Music lovers may prefer vinyl to CD, but is such a preference warranted?

Friday, 17 February 2012 12:22

News & Events - Engineering News

February 17, 2012

A debate has long raged within the music industry over whether old-fashioned records produce a higher quality sound. According to experts, it may depend on preference.

Vinyl lovers often assert that listening to music through the medium is more pleasing, with records lending a more nuanced and overall improved sound quality than their CD counterparts. However, sound engineers such as Scott Metcalf, the director of recording arts and sciences at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, have a different take on the quandary.

In an interview with NPR, Metcalf said that he prefers CD quality to that offered from vinyl records. He said that analog formats, to which vinyl belongs, actually lend a certain sound, one that sometimes can improve the quality of a song - and at other times distract from it.

"Well, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I'm primarily a recording engineer, as far as working with music," Metcalf said. "And it's - the closer thing to what I'm sending into the recorder is very much what I'm getting back out. With analog formats, although the sound can be very pleasing in certain styles, it's definitely imparting its own sound on it. And I think, to an extent, it's that sound that some people are really drawn to. But it's nice as an engineer to have the confidence of knowing that what I'm putting into - in most cases these days, the computer - is pretty close to what I'm going to get out."

That sentiment is one that is common among recording and sound engineers. The switch away from vinyl and toward CDs was largely prompted by dissatisfaction with vinyl sound quality. Harman International acoustic research director Sean Olvie asserted that he "definitely" prefers CD to vinyl, affirming the latter can distort sound quality.

"I was involved in testing loudspeakers up at the National Research Council in Canada," he said. "And we were testing cartridges at that time, and it was quite apparent that the amount of distortion coming out of these devices was very high compared to CD. So what we found was that vinyl was a limiting factor in our ability to do accurate and reliable listening tests on loudspeakers, and we had to find a more reliable and more accurate medium."

Popular Science reports that the very essence of a standard long-play record is to blame for the distortion of sound. The grooves in a record replicate the shape of the sound waves from musicians' instruments. However, the needle that carves such ripples into an LP is shaped differently from the needle that reads them, a disconnect that is largely responsible for the variation in sound quality, according to experts.

Moreover, heat and humidity can spur shifts in vinyl over time, making them less resilient to the whims of nature than CDs. University of Waterloo Audio Research Group scientist Stanley Lipshitz said that those who prefer vinyl to CDs may enjoy the "fullness" of LPs, but he said that on a scientific level, that logic is faulty. The needle of a record player may pick up additional vibrations, contributing to such an effect, but that is not actually producing superior sound quality, he said.

"Some people may mistake this defect for a virtue," according to Lipshitz.

Ultimately, it is a matter of taste whether one enjoys listening to music from a CD or an LP, but the mathematical data encoded on the former is a near-perfect representation of the original sound created during the recording process, according to engineers.