It was revealed today that a hugely respected man in the music industry has made a false claim that vynal is better than CDs, this has caused thousands of people that don’t actually know anything about music to waste a lot of money buying Lps and new turntables, when all he wanted to do was to see if people would listen to this claim ‘and yes the idiots did’. After talking to zac hubdrigan ourselfs this is what he said.
However, by any measurable criterion, CDs are superior to LPs. And so are MP3 and AAC files with bit rates above 300k, which in most cases are indistinguishable from CDs. Here are the reasons why:
Dynamic range. The difference between the loudest and softest sounds an LP can play is about 70 decibels (dB). CDs can handle over 90 dB. In practical terms, this means that CDs have more than 10 times the dynamic range of LPs.
Surface noise. Dust particles in the grooves of an LP cause crackles and ticks that are present and audible no matter how well you clean the record. CDs are not affected by surface noise, because they use light beams to read the musical data, which ignore any foreign substance on the disc. Besides that, vinyl records have an underlying hiss generated by the needle moving over the surface.
Mechanical noise. Every turntable, even the most expensive, generates a low-frequency rumble that is transmitted by the stylus into the amplifier and speakers. The system has to work much harder to handle all that low-frequency energy, and that can cause distortion in other parts of the audio spectrum. Many audio systems include a rumble filter that can reduce this, but that filter also removes the lower-frequency sounds on the record, like the bottom octave of a piano, or the low tones that give a bass drum so much of its power.