Most probably, but not for the reasons you are thinking of.
If you go round to your friend the audiophile’s house, and he gets out a vinyl and puts it on his record player, and you hear it coming through his big, 4 foot high speakers, it sounds absolutely amazing. Way better than anything you’re normally hearing.
But why?
- The music he just put on is from his precious collection of great albums.
- It’s coming through big, 4 foot high speakers, rather than tinny ear buds
- His hifi (as they were called) has been carefully balanced for the ideal sound. Your earbuds or, worse, Dr Dres, on which you turned up the bass on your iPhone when you first got it and never worked out how to turn it down again, are not.
- He has ideal separation between his speakers, for a perfect stereo image. You’re not even hearing stereo on headphones—you’re hearing binaural.
- The album in question was recorded with low compression and played back with high amplification. It has 40dB of dynamic range. You can hear the gentle whisper of needle noise, but it doesn’t bother you. Your Carly Rae Jepsen album was recorded with the limiter set to maximum, and, despite the possibilities of digital (96dB dynamic range or better), has an actual dynamic range of 11dB on a good day, and 4dB on a bad one. (More is better.)
- There’s a psychological effect of sitting in his sitting room, listening to carefully curated music.
- The album artwork is immense, so the imaginative journey you go on is also much bigger.
In principle, CD or AAC can give a much better quality, but it is not usually reflected in the listening experience. It’s mainly heard on headphones, car speakers, or on boxes with a separation of about 12 inches. The headphones have got built in compensation to make some kinds of music sound better, which makes most kinds of music sound worse. There are only a few truly great albums. Most of them were recorded in the days of vinyl, and wrestling with the problems of vinyl was part of the creative process. In other words, they made the most of the medium.
There’s nothing about vinyl itself which is intrinsically better. It’s just that a huge amount of care went into production, packaging and reproduction of vinyl records. A better medium — CD or low compression audio files — will not be as good if less care has gone into the track as a whole, and the listening presentation.
There are a few people offering to edit the answer to say that vinyl is intrinsically better because sound is analogue.
This represents a misunderstanding. The sound you hear is ‘analogue’ (actually, it isn’t ‘analogue’, it’s just sound). It is transmitted to your speakers by an analogue means, and your speakers turn it from an electrical signal into sounds your ear can hear. This is a non-linear process, which is why some speakers sound better than others. At the other end, it has to be converted from sound into an electrical signal — by way of electromagnetism — through a microphone. It goes through a mixing desk, and various compressors, and, for analogue, magnetic tape, all of which add non-linearity. If it goes onto vinyl, it then goes through a physical process of transmuting electrical signals into grooves, and, on the player, the needle then converts these back into electrical signals. All of these are non-linear processes. Digital is just a different kind of conversion.
If you’ve ever worked with analogue tape, or analogue camera film, or any other analogue recording medium, you will remember just how hard it was to stop the intrinsic discontinuities and artefacts of analogue from destroying the signal. When you put something onto magnetic tape — and almost all analogue recordings after the early days were done this way, even if they ended up on vinyl — you are breaking it down into granular form like digital. The difference is that tape is stochastically granular, whereas digital is a granular matrix. But you’ve still split it into chunks. If the chunks are small enough, then you will not hear the difference.
