Has anyone been able to define well or measure differences between vinyl and digital?

I think the most amazing point is that LPs and CDs can sound amazingly close given the wildly different paths the signal must take!

Regards,

barts

Reading the answers, @asctim ’s most resonates with me. Some of my favorite recordings are on vinyl. Some of my favorite recordings are digital. I don’t feel a need to declare vinyl better than digital to like it. Neither is my first born :-) I have never seen any argument that holds up that supports vinyl having any property better than digital. IMHO there is probably something to the magic that @asctim describes, flaws or not. Vinyl also ties one had behind the back of the person working on it. Does that force them to pay more attention to what they are doing? Groove space is a limited quantity. Make the most of every one and do it right or it will sound terrible. Digital? Throw whatever you want down, it will fit and come out the other end.

@sns , I cannot speak for audio equipment in general, but for professional speakers (that some consumers buy), except for lunch room conversations, analog as a storage medium is not something that ever comes up. We never say, "we better feed this with a record player or tape player in case we missed something" though some people bring in needle drops.

IMHO as well, I think the MOFI debacle should put to rest much of these discussions. It won't, but it probably should. We could be spending effort figuring out where the magic comes from, not making up properties that always fall apart under the magnifying glass.

@thespeakerdude

I have found that vinyl records sounded better than the same album on CD. My girlfriend whole heartedly agreed. I wondered why the CDs sounded relatively crispy and lacking in richness and fullness. I suspected frequency response, but this is hard to test on an LP playback chain. How do you test it? Is there a record with a sweep tone on it that can be used as a reference point? I couldn’t find one so I resorted to comparing the spectral content of the same song played through my CD player or through the LP chain. What I found was a nice gradual roll off of the highs on the LP compared to the CD. This was consistent across multiple albums. So using a digital equalizer I replicated that roll off for the CD player and the CDs sounded much better! I tricked my girlfriend with the equalizer. So that’s another interesting point about LP playback. What really is the frequency response? A gradual treble roll off does not necessarily create an impression of a lack of highs. It can sound bigger, fuller, deeper, more spacious. It might even sound more detailed if the overall balance in the listening room comes across better. If someone has experience with calibrating frequency response on cartridges and phono stages I’d like to learn more about that. If it turns out they really are producing flat playback response on most high end systems that would be interesting to know. My system was not high end, just a Sumiko Blue Point on a Project One turntable playing into a Creek integrated amp. Stereophile, I think, had put me on to that setup as a decent budget rig that could beat most digital.

@asctim , here you go. https://www.audiogon.com/listings?q=test+record

RCOA test systems record has a frequency sweep. So does the Stereo Review one but it is pretty old.

Some newer ones here:

https://store.acousticsounds.com/g/48/Test_Record

Perhaps you can post how to do your phase test and the frequency roll off. I wonder if that is unique to your setup?

@thespeakerdude

Thanks! So I assume those records have perhaps sweeps and pink noise, white noise, etc, which you could get a line level reading off of the phono stage output to analyze. Anybody here tried that?

I did my testing using a Behringer DEQ2496 and calibrated microphone fixed on a tripod in front of one of the speakers. I didn't do a phase test. It had a real time analyzer on it and I’d just play the music on LP and watch that real time analyzer with it’s peak hold feature. I’d take a picture of it at the end of the song, re-set the peak hold, and then play the same song on the CD and compare the peak hold values at the end. It was crude but I could definitely see a consistent difference with the highs not coming up so much on the LP playback. 

I never tested the Sumiko Oyster cartridge I had before the Blue Point but I’d bet it was even more rolled off. That was a moving magnet cartridge and I had a Carver Pre-amp with the right settings for that.