"Vinyl is indisputably superior, blah blah..."
It's well known that the world of audiophiles is not always based in reality, in fact it's right up there with homeopathy, Intelligent Design and the Tooth Fairy when it comes to believing any old bullshit.

If you mean that you prefer the sound from vinyl, that's fine. But trying to build a technical case for it being inherently superior is doomed to failure because the laws of physics and the limits of human perception will always trip you up.

I've been recording / mixing / mastering since the 1970s, and anything analogue can fuck right off.
( MisterPunch did it that way on, Wed 10 Nov 2010, 15:38, 5 replies)

psssst
I've got some quantum nano wave effect speaker cables for sale. They're demagnetised as well, so there's no reflective resonance. Only £1200, they're £2K in the shops.
( Ring Of Fire A petty, drooling belming butthurt retard., Wed 10 Nov 2010, 15:45, closed)

*orders twelfty*

( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Wed 10 Nov 2010, 15:46, closed)

I would buy them
But i'm saving up for the £500 kettle lead and wooden volume knob.

In seriousness, I use 'LT' cable, it's meant for powering things like 12v transmitters and that, nice and thick without the bullshit of hifi magazines.

I'm sure I heard somewhere that hifi magazines don't do double blind because they know fine that the manufacturers would blacklist them if they tried it.
( Slippery Mick ‏, Wed 10 Nov 2010, 16:33, closed)

There's a page of New Scientist
that re-prints the more outlandish claims for HiFi cables. There's some very stupid, but apparently well off, people around.
( Ring Of Fire A petty, drooling belming butthurt retard., Wed 10 Nov 2010, 16:57, closed)

This.
I can think of half a dozen reasons why vinyl is technically inferior to digital, and I'm hardly an expert. For one thing, the surface of digital media doesn't rub off when you play it.
(Falstaff's Spiritual Successor, Wed 10 Nov 2010, 15:58, closed)

also...
"a vinyl record basically mirrors the exact sound which was played into the pressing machine"

Are you Thomas Edison?
( MisterPunch did it that way on, Wed 10 Nov 2010, 16:02, closed)

Totally true
But (and there is always a but)

When a number of people say they prefer vinyl, I suspect they prefer the recording and mastering style of the sixties, seventies and (early) eighties. CD (despite being no spring chicken) can achieve amazing results but the current trend for making everything (in popular music circles anyway) AS LOUD AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE means it can sound bloody awful- and I am well aware it is normally a label that asks for it to sound like this for radio/compression work rather than a concious decision on the part of the studio engineers.
(Leonard Hatred briefly did some work on, Wed 10 Nov 2010, 16:08, closed)

It's a matter of taste, and distortion.
Analogue distortion is mildly palatable, digital is not.

I fully believe that digital can render a better approximation of a source than analogue (and that's ignoring things like non-linear reproduction in vinyl, etc). But the problem is that a lot of engineers seem to compress and clip the tits off modern recordings. Vinyl has limits to how strongly this can be applied.

It's a shame that a lot of digital recordings seem (to me) sound shitty. More people should take notes from Elliot Mazer. Heart of Gold is one of the best sounding cd's I own, I hear the SACD/DVDA thingy is even better.

Also, you miss the point that VINYL SMELLS BETTER.
( Slippery Mick ‏, Wed 10 Nov 2010, 16:25, closed)

and when you take it out of the sleeve
you get a charming static crackling sound
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Wed 10 Nov 2010, 16:54, closed)

The reason a lot of digital recordings sound shitty
is that it is much, much, much cheaper and easier to make music using all this digital technology therefore there is a greater amount of cheaply-made, bedroom-produced crap about than when you had to get cleared and funded by a record company before you could get a disk pressed.

Anyway, what has analog and digital distortion got to do with CDs and vinyl? You shouldn't be hearing any distortion from the medium if it's well produced.
(MrChimp previously Monsieur, Wed 10 Nov 2010, 17:35, closed)

You shouldn't be hearing any distortion from the medium if it's well produced.
That was kind of the point. Most digital productions are shittily produced. Often it's the big names that make an arse of it as well. go and listen to californiacation, it's clipped to fuck.
( Slippery Mick ‏, Wed 10 Nov 2010, 18:06, closed)