Music Banter - View Single Post - Vinyl making a HUGE comeback:
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Old 03-17-2009, 02:32 AM   #64 (permalink)
Guybrush
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You don't really lose much quality if you have a high bitrate file. The reason vinyl will always be better (ranging from virtually unnoticeable to noticeable depending on the file) is because it's lossless. The sound is recorded and represented by physical changes in the medium, the depth of the grooves. When the sound is digital, the way I understand it, it's not continous .. rather, it samples the sound many times a second and converts that to numbers. How often the sound is sampled and the size of each sample determines the quality of sound. The more often it is sampled for example, the more accurate the rerepresentation.

If you have a 320 kbps mp3, I'm sure you don't actually hear much difference in sound quality. It will sound different because it's vinyl and possibly played on a different sound system, but that's not synonymous with better quality. Furthermore, analog mediums are vulnerable to specks of dirt and scratches and whatnot that will corrupt the quality of those mediums, even if they start out real good.

I will never replace my digital music for vinyls. Vinyls are nice to keep because the covers are nice etc. but for listening to music, the cons outweigh the pros when compared to digital music.
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