Vinyl

Vinyl does not have a sound#

I have spent a fair time in studios that cut vinyl. If you flick between the master and what is being cut, apart from the delay it is almost indistinguishable. That is with a pristine setup. After that, what you hear depends on everything downstream: the cutting engineer's choices, the lathe and its stylus, the lacquer, the plating, whether the centre hole was punched straight, the press temperature and PVC quality, how the record was stored, the turntable's wow and flutter, the stylus and tracking weight, the phono preamp and finally your speakers and room.

So does vinyl sound warm? It can sound harsh and bright if cut that way, so no. It doesn't "sound this way", because it depends. High-quality digital is obviously more transparent. Saying vinyl sounds superior to digital is demonstrably wrong.

Surface noise and crosstalk are its real signatures#

If vinyl has a sound, it is surface noise and crosstalk. Crosstalk narrows the stereo image and pulls hard-panned bass towards mono. Surface noise is most exposed in quiet passages, and pressing plants can vary enormously: one pressing of a record of mine was unlistenable in the quiet sections, and pressed again at a different plant it sounded way better, though it still has a lot of surface noise.

You can cut stereo bass, it is just less safe: out-of-phase bass moves the stylus vertically and the needle can jump, and cutting deeper is limited by lacquer thickness and plating.

A record that sounds different is usually a different master#

Vinyl lead times can be months, so the cut often starts from an earlier master while the artist's late changes go only to the digital release. It's not the magic of vinyl. It's a different mix. The cutting engineer also makes decisions: take some bass out to fit a long side, or cut a short 45 rpm 12" with plenty of bass and level.

Vinyl often sounds more dynamic for the same reason. It is often cut without as much limiting as the digital master. If you buy vinyl for the dynamics, what you actually want is the unlimited high-resolution file, not necessarily some unspecified magic associated with the sound being carved into plastic.

Limiting does not make a cut louder#

Vinyl record loudness is limited by physical space on the disc. Wider grooves mean a louder cut and better signal to noise, and less music per side, which is why people do double and triple LPs. Limiting does nothing to change that, nor does clipping.

Almost all records are cut from digital#

Since the late 1970s, cutting studios started switching from using tape based delay to digital delay. The reason why you need delay is so the cutter head can anticipate loud sounds and save as much space on the disc as possible. So nearly every record cut since the '80s, including recuts of older albums, has passed through AD and DA conversion. That is fine: the delay is transparent and gives a better cut, but anyone who is an analogue purist is either fooling himself or has such old fashioned taste in music that Michael Jackson's Thriller is considered indecently modern.

All-analogue cutting with a tape preview head exists, but it is rare and specialist.

Plenty of vinyl "reference records" were digital long before then. Donald Fagen's The Nightfly was recorded digitally, and most classical recordings of the '80s were digital because orchestral music needs the dynamic range. The idea that any digital stage "contaminates" a record is marketing hype (see analogue).

Playback matters more than the format#

The phono preamp and its RIAA equalisation are probably the most important part of playback. A bad preamp, or one with a different curve, might colour the sound even more than cutting and plating do. Applying RIAA digitally after plugging the cartridge straight into a mixer fails, because the cartridge isn't loaded properly. An elliptical stylus is obviously brighter and more detailed than a spherical one. Tracking weight has to be in a sensible range, too light and it skips or distorts and too heavy and it distorts and wears down the record.

I love vinyl for reasons that are not sound quality#

Vinyl is my favourite format. I can't hold a WAV file in my hands. A record has big artwork, lyrics and inserts, it is collectable, you can buy it from the band at a small show, and the mechanics of a diamond dragged through a groove are fascinating. Those are legitimate reasons to prefer it. They are just not sound-quality reasons, since the same music is on CD and digital files. See music.