I'll take a 320 MP3 over Vinyl any day (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Saturday, March 21, 2015, 16:52 (3783 days ago) @ Xenos

Kermit and I have had this discussion before, but I'm a firm believer that Vinyl sounds substantially worse than high-quality digital audio.

The thing is, Vinyl has a distinct, inescapable character. It has a high noise floor, low-end compression, and it rolls off high end frequencies in a way that gives it that "warm" character.

If you like those characteristics, then Vinyl is great. As an audio engineer, I'd rather have total control over how my mix ends up sounding. If I want tighter bass frequencies, I'll mix them that way myself. I can add a little vinyl-hiss if I want to, but it's not forced upon me. At the end of the day, the characteristics of my mixes are all up to me, not the medium my tracks get printed to.

Going back to the 1940s through to the 80s, audio engineers expected with and counted on the qualities of vinyl to influence their mixes. They could get away with harsh sounding guitars and piercing cymbal crashes because they knew the vinyl would "sweeten it up". Then CDs come along, record labels start taking those original masters and putting them onto a medium with more "pure" audio qualities (CDs don't add any character of their own... they perfectly reproduce what you put on them), and the result is a bunch of thin and harsh sounding CDs.

But, at the end of the day, I'm listening to it all on my little earbuds through my iPhone just like so many others :)