Vinyl Vs Mp3 Quality

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

Vinyl vs mp3 quality.

Cd quality sits somewhere in the middle with 44 100 samples per second at 16 bit accuracy. 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. The results may surprise you as they did us. In the time that the dominance of cds started to erode around the turn of the millennium we ve come to understand the wide range of how mp3s can sound how cymbals on a circa 2002 128k mp3 sound.

There s very little compression so the loudest parts of those sounds often. People who complain about the fact a digital recording is quantized don t understand signal processing. Digital superiority technically speaking cd is a generally superior medium. See our youtube debate.

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. It happens because audio files get compressed to make them small enough to store thousands of them on the phone and to stream online. Check out our listening results. But whether its origins are digital or analog more on this later a vinyl disc should have more musical information than an mp3 file so it should be an improvement on streaming sites such as.

Vinyl sounds better than mp3s ever could. We are working out some algorithms that will try to improve low quality mp3 so it sounds closer cd. The quality of a digital reproduction is dictated by how many of those samples of the original are made. To take advantage of higher quality dvd audio discs however you will need a dvd player with a 192khz 24 bit digital to analog converter.

Dvd audio discs and players are rare right now but they will become more common and the difference in sound quality should be noticeable. We don t try to compensate for in the loudspeaker system for deficiencies in the mp3 or vinyl. Most dvd players only have a 96khz 24 bit digital to analog converter. Most of the music is broadcast in some lossy format where details are missed and the overall quality is reduced.