Cds have more dynamic range than vinyl?

CD is more linear and dynamic than vinyl, but doesn't sound good to my ears.

 

...and is about as useful...

 

Another train wreck thread that I can't seem to not gawk at.

CD has a greater dynamic range on paper of course. Vinyl has a mid-range quality like. Vinyl has a lot of distortion starting around 10k but the second harmonic is too high for me to care about. Analog doesn't need dither to reduce the crossover distortion though.

If you can't trace your records you may as well throw them in the bin...

 

Sorry but I have to disagree on this one . I prefer CDs longer playing time , extra tracks it's small size is an advantage when carrying around, playing late at night , certain styles of music where quiet passages are used, it does have great sound quality but I think vinyl sounds better. It's more 3D & the bandwidth is more extended & feels more like the real event then cd. If you want to use this term
"prefer" so be it but I prefer to use better.

 

The longer possible playing time with a CD is more or less a fact, so is the smaller size. The rest is subjective, it´s not better or worse, anyone else can have a different view and they wouldn´t be wrong. But nobody can state the Lp is the same size as a CD. It´s good to understand what is subjective and what is not.

 

Why does that surprise you? It's an audiophile forum.

Nah! It's probably because we can't discuss politics, race, and religion.

 

For those of you watching at home, the Indisputable Facts established so far are: The LP and the CD are different in physical size.

The longer playing time of the CD is "more or less" a fact.

 

One stores groove indentions in a spiraled track, and one stores pits on a spiral track. So, they're the same!

 

No surprise at all, I simply made an observation... However, it can be interesting to read the comments by those who are more sure of their own facts than the actual ones.

 

Would you rather have a mint 69 Camaro or a new one off the lot? I would say the classic is more fun to drive, holds its value better, looks cooler and will require more maintenance.

A new one will come with a Cd player, get better gas mileage, be more reliable and you can let your girlfriend drive it with less concern of it getting wrecked.

Same thing and there is no wrong answer, just different preferences.

 

I am reading carefully, You are simply wrong.

 

I don't think they're usually better, I'd say it's probably more like 50/50.

 

I certainly wouldn't tell you that. But I would tell you that if we are talking about the *capacity of the medium* we *have to only consider it at it's optimum.* If we take the on paper numbers for CD and then compare it to less than ideal examples of vinyl then we are simply making an unfair comparison. It would be no better than taking a brick walled CD and claiming that is proof of a lack of dynamic range of CD as a medium.

If we want to talk about the dynamic range of an individual LP then yeah we talk about the actual surface noise on *that* LP. If we want to talk about what the medium is capable of we only consider the quietest vinyl ever pressed. That I will tell you.

 

Agreed but...we can look for objective cause and effect mechanisms behind our preferences.

 

Ahh, but that´s when everything starts to get wrong, and not interesting, and not important. It´s much, much better just to say we listen subjectively, and we might prefer to listen in different ways, using different components. Saying that one prefers CD and then explaining why one objectively does that, it just doesn´t work, in principle, if it´s not what is physical. It´s this pseudo-objectivety that often is the cause of an heated debate.

 

Whether or not it is the cause of debate I still think it's worth exploring. And it doesn't have to be pseudo objectivity. Nothing wrong with making measurements and looking for correlations with subjective preferences.

 

Well I agree, but that is not normally the case. Few are making measurements that are in reality contributing.

 

Don't I know it. Having been open to admitting that I ditched vinyl a few years ago, for reasons that had nothing to do with any supposed lack of quality with vinyl, and even though I grew up with it for decades beforehand and very much enjoyed it, seemingly, my moving to all digital and leaving the P3/AT440MLa on top of the wardrobe makes me a vinyl hater. All I ever said was that I was ready to give up vinyl when CD was as good and in many cases better. Whoa!

 

Sad but true

 

On a similar note my Yugo has more high speed range than any Nascar car. The compression experienced while accelerating kinda negates it though.

 

Not an uncommon story. Kind of makes me sad that some folks have given up on vinyl for practical reasons. While I have a preference for vinyl when all else is equal we should all know by now that all else is seldom equal. There may be more examples of music better mastered on vinyl (IME YMMV) there are more than enough examples of music better mastered on CD or SACD or DVD-A to make those formats worth having for the purpose of better sound. So despite my preference for the euphonic colorations of vinyl I would not be without CD, SACD or DVD-A for the sake of those titles that are better mastered on those formats.

 

I would imagine most of us could agree that the CD format is capable of more dynamic range than the vinyl format. And I would imagine that most of us similarly could agree that, for a wide variety of reasons already discussed here, that dynamic range advantage of the CD format often is not taken advantage of, or negated, or reversed, or irrelevant in practice.

In fact, one could say the same thing about channel separation. Vinyl has more crosstalk than digital/CD, and therefore inferior stereo channel separation. And yet not only does this weakness of vinyl usually not pose a problem, it actually can enhance our enjoyment of the sound (at least in some cases for some people). In other words, the variable nature of analogue crosstalk is a likely candidate for one of the main "euphonic distortion" components that attract so many folks to the sound of vinyl playback.

Yes?

 

some interesting comments in this article about the whole debate

http://www.laweekly.com/music/why-cds-may-actually-sound-better-than-vinyl-5352162

 

Er . . . uh . . .