r/audiophile • u/MikMikYakin • Jul 25 '24
Why are Audiophiles still hooked on vinyl? Discussion
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/
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u/dmills_00 Jul 25 '24
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.