Vinyl vs Streaming

And let’s be real. This is a mostly aged (ahem) crowd whose hearing is changing, and the draw of convenience & downsizing looms large at a certain point. 
 

👍

@mulveling I agree with you but I can only speak from what I hear with my own system. I have no other reference as I don't live anywhere near an audio salon of any kind and I don't know one single person in my area who owns any kind of stereo system that I would care to hear. For those of us who always thought of vinyl as being better, most of us have geared our systems toward vinyl. I'm getting blasted and actually blocked out by pop ups. Will try later. This is very annoying.

@billpete 

It is entirely dependent on every component that you have in your analog and digital steam. There are so many variables. It is easy to put together a system that sounds terrible, in either digital or analog domain. 

But for folks that know what they are doing and what they want... it began in fairly expensive gear about ten years ago and the levels at which putting digital together that equaled or exceeded analog has worked its way both down cost tiers and up. 

To determine resolutions etc. you would have to develop a standard yourself for analog and digital and make your own comparison. But it is all component dependent. 

I know my analog and digital ends are very close. Such that differences in recording and mastering is far and away the biggest variable in what a recording sounds like. And exactly the same mastering will sound the same at high resolution and vinyl, but how early the vinyl master is in the sequence from a given stamper will determine whether it is as good or less so than the digital version. 

@ghdprentice I agree with you............mostly. I do think that the very most important piece is the recording itself. If it is the absolute best that it can be in analog and in digital, which one is actually superior? You have a great deal invested in both or all sides of your system. I admire that and would love to hear it or something like it but I probably never will have that opportunity.

I'm not looking to argue anything with anyone (I don't think you are either). Just trying to find an answer if one exists. Maybe it doesn't yet. It just seems like there should be a way to measure it somehow besides our own ears. I don't want to sound like an ASR advocate but...............well, I just don't know. It seems that this should be measurable in some way just as in my photography analogy. It simply came down to megapixels or dots per inch. Digital surpassed analog photos at roughly 7 megapixels. The "music picture" should be measurable in some way as well..........at least in my mind.

@billpete 

Ok, I think I understand what you are asking. I typically approach these problems from a pragmatic side. Here are some theoretical limits of vinyl vs digital

I tried a number of queries and an AI came up with this answer from a theoretical perspective:
 

A fair engineering estimate is that the best vinyl playback lands roughly in the neighborhood of 10 to 12 bits of effective amplitude resolution, paired with bandwidth that is broadly comparable to about 44.1 or 48 kHz digital sampling. That is because top vinyl playback usually delivers something like 55 to 70 dB of usable dynamic range, while 16-bit digital provides about 96 dB of dynamic range, so vinyl falls well short of 16-bit on noise floor alone. 

So if you wanted the digital format that best matches the best analog vinyl, I would say:

About 12-bit / 44.1 kHz is a reasonable rough equivalence.
Not exact… but in the ballpark. 

Why that answer?

Digital has two separate axes:

Bit depth maps most closely to dynamic range / noise floor.
Using the standard rule of roughly 6 dB per bit, 60 dB of vinyl-like dynamic range works out to about 10 bits, and 72 dB works out to about 12 bits. That is why people often treat very good vinyl as somewhere around 10–12 effective bits. 

Sample rate maps most closely to frequency bandwidth.
If vinyl can reach roughly the top of the audible band under good conditions, then 44.1 kHz digital already covers that, because it can represent frequencies up to a little above 22 kHz under the sampling theorem. 

But there is an important catch…

Vinyl does not fail like digital fails. It is not cleanly “12-bit.” Its limits vary with groove position, cartridge alignment, record wear, cutting level, pressing quality, and frequency. Inner grooves are worse than outer grooves, and distortion rises in ways that do not map neatly to bits. So “12-bit / 44.1 kHz” is only a rough analog-to-digital translation, not a literal one. 

So the simplest answer is:

Best-case vinyl ≈ roughly 12-bit, 44.1 kHz digital
Typical vinyl often behaves more like 10-bit or 11-bit equivalent

And that is why CD-quality digital already exceeds vinyl technically, even though many listeners still prefer vinyl subjectively.

I live in the Pacific Northwest. I’d love to have you over if you get up here. Just send me a direct message.