Vinyl sounds better.

An argument I thought was dead to logical people is the argument that "Vinyls sound better than cds". This argument is flawed for more reasons than you can imagine. The first time I heard it was in "The Rock" when I Stanley Goodspeed, an eccentric biochemist recieves a $600 LP in the mail. When asked why he didn't just buy the cd, he reponded with the above argument.

People today do not usually listen to LPs. Today they buy CD or more commonly download their music. The quality of the sound is usually based on a number of factors, which are usually all the same. These are bits per sample (8 or 16), sample rate (11, 22 or 44) and bit rate. The first two are almost always the same. The last one changes according to the media. 128 is a pretty good bit rate, and up until about 2003 people usually used this size for encoding mp3s. Later, you got codecs (a compression method of which mp3 is one example) like OGG and FLAC and AAC. AAC and high quality mp3 are 320kbps and are the files you would pay for from iTunes or Amazon. The bit rate supported by CDA - CD Audio Red Book standard is 1411 kbps. As you can see, there is no essential loss in quality from 1411 of CD Audio to the 320 of the mp3 stores out there today. All of these bit rates can be thought of as a conveyer belt of boxes with information. The higher the number, the more boxes which flow by in a second. In real time, you can't even tell what they are.

Vinyl doesn't work like that, it's analog. A stream of sound which is turned into sound by the same stream of information, like a river instead of quickly flowing set of boxes. In our vision, we see 24.93 frames per second as motion, operating on the flicker fusion threshold. To hear digital audio - the "bits" like frames in a movie, are fused at a much lower rate. In other words, although the mediums are instrinsically different, they both operate on the idea that the brain will fuse samples and create seamless sound.

I once heard someone say something to the effect of "What makes art beautiful is that it dies." So an opera, a one night performance will never be the same again. A photograph will fade and decay. A painting will grow old and lose its original properties: in art restoration, only the interlaced lines are restored, allowing art historians to reexamine the original canvas just as it was when the artist left it (a trick of the eye makes it seem whole). Ask yourself "why go through so much trouble to for movies to try to produce a unique experience at the cinema before releasing it at the home?". The movie won't change but the experience will. In that same way, a concert which varies and changes the songs for live performance will also never be the same again. The allure of the live, the seduction of the big screen. In this vein of reasoning, a CD will not decay and will quickly lose it's beaty, while a vinyl, so-named for it's material, will change with every listen as the needle which delicately dances over the tracks and grooves gradually wearing out the needle and the record.

People often say of Bose, the speaker company: It's got the BEST sound. Owners of a Bose speaker system are not so quick to agree. The magic is in the difference. It gives you a different sound. People like different. So, when after you hear the same Pink Floyd song on the radio, on your ipod and on your computer -- each an exact replica of the other - and then you hear a record, played 17 times and say that it sounds better, ask your self, does it sound better or different?

My point is not that CD's are the best possible medium for reproduction of sound of any kind, but that vinyl, although it can sound better, does not always sound better, as it is constantly changing.