Chronometer (aka yacomino)
32470
Ah! A trick question!
Nov 27, 2020,13:43 PM
If you allow me to cheat, I would like to re-use a post on a similar question a few months back as I like Vinyl as well as Digital equally...I think both are great and with DSD today, digital has matured into an organic medium as much as Vinyl can be. However the preferred medium will almost always depend on three elements:
- quality of the recording;
- quality of the mastering;
- quality of the playback system...
Music is about emotion, not technology, and when done right, each type of medium can bring out the emotion of the original artist performance. I think a question on another thread was which is better Vinyl or Digital. This was my answer hoping this helps:
The debate between vinyl and digital is an interesting one but sometime we forget that it all depends on the actual source for a specific recording and also, nothing is black and white. Let me try to suggest some reflexion points with a few scenarios
1- If the original recording is analog and mastering was also done with top notch analog equipment, then put on a vinyl and played back on a good turntable, the results will be unbeatable by any digital medium of that same recording;
2- If that same analog recording above was poorly mastered before being transferred into a vinyl it is quite possible that a top notch digital mastering (some of the best digital mastering engineer do use full tube system in their workflow) of that analog recording end up being better played back on a good digital playback system not because digital is better, but because the mastering was done better;
3- Today there are also many recording which have been original recorded digitally. Sometime people do create a vinyl starting from these digital recording. So for those album by now you probably guess that if you want to know which medium sound better, it depends! It will depends on the quality of the mastering, the quality of the vinyl pressing and the quality of the playback system for each medium - several commercial album fall into this category BTW as most of the recording nowadays are digital. Most of my Diana Krall vinyl were created from the original digital recording. Some actually sound amazing as the whole workflow was executed perfectly and some actually sound much better in digital format because the vinyl pressing was done poorly...
4- A fully digital workflow (in DSD for example), from recording to mastering to playback executed perfectly can sound pretty much on par with any example in my scenario 1 above for that specific album of course