Plastic vs Vinyl – No Contest

A Personal Comment……

Many months ago my regular Wednesday evening and Sunday afternoon vinyl listening sessions stopped, much to the dismay of my wife Michele. I had become annoyed by the effort involved in continually changing sides when spinning 45RPM audiophile discs and I rarely get the same satisfying aural experience from listening to plastic. Also with COVID impacting just about everything, I couldn’t find many vinyl audiophile releases that I wanted to buy for review. So I decided to take some time-off from listening to vinyl before I jumped headlong into reviewing plastic (CD’s).

After my ears and brain had “lost that lovin’ feelin” for vinyl, I jumped into CD listening. I was amazed at just how quickly I ignored my memory of the sound of the studio control room and vinyl, and became quickly accustomed to listening to, and comparing, 16bit 44.1KHz plastic discs.

So after many months of being “vinyl free”, and having recently ordered, The Thelonious Monk Quartet – Monk’s Dream, and The Gil Evans Orchestra – Out Of The Cool , Michele convinced this aging vinyl ‘fan-boy’ to go back last night (2/24/2021) and re-introduce my ears (and brain) to the “sound of music“, sorry, vinyl!

IT WAS A REVELATION!

I randomly selected three audiophile quality vinyl albums that night and reluctantly dragged myself into my A/V room:

1. Sheffield Lab 20 – The Sheffield Track Record
2. Dire Straits – Dire Straits – Mo-Fi 45RPM
3. Daft Punk – Random Access Memories

It took about two bars of Lab 20 to put me right back into the control room at Livingston Studios. It was quite an emotional evening. I sat there mesmerized and transfixed by the imaging, dynamics and frequency response of what that mechanical stylus and arm was tracing out from those vinyl grooves. The level of realism was outstanding bringing the performance back to life and right back into my room. Yes you guessed it, almost as good on the other two albums.

To put it mildly I was astonished that with all my high end digital technology and high end digital processing for plastic CD’s, that vinyl was such an enormous step, nay, leap, in sound quality. It wasn’t as if anything I had been listening too for the last several months was poor, it mostly wasn’t, it just couldn’t ‘hold a torch’ to what was coming of this vinyl. Can I put it all down to the medium or is it a much more complex mix of; the recording, mixing, mastering and medium? I suspect the latter. Either way, I did ultimately get a few of my older audiophile CD’s, SACD’s and DVDA’s out just to check, and you guessed it. While several sounded very good and technically superior to many of the CD’s that I have been listening to, they were not audiophile vinyl.

Considering the theoretical (and measured) technical superiority of a modern digital signal chain to that of even the best custom engineered all analog signal chain with a mechanical process placed upon its medias input & output, a stylus, I was taken aback. I concluded that the production and recording of high end professional performances and their attendant processing for vinyl causes engineers to take exceptional care at whatever part of the audio chain they are working on. Vinyl cannot provide the dynamic range, signal to noise ratio, low distortion or frequency response that the modern digital chain can. However, it sure sounded like vinyl well exceeded almost anything I was hearing off plastic.

In the end it is our ears that tell us what is good and what is not. NOT a technical measurement, though that certainly helps. Unfortunately, despite the recent modest increase in vinyl sales, I think that the vinyl audiophile maybe a dying breed, especially with the gargantuan increase in on-line streaming and on-the-move ear bud listening. At the end of the day these digital bit streams, either high bit rate uncompressed LPCM or “lossless” FLAC or MQA, are little different to a plastic digital signal source, and are sometimes created and up-sampled from one. I do understand that some streaming services are provided with the original digital masters, but….digital is digital. So unless those masters contain significantly higher bit rates with a lot more bits per sample with lower overall end to end jitter, they are no different to what comes off the CD or DVDA. Just a lot more convenient. This was certainly my experience with the HQ streaming service that I tried.

So based on all my recent CD listening, and ignoring the music and its performance, many well recorded and mastered plastic albums, even when recorded in an all analog studio environment, just don’t provide the visceral, dynamic, smooth and open sound of a well engineered, mastered and pressed audiophile vinyl album.

In support of the above comment I also have several of my Sheffield Lab D2D vinyl series on plastic (44.1KHz, 16bit) that were created from the ORIGINAL live sessions digital back-up tapes. Remember, these digital back up recordings contain ‘exactly’ what went to the Neuman cutting lathe. Not one of them sound as good as, and none sound better than, the vinyl pressings!

So it is with a much lighter heart, and improved patience, that I’m “never gonna give you up” vinyl!

Have a thought or a comment? I would really like to hear about your listening experiences.