nick_charles
Headphoneus Supremus
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Obviously the LP does that because it is a mechanical device. It produces noises because physically is propagating, extracting or producing the analog signal as the needle hits the grooves in order to be heard.
The problem with LP is that it adds a substantial amount of noise and distortion, noise and distortion that is not part of the recording,decent CD players do not add significant amounts of audible noise, therefore CD is by definition more accurate
The CD or any other digital crap, is an electrical device that attempts to recreate an analog signal or attempts to give us a representation or samples of what it thinks that it may be. In others words, lie to our ears, it mimics music badly.
Yet it produces an output signal music that has less added noise and distortion , a cleaner signal with near perfect pitch and a verifiably better waveform than that extracted from LP it must therefore be more accurate by definition
An analog scope or any other measuring data device does not measure, space, separation of instruments or vocals, imaging, tridimensionality, tonality, etc. A guitar could be out of tune and the analog scope will not measure anything wrong with it. It is up to our ears to judge that.
Since CD has superior channel separation across the audible spectrum as well as lower noise it is by definition better at all these things you mention, or at least the ones that actually make any sense, LP has massive cross-channel bleed (a good LP playing system might give you crosstalk of -35db) that is not part of the recording. Take an old early Stereo recording which has bass/vocals on one channel and guitar/drums on the other the CD will give you just that , the LP will mush the channels, you might prefer it but no way is it more accurate.
So then let's look at some more limitations of vinyl, how about the level at which we record different frequencies
http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/HFN/LP1/KeepInContact.html
from the above we can see that based on the physics of the cutting operation there are pretty well-defined limits on the levels you can encode onto LP. The levels of high frequency sound you can even encode are severely limited especially as you hit the label. below the FR for a first gen iPod
How about the actual performance of a well regarded cart
How about THD vs frequency for an old CD player