71 dB
Headphoneus Supremus
Nothing wrong with loving the sound of vinyl. Vinyl creates certain type of distortions and people find those distortions pleasing. The problem arises when vinyl lovers think the pleasantness of the sound is a sign of higher fidelity. That is not true. Vinyl is lower fidelity than digital formats. Digital formats add hardly any audible distortions to the sound. They are audibly transparent except for lower bitrate lossy formats.I think you are being too harsh. He loves the sound of vinyl just like some people are crazy about birdwatching. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Now, what I am interested is why the distortions of vinyl are pleasant and what can we learn from that? Adding vinyl type of distortion to masters of digital formats would make the digital versions similarly pleasant (but without the clumsiness and problems of analog formats), but it is important to understand when to do this. I wouldn't "ruin" recordings of classical music with vinyl distortion, but maybe metal music benefits from it?
Vinyl forces left and right channels modulate each other and this creates "out of focus" soundstage which can "hide" unnatural aspect of it. Because of RIAA corrections, the distortions created by vinyl playback are massively lowpass filtered which also probably feels pleasing.
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