Vinyl Vs Tape Vs Cd

That said there s a strong argument that the cassette is a less redundant medium in 2013 than the cd more on which later and the arguments that tape nostalgia is invalid hipster bullshit.

Vinyl vs tape vs cd.

Cds gave the world a higher quality sound than the tape which audiophiles appreciated as well as its close similarities to the record. We compare the sound quality of analog vinyl vs digital audio cd flac on a 100k stereo setup. The difference between the cd and the record is that the cd worked as a digital entity with the tracks being read through a laser within a cd player much different to that of the needle in the vinyl groove aspect from the vinyl record. For the entirety of the 1980s before portable cd players became viable it was really the only way to listen to your own music in the car or on the go.

A vinyl record is an analog recording and cds and dvds are digital recordings. 2 robert points out that in the early days of cd the mastering job for vinyl and digital was the same. Take a look at the graph below. A digital recording takes snapshots of the analog signal at a certain rate for cds it is 44 100 times per second and measures each snapshot with a certain accuracy for cds it is 16 bit which means the value must be one of 65 536 possible values.

It owed its popularity to its portability and durability compared to vinyl and its cheapness compared to cd. Check out our listening results. See our youtube debate. Cds have a better signal to noise ratio i e.

Now that tape sales are on the rise too we have to consider if the retro cool phase of a format s lifespan is inevitable. The only problem with this theory is that while many listeners argue that vinyl records are superior to cds in sound quality no one is making that argument for cassettes. There is less interference from hissing turntable rumble etc better stereo channel separation and have no variation in playback speed. Original sound is analog by definition.

That changed over time as mastering engineers were asked to take advantage of the. Some formats age better than others. It wasn t because of its quality that cassette became a thing in the late 70s to 90s. From a technical standpoint digital cd audio quality is clearly superior to vinyl.