Digitally-recorded albums on vinyl?

Almost none at all. However, sometimes the LP can exhibit less compression than the CD and thus be objectively "better". The CDs were cut so hot that if transferred to LPs they would almost certainly skip.

This was the case for say, Depeche Mode's Playing The Angel (certainly) or any of the Coldplay albums (I... think).

It's usually much more complicated than everything being analogue or digital these days though isn't it? When you have rock bands like U2 and even Country singers using digital delays even if they record acoustically to tape the sound will have been originated digitally or been sampled and played back somewhere in the chain. It depends how far do you want to take it.

Recording to analogue tape adds compression which will never be able to be replicated inside a plugin. There are just too many variables in a mechanical electromagnetic chemical process like that which varies from one machine to the next, one stock to the next.

Unless the record is pressed from a CD originated entirely inside Cubase or something with VST instruments and no samples, it's going to have gone through some analogue processing and this will alter the sound, for better or worse depending on the skill of the producer/engineer/musician/artist and quality and type of equipment used. Even duplicating the same file via different audio codecs seems to degrade it somewhat after a while so that it comes to lack sparkle somehow.

As close as digital editing allows us to come it's never going to be an exact science no matter what the theory may say and obviously the skills of the people involved will ultimately shape the results.

This is really the only case I see for releasing digital recordings on vinyl. One could cut the vinyl from the original 24/192 master, rather than converting it to 16/44.1, which would sound better in theory.

That only works if you can transparently capture the full range of the master onto Vinyl and in the case of 24/192 you cant do this, you cannot get a dynamic range of 120db onto vinyl, you cant get the 96db that you get with 16/44.1. You can get 75db - 80db which is good enough for all practical purposes, and apart from some (very rare) classical recordings as much as is ever on a CD but if you are using the full potential of a 24/192 recording medium then you will lose some of it going to vinyl. Given that unless you live in an anechoic chamber or Zabriskie Point your background noise level is going to be 35 - 40db a 75db DR lets you go from barely audible (above noise) to deafeningly loud anyway and a 120db DR looks a lot like overkill. 120db + 35db = hearing damage

http://www.dangerousdecibels.org/hearingloss.cfm

You may check out a thread at Steve Hoffman's forum below.

Does vinyl suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio ?

Yes, but the finite limits of vinyl mean that this extra resolution in the recording isnt carried over to the pressing, the cutting head just isnt capable of that level of resolution, neither is the physical medium. A system with a DR of 80db is capable of about 8k unambiguous levels, that is it. DR and resolution are inextricably linked, if vinyl was capable of better than 80db then it would have higher resolution than it does, you cannot cram more information onto it just because you start with a higher resolution source. When you transfer from 192/24 (144db) to vinyl (~80db on a good day) you are by necessity compressing the range of the signal , otherwise how else do you get 144db into 80db. When it is compressed down all the extra resolution is lost and the "levels" are effectively aggregated.

If a signal is confined to a bandwidth of 20 kHz and the dynamic
range between the abient noise floor and the loudest signal is
80 dB, say, a 192 kHz 24 bit sampling will not capture
more information about that signal than a 44.1 kHz 16 bit system because there isnt any more information to capture. The higher sampling gets you higher bandwidth but over 20 - 20k it isnt relevant in information terms.


I am not knocking vinyl btw, I have been actively researching TT rigs for myself but within the realm of the physically achievable 192/24 onto LP doesnt buy you any advantages.

Thanks, it was an interesting read.

Fair points. As for 20K+, sigh, maybe 20 years ago I would have cared, these days my hearing certainly doesnt go above 16K

There were some interesting AES studies about the effect of Low pass filters back in 1983, sadly I cant recall the references exactly, I will try and hunt them out, however I think that they used audio professionals who may have been in their 30s thus making their perceptions of 20k filters er moot