Records from the past were recorded with tape and analogue equipment and recorded on vinyl. It then went to digital recordings on CD with digital recording gear.
How are vinyl records of digital recordings better than CD’s?
In: Technology
They aren’t, from a technical point of view.
but vinyls have large sleeves with room for album art, can be pressed out of colourful materials instead of black for special editions and the process of playing them feels cool. So if you’re gonna collect physical format music, considering all of it is on the internet anyway, you go for the cool format.
Technically it’s an inferior format, as far as music reproduction goes. But people enjoy the retro aspect and the satisfying sounds and visuals of a spinning disk on a record player. The artwork on disks and sleeves is pretty neat too.
They’re not better really, it’s just trendy and people come with various reasons like “warmer” etc.
There’s more to it on the technical side, it’s best to google it.
Popularity has often no relation to underlying technology. There has been a surge in ‘nostalgia’ for a lot of things and vinyl has been one of them. When it comes to actual listening, vinyl has a special place for many as it ‘seems’ more natural than a fully digital and clean experience.
From a technical point of view vinyl records do not produce better sound then CD. Although it is possible to argue that the frequency range of vinyl records is much higher and the dynamic range is higher since vinyl is an analog format, CD was specifically created to capture the entire range of human hearing with some margins. And the issues with vinyl as a physical and degrading material makes it much worse.
However vinyl records can produce a much better listening experience. It is a larger format so you get more album art. You can press the vinyl in different colours and do various fancy things with it. When taking the vinyl out of its sleeve you can see the music in the grooves even before you start playing it. Even the longer time setting up a vinyl record on the player compared to a CD and the more manual steps involved increases the anticipation and eventually improve the experience.
“smoother sound” , the feeling of gently taking a album out of its sleeve and gently putting the needle in the groove , the crackling sound of silence … It is a user experience , like live music is nearly never better then on record but people go for the experience and that is better .
Apart from what others have said there is another aspect, and that is the “ritual” of playing a vinyl. Since there is a bit of effort to play a vinyl it softly forces you to play an album from start to finish. This provides a contrast to the modern way of listening to music where play queues and skipping is quick and easy. CDs are sort of in between these two extremes. It’s quicker to skip songs, and change CDs although not as easy as Spotify.
It’s a more rewarding thing to own, that’s mostly it apart from specific cases of audio differences which are largely not relevant for newly released music.
A CD is just an inconvenient storage device for the same files you can download off Bandcamp or whatever. A CD is a generic thing that can be created simply and cheaply by anyone, and the physical experience leaves much to be desired. Cheap plastic case that is easily broken, minimal artwork and liner notes, looks the same on the shelf as a copy of Microsoft Publisher 98.
Meanwhile a vinyl record is an almost bespoke item that likely requires the music to be mastered differently to account for the limitations of vinyl, a skilled engineer working the lathe to cut the lacquer that is used to create the stampers that create the records. The records themselves can be in any kind of fun colours if you want. The jackets are large and can have gatefolds to display even more art.
A record is just something that is a bit more special and involves a different experience of owning and listening to it. A CD isn’t far enough away from just streaming the music so isn’t as satisfying to own.
A lot of interesting answers here. I agree that technically any decent CD player will outperform any vinyl system.
One thing that is often forgotten is that music is mastered to suit the format it is likely going to be played on. It seems to me that a lot of the nostalgia for music from the 60’s and 70’s is due to this mastering as much as the actual format. Masters tended to have a more “spatial” feel and the modern “everything all at once and all at full” compression trend had not started. There were quiet bits in even the heaviest rock albums…
Perhaps I’m old.
The popularity of vinyl records doesn’t mean they’re better than CDs.
Popularity is not equal to quality.
The resurgence of vinyl is a trend, of nostalgia, and of people wanting to collect physical things, and to cater to the people who want to experience some forms of non-digital material experiences.
But it’s not because it’s better than CDs. That is objectively untrue.
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