Which is Best, LP’s or CD’s?

For the past 30+ years “digital” has become an unparalleled buzzword in the music industry. Many children think that LP’s are just some kind of an oversized CD.  All of us who back in the day had even marginally decent turntables complimented with a good set of speakers can share stories about our first exposure to CD's; we all thought they would be better than LP’s and with the purchase of our first rather expensive CD player, most of us ran right out to buy a CD.  

With excitement building, the big moment finally arrived ...we pressed play and about 30 seconds later, with this odd new sound coming from the speakers, we instantly concluded that we must have done something wrong during the installation process and in turn carefully checked all the connections and such to the new CD player. Following a failed attempt to improve the sound output, we then concluded the player was surely defective so we called a friend who also had a new CD player and borrowed it, the same damn results followed!

This thin dry and super clean sound just wasn’t doing anything right for many of us; but this experience was, as it turned out, our very first encounter with what is now called “ear fatigue”.

In the years to follow there was a great deal of pressure placed on manufacturers to improve the performance level or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say “make good on their claims”. Yes, many aspects of the CD player’s design have improved, but some parts have actually gotten worse.  During the 30 years that have passed, many “older” listeners have simply forgotten the genuine difference in sound between the LP and the CD and have adjusted our hearing and expectations to a lower level. Admittedly the CD does have good points, but most are related to engineering and industrial design rather than fidelity.

To remotely understand how an LP or CD actually works from a very simplistic point of view, it’s necessary to recognize that a vinyl record is an analog recording, and CD's are digital recordings.  Original sound is analog by definition. A digital recording takes “snapshots” of the analog signal at a certain rate (for CD's it's 44,100 times per second) and measures each snapshot with a high degree of accuracy.

The fact is that no matter how you put it, this means that a digital recording is not capturing the complete sound wave; instead it’s approximating the sound wave with a series of steps. Some sounds that have very quick transitions, such as a drum beat or that of a trumpet’s tone for example; this will be distorted when converted to digital because they change too quickly.

In the typical home stereo system, the CD player takes this digital recording and converts it back to an analog signal, which is fed to the amplifier. The amplifier then raises the voltage of the signal to a level powerful enough to make the speakers work.

On the other hand a vinyl record has a groove “carved” or “cut” into it that mirrors the original sound’s waveform; this means that absolutely no information / signal is lost, so in short, since the output of a LP or record player is analog, it can be fed directly to your amplifier with no conversion, thus no signal is lost and because of this, a better sound results.

However it should be noted that to have a direct analog (LP) playback system that is noticeably superior to a modern digital (CD) playback system requires a large monetary investment in the analog system or let’s say a delicate balance of “gear”  with a proper setup is essential. . .

This might include: Speakers, single ended triode amplifiers with no feedback, a single ended triode preamplifier, a good MC cartridge (the “needle”) with a step-up transformer, a good tone arm, and a good turntable with good wire. If anything in the above list is weak, the illusion will simply collapse.

In the long and short of all things being considered here, unless you can create the LP playback system quite similar to the one described in the above paragraph, then what’s the point in piddling with LP’s in the first place, especially these days. Truth is if you’re going to do vinyl, there are no short cuts. While it’s possible to create the ideal audio illusion with a not so modest $2,000.00, you must be practical and careful in choosing the components.  However that $2,000.00 is likely to surpass the price of a good digital-to-analog converter (DAC) or to put it more plainly, a good CD player.

For the difference in sound it’s often argued that the rewards of the LP are obvious beyond cost.  But keep in mind that there are downsides to LP’s such as tiny specks of dust that often collect on the disc or minor damage to the disc can be “heard” or “amplified”  as noise or static, thus sabotaging the concept of a better, wholesome sound. During quiet spots in songs this may be “heard” or “amplified” as a “crackling” noise; if the digital recording contains silence, then there’s only silence heard on the CD.   Further, digital recordings don’t degrade over time, and finally CD’s can hold 74 minutes of music; LP’s don’t even come close, with about 20 minutes per side.

To take the sound / fidelity issue one step further, there is the response from the masses who never owned a high quality turntable set-up that can justifiably argue  that when compared to the cassette tape player, that was once the rage, CD’s  actually do sound lots better.

Regardless, according to Rolling Stone Magazine, sales of vinyl albums continue to grow, setting a new record in 2010, in fact as early as April of 2008 C/Net reported that LP sales surpassed CD sales, but does vinyl really reproduce sound that much better, or is this just an extended trend? 

The Compact Disc was introduced in 1983, and three years later CD sales outsold LP’s, but since CD’s sold for $15.00 to $17.00, twice the price of an LP at the time, a lot of buyers resisted the changeover from analog to digital. Today, as you might guess, the opposite is true. 

Sources:                                                                                                                     http://www.decware.com/paper20.htm                                                    http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question487.htm                                       http://www.prodvd.com.br/vinil_k7_cd.php                                                                         http://www.npr.org/2012/02/10/146697658/why-vinyl-sounds-better-than-cd-or-not http://news.cnet.com/8301-13645_3-9906397-47.html