Let’s face it – there’s no need to debate whether digital music sounds better than vinyl.
It’s beyond obvious that the former sounds, looks, and even ‘tastes’ better as a matter of fact.
That being said, we’re here to go over the five reasons why vinyl sounds better and more authentic than digital format music.
Vinyl simply sounds superior
There are millions and millions of reasons why vinyl sounds superior to MP3 format, but let’s just agree on this – these formats aren’t really suitable for comparison as far as quality is concerned.
Namely, the audio quality of the songs you are listening to mainly depends on the quality of your speakers, but there’s a limit to how ‘good’ the song can sound this way, whereas listening to that same song on a record player gets a different flavour entirely.
Turntables are purposefully made to capture the beauty of vinyl records, you get the same experience the performers had while recording it, while the same can’t be said for MP3 audio files.
Vinyls are ‘physical’
Although this point doesn’t deal with the actual audio quality issue, the ‘physical’ attribute of vinyl records is equally as important.
PCs and other digital devices ‘process’ audio files, hence errors are possible, spikes often happen, and even in the best case scenario where nothing goes awry, digital songs are still digital songs – you can accidentally scratch them or destroy them rather easily.
If you’re asking ‘well, you can scratch a vinyl record as well, right?’, that question wouldn’t be too valid. Namely, the way a record player operates is by literally scratching the record, so it’s only obvious that vinyl records are more resistant to these forms of damage.
On another hand, vinyl records can be repaired and restored to almost pristine condition, whereas a scratched or broken DVD or CD can’t.
Collectability adds the flair
Again, this might not be the reason why vinyl records sound better than digital ones per se, but once you start collecting them, you start to regard and treat them differently. The term ‘my favourite song’ gets taken up a notch once you actually start collecting vinyl records.
Have you ever heard of that one guy or a girl that’s a ‘CD collector’? Probably not. On another hand, have you heard of vinyl record collectors? There are tons of them, there are whole communities of collectors, not to mention the social aspect of this – once you buy your first vinyl record, there’s no stopping there.
You start to appreciate music more, start to perceive it through a different prism, and that, in one way or another, changes the way you actually ‘hear’ music.
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Major breakthroughs in the turntable industry
There are people who claim that ‘record players’ are a thing of the past – modern technologies are now ‘responsible’ for Hi-Fi speakers and sound systems, so we don’t actually need vinyl record players, right? Well, that’s as wrong as can be.
Namely, there are still people who are loyal to music, people who invent new ways to improve how a record player performs, so for as long as these heroes exist, digitalized music formats can never come close to the real deal.
It’s true that there are people who think that record players are expensive, but can you really put a price tag on quality? There are good turntables to be found even under $300 these days, and that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Try it out, give it a shot, and you will start to notice the difference one way or another.
Uncompressed audio files
Regardless of how ‘big’ a vinyl record is, that’s something that turntables won’t address as an issue, whereas the same can’t be said for MP3s which are stored on PCs, laptops, and other smart devices.
You’d be surprised how big the tracks are once they’re out of the recording room – dozens of gigabytes are a thing even before the compression process takes place, and that’s simply too big for the demand of today’s technologies (PC storage, YouTube uploads, and such).
That being said, most people ‘compress’ MP3 files and scale them down a bit, so that uploads, streaming, and sharing can be made easier. One thing that happens along the way is that the quality of these songs gets diminished. Obviously, vinyl records are not compressed in such a way, so you get Hi-Fi experience every time.
