What is behind a "warm" or "vinyl"sound?


I found an interesting article in The Saturday Toronto Star's entertainment section on the resurgence of vinyl.

What I found most interesting in this article was a description of why people describe vinyl as "warm". Peter J Moore, the famous producer/mastering engineer of the legendary one microphone recording of the Cowboy Junkies' Trinity Sessions recording says it all comes down to the fact that humans do not like square waves - ie. when you go from super quiet to super loud at no time at all. He gives the example that if someone was to slap two pieces of wood together right beside your ear would be about the only time one would feel a square wave - and that would make you jump right out of your skin! He says digital, particularly MP3s reproduce square waves like crazy, which triggers fear which also produces fatigue. He says if those same two pieