Why Vinyl Is Better Than Digital Music

Digital music can sound more dead than vinyl for multiple reasons.

Why vinyl is better than digital music.

Sales of vinyl records have been soaring although they still represent only a tiny fraction of the music industry s revenues. About 2 percent in 2014. My theory about why vinyl sounds better goes beyond the analog mastering and the nice album art and having the actual physical music in the room rather that just the code. Some of the credit probably goes to the hipster trend toward retro everything but music lovers often claim records just sound better than.

Digital music or more specifically the mp3 file is compressed to be extremely loud. If you re streaming music from the likes of spotify apple music or tidal you re listening to a compressed music file. Plus they re not going to skip unless scratched. Vinyl is back no doubt about it.

This causes a lack of warmth and personality and the overall. So no vinyl isn t better than digital music but it offers several advantages because of the fact that loudness war mixing isn t feasible on the medium. Vinyl for the most part avoided the loudness war with the rise of digital music cds included it s possible to make a track sound louder than it naturally should. There s a reason music streaming services are so popular.

Cds obviously sound better than streaming digital files too. Vinyl collectors claim that their format of choice is superior citing reasons why vinyl is better than digital. Digital music may be more convenient but there are still plenty of reasons to listen to vinyl records. The problem here is that it had a tremendous result on the audio quality.

However others including myself think differently. Vinyl s volume is dependent on the length of its sides and depth of its grooves which means an album mastered specifically for the format may have more room to breathe than its strained digital. The fact is that digital music is much better than vinyl and in this article we ll outline the reasons why. For digital to truly eclipse vinyl thousands of records from the 1990s onward would need a remaster.

There s another far superior reason why vinyl is better than lossy digital formats. Dynamics are usually lost because everything on the mix has to be decipherable at every volume level on every platform.