dwasifar
ArboristSite Operative
I'm about to hold forth at length on psychoacoustics, rationalization, and the power of suggestion, so if this doesn't interest you, skip this post. You have been warned.
It's trendy right now to make the blanket claim that vinyl "sounds better," as if that were an objective fact. It's not. It's an opinion, and the only reason you don't really hear the opposing opinion from the other side is that digital is the standard and doesn't need evangelists. There are a lot of things about audio reproduction you can measure and quantify objectively, but what "sounds better" is and always will be subjective. To put this in perspective, there was a study done about ten years ago showing that the MP3 generation - those who had grown up on compressed digital files, iPods, and streaming - actually preferred the sound of the compressed, lossy mp3 files over the uncompressed source material. To them, the obvious audio artifacts of digital compression are "normal" sound. The waveform is far less accurate, but they find the change euphonic.
I think the same thing is going on with the vinyl fad. Do vinyl and CD sound different? You bet. Those things that can be objectively measured - waveforms, distortion, noise, channel separation, dynamic range, channel crosstalk - all show CDs to be far more accurate in reproducing the original waveform than vinyl ever was or could hope to be. Certainly there are people who like the vinyl sound, but what that really means is they prefer greater amounts of distortion because they like that kind of distortion. That's okay, if that's what they want, but again, it's an opinion and a preference, not a hard fact. Vinyl sounds better to them.
A good comparison might be the frame rate of film. 24fps has been the standard for ages, and you're conditioned to think that looks natural. When you see something in 48fps, like Avatar or The Hobbit, movement looks weird and artificial. 48fps is actually more accurate, but you've trained yourself to expect the less-smooth movements of the older standard.
When CDs first invaded the market the audio industry was all over it. "Perfect sound forever" was the claim, and they sold a lot of hardware, and everyone had to rebuy their favorite albums. It was very profitable, at first. But once that died down, it became obvious that the CD standard was not very conducive to repeat sales. There was not nearly as much difference between the music reproduction of cheap CD players vs. expensive ones than there had been for analog equipment, when customers could be put on the treadmill of upgrades, chasing perfect sound with diminishing returns. The customer who kept coming back to buy different phono cartridges and such in the pursuit of better sound stopped coming back after he switched to CDs.
The reaction of the high-end audio industry was to take a hard left turn straight into the land of voodoo and BS. This is when you started to see insane claims about accessories really start to take off. There was always a reason to buy good analog interconnects, up to a point, but when you see people spewing sciencey-sounding doubletalk about "digital smearing" to sell you a $100 digital interconnect that does exactly what a $2 one would do, or $250 power cords, or (and I am really not kidding) hand carved exotic hardwood knobs to make your amplifier sound better, you're listening to BS artists preying on your gullibilities. Remember the green pen thing? Thousands of golden-eared audiophiles convinced themselves that coloring the edges of CDs with a green marker made them sound better. There were even special green pens being sold in the back pages of audio magazines. Eventually everyone sort of realized they were being stupid and you stopped hearing about it. There's no science behind any of this, just mysticism and woo-woo. But it sells, because people want to believe in it.
With this in mind, is it any wonder the industry would love to see vinyl come back? It's expensive and fussy and focuses people on constant hardware maintenance. It takes audio back to a day when things like pricey interconnects and fancy isolation feet and so forth really did make some difference (still not as much as claimed, but it wasn't complete bullshit like some of those other things). And, a plus for the record labels, there's no way to file-share analog. CDs and MP3s were the moment that they dropped the leash on their moneymaker, and they'd love to put that particular dog back in its pen.
There are people who genuinely prefer the distortions of vinyl, just as there are those who prefer the distortions of tube amplifiers. But I think right now their numbers are being swelled by a lot of newcomers just wanting to be part of the vinyl elite, which makes it easy for them to convince themselves that vinyl sounds better to them. Most of it has more to do with fashion, rationalization, and status than with anything concrete about audio reproduction. But people love their hocus-pocus and magical thinking.
Sorry for the diatribe. I had to get that off my chest. We now return you to making fun of morons on Craigslist.
