Recommendations for a jazz record which demonstrates vinyl superiority over digital


I have not bought a vinyl record since CDs came out, but have been exposed to numerous claims that vinyl is better.  I suspect jazz may be best placed to deliver on these claims, so I am looking for your recommendations.

I must confess that I do not like trad jazz much.  Also I was about to fork out A$145 for Miles Davis "Kind of Blue" but bought the CD for A$12 to see what the music was like.  I have kept the change!

I love the jazz in the movie Babylon, which features local Oz girl Margo Robbie (the film, not the jazz).

So what should I buy?

128x128richardbrand

Again, I agree with the point that you could construct a system that would make one or the other medium sound best. My streaming set up is pretty good, my vinyl set up is better. I enjoy both, and I am grateful for that, as I have access to way more  good-sounding music than I could have dreamed of when I was flipping through the stacks as a younger person.

Recently, I heard Ambrose Akinmusire's  "Owl Song" on Qobuz. I loved the music (truly just filled me up), and thought it sounded great. Because I know my system, I thought it would be likely that it would sound even better on vinyl, so I picked it up. To my ears, in my room, on my equipment, it really does sound better on vinyl. 

But after decades of a vinyl-first mindset, and using a greater share of my budget on vinyl gear than on digital gear, I think that is to be expected. Like i said, I fell in love hearing the album streaming. I listen to it now on vinyl. That is often my work flow - some experiences I just leave in the digital realm, but sometimes I think that it would sound even better in my turntable. 

We are living in good times, music-wise...

You might not have asked about gear, but you can't make blanket statements like 'vinyl sounds better than digital' or 'digital sounds better than vinyl' without taking into account gear, room, listener's hearing and preferences, etc etc. 

Wanna hear great sounding vinyl source? Go to Acoustic Sounds website (as one example) and check out some of their jazz titles; they've got a great many of them...

This week I bought an album on the ACT label - whose recordings are superbly engineered. Call this one A.  Listening to it, I felt the sound quality was not as good as the previous album on ACT that I listened to - call this one B. Different artists but both female vocals / small ensemble. When I checked the release date on A it was 2017. In both cases I was listening to CD. Likely cause - better adc/dac's for the recording.

Vinyl / CD comparisons are futile because both technologies are different and both are continuing to evolve. Though I would argue that they are are converging in terms of sound quality - which is what happens when you reduce distortion and noise.

If an album was mastered in 16/44, which almost all are, it never sounds better upsampled to 24/96. Listening to 24/96 and higher is a waste. 

Vinylshadow, that hasn’t been my experience. In general I have found that sampling is a good thing. Also, you leave out SACD. I find that music recorded as SACD and played back as such is far superior to RBCD; whereas older recordings reproduced on SACD are not noticeably superior to the original RBCD. I really cannot enjoy RBCD except as background when I don’t feel like playing LPs, for reading a book or at parties. I don’t care how good or expensive the RBCD player is reputed to be.