Vinyl Vs Cd Test

Unfortunately no one appears to have done a double blind listener test comparing vinyl to cds but there is a good study from florida state s john geringer and patrick dunnigan doing that with cds.

Vinyl vs cd test.

The cd audio is digitally encoded and read by a laser while analog vinyl audio is physically read by a needle. However some started to take it a little too far and it wound up being known as the. Take a look at the graph below. Newer recordings on cd however have significantly closed that gap.

Production studios for large entertainment companies made the switch to digital and realized that the new format afforded new ways to edit music. While the cd had a whopping 2 7 pt average advantage to the vinyl recording for noise floor it still lost out unanimously with our listening panel to the latter mostly because of dynamic compression found in the digital recording. The answer lies in the difference between analog and digital recordings. I can t hear the warmth of a ride cymbal like you can in person.

Cds and vinyl records are both audio storage and playback formats based on rotating discs from different times in music history. Vinyl record sales surpassed cds for the first time in decades. Original sound is analog by definition. And we were testing cartridges at that time and it was quite apparent that the amount of distortion coming out of these devices was very high compared to cd.

The 2020s have officially begun but based on the music. Ldprod istock via getty images. Comparing compact discs cds to vinyl or gramophone records is the musical equivalent of comparing digital photography with film photography. It s better but that aspect is still trailing vinyl.

On vinyl you can hear more of the wood in the stick in the sound the warmth.