However, what is true – is that with Vinyl you do get that certain reverberation that comes from the speakers creating vibrations in the room and those vibrations coming back through the stylus and through the speakers. This is what gives the perceived “warmth” of Vinyl. Compare the two. Still, none of that really matters if you have dodgy amplifiers speakers etc.

I am now a digital DJ and producer, but there is still a certain quality that comes with Vinyl. Perhaps it’s just the feel of having the records spinning and the rest is beyond human perception, but part of being a DJ is the show.

My 2 cents.

More realistic and lifelike, and less artificial.

I’m sorry but if you’re teaching people analog audio engineering you should not be resorting to describing a signal in worthless terms like that.

Gimme SNR. Gimme dynamic range. Harmonic distortion. Terms that competent audio technicians use, not Monster cable salesmen.

The wave form is sampled every so often -on CDs 44Khz -about twice the highest expected hearable frequency of 21Khz. This means that a single high frequency cycle is sampled only a few times compared to low frequencies which are sampled tens of thousands of times. Low frequencies therefore have higher resolution than high frequencies, perhaps contributing to the supposed harshness in digital recordings. Note that pro’s record at 98K presumably to to lessen the effect.

Signals don’t work that way :) 
When you’re dealing with signals, you’re speaking in terms of sine waves. So if you sample a high-frequency cycle at twice its frequency, then you can perfectly reconstruct it. That’s just a mathematical fact.
Some professionals record at 96kHz and even 192kHz, but the main reason for that is that it reduces the need for high-quality low-pass filters to exclude the signal above 20kHz without artefacts, which is damned difficult to get right. 

2. The bit depth determines how closely the sample point conforms to the actual analog waveform. Low bit depth means less resolution at the sample point and high bit depth gets closer to the real waveform. An extreme example would be 1 bit where the wave form at any point in time would be sampled as either no amplitude or full amplitude.
So I can see why vinyl theoretically could sound better -especially on the high end. What CDs do have over LPs besides no wear is about twice the dynamic range -the difference between the highest volume sound and the softest sound.

Much like sample rate is directly linked to the maximum reproducible frequency, sample depth is directly linked to the dynamic range. The dynamic range of 16-bit audio is 96 dB. With 24-bit sampling that number increases to 144dB. The dynamic range of vinyl can not be definitely measured based on its characteristics, but you’re lucky to get 80dB with an extremely good setup.

The early CDs were usually mastered by the same digital equipment on which the vinyls were mastered, simply because DASH and Soundstream was inherently better than their analog competitors.

Just like with vinyl and CD, come to think of it, except the sound engineers who understand audio recording made the decision about which is better, rather than audiophiles who think “warm” or “full” are useful terms to describe audio.

When “dB” is used colloquially, it is to measure sound pressure relative to .0002 microbar, or 20 micropascals. 
Then you have the analog measurement of signal amplitude, typically dBm – relative to one milliwatt.Then you have the digital measurement of dBFS, which is relative to full scale, the maximum amplitude a system can capture without aliasing.

A digital system will distort the audio, usually unpleasantly, at 0dBFS. 

However, with analog, the limited dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratio forms a strong impetus to record as close as possible to the maximum signal amplitude, even if that may mean occasional distortion around transients.

With digital, professional digital audio equipment which records 24-bit or even 32-bit samples mean that you can literally dial it back a little – so both in recording and mastering it, you can still retain very good audio quality without having to go near levels that cause distortion.

The thing with favoring vinyl I believe is part of this mini-boom economy in vinyl pressings.  Trust me, in a few years, those audiophile Neil Young pressings that sell for $50 will be in the dollar bin.

But the debate brings up another point.  Do you really want a better sounding recording?  If your band plays a sort of lo-fi genre, say, Guided By Voices, should you really release on vinyl?  An imperfect sound is a sound of choice these days amongst artists, and if CDs, mp3s and cassettes deliver a less than better sound, than that ought to be the preferred format.  Maybe Venom should have waited for the advent of mp3 before releasing ‘Black Metal’.

What about artists that purposely adds clicks, pops, noise, and assorted feedbacks to their compositions?  It would seem to me that discordance is as discordance does: don’t release on vinyl if you want to perfect the loop so to speak.

Lastly, having produced a number of releases, the case more than often is that the vinyl record is mastered from a CD source, so this argument that vinyl better captures the analog really only holds water if you master from tape or some other analog source.

In reality, most people back in my parents’ day listened to music on a $79.95 fold-down “stereo” from Sears, or a three inch mono car speaker (two speakers if lucky).

I contend that even after auto mixing and the loudness wars, I’m getting better sound from what I am listening to now (a Decemberists CD ripped to 256 mp3) than my big sister did when listening to “Rubber Soul” after a few passes through her ceramic cartridge “hi-fi”.

Cheap amplifiers may simply not have enough bandwidth and slew rate to accurately produce sounds above 20k, and while you can not hear that sound, (and technically they shouldn’t be present on a CD) that inability may lead to distortion in a frequency range you can hear.

