Cd Vs Vinyl Sound Quality

There is less interference from hissing turntable rumble etc better stereo channel separation and have no variation in playback speed.

Cd vs vinyl sound quality.

The quality of a digital reproduction is dictated by how many of those samples of the original are made. Cds have a better signal to noise ratio i e. Cds can also hold 74 minutes of music. Vinyl can still push music to the limits of its dynamic range 55 70db but it often shies away from doing so in order to maintain sound quality.

Cd quality sits somewhere in the middle with 44 100 samples per second at 16 bit accuracy. A turntable with a worn out needle won t be able to accurately convey the music within the grooves just as a stereo with blown out speakers won t properly deliver the data on a cd. It is why mp3 with relatively few samples is so poor and hi res audio with far more is the closest we have to a studio recording. Because vinyl s restrictions do not permit the same abuse of audio levels as the cd mayo says that listeners might hear a wider dynamic range in an album mixed separately for vinyl over a compact.

Having a proper sound system to play your cds or vinyl records through greatly affects the quality. There s very little compression so the loudest parts of those sounds often. That s why snare drums cymbal splashes and other loud instruments have so much more punch in vinyl recordings. The results may surprise you as they did us.

Why vinyl sounds better than cd or not according to rolling stone magazine sales of vinyl albums continue to grow setting a new record in 2010. Dvds can hold 74 minutes of music at their highest quality level. See our youtube debate. The recording industry has a new standard for dvd audio discs that will greatly improve the sound quality.

Still as artists and labels hop on the vinyl trend some new vinyl releases may be mastered from cd quality audio not the high resolution formats audiophiles and folks like neil young adore. The table below lists the sampling rate and the accuracy for cd recordings and the maximum sampling rate and accuracy for dvd recordings. From a technical standpoint digital cd audio quality is clearly superior to vinyl. Sales of vinyl records have been soaring although they still represent only a tiny fraction of the music industry s revenues.

We compare the sound quality of analog vinyl vs digital audio cd flac on a 100k stereo setup. Check out our listening results.