Just saw a segment on ABC news about vinyl...

[hunter]

91. The sound of vinyl is certainly not "better quality" from a mathematical perspective.

LP's are noisy and their overall frequency response is horrible.

In spite of that, an LP record and a turntable are analog instruments and a few very skilled sound engineers were (and are) able to "play" these analog instruments in a way that enhances the perceived sound of the overall performance.

Many of the first albums re-mastered as CDs didn't sound as good as the LP because they were artless analog-to-digital conversions of the original sources. Many later CDs were bad because digital effects like compression were used in a heavy-handed and clumsy way.

Anything you can do in LP mastering and playback you can do with digital recording and playback. Every analog effect can be precisely duplicated. It's possible to make CD recordings that are indistinguishable from an LP. But it's also possible to make digital recordings that are far superior to anything you could do with the LP format.

I have a collection of LPs, 45s, and 78s. I also have a few home-cut recordings made on machines that predate home tape recorders, and some 16 rpm audio books. I occasionally play these records on a slightly modernized, restored, and very rugged record player with tube amps that was made for library use. Mine once belonged to a big university music department. On this machine the sound of records is exactly as I remember; it's a time machine.

I also have a 'seventies "High Fidelity Stereo" turntable with a more modern cartridge, but it's only really good for LPs explicitly produced for that format.

I'm not an "audiophile" in any way, I'm a Keep-It-Simple-Stupid Engineering type who is entirely unwilling to spend anything more than thrift-store prices on obsolete technologies. The most expensive new things on my record players are the needles. I've also replaced various bits of rubber and a few bad capacitors, but that's it.