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This isn't zero sum. It isn't "streaming or vinyl." The two things are complementary.

If a great indie band can survive the lean early years while they develop their sound, they might actually make it to your Spotify or YouTube Music station. You might have heard the streaming version of your favorite song, but do you have the vinyl record of the live performance of that song that you saw in a dive bar outside Nashville?

Vinyl sounds different. Not everything needs to be super high-fi.

@mekkaokereke I thought the point of vinyl was that, being analogue, with its infinite bitrate and zero sampling loss, it effectively /was/ super hi-fi?

@conniptions

You have "software engineer" and "musician" in your bio? That means I probably shouldn't try to 'splain to you how (I think) vinyl works. I've learned from previous (gentle!) spankings that this is generally not a good idea.

That's how I find out which of my friends worked on CoreAudio, who owns a modular synth, and who was in a rock band and played with bands like Life House before they suddenly said "C++ is cool, I wanna work on Spanner, tell me about the atomic clocks again."

@conniptions

Instead I'll politely wait for someone else with "software engineer" and "musician" in their bio to show up, and they can tell both of us how it really works!

My (probably wrong?) understanding: the noise of vinyl gives it an effective bitrate. As in, there's minimal audibly detectable loss relative to vinyl if digitizing above bitrate X.

@mekkaokereke I'll answer this with my 'music fan' hat on rather than the 'musician' or 'software engineer' hats.

I am lucky enough to have copies of several albums both on vinyl and digital.

Repeated A-B testing reveals that I prefer the vinyl playback every time without exception.

I don't really care if - as Adrian has pointed out - "digital audio is more accurate to its input". Maybe so.

In that case, perhaps accuracy-to-input isn't so important after all. Something else is going on.

@conniptions @mekkaokereke
I’ll take this one.

Vinyl does not have “effectively infinite bitrate.” All sound reproductions introduce error, including analog. The question is: What •kind• of error? How much?

In the case of digital, much of the error comes in the form of •quantization noise•: the difference between the “stair step” shape of digital and the actual signal. (Good image of it here: http://davidswiston.blogspot.com/2014/11/adcs-dithering-when-adding-noise-is.html) There’s also some error that comes from circuitry etc. 1/

@conniptions @mekkaokereke
Vinyl lives in a whole different universe of error: harmonic distortion, noise, surface defects, etc. No quantization noise!

But here’s the thing: the noise vinyl introduces is •orders of magnitude• larger than the noise CD-quality digital audio introduces. Like 20-30dB more.

There is basically no perceptible sound an LP can produce that a CD can’t reproduce (much less higher-quality digital audio). There reverse is not true.

Yet LPs •do• often sound better! Why?
2/

@UncivilServant @conniptions @mekkaokereke
Huh, it’s possible! And also possible that a player’s speed might vary slightly, creating a subtle waver that becomes a sonic fingerprint.

Some quick math says a player being off by 0.1 rpm is about the threshold of audible difference (5 cents, though more like 0.5 cents to a highly trained ear).

Anecdotes here of people seeing much larger variances: https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/turntable-speed-variances-and-acceptable-levels.15428/ Don’t have total confidence in their methods, but your theory is credible.