Vinyl vs Digital: The Battle of Lo-Fi vs. high-tech
“What I’m doing is trying to save the art that I’ve been in for the last 50 years,” Neil Young told Wired magazine. “We live in the digital age, but unfortunately, instead of progressing, music has gone backwards in this age.”
Jobs, the giant who revolutionized MP3 products with his iPod line, was also an audiophile and used to listen to his vinyl records at home. MP3 used to be considered a compromise between loading smaller files and listening quality.
Ironically, we used to grow up listening to music and the way we listened to music was much better than the way we listen now – the sound quality we heard back then was much better than the way it’s now common, whether ripped from CD . MP3s are also bought. from iTunes or Amazon. As digital technology became more widespread and replaced analog recording technology and the number of physical discs consumed, the quality of music slowly declined. For example, an MP3, regardless of whether it is ripped from a CD or downloaded, or downsampled at 192 kbps, only retains 5 of the recorded vinyl records from a master recording studio tape.
You may not notice this difference when listening to songs on the go with normal sound quality headphones, but listening to the same song, your MP3 may not be very good compared to a CD.
The vast majority of modern music turns up the low-frequency volume, with “heavy bass” and “subwoofer” as a trend or selling point, but gets a muffled midrange. It also loses a lot of the dynamics of the high quality format, especially the analog texture that is nowhere to be found.
Heading into the damped midrange
I had a huge vinyl collection a few years ago, but for some reason I’ve been trying to replace them with CDs and digital downloads over the years. I used to be able to hear the vocals before the chorus of a Judybats song, but now that’s gone and the mids are muddy. The 320 kbps sound quality of the song, which was ripped from a CD, lost its inherent dynamics and was attenuated by compression.
And a song with a sample rate of 320 kbps should have no difference to the human ear with a CD. At least that’s how it should be for most people, including me, but with today’s technological advances, photos and videos have reached “diamond” level, but music quality has gone downhill, especially when beginning of the evolution of analog recording. to the birth of the digital format.
