Do Clear Vinyls Sound Better

Sales of vinyl records have been soaring although they still represent only a tiny fraction of the music industry s revenues.

Do clear vinyls sound better.

Of course when you listen in on casual discussions of sound in 2013 you often hear that lps are back because they sound better this has happened in part because digital audio is now. Vinyl is back no doubt about it. Cds reflect exactly what the artists recorded in the studio. The answer lies in the difference between analog and digital recordings.

Very few additives can be mixed into clear vinyl without jeopardizing the opacity which means there is a potential for worse sound quality albeit this drop is often imperceptible to the common listener. Clear vinyl picture discs and glow in the dark pressings are more susceptible to poor playback. There s basically nothing you can do to make an hour long album on one record sound good gonsalves said. Pete lyman co owner and chief mastering technician at infrasonic sound an audio and vinyl mastering studio in echo park.

The latter is usually preferred for an album as it means you can fit more tracks onto a single disc but it is becoming slightly more popular to favour sound over convenience especially with re issues. Loud music can sound better in some instances but when you push it too far you lose a lot of sound quality when your listeners change the volume. A few exceptions exist. So a record spinning at 45rpm will sound better than the same one built to spin at 33 1 3rpm.

It s also clear that the vinyl experience is about more than just sound. The more information running past the needle per second the more detailed the sound being reproduced. Take a look at the graph below. A vinyl record is an analog recording and cds and dvds are digital recordings.

Comparison of a raw analog audio signal to the cd audio and dvd audio output. Vinyl s capable of a lot but only if the grooves are wide enough for the needle to track. Is the sound on vinyl records better than on cds or dvds. As of today he makes it clear that he s comparing vinyl to mp3 but when i originally commented he simply said that vinyl was better than digital i agree that vinyl when played through a good audio setup will probably sound better than an mp3 file especially a low bitrate one.

By doing it too much you can unintentionally add noise and artifacts into your recordings by raising the levels of certain sounds as well as cutting the loudness of individual. About 2 percent in 2014.