming out. Now, however, with so much information online, this is a dead issue. CDs were cheaper to make than LPs, however, so as long as we didn't complain the industry gave itself an immediate increase in profits. The profit was even greater as long as we were satisfied with a reissued CD that included only the 30-45 minutes that was on the original LP. At times I considered -- and then dismissed -- the "sampling" argument we used to hear: that the sound coming from a needle on a disc was more pure and natural than the digital sound created by sampling the source material at however many times a second. I could not hear the difference then, and as the decades have gone by and my hearing deteriorated, that is just another dead issue to me.

[@normanmeharry58]

In the early 70s folks, had their portable cassette tape machines while I continued with vinyl. When I set off to tramp the world on a ship, I had two expanding suit cases. One with clothes. The other with my books & vinyl. In Rotterdam I bought a little Philips battery record player where the lid was the speaker. It ate batteries by the hour. In the Pacific, I took it ashore on Bikeman Island , a desert island and played Sibelius' 5th to the palms and birds. That island today is long gone under the rising seas. But my vinyl kept me sane on those long voyages when we never saw land from one day to the next for weeks but my little record player and vinyl became popular with my shipmates (who had their cassettes) and we had classical hour in the mess on boozy nights.

[@tweakerman]

I love both formats, although I buy more cd's/sacd's because they are cheaper than vinyl, a great video👍

[@dranfox]

Please discuss the green marker trick in your next video.

[@ilunga146]

I knew someone who did that religiously. He also kept the CDs he planned to play each day in the freezer.

[@GeneSavage]

I have gotten back into vinyl for one reason only: I've inherited my parents' record collection, my in-laws' record collection, and my wfie's grandparents' record collection. Some of the recordings never made it to digital. Every upgrade I have planned for my record playing system is an attempt to make the vinyl from my childhood tolerable to my ears after having listed to pristine CDs for 35 years. I have no expectation of meeting, much less exceeding, CD sound quality. I hope to make the rumble tolerable, the groove distortion minimal, the frequency response as flat as possible, and the wow and flutter down below my detectable threshold.... OH, and try to deal with the clicks, pops, and surface noise you get from dragging a diamond across a slab of vinyl! Once I get a good ENOUGH setup, and my family's vinyl into the computer and cleaned up as best I can, I'll probably sell these records as "RARE!" "VINTAGE!" "ORIGINAL RELEASES!" to some poor sap that doesn't realize most beginner phono cartridges are lucky if they give you 25 db (!!!) of stereo separation. You said it well!!

[@samuelheddle]

There is one great thing about LP's: for operas, the libretto books are giant, and frequently gorgeously illustrated. I sometimes get them just for the books, especially because old opera boxes are incredibly cheap. So much nicer than the tiny CD books that you have to page turn every thirty seconds

[@DrSFG]

History repeats itself. When Lps came out in 1948, the sound on them was a bit tinny. And 78s definitely sounded better. When transistor equipment came out, people said the sound was inferior to tube-based equipment. And then when CDs came out, they were considered inferior to vinyl. The sonic experience is an expression of many different factors: the recording itself, the mastering, and the equipment it is used on. CDs did suffer from poor sonic quality initially due to a combination of ignorance about the medium, frugality, and equipment issues. Most of this has been dealt with. So going back to Lps is actually not a good idea because of the same issues in going from one m edium to another and not willing to pay the costs necessary to adapt a recording to a different medium.

[@BobCoalWater]

The noise you where hearing, was most likely a neighbor cleaning a vinyl record.

[@markbudd8432]

I'm loving the comments coming through! I'm 64 and my 2 sons got me into vinyl again. I do think a big part of its appeal is handling the physical object and the liner notes etc.. Something Dave touches on....

[@rabit818]

You are right, younger people point of reference for digital sound is Spotify which is “CD quality”. Analogue or digital, if the mastering sucks, end product will suck. There is a a classical concert where I can hear the people coughing on CD but not on the LP, so there.

[@d.r.martin6301]

I gladly divested myself of LPs through the late 80s and into the 90s and I have never much missed them. I'll allow that when played on a quality turntable with a good cartridge properly set up, they can sound great. But oy, how much effort, how much fuss, how much cost, how easy to mangle a costly cartridge (I once lost a $500 Ortofon moving coil to workmen bouncing ladders off my outside wall, it still hurts). I like CDs so much more.

[@hoifcheu7533]

I have both, high end systems. Agree with Dave CDs are better in sound quality, convenience and longevity, if one takes the time to tune the sound system, which can be as simple as placing the loudspeakers correctly.

[@papagen00]

I got rid of all my vinyls 15 years ago and never looked back. I ripped all my 3000 CD's to hard drive and got rid of them too. Hi-res digital >> CD >> vinyl

[@michaelturner4457]

Back in the day we called them records or LPs, not "vinyl" or "vinyls". We don't call CDs "polycarbonates" do we? The last record I bought was in 1991, The Planets Suite by Holst. Still have it, but don't have a record player now.

