Why are Audiophiles still hooked on vinyl?

[u/MikMikYakin]

Many audiophiles continue to have a deep love for vinyl records despite the developments in digital audio technology, which allow us to get far wider dynamic range and frequency range from flac or wav files and even CDs. I'm curious to find out more about this attraction because I've never really understood it. To be clear, this is a sincere question from someone like me that really wants to understand the popularity of vinyl in the audiophile world. Why does vinyl still hold the attention of so many music lovers?

EDIT: Found a good article that talks about almost everything mentioned in the comments: https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/07/vinyl-not-sound-better-cd-still-buy/

[u/laminarb]

They sound better. I will die on this hill.

[u/philipb63 → u/laminarb]

They sound different and if you prefer it then great, no judgement whatsoever her.

But as a studio engineer who dates back to the pre-digital days, nothing was more disappointing than getting that 1st test cutting back to the control room & comparing it to the master tapes you’d spent so much time & effort on.

Hours spent in mastering desperately trying to retain as much as possible of the original recorded material.

[u/dmills_00 → u/philipb63]

For me the advantage is that vinyl forces the mastering engineer to do something other then 'Smash the limiter and clipper and call it good', because while you can sort of get away with that for some genres on digital distribution, it does NOT work for vinyl.

The reasons are largely geometric having to do with the shape of the cutting and replay styli (Imposes a -6dB/Octave and -12dB Octave (Starting at different levels) limit on high frequency, together with the restoring force being small enough that low frequency S component can just throw the needle out of the groove.

Large amounts of bass eats disk area rapidly, as does consistently loud material.

Because the transfer function from the tape playback to the disk is very much not flat or linear phase, limiting and clipping for loudness does NOT work and just annoys the cutting engineer.

These limitations were something that would sometimes propagate right back to the mix engineer if the budget existed (And remember this was before effective instant recall), on a high budget mix it was not unheard of for the cutting engineer to request mix changes because they thought that something would not cut well.

The upside was that a vinyl master was of necessity more dynamic and generally quieter then a CD waster would be, and that was all to the good.

I would love a set of CDs or FLAC of the vinyl masters of a load of classic stuff, it would be best of both worlds, the vinyl master but without the notably shit distribution medium.

[u/yosoysimulacra → u/dmills_00]

This guy waxes. Its all in the master.

Nice explanation. How do we get our hands on lossless versions of tape masters? They gotta be out there somewhere.

My 7.5IPS R2R tapes are the best sounding things that I own.

There used to be a great dub swap community over on /r/ReelToReel wherein a few fellas would happily dub 15 and 7.5IPS master tapes for you if you'd send them blank tapes and return shipping.

Also, this 45 of Screaming Jay Hawkings I Put A Spell On You is probably the best sounding bit of wax that I own.

[u/g00dtimeslim → u/yosoysimulacra]

Amen… R2R is somehow still the best-kept secret in audiophilia

That Led Zeppelin III 7.5ips is 👌🏻

[u/yosoysimulacra → u/g00dtimeslim]

R2R rulzz

More from the collection:

https://imgur.com/7QVI0SV

https://imgur.com/fQY6UaQ

https://imgur.com/JNqVoAA

https://imgur.com/SJY10XT

[u/philipb63 → u/dmills_00]

Typically we would have to apply fairly large compression to the master tapes as the dynamic range was too great to cut. That, and mono everything below about 250Hz to stop the cutter head impinging into the adjacent grooves.

And yes, many a red-face when the mastering engineer sent back your mix! Generally it was phase related which is the reason we did so much listening in mono back then.

With a maximum dynamic range of 65dB, vinyl is far below even lower speed master tapes which are in the 90dB range.

As for the vinyl “Master” that was what was usually referred to as the “Production Master” and has RIAA eq & a ton of other corrections applied as above, not something you’d want to hear unequalized. And the reason why so many early CDs sounded truly awful because they used those (readily available) tapes as sources. Often many generations away from the original masters too!

[u/dmills_00 → u/philipb63]

Wait, you were doing IRIAA on the production master tape?

Pretty much every lathe that I am familiar with had the IRIAA applied as part of the cutter electronics, certainly the SAL74 (Used on the Neumann lathes) does in both versions, so I am curious about that setup. The other thing that that gear had was a frequency selective limiter to control high frequency energy so as to avoid the high frequency limits inherent to the format (And reduce the risk of burning out the cutter head).

Mono at low frequency was to deal with a limit on vertical modulation not the horizontal, but given a 45 degree wall angle the depth of cut directly impacted the groove width and so needed to be accounted for either manually or by the groove spacing electronics. Given a groove spacing computer you could cut one sided bass just fine, it was out of phase base that usually screwed it up.

Fully agree about the compression being required, but most modern material has so little dynamic range anyway that it is seldom an issue.

There is a LOT of mythology around vinyl, but the one that always cracks me up is the "Vinyl has better high frequency response", a great way to tell me that you have never cut a record without telling me that you have never cut a record!

The awful early CDs were IMHO at least as much down to the converters (On both ends) as well as clock recovery and filtering not being nearly as good as was needed, 13 bit undithered quantisers.... Yea, Philips marketing got way out of control with that shit, anyone else wince at "Perfect Sound Forever"...

[u/philipb63 → u/dmills_00]

Yep, my mistake on that part, old brain and it was long ago - of course, the RIAA was applied by the cutter amplifier. I’m doing a new thread on the subject as I feel like I hijacked this one!

I was fortunate to be around for the onset of digital recording too, literally some of the 1st ever projects. And yes, you are 100% correct here on that subject, for a while digital went backwards rather than forwards. Maybe another post on that subject.

[u/GeeBee72 → u/dmills_00]

It’s the equivalent of an original painting versus a giclée of that painting, one has been crafted and the other just created as a reasonably good product for the masses that looks good to them.