Tomcy6, good find, as it is Saturday morning, I read both of the articles that you posted links for, and I found them both quite enjoyable. I am not a dyed in the wool vinyl guy, nor a fully digital man, I have both and enjoy both, though I do lean toward vinyl, and I play more vinyl in my system, despite having a larger collection of digital music.
The articles make a good point for digital, though I am sure one can find equally convincing journalism that sings vinyl's praises. Nearly convinced after reading the 2 articles, I thought I would refresh an experiment with fresh morning ears, and also with new speakers that have only just been perfectly positioned!
It is not an amazingly scientific experiment, but here is what I did for a bit of Saturday morning fun. I found Steely Dan Gaucho in my LP collection - a clean, 180g disc of vinyl, and put it on my table. I then cued up the 24/96 version on my mac mini with the lovely software by Roon. I played them at the same time, and I lowered the output on my DAC to match the output on my phono preamp. I switched back and forth a bit real time on the preamplifier to make sure the volume adjustment was as equal as I could get it.
Now, the test. I restored the track - Babylon Sisters - on both the DAC and the turntable. Normally I find this kind of hard switch A-B testing a bit too crude, but it is valid for some purposes. So, with both digital and analog playing, I switched back and forth every 10-15 seconds or so, to appreciate the differences between analog and digital.
After reading those two articles, I was all ready for digital to take the cake, in at least some ways. But alas, in my system, vinyl is king, at least, most of the time. As the articles pointed out, there are many variables involved, and perhaps for some albums, the digital version is better prepared compared the the vinyl version.
Naturally playback equipment has a huge impact. I read an opinion piece by a non-audio journalist recently that digital sounds better than vinyl unless you break a certain threshold of quality on the vinyl playback system. a crappy CD player sounds better than a crappy turntable he said. Probably true.
My digital front end and analog front end are pretty fairly matched from top brands (PS Audio, Whest, JA Michell, Lyra), with a bit more spend on the analog, but not by a huge amount. On my system, with this recording, the vinyl sounds better, but then again, not by a HUGE amount. I would be happy listening to either.
I would love to hear a digital recording that blows away the vinyl on my system. Got any recommendations? I do think there is merit to the potential of the digital realm. DSD being the latest thing, seems to have made some big improvements, and the future has yet to come - perhaps someone will come up with something new in the next decade that takes digital to the next big leap, which is totally expected!
For now, I do love my records :-)