[@juanfarrell1088]

You're the man. The most transcendental musical experiences I've had were from a 200 dollar sony cd only system. I have a proper hi fi with a turntable these days, and audiophilia is a hobby that is separate from musical appreciation. Audiofools (which I consider myself to be) love to justify their insane expenses as if it's a means to get closer to the heart of music. Absolutely ridiculous.

[@AlbertoBerrizbeitia-j8m]

It couldn't be any clearer than that. Putting Vinyl over CD at this stage is rather sort of a romantic position, absolutely subjective. It's nice to keep classic records on LPs, no doubt about it. Art covers and presentations and written contents were fantastic. But no way it can be claimed that the sound quality and product durability is better on Vinyl. Technology evolved into CD format for obvious reasons, as is it did later on into downloading format. It's the natural, objective way of things. The rest is just subjective. Thankfully, there's plenty of room for everyone's taste, and this is the only thing that ultimately matters.

[@duncanrichardson2167]

Can anyone point to a reputable comparison test in which the same recordings were played on the same speakers and amp on CD then vinyl at random with the CD and vinyl disk players being out of sight?

[@barrysaines254]

Fascinating Stuff Dave, thanks for talking about vinyl.

[@fnd111]

I had been meaning to ask you... Could you give us a rundown of your system?

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

No.

[@iftekherahmad3376]

For Classical Music, CD is the ideal medium. It is a bliss to be able to listen to Beethoven 9 or Bruckner 7 without break/interruption . Incidently, I bought 7 CDs in 1983, before the CD players were on sale - they still sound as good as any new CDs today! Thanks Dave for your opinion.

[@elmerglue21]

My parents have a vinyl record player that I like to use. To be honest, I like vinyl because of the large covers (and nice artwork), and because I like to go to vinyl record stores and just peruse their classical music selection and see if there's any pieces I don't yet have. Most record stores might have expensive vinyl in general, but their classical music vinyl usually sits in large bins and they're like 1$ for 5 records or something. It's insane. And really, you know, that's it. It might NOT sound good, and I have some records with annoying skips, but I can play it loudly, and it's fun for me to build my collection. I have some great classical music cds for my car though. One day I'd like to get a cd player but until then. I have a nice, cheap collection.

[@danielgeiger7739]

I would welcome consumer choice in terms of formats in classical music. I prefer my music on vinyl, particularly for the artwork/liner notes. Minor classical recordings are not available on vinyl; I like odd strings (viola d'amore, da gamba, da spalla, tromba marina, baryton) and HIPP Baroque music. e.g., BIS does not issue vinyl..That is in marked contrast to contemporary minor pop/rock recordings, which are typically available on vinyl and CD (plus digital). I have compared some different formats, and there are differences.

[@spitzwegayrich7837]

Alright, I'm here for some sentences no one asked for. I don't listen to vinyl. I'm also just 20 years of age, but I have listened to vinyl. CDs and Digital files are my go to. I love, when a recording doesn't sound clean, like with these vinyl pops and scratches. But you can also have that on some few digital media. Not by the medium itself, but by the recording or the medium it was saved for for decades. These noises give a certain depth to teh music, but why can't you love a great recording any way you like. It's for finantial reasons and all that stuff that Mr Hurwitz mentioned that it doesn't really matter.

[@alenaadamkova7617]

Its like the music of 80s...the video clips can be blurry a bit, crazy and with abnormal clothes and hairstyle....and imperfect graphical effects But for some reason you enjoy it and its unique vibes....Its not like copy paste. Sometimes crazy is good too, if music is unique.

[@leeturner1202]

I wonder if there's a statistical correlation between those who love vinyl and those who say "they don't make cars the way they used to."

[@sbwlearning1372]

Check out why mercedes Benz is considered rubbish today versus their 70s/ 80s cars. Now go and research profitability Vs materials costs for any operating business. They don't make anything the way they used to anymore because of accountants. Even Volkswagen legendary durability and reliability has gone because they cheapened out in parts and design

[@timyork6150]

You say it all here, Dave, about the vinyl fad and in an admirable way. Unlike many people, I kept most of the LPs (several hundreds) which I started collecting in 1952 (age 14) and they are largely in good condition apart from about 100 of the earliest where the inner grooves were ploughed up by the heavy pick-up heads I had then. I still play my LPs occasionally as many contain my favourite interpretations, e.g. Klemperer's Beethoven, Brahms, etc. and Boult's Elgar and VW, as well as in works where I have no CD like yesterday's playing of Magnard's Symphony 4. They still mostly sound good but not often as good as the CD remastering when I have been able to compare. Frankly, though, I nowadays find irksome the TLC required for good performance, especially the kneeling down after about every two plays to clean the stylus and sometimes even in the middle of a side. However I do wonder if the need for this TLC is not a strange attraction for some vinyl enthusiasts!