Vinyl sounds better (shots fired)

I suspect that it is the differences in mastering that are the most significant factor.

@newton_john One difference is that many LPs have less compression than the digital release. This is because there’s no expectation of the LP being played in a car, whereas there is with the digital release. This isn’t universal, but many producers will send an uncompressed tape or source file to the LP mastering operation on this account if they are quality conscious. When I was running my LP mastering operation we always would ask the producer if such was available.

vinyl is highly processed in order to keep many issues at bay. and interestingly enough many people like the sound of that.

@stealthdeburgo This statement is false. Vinyl often gets some processing (such as mono bass for a few milliseconds at a time) or compression to reduce the engineering cost of the project. When I was running our mastering operation, I found that even with out of phase bass, if we simply spent enough time working on the project we could find a way around the issue without any processing at all. None of the recordings we turned out had any other than the normal RIAA pre-emphasis.

FWIW a typical LP mastering cost is about $500/hour. So you can see that anything to reduce the engineer's time could be valuable. All this comes down to the producer of the project; what sort of quality he's after and how much he's willing to spend to make it so.

Vynil introduces a level of distortion that is pleasing to the ears of many, whereas other people prefer otherwise.

@squared80 Actually vinyl has extremely low distortion- much lower than any of the 'tests' show. The reason is because of how much feedback is used in the mastering process. My Westerex 3d system using the 1700 series electronics employed 30dB of feedback between the cutter head and the mastering amplifiers, which had a fair amount of feedback of their own, nested within the 30dB feedback loop.

If you've read any papers by Bruno Putzeys then you know the significance of that fact.

IOW the distortion comes in during playback; hardly any of that is actually on the LP. That distortion is highly variable depending on the playback equipment (starting with the platter pad, and uncontrolled variable in all the 'tests' and 'studies' I've seen) and its setup. All the so-called 'studies' over the last 50 years ignore this simple fact. As LP playback equipment gets better and the more care is taken to setup, the playback distortion goes down.

My point here is the use of 'Vinyl' in your post above renders the statement false since that isn't where the distortion is coming from.

I recently read that almost every vinyl record since the early 1970s has been cut on a lathe that utilized a digital delay line for the source material.

@dgd What you read was false. What you are talking about is a ’preview head’ which was used on tape machines. Its output was digitized and then used as data to drive the cutter speed (driving a motor that drives the worm screws which advance the cutter head), allowing for variable groove width.

Meanwhile, the actual analog tape heads were sending the analog signal to the cutter head.

We used a similar system in our mastering setup, but since finding a preview head setup is pretty hard these days, we made a device using an Arduino and then played the project into it, creating a ’groove width file’. That was then synchronized with the project when we actually did the mastering. We did this because our Scully lathe was an older one with manual operation and didn’t have variable groove width built in.

@russ69 @ghdprentice Actually with many systems ticks and pops are caused by the phono section. The mechanism is if the phono section does not have good high frequency overload characteristics, ultrasonic or RF noise can overload it briefly, causing a tick or pop.

The way this happens is due to the fact that a cartridge has an inductance and the tonearm cable has capacitance. When you put the two in parallel an electrical resonance is formed in the same manner that FM stations are tuned in on a radio. With high output cartridges the inductance is higher so the resonance is just at the upper end of the audio spectrum or barely ultrasonic. The peak can be as much as 20dB. If the cartridge is a LOMC type, the peak is in the RF range up to about 5MHz and can be as much as 30dB higher than the actual signal.

Many designers simply don’t take this into account despite what happens when you parallel capacitance with inductance is taught in Electronics 101 in the first week. So there’s a raft of phono sections with this problem going back 60 years. A lot of audiophiles grew up with this problem not knowing this!

If this problem is taken care of in the phono preamp design you experience quite a lot less ticks and pops (I’m very used to playing entire LP sides with no ticks or pops at all, despite minimal LP cleaning- I just use a dust brush). If the cartridge is of the LOMC variety, you don’t have to mess with ’cartridge loading’ resistors either since how they actually work is to detune that resonance, which helps out phono sections that have this design flaw. But if the phono section has RFI and overload immunity you’ll find the resistors have no effect- its literally plug and play.