Vinyl has more resolution than 16/44.1, just for starters.
Yes and no - mainly no. 16-bit has a dynamic range of around 96dB. Vinyl offers nowhere near that, and it's an obtrusive non-white rough noise floor at that, not the benign uncorrelated noise you get from a properly-dithered PCM system, so in terms of detail, vinyl loses hands down.
44.1 kHz sampling means that the system can capture information at full dynamic range above 20kHz (just). Humans can't hear that high unless it's very loud (120dB SPL for example, but then you can't tell what frequency it is - or, probably, what it sounds like at all). There is a case for recording at higher sample rates so that filtering can be done well outside the audio band, but you can do that with oversampling.
To comfortably extend beyond the capability of human hearing, the coding space offered by a properly-dithered 20-bit system running at 52kHz or above will do nicely.
Vinyl certainly /appears/ to have content above the 12kHz or so level, but most of this is actually groove and harmonic distortion masquerading as HF. There have been attempts to get extremely high frequencies on disc, eg subcarriers for quad difference signals, but they fade away after a few playings - they just get worn out by the stylus, even a special Shibata one designed to play CD-4 discs. A regular stylus can't track anywhere near 20 kHz and most cutting heads had trouble too.
Of course, early digital recording and early CDs sounded like crap, because in those days we didn't know how to do filtering properly, or minimise jitter, or build the analogue side properly. Now we are a lot better at it.
Michael Peters wrote:
The question isn't wether or not more information will be recorded - the question is can people hear a difference.
Or perhaps the question is actually which sounds closer to the original masters. As a former cutting engineer, I promise you, it won't be the vinyl. However, if you have only /heard/ the vinyl you won't know what the masters sounded like. As someone once put it, "The only people who prefer vinyl are the people who've never been in a recording studio."
We always used to hate listening to test pressings. They were special discs that the plant had taken real care over and they sounded horrible. And you knew that buyers would get something much worse. We had already lost so much in the cutting room, adding compression and weird EQ just to get it on to the lacquer, and now they pressed it. Yuck. I'm glad those days are over, quite frankly. The only discs that were halfwayd decent were microgroove 78s, and they were pretty unusual. And still didn't match the human coding space.
Now there are hi-res disc formats offering 24/96 and 24/192, it means that CD is the 'old' format. You are now, therefore, allowed to enjoy it, just as when CD came in, you were allowed to enjoy vinyl and were no longer obliged to profess the belief that 78s sounded better.
--Richard Elen
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