Vinyl / MP3 theme seems to be all the rage. Some vinyl purists believe that there is no debate. “You understand that when you listen to a vinyl, it is better, cpocomprésséblabla […] blabla”, we all live this type of conversation with an individual with the red label “with (ne) base”.
The “micro-groove” vinyl record was released on June 18, 1948 during a press conference organized by Columbia Records to announce the end of 78 rpm. Format adopted by the general public since the mid-1950s, vinyl will remain the exclusive medium of music for almost 20 years.
The Compact Disc arrives in 1982 and offers quality music transcription based on a sample of 44,100 Hz. Sound is collected 44,100 times per second. This rate gives it an accuracy close to that of vinyl.
MP3 was released in the mid-90s. Wanting to reduce the weight of songs and fit on our “smartphones”, it compresses the audio data. This results in loss and degraded sound, provided you listen carefully on a high-quality sound system. Finally, everything also depends on the compression rate mentioned in bitrate per second. Corresponds to a bit rate of binary information (or bits) per second: a bit rate of 320 Kilo-Bits-per second corresponds to approximately 320,000 bits transmitted per second. This is the reason that the less the sound is compressed, the more information the file has and, consequently, the bigger it will be. To listen more or less faithful to the sound, above 256 Kbps, you go alone. It is always possible to choose the so-called “lossless” formats like FLAC,
Sound can be defined as a wave, a signal that vibrates the membrane of the inner ear at a certain frequency. To clarify things, we must quickly analyze the concept of bandwidth, which is the range of reproducible audio frequencies for each medium. The higher the frequency, the higher the note; the lower the frequency, the lower the sound (hence the bass name for bass, little genius). Your broken headphones or your Funktions One are just trying to transcribe this signal.
The vinyl bandwidth is, in principle, unlimited. MP3 seeks to reproduce this signal as faithfully as possible. An excellent quality vinyl record can store sound information at frequencies up to around 50,000 Hz. In lossless mp3, the frequency range generally reaches around 23,000 Hz.
FUN FACT: The human ear can hear frequencies ranging from 16Hz to 20,000Hz. We cannot capture the entire frequency spectrum of a vinyl or MP3.
It is often said (too?) About vinyl that is distinguished from MP3 by its warm sound, by its “grain”. In fact, there is a noticeable difference between listening to an MP3 and a vinyl because the recording techniques are different, hence the famous “grain” of the vinyl, but it is reproducible without problems in numerical format
From a technical point of view, vinyl is no better than an MP3 in the correct format. Surely there are many more emotional considerations to help understand the new vinyl spring.
