The Sonic Differences:
Just what is it about vinyl’s sound that gives it the sonic edge? Perhaps the most effective way for me to contrast the differences I hear between the two mediums is to compare them to two differing motion-picture formats, celluloid (or film stock) and video tape. As you watch a motion picture—that is, actual film in a theater projected by light onto a screen—there is an overwhelmingly three-dimensional perception to the image. There is more vividness to a motion picture viewed on celluloid. Images have more detail, colors are rendered with more vibrancy, detail is more vital, contrast more stark and nuances exhibit more power over the viewer. These distinctions, readily apparent to anyone that chooses to compare both a film and its video-taped transfer, all serve to create greater involvement with the motion-picture experience. Although the videotape catches the essence of the film, these more subtle interpretations and variations just don’t make the translation. So I find it with vinyl.
Timbre, like the color in our celluloid film, is more natural and correct sounding. Bass is more full, round and rich. Vocals are more present, providing more of a sense of the "body" that created them, be it flesh and blood, wood or metal. Cymbals are more detailed, more bronzy and lifelike. They are more likely to shimmer over you rather than splash at you. The soundstage, again much like the film image, is more dimensional in its layering, providing a better sense of both the real space of the individual instruments as well as its placement in the venue. There is a greater sense of the space around instruments, and of the bloom of each instrument itself. The image, just like that of the film, is wider, deeper and especially taller. There is an overall vitality and life to the music that is inescapable—to me anyway.
With the CD, bass tends to be more flat, coming across more in a two-dimensional sense, with less depth and less breadth. Timbre is often less honest. Vocals nearly always seem rougher and have less body. Cymbals sound "whiter," often with a splashy, tishy sound. The stage is usually more shallow. Layering is rendered much more discreetly, more like a two-dimensional cut-out suspended in space rather than projecting spherically in all directions and overlapping in space. The CD portrays the acoustical space much like a videotape foreshortens and flattens the cinematic image. The obvious "flatness" of the videotaped image is inescapable by comparison. The image is most often more prone to wander. While I will acknowledge that these attributes typically lessen as the cost of the player/DAC rises (and conversely, increase as the price drops), they nonetheless describe the overall performance of the digital medium in general. There is an overall sense of "less" rendered by the CD when compared to that of good analog playback, and it is painfully obvious.
Neil Young, the grizzled rock veteran, has a much more graphic analogy for the contrast. He said that if you equate listening to vinyl to the feel of the water falling on you when standing under a waterfall, then listening to digital is like standing under someone pouring buckets of ice over you.
