BETA Records - Your music matters!

Let me get a recurring myth out of the way: Vinyl does not necessarily sound better than CDs. The Red Book CD format, or more precisely 16-bit stereo linear PCM sampled at 44.1 kHz, has a 90 dB SNR and can have up to 120 dB of dynamic range with proper noise-shaped dithering. Vinyl seemsto have a larger dynamic range and bigger bass because the labels master most new CDs not for home play or club play but for radio play, which prefers dynamics to be compressed out of the signal so that the sound can make it unharmed by FM radio's weak high-end performance and the noisy environment of a moving automobile.



JK mentioned that digital sampling introduces aliasing artifacts, but I haven't seen much foldover on spectrograms of any recent CDs because modern mastering kills most of the aliasing, and psychoacoustic masking takes care of the rest. Modern CDs are mixed at 96 kHz 24-bit and then low-passed using sinc convolution or bidirectional IIR filtering. Players also use "oversampling" (a digital low-pass filter) followed by an analog low-pass. CD aliasing as a form of harmonic distortion is no worse than the vinyl aliasing caused by friction between the needle and groove and commonly referred to by vinyl advocates as "warmth".