Vinyl Is King.

I'm writing this blog today because there are still people on this Earth that believe that CD's or DVD-A (DVD Audio) is the best format to get your audio in. I'm here to rank the King and below of Audio Quality for those that don't know better.

Let's first get out of the way the explanation of the difference of Vinyl vs CD's.

The following excerpt is located here:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=375592

“Hi,

The key to this question is the difference between a digital and an analog recording. Natural sound is by definition analog. When a CD recording is created, this analog is sound is digitized. To do this, they take a lot of snapshots of the analog sound. For a CD recording they take 44,100 snapshots in a minute. These snapshots are then converted to digital information with a certain precision. For a CD recording this precision is 16 bits which means that every one of

the 44,100 snapshots needs to be converted into one of the 65,536 (2^16) possible values.

You can probably see where I am going: by definition a digital recording doesn't include all the sound information. You could visualize a CD recording as a really large chest with a lot of

drawers. Because the number of snapshots that are taken are not infinite (the maximum is 44,100 per minute), the process of taking snapshots results in the loss of information. Information is further lost because each of these snapshots must be made to fit in one of the

65,536 drawers of the chest.

A record player which plays LP?s is strictly analog. A vinyl record has a groove carved into it that mirrors the original sound's waveform. The record player than transforms this groove to an analogue sound signal which can be fed into an amplifier. In this process, no information can be lost. No snapshots need to be taken and the sound doesn't need be converted to one of the possible 65,536 values. There basically is an infinite number of 'snapshots' and 'possible values'. Therefore vinyl recording sound richer than CD recordings (as long as you have a decent vinyl record player).

Be aware that recent DVD Audio players and Super Audio CD players come closer to vinyl recordings as they have a much larger number of possible snapshots in one minute (up to 192,000) and because these snapshots can be converted to a larger number of possible values (up to 16,777,216 possible values, or 24 bit).

Search strategy;

Google: vinyl OR LP "better than" sound CD

I hope you have enough information. If you need any more, please ask

for a clarification!

Thank you,

paul_b_18”

So there we have it. The King is Vinyl, the Queen is DVD-A, and the Jack is CD. Then we get into Lossless digital files that recreate both DVD-A and CD 100% with no loss in quality. The most popular formats include WAV (Waveform Audio File Format), FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), and ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec). Theoretically those lossless digital formats could recreate any digital file available assuming you have a source better than what DVD-A can give you. This can indeed be the case as you look at Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd. There are so many sources to pull from online that the quality goes from horrible all the way to the original mastering tapes released as a digital mix. The main reason to not use WAV is that it does not support tags. Tags is all of the information your song keeps with the file like Artist, Year, Album, and Artwork. FLAC and ALAC both support tags. FLAC is not supported by Apple Products and ALAC does have some support outside of Apple Products. WAV, FLAC, and ALAC are 100% equal in quality. Then we have the MP3. This is the most widely used format because it's smaller in size by usually around 66% overall. But with this you lose the full range the song was mixed in and don't hear everything the Artist intended you to hear. There is a wonderful article that goes into detail on this here: http://www.head-fi.org/t/457310/comparison-flac-vs-mp3-320kbps. Even "high quality" 320kbps MP3's don't retain the full range of the song. The quality is incredibly close to WAV/FLAC/ALAC for the range that is in the song though.

Google Play only supports MP3 @ 320kbps and iCloud only supports MP3 @ 192kbps. Neither of them support a lossless digital format. Hopefully over time with faster networks and higher bandwidths we'll see them start being supported. This is a great link to hear the difference in 320kbps vs 192kbps MP3: http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/mp3-sound-quality-test-128-320/. The higher the bit rate the better the quality is. If you don't hear a difference on the link provided then you are probably one of the people that say they don't see a difference in their Standard TV and 1080p Hi Def TV.

I hope this information is useful for those of you out there that are unaware of the quality of music you haven't been hearing. I hope you go out and buy your favorite Artists' album on vinyl after reading this.

***UPDATE 8/17/2012***
 I recently discovered that the iPod Classic, iPod Touch, and iPhone 4s only supports 24 Bit at 44,100 kHz. So that luxurious 96,000 kHz, or 192,000 kHz if you're Neil Young, simply won't be supported. You'll have to down sample them to 44,100 kHz for the song to play. Or you can jail break your iPod and put Rock Box on it and it will automatically output the song at 44,100 kHz.

***UPDATE 8/20/2012***
I starting looking into 16 bit @ 44kHz vs 24 bit @ 96 kHz, in particular this article:

http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html


I ran this article across a friend of mine on FB who is in my FB Group "Emerging Multimedia Professionals" and he gave an excellent reply, as for me to test 16 bit vs 24 bit would require a very nice set of headphones that I don't have the money for and his explanation does make sense and it was the original thinking I had before the article above.