Is the sound on vinyl records better than on CDs?

The sound quality of vinyl records is sometimes better than that of CDs and DVDs -- and sometimes worse. Learn more about the difference between the sound quality of records, CDs and DVDs in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain stuff front House, stuff works dot com
where smart happens. Hi. I'm Marshall Brain with today's question,
is the sound on vinyl records better than the sound
on c d s or DVDs. The answer to this

(00:22):
question lies in the difference between analog and digital recordings.
A vinyl record is an analog recording, and CDs and
DVDs are digital recordings. Original sound is analog by definition,
so a digital recording takes snapshots of that analog signal
at a certain rate. For CDs, it's forty four thousand,

(00:44):
one hundred times per second. It also measures each snapshot
with a certain accuracy. For CDs, it's a sixteen bit number,
which means that the value must be one of sixty thousand,
five hundred thirty six possible values. This means that, by definition,
a digital recording is not capturing the complete sound wave,

(01:05):
it's approximating it with a series of steps. Some sounds
that have very quick transitions, such as a drumbeat, will
be distorted because they change too quickly for the sample rate.
A vinyl record, on the other hand, has a groove
carved into it that mirrors the original sounds wave form
This means that no information is lost. In theory, the

(01:29):
output of the record player is also analog and it
can be fed directly to your amplifier with no conversion.
So the wave forms from a vinyl record should be
more accurate and that can be heard in the richness
of the sound. But there is a downside. Any specks
of dust or damage to the disc can be heard

(01:50):
as noise or static during quiet periods and songs. This
noise can be heard over the music. Digital recordings don't
degrade over time, and if for digital recording contains silence,
then there will be no noise. The main ways to
improve the quality of a digital recording are to increase
the sampling rate and or to increase the accuracy of

(02:13):
the sampling. The recording industry has a standard for DVD
audio discs that could greatly improve the sound accuracy. There
are more than four times as many samples on a
DVD audio disc than there are on a c D,
and the samples are twenty four bit instead of sixteen
bit like on a CD. But the DVD audio format

(02:36):
has never really taken off. Apparently, CD quality sound is
good enough for the vast majority of listeners, do you
have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast, If so,
please send me an email at podcast at how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, go to how stuff works dot com and

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