The 'vinyl is better than digital' thing is a myth

I think it's clear that most digital technology provides measurably better audio fidelity than most analog technology and at a much cheaper price. Whether that audio fidelity is desired over the pleasant (and/or harsh) distortions introduced by the equipment (both analog and digital) is another question. Add to that the impact of speaker response, room acoustics, biology, psychology and personal taste, and you have a prickly problem indeed.

Originally posted by PBE6
I think it's clear that most digital technology provides measurably better audio fidelity than most analog technology and at a much cheaper price. Whether that audio fidelity is desired over the pleasant (and/or harsh) distortions introduced by the equipment (both analog and digital) is another question. Add to that the impact of speaker response, room acoustics, biology, psychology and personal taste, and you have a prickly problem indeed.

The only problem there I see is what do you do with your digital media 20 years from now? I can say for sure my vinyl collection will sound pretty much like it does now.

But what new technology will be replacing the CD's, flash drives, hard drives and so forth? CD's will only last 20 years or so, humidity will get to them eventually. Flash drives and HD's will lose bits also. You going to be ready to re-record all your music on the technology of the month club?

I say that knowing I have a couple of thousand vinyl's and hundreds of CD's and my own music on hard drives, some of which have died already. My musical compositions generally get better as I stick to it, so the older stuff is not as good as the newer stuff so I don't miss losing some of the old tunes I wrote back in the day.
Do miss hearing my friends recorded at parties on cassettes though. Cassettes seem to get a lot of print through as time goes by.

Originally posted by sonhouse
The only problem there I see is what do you do with your digital media 20 years from now? I can say for sure my vinyl collection will sound pretty much like it does now.

You think so? Not if you keep playing them every day, they won't. Vinyl does wear. You can keep the wear down to a minimum, but it will still wear.

But what new technology will be replacing the CD's, flash drives, hard drives and so forth? CD's will only last 20 years or so, humidity will get to them eventually. Flash drives and HD's will lose bits also. You going to be ready to re-record all your music on the technology of the month club?

Why not? It's all digital, the masters are (presumably - certainly for anything recorded in the last few decades) available on a computer somewhere, so they're easy to clone. A bit-for-bit copy is a perfect copy of a digital recording. All you then have to do is transfer that to the new digital medium.
Contrast this with an analog medium, where any copy is going to be lossy. You can't copy an LP to a tape, even to a massively overspecced master tape, without losing something. You can't copy a tape to an LP without losing some data, either. If the original is damaged, it's lost forever, because all copies of it are imperfect. The imperfections may be small, but one day your vinyl is going to be gone. And even then, you'll be able to get a perfect copy of your CDs on the digital medium of the day.

Richard

Originally posted by Shallow Blue
You think so? Not if you keep playing them every day, they won't. Vinyl does wear. You can keep the wear down to a minimum, but it will still wear.

[b]But what new technology will be replacing the CD's, flash drives, hard drives and so forth? CD's will only last 20 years or so, humidity will get to them eventually. Flash drives and HD's will lose bit ...[text shortened]... be able to get a perfect copy of your CDs on the digital medium of the day.

Richard

Actually, what I do is use the vinyl as reference, occasionally listening to it but mostly listening to the CD I copied them to. That way I get the best of both worlds. When CD's make way for the tech of the month club replacement, I still have the original. My collection is not one most people would like and only special houses have them digitized yet and I think not much of them. Some of my records are rare and nobody has hardly heard of them so I don't think there will be much chance of them being digitized unless I do it myself.