Why Do Vinyl Records Sound Better

The output of a record player is analog.

Why do vinyl records sound better.

Some listeners honestly feel that the defects vinyl introduces somehow make it more attractive or warmer but from any objective standpoint there s no justification in calling. The simplest is to make a record that plays faster. There are a few very important reasons that records sound the way that they do and why they sound vastly different from pure digital recordings. Sonically vinyl has both strengths.

For comparison listening to vinyl as opposed to digital is like viewing the mona lisa with your own eyes rather than looking at a picture of it on a smartphone. While coloured vinyl and picture discs are an easy way to ensure degradation to a record s playback there are practices made to better the way an lp sounds. Over the 2000s songs were mastered with less and less dynamic range all while getting louder and louder on average. It can be fed directly to your amplifier with no conversion.

Vinyl is a lossless format. Whether you re playing tape or spinning vinyl moving parts are involved in getting sound to reach your ears. The first and possibly most important reason that records sound different from mp3s and cds is that in the digital realm the artist can create just about any sound that they want and it will be faithfully reproduced in the digital world. The vinyl lp is a format based on technology that hasn t evolved much over the last six decades.

The pressings are made straight from the masters and contain all of the detail the artist intended. A turntable s basic function is to pick up the vibrations emitted by the grooves of your records via the tonearm and cartridge the stylus then measures and converts these vibrations into an electrical signal that is amplified into sweet sweet music via. Reproducing bass on vinyl is a serious engineering challenge but the upshot is. Back in the day making records was an industrial process with millions and millions of records being pressed.

This means that no information is lost. In fact simply because vinyl was kept alive primarily by audiophiles we saw more audiophile records being made. In some ways it s the audio equivalent of driving a ford pilot. Records made today can sound better.

It wasn t long before vinyl recordings of the same content often had better sound quality at normal listening volumes simply because they had higher dynamic range.