RE: digital = clarity and duplicable

I'm with you on the memories thing. When I was in college in Boston, it seems that all we did on weekend days was go from used record shop to used record shop. There were a lot of them in the eighties. I still have about 300 records or so moldering in my basement. Whenever my teenagers think they've stumbled on a great song they've heard, sometimes I'm able to leap down the stairs and emerge triumphant with the original vinyl in my hands. (Much to their feigned disgust but actual interest due to the album cover.)

I have to say I don't miss having to wet the record down with isopropyl alcohol to get a "good" tape recording. Dust was our enemy.

The weird thing is; whenever I hear a digital recording of a tune I haven't heard since the vinyl days, I tend to think; "That’s not how I remember hearing that; did they re-master it or something?" I think that might be the cause of a lot of people saying they liked vinyl better; our 'ears' have a memory for the way we heard it the first time.

Being able to carry an entire collection (ipod) from the house to the car does have its merits though.

That is my entire point about the vinyl vs. digital debate. Vnutz provided the technical reasons why digital is far superior, but the only reason vinyl still gets as much attention as it does is nostalgia. It doesn't sound better, happy memories make people believe it is better because it takes you back to when you first heard the song.

I'm glad that the records take people back, but it is not a great argument.

Again, like I mentioned before, my argument is not against subjective personal preference, only the reality of objective quality. I think twabulldogg's example of VHS versus DVD is right on the money. Even if there were something nostalgic about liking the "softened" edges from analog or even the fuzziness at the screen edges from head tracking ... it's still inferior to digital.

I found some good articles/links supporting the differences between the audio technologies. One digital plug-in will even alter a waveform to mimic the vinyl effect. I think it is telling when the list of configurable alterations sound like things you normally want to minimize. There's an article on the history of vinyl that goes against CDs though it sounds like they don't understand acoustics - the human ear can't discern what they perceive as faults and they incorrectly describe the harmonics on the vinyl. Part of what people believe is the warmth on vinyl is simply the recording of harmonic frequencies on the groove - an effect of the stylus. In theory, an exact reproduction of the music would not have that harmonic unless the instruments produced it (which would be captured by the digital inputs). So it's ironic that part of the preferred sound is an artifact of the player/recorder rather than the real music. We all hate wikipedia here, but they have a good technical section on the capabilities of various vinyl's through the years. It seemed like a much smaller frequency response - although I would think it would have to be bigger than the 10Khz indicated otherwise music wouldn't sound remotely correct.

But anyway, as mentioned, preference is personal. Perfection is math. :-)