The eternal battle between vinyl and digital audio. Which sounds better?

For a long time I have been wondering which sounds better, vinyl or CD / computer audio? Could there be an objective test?

As I have already mentioned at my older post regarding reference recordings, I am not dogmatic about the media. Sure, I know cases of analogue vinyl albums like Michael Jackson or Dire Straight that sound much much much better than their equivalent albums on CD or even high res audio FLAC files. We have done with Panos back to back comparison tests and it felt like that the sound of these digital albums were some kind of a prank with a hidden camera. This is why I keep stating that if you haven’t heard Michael Jackson or Dire Straight at a good analogue system, you can’t know what their music feels like.

Still, that doesn’t prove anything. It just proves that the record label took good care on the analogue albums and didn’t care about the digital ones.


Nice turntables existed since a long time ago. This 16.5kg Sansui SR-929 turntable comes from the 70's. 

Many people, especially younger ones, don’t know how a record really sounds. Chances are they haven’t heard a record through a decent analogue system. I have noted that lately there are many trendy cute turntables that should be better described as toys and be limited for a Barbie & John-John dollhouse use. There are also turntables costing some hundreds of Euros that should better be described as pieces of wooden planks finished in impressive colors and with a motor & tonearm bolted on them. It seems that there is also some kind of a competition of who can make a turntable with the smallest wooden plank. I am sorry gentlemen, I do like minimal designs but this is not minimal, it is just insufficient.

At the opposite side, there are these weird guys who spend thousands of Euros to get a heavy turntable with a platter so big that it looks like an upside down casserole without handles, filled with exotic materials from Krypton planet.

So, if you put all these facts together and as you are smelling the trendy and romantic aromas of vinyl-is-back thing, you can easily get the wrong idea.

The truth is that yes, vinyl can sound marvelous. But in order to do so, it requires a decent turntable, a decent cartridge and a painfully careful set up. In a few words, it is easier to get decent sound from a digital source than from vinyl.

So let’s leave our prejudices aside and come back to our initial question: which sounds better? The problem answering this question is a practical one. We just could:

• Compare "similar" things, that is an analogue system costing X Euros Vs. a digital system costing X Euros. But this would be rather an efficiency comparison, meaning it would show for a certain amount of Euros how much sound performance you managed to buy.
• Compare top of both worlds, that is the "best" analogue system available Vs. the "best" digital system available. However, this is not a worthy comparison for a mortal Hi-Fi enthusiast, neither there is any way to objectively define “best digital / analogue system available”.

There is also the matter of what recording to choose. As I said, there are good and bad analogue and digital recordings. Tell me which type of system you want to be the winner and I will just choose the appropriate album that will favor this system.

The recording issue is a bit more complicated. You see, a good analogue studio recording coming from analogue master tapes might favor transfers to analogue media. On the other hand, if you have a good digital studio recording, in order to make a vinyl record out of it you will have to make a digital to analogue conversion that could potentially be the limit of the performance of the record.

Think of the album media as the vehicle in which the studio sends the artist at your Hi-Fi system. We want to understand if one vehicle is better than the other. We don’t want to judge the quality of the digital or analogue studio console, the quality of the DAC (digital to analogue converter) or the ADC (analogue to digital converter) etc. Many people think that since the sound in nature is analogue, any conversion to digital can only be a compromise. Even though there is some true in that logic, it is just some true. It is like saying that a digital camera has an finite number of pixels when an analogue camera has infinite number of pixels. This is not completely true, resolution of film is limited by the number and size of the microscopically small light-sensitive silver halide crystals that a film has.

There is also the matter of the journey that the sound needs to travel before it gets at our hands. We don’t know what is more comfortable for our passenger (the sound) to travel with, analogue or digital? You see, no matter what you do, a conversion is going to happen:

• If you go digital, you got to convert the analogue signal of the mics to digital. You can only choose at what production state to make the conversion. Then back at home, digital has to be converted to analogue in order for the speakers to play it. Again, you can only choose at what reproduction point to make the conversion - at a line level DAC or at a digital power amp for example.
• If you go analogue, sooner or later you got to convert the signal of the mics to a shape in a track on a vinyl record. Then back at home, the shape is creating movement at the phono cartridge and this movement produces a very low level signal. This signal will have to be equalized / amplified in various stages in order for the speakers to play it.

All these things were at my mind. I had managed to spot some analogue albums that sounded better than their digital brothers. I also had listened to some digital albums that were sounding amazing, but I did not have the analogue version to try a comparison. I hesitated buying one of them because I still wouldn’t know what I would be comparing, the analogue vs. the digital sound or just the production studio preferences and the abilities of the sound engineer?

Getz / Gilberto Verve Reissues Analogue Productions.

One day, a particular vinyl album (Stan Getz / João Gilberto Featuring Antonio Carlos Jobim ‎– Getz / Gilberto, Verve Reissues / Quality Record Pressings / Analogue Productions B0015625-01)  got mine and Panos attention. It was a limited edition, remastered, numbered, 200 gram vinyl, directly coming from restored master tapes and even though the recording was made back at the 60's, it sounded great. 

At the back you can see the badges.

Reading the literature that comes with the album, we understood that sound engineer Mr. George Marino was very serious in his work and also loved what he was doing. He was a sound engineer that could be trusted, meaning that both analogue and digital versions of the album coming from him would be as good as it gets.

The leaflet of the record has some usefull info.

So here could be our chance for a comparison test, at a good system of a mortal owner – meaning that most people can afford it. Turntable was a Dual 505-4 Audiophile Edition with an Ortofon Super OM30 cartridge and digital source was a modified EMU 0404 USB interface with a custom made battery power supply. The cartridge and the record were at perfect condition. The record had been cleaned at an Okki Nokki record cleaning machine. The whole system set up after years or experimentation provides confidence and is not biased towards analogue or digital reproduction. It is just biased towards enjoying the soul of the music.

First thing we did was to compare the various digital albums. Soon we found out that there are various albums with the voice of Mrs. Astrud Gilberto coming from either the right or the left speaker. After some blind tests we happily found out that an .iso file coming from the SACD of the album remastered by Mr. George Marino was sounding superior, distinguishing itself in performance the same way that the vinyl did. BTW, the voice of Mrs. Gilberto was coming from the left, both in our vinyl and our digital file.

The listening test started and as always we took care to listen at the same sound output levels.

The result was that we had no true winner. We, the lucky listeners were the winners since both albums sounded equally wonderful. We couldn’t say that we preferred the sound of the one over the other. We were just feeling happy listening to both media, we could feel the music and its emotions. In both cases we just wanted to keep listening and relaxing under the sound of the Girl From Ipanema. Don't take this as a naïve generalization from our side; have no doubt that we take our listening very seriously.

So, prejudice left aside I urge you not to be dogmatic about the media. Yes, at a given system a certain album can sound better depending if it is in digital or analogue form. But you shouldn’t blame the digital or the analogue technology, both of them can fill your life with beautiful sounds and emotions coming from the music. Both can give you the same amounts of listening pleasure. Ok, vinyl can be a bit more kinky since it can give you a real pain in the @ss setting it up, pairing the cartridge with the tonearm and the phono stage.

There is a (kind of) part II of this post, you can find it here.

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Happy listening as always!

Chris