This week's topic

The Great Vinyl Delusion

The gradual return of vinyl for music reproduction over the past 5 to 10 years represents a fascinating study in human behaviour. There is one inescapable fact, however, that we all need to be aware of: vinyl pressings of anything recorded this century simply cannot be better than digital, and anyone who listens to vinyl thinking this is the case is delusional.

Now, please don’t mistake what I have just said. I did not say that people cannot think that vinyl sounds  better than digital, I just said that it can’t be  better. Let us consider how just about any recently recorded music becomes available to the listener currently. All of this music was digitally recorded, so there is zero chance that any final consumer-oriented product designed to replay that recording can actually improve on its original quality. Any and all audio manipulation of that original recording degrades its quality, and – whether the end user likes the result more or less than the original regardless – there can be no doubt that the process of making the recording available on vinyl, on cassette, or on CD, degrades quality. As far as CDs are concerned, no one these days ever records at less than 24-bit 96khz, and as CDs cannot reproduce that resolution, these too must  be supplying a degraded version of any original.The only way the end-user can hear any modern recording at its optimal quality, therefore, is to use a replay method that gets as close as possible to maintaining the attributes of the original digital recording.

The only way to do that is to have a digital-to-analogue converter (DAC) – whether stand-alone or integrated into another device – that is as close to instrument grade as possible, and, in the case of “classical” music in particular, to also have a physical disc-player capable of replaying SACD as well as Blu-ray Audio (the reason this pertains more to "classical" music is on account of the fact that very few new recordings showcasing more "popular" music styles are released using these high-definition formats). Fortunately, however, both of these requirements have never been more affordable, and certainly the hardware needed to achieve these capabilities is currently far, far cheaper than any built around a mid-priced turntable-based system that cannot possibly sound anywhere near as good.

So, let’s not be fooled: if people want to listen to vinyl, it is not because it sounds better. It can’t. The only reason people might listen to vinyl is because it changes the listening experience into something that perhaps offers more engagement. There are better, and more aurally satisfying ways to do that, however!