-Obviously that doesn’t have a lot to do with LP vs. CD, but it’s something to point out on technical merit.  Especially if you are dealing with electronically created music.

You can pair a digital source (like CD) with a tube amp and still produce that “warm” sound.  You can pair an LP with a solid state amp and produce a “warm” sound.  Both are introducing distortion into the audio chain.  A distortion that doesn’t exist in the original recording, yet it is one that most people find pleasing.

There is not a lot that can be done where records are concerned, so in some ways that is subjective (as the only other option is a different medium.)  But for something like a tube vs. solid state amp they are essentially the same thing as far as the audio chain is concerned.  The only reason to choose the tube is because of preference, not technical merit.

Uncompressed digital is technically a superior recording format compared to vinyl (mastering being equal and all), so is a solid state amplifier.  The only reason to use anything else is entirely preference.

Which medium is better? Well, depends on one’s needs and the situation. There are too many CDs I bought in the late 80′s and early 90s that have no scratches, were stored in the same variable conditions as my vinyl, yet, the CDs are toast – as of 2003 when I culled them. I have an Edison phonograph disk from 1912 that played just fine on an acquaintance’s machine. 

My parents’ 50 plus YO vinyl play just fine, even with scratches. I agree that later CDs have much, much, better longevity, but how much longer remains to be seen. Tape cassettes? Fcuk, I don’t know, but it seems mostly related to amount of use, quality of the tape (and playback machine), handling and storage environment. One friend of mine who was 72 (68?) at the time was rummaging around at his place and found a 30 YO recording made by his then 7 YO son. It still sounded okay. Cheap tape. Cheap player. Bought at Sears. He transferred it to digital, cleaned it up using shareware, sent it to his son. Cheap cassette tape, recorded by a child, 30 years later, it works. Go figure. 

If I were building a doomsday music archive, I would store versions on the best non-volatile digital medium I could find/afford, and include a vinyl copy, even if the source of the vinyl copy was digital. These I would store in a cool, dry place somewhere deep, not prone to seismic activity and etcetera. Maybe between the two media, many would be preserved indefinitely. Also, vinyl has the advantage of not being encoded, and can be electronically scanned. A shattered record with a lot of scratches can be scanned and reconstructed, much in the same way the more fragmented and brittle ancient writings such as the Dead Sea Scrolls are now – or shredded documents are by forensic detectives. Plus, as with the DSS, if a physical shard is missing, the computer can use an algorithm to ‘guesstimate’ the missing information. (I am not a scientist, or expert, this is what I remember reading somewhere.)

Edison disks were “…molded phenol and formaldehyde mixed with wood-flour and a solvent into a heat-resistant disc.” I’ve thought they were Bakelite, but this is different from my understanding of B-lite.

Here’s the ref:
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bledisondiscphpgraph2.htm

Wow, me too! I have done this ever since I can remember, like when I was about 3 years-old. This was pretty reliable, and even though I had a Sony Boodo Khan in high-school (this was circa 1987) and later CD players, I still heavily relied on my mental reply because one could only carry so many cassettes or CDs, and my brain worked well enough. 

However, over time, especially in the last, like, eight years, this ability has declined. At first the lyrics were fuzzy, even if I could vocally recite them flawlessly. Now, at 41, it still works, but the lyrics are muffled, and the music is less muffled, but the arrangements do not reflect reality (I’m actually quite okay with this.)

I wonder if my use of portable media players that have such a huge storage capacity have caused this to fade, my age or both. My cognitive abilities are the same. I mentioned this to a doc and he smiled and shrugged, asked me if everything else upstairs was okay (it was) and said my recent MRI and CAT scan was fine (I had recently been beaten about head and shoulders by a dentist frenemy.)

OP Damian and anyone else reading this – anything thoughts? 

This is my biggest problem with these types of explanations, using evocative language to describe precise events that get interpreted as reality by our ears then issuing a statement of preference as if it was not subjective.

This doesn’t mean that you cannot prefer one over the other but it seems to me, this renders the matter (Audiophiles, that vocal minority, aside) a taste preference.

I happen to think that the best resolution is memory myself, I quite enjoy playing back my favorite songs in my mind, completely lossles, free from amp distortion and as jitter free as perception allows while playing drums on the desk till I notice the stares of the people around me… Oh well. :)

That said I prefer vinyl, but I have no beef with CDs (mp3′s are another story.)  Some famous audio technicians (Rupert Neve for example) claim they can hear the difference between 44.1khz (common CD) sampling rates and 96khz or higher sampling rates (SACDs for example)–  I can not hear the difference, but I am willing to believe that they can.

In my country the waiters at restaurants tend to bring you whatever Cola drink they have when you order Coke (same for Sprite… they bring whatever Lemon soda they have). After I don’t know how many times that I’ve tasted my cola drink and realized it was Pepsi instead, and yes, got confirmation from the waiter that it indeed was Pepsi, I’ve learned to instead ask what Cola drink they have.