Does Vinyl Sound Better

Few aesthetic experiences are as subjective as sound.

Does vinyl sound better.

It s for this reason that vinyl sounds better than digital. Vinyl sounds better than mp3s ever could. Vinyl is a lossless format. Most of the music is broadcast in some lossy format where details are missed and the overall quality is reduced.

It can be fed directly to your amplifier with no conversion. So no vinyl isn t better than digital music but it offers several advantages because of the fact that loudness war mixing isn t feasible on the medium. 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. It happens because audio files get compressed to make them small enough to store thousands of them on the phone and to stream online.

But there is a downside any specks of dust or damage to the disc can be heard as noise or static. For digital to truly eclipse vinyl thousands of records from the 1990s onward would need a remaster. Vinyl s capable of a lot but only if the grooves are wide enough for the needle to track them properly. So enjoying what an lp has to offer is in no way contingent on convincing yourself that they necessarily sound better than cds.

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. A longer album means skinnier grooves a quieter sound and more noise.