Music formats and capabilities.....

[heypaulie]

I was recently told by someone that music listened to from vinyl is the best source for a perfect recording with CD's coming next and MP3's last. I was told this is something to do with the fact that on the latter 2 formats certain 'parts' of songs are missing when they are compressed. Does anyone have any facts to prove this and what 'parts' of songs disappear?! Please point me in right direction....

[Aschenbach]

Some audiophiles still prefer what they perceive as the warmer and more natural sound of vinyl over the harsher sound of CDs. Some listeners were also disappointed by what they considered to be unfaithful remastering of analog recordings.

The arguments about the superior quality of vinyl records are wide-ranging. Proponents of analog audio argue that, unlike CD audio, it is not affected by the sharp frequency cutoff and phase characteristics, including group delay, near the Nyquist frequency and the quantization noise of 16-bit linear quantization, but that analog recording has a more gradual frequency cutoff, and what they consider to be a more natural descent into the analog noise floor.

Proponents of digital audio state that these differences are generally inaudible to normal human hearing, and the lack of clicks, hiss and pops from digital recordings greatly improved sound fidelity. They also state that more modern anti-aliasing filters and oversampling systems used in modern CD recordings greatly reduce the problems observed with early CDs.

[ugly_bob]

It's inherent with digital music that some of the music is lost. The original analogue sound is sampled (at around 22KHz I think for CDs) and this is then assigned a number between 0 and 65535 (for 16-bit) for each sample.

Although you lose some information in doing this, It's not likely to make a noticable difference. Some people say they can notice a difference in quality between LP and CD music, but very few. Indeed, due to the fact that LPs are read mechanically, the system is open to much more noise (in a signals sense) than CDs, hence the crackling and hissing observed with vinyl.

MP3s simply compress the data from a CD Audio file, thus with a smaller MP3, you may well notice a detraction of quality - especially in the higher pitched range

[198x]

This was actually tested on the Gadget Show on channel 5 a while back.

It was about vinyl vs CD vs MP3 and indeed vinyl won.