Host john dankosky to talk about the science of audio and how perceptions can shape the sound experience.
Vinyl vs cd quality science.
The cd always comes up technically better if you measure it with scientific.
They sound different and that s exactly the point.
From a technical standpoint digital cd audio quality is clearly superior to vinyl.
What vinyl can t do.
These days many records are made using playback of a digital file so vinyl preference cannot be attributed solely to the differences in the way the sound wave is reproduced.
Cds have a better signal to noise ratio i e.
Playback and inconsistencies though cd s sample rate is high and we re all well aware how good they sound the idea of its being converted once into digital and then back to analogue losing and approximating information seems to infer it will always be inferior to vinyl.
A vinyl record is an analog recording and cds and dvds are digital recordings.
Take a look at the graph below.
That will try to improve low quality mp3 so it.
Vinyl is great but the idea that its sound quality is superior to that of uncompressed digital recordings is preposterous.
Even the standard redbook cd 44khz 16 bit resolution has about a 26db advantage to vinyl with respect to dynamic range and at least a 40 50 db advantage in stereo separation as well as unmeasurable wow and flutter.
A digital recording doesn t degrade overtime like a record does when played too many times.
Because vinyl s restrictions do not permit the same abuse of audio levels as the cd mayo says that listeners might hear a wider dynamic range in an album mixed separately for vinyl over a compact.
Original sound is analog by definition.
Why vinyl sounds better than cd.
Cds are not affected by surface noise because they use light.
There is less interference from hissing turntable rumble etc better stereo channel separation and have no variation in playback speed.
A digital recording takes snapshots of the analog signal at a certain rate for cds it is 44 100 times per second and measures each snapshot with a certain accuracy for cds it is 16 bit which means the value must be one of 65 536 possible values.
Cd quality sits somewhere in the middle with 44 100 samples per second at 16 bit accuracy.
