# Vinyl vs CD vs digital audio

I thought I’d provide some feedback on this discusion.

At one point in my career, I thought I was going to be a music producer, and I’ve spent about 20 years writing, recording and producing music. Writing mostly electronic music played by DJs, and given the timeframe we’re talking about, I actually started mixing (as in the audio engineer definition) while vinyl accounted for close to 100% of sales, so everything we did ended up being mastered for vinyl.

As part of this process, we’d send every single release off to be mastered for vinyl, and receive an acetate (a one off copy), a test pressing (initial pressings using the vinyl master), or the final release pressing and be able to compare it to not only a 16bit/44.1khz master of the exact same recording, but we were also often able to compare directly to a 24bit/44.1khz master and 24bit/44.1khz pre-mastered version of the exact same song. And all typically on studio nearfield masters and really nice headphones.

Keep in mind that I say the following as an owner of lots of records and as someone who remembers my time with vinyl fondly. There was no greater feeling than receiving a test pressing of a song you've written — a physical representation of your work. I really miss that with software.


### Dynamics

In terms of dynamics, vinyl is terrible and often our songs needed fairly drastic compression (the audio kind) and limiting to fit into what is acceptable for vinyl. Mastering for radio these days often uses brutal limiting, which raises the overall loudness, but vinyl had its own flavour of poor dynamics, which was a real issue for the kind of music we wrote. Softer passages of the music would often have to be made a lot louder, to keep them within range and well above the noise floor.


### Frequency response

Again, vinyl is terrible in this respect. Not only does vinyl have a narrower frequency response, but that response curve changes based on side length and how close to the center of the record the needle is. It makes sense when you think about it — the record player spins at a constant rate, but the distance the needle travels and the amount of data is lowered as you get closer to the center. This is why most releases put the important tracks early in the playing sequence. This is really, really obvious if you have a record handy. Focus on high hats or cymbals, and move the needle to different positions to hear how drastic the effect is.

Vinyl often has issues with sibilance as well (“s” and “t” sounds in vocals). The solution is to run an aggressive de-esser as part of the vinyl mastering.


### Stereo imaging

The feeling of something being wide and spacious often comes from the difference between left and right signals. Apart from the frequency response issues of vinyl, which blurs stereo imaging, vinyl has another stereo problem — low frequencies need to be almost mono. If you have a loud, sharp bass sound that's on one channel only, it will cause the record to jump. If you imagine the groove of a record being like a canyon with the sylus running along it, a loud bass sound on one channel is like a giant spike on one side of the canyon. When mixing, we typically kept all low end sounds mono or near-mono, and vinyl mastering engineers would do more work if they noticed issues.


### Noise, pops, clicks

Vinyl also has many added noises. When doing an A-B comparison between vinyl and our digital masters, noise, pops and clicks were always the tell-tale sign that we were listening to the vinyl version. If everyone had done their job properly, it was often difficult to hear the difference between the CD and record. Please note that a lot of damage had already been done to the CD mix, to make it fit with vinyl requirements.


### Distortion and converters

Here's where some of the fun begins. Early digital to analogue and analogue to digital converters were pretty terrible. I think a lot of the myths about digital were formed in the 80s, when the tech was still fairly new.

Also, when vinyl or analogue tape distorts, it can sound nice. It's a soft distortion. A harmonic distortion. It's often warm and fuzzy. When digital fails, it's usually an unplesent shrill. I think many people like vinyl because they're attached to the sound of how the format *can't* reproduce well, not the other way around.

In my opinion, vinyl is absolutely terrible. It should never, ever be used as an example of something to be revered.

Cheers,
Marc.

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### Mastering addendum

One thing I forgot to mention — it's common for audiophiles to wax lyrical about how amazing their all analogue system is. It was also common on early CDs to champion digital recordings, mixing and mastering with "DDD" labels on CDs.

Ultimately, it was all consumer-facing bullshit. We used to use a mixture of analogue and digital at every stage, including mastering and I suspect many other artists did as well. They both have good qualities. Summing, EQ (equalisation) and compression often sound way better with high end analogue processing, probably due to the subtle harmonic distortion and physical restrictions of the hardware — analogue compressors can't react as fast, which makes them sound warm and more alive. Limiting and editing has been mostly digital since the day it was possible, because that's something that digital does way better.

I suspect a huge amount of early DDD recordings still had a lot of analogue processing. I also suspect many all-analogue proponents don't realise how much digital processing has been involved in a lot of vinyl recordings. I don't think I've ever met an experienced sound eningeer who didn't use a combination of analogue and digital when recording, mixing and mastering.

Like most good programmers, you use whatever gives you the best results. 

The “vinyl is better” mantra is almost entirely a consumer and prosumer battle.


### Message for Casey

I love you man, I really do. I completely agree about vinyl art. But, vinyl sucks. I can't think of any axis it wins on, when you're talking about audio quality.