Does vinyl sound better?

Robert Wood is the Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His courses include “How Music Works: Engineering the Acoustical World.”

From a purely mechanistic perspective, a vinyl record has information encoded in the meanders of each groove in the record. The needle physically interacts with those grooves, and the resulting needle motion is converted to a proportional electrical signal. It is therefore possible to generate a signal path — from the mechanical grooves to an electrical signal that is then amplified and used to drive a speaker that is entirely analog.

When we convert an analog signal to a digital representation, we take a continuous signal and chop it up into small “slices” that are compatible with storage in a CD, computer, etc. When we play this now-digital audio file back, we reconstruct the original signal, but since we are starting from a digital version the signal is not as smooth as the original; there are subtle discontinuities that could add unwanted artifacts into the audio. If these are prominent enough, and if there is insufficient correction (i.e., smoothing), these jumps could sound choppy and could add subtle but harsh high-frequency noise.

That is the primary argument supporting the audiophile’s claim that vinyl is better. And there is certainly truth to that. But that “purity” is debatable for several reasons.

First, modern digital audio systems are extremely good at reproducing audio signals that are imperceptible from their analog counterparts to all but the sharpest ears. As I describe in my class, even CD-quality audio nearly covers the dynamic range and bandwidth of human hearing. And there are higher-fidelity audio formats — e.g., “super-audio CDs” — that can, theoretically, exceed our human ability to tell analog from digital.

Also, with digital music I can create arbitrary playlists and even mashups of multiple songs. There is nearly infinite freedom with digital music, including suggestion systems that help expand our musical palette and discover new artists and genres. Vinyl records are far less portable and flexible. Cassettes were a successful attempt to achieve portability and some flexibility but could not match the audio quality of vinyl or CDs. 

All of this is, of course, highly subjective. The convenience of digital music is hard to beat, but there is something to be said for the warmth and feel and even the pops and cracks from dirt and debris on the surface of a record. And there are other, more subtle benefits to listening to music on vinyl. The most important, to me, is the fact that once I put on a record, I am locked into that record. That is, it is far less convenient to skip tracks than it is with CDs or other digital formats, so I am forced to listen to the album as an album instead of a collection of songs I can shuffle. As a fan of album-oriented music, this is very important to me and arguably something that has diminished in the digital music age.

— As told to Anna Lamb, Harvard Staff Writer