this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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CDs just don’t have that “collector’s item” characteristic (yet?). Physical album sales are low enough nowadays that enthusiasts that are looking for a specific medium probably make up a very large portion of the buyers.
It's more that a CD is just a physical copy of a digital file. Buying a CD and buying a mp3 file are basically the same. People buy records because they have this idea that "analog sounds better"(despite modern record players being digital as well - it's the tubes, not just the record, that made it analog)
Records often do sound better. This is a case of garbage in garbage out though - records cannot handle some of the tricks done in mastering to make CDs/digital sound okay on a car radio (that is against road noise), from a phone (tiny speakers) and all the other awful listening environments most people listen to music (a cynic would call this background noise with lyrics not music). So if you want to make a record you have to master it without those tricks and this makes for better music. People who listen to records also generally are listening in a better listening environment. If you can get a CD mastered for a great listening environment and listen to in a great listening environment it would be better than a record could ever be - but you can't get a CD mastered like that and even if you could most people are not listening in a great environment and so the CD will sound worse than one mastered as they are.
You are right that the main difference is that vinyl records are mastered for use in a specific environment designed for the best audio experience and CDs are generally mastered for a wide variety of listening environments that include terrible acoustics. But any well mastered CD will sound better on the same level of hardware compared to vinyl from a technical perspective and the supposed superiority of vinyl tends to come from the imperfections analogue playback, including noise from dust, is really a preference thing.
Not to mention a ton of modern record players are digital, so vinyl is just one physical step between digital mastering and digital playback.
This is theoretically the best defense of records I've heard...
But, I still find it pretty hard to believe they're mastering the records any different than they do anything else.
My current hunch is that maybe the imprecise nature of a record results in it sounding a bit warmer (which ... to be fair is a very desirable sound to a lot of folks; I've thought about using a tube amp for that exact reason).
They have to master records differently as too much bass boost will cause the needle to bounce out of the groove and skip.
I ... find that hard to believe, but also someone on the R site said in a "everything is bass heavy" troubleshooting section that the vinyl master has less bass and the record players add extra bass back in to the signal.
I'm really leaning towards Vinyl is just a different reproduction that some people like more than digital. Seems like a similar thing with how some people use tube amps with their digital audio library to cause that "old school radio" warm tone when you crank it up.