Why Do Vinyl Records Sound Better

The output of a record player is analog.

Why do vinyl records sound better.

In some ways it s the audio equivalent of driving a ford pilot. A vinyl record has a groove carved into it that mirrors the original sound s waveform. It s for this reason that vinyl sounds better than digital. 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.

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. It can be fed directly to your amplifier with no conversion. Over the 2000s songs were mastered with less and less dynamic range all while getting louder and louder on average. The vinyl lp is a format based on technology that hasn t evolved much over the last six decades.

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. Records made today can sound better. 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. Sonically vinyl has both strengths.

Vinyl is a lossless format. 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. 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.

The warmth that many people associate with lps can generally be described as a bass sound that is less accurate. The simplest is to make a record that plays faster. This means that no information is lost. 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.

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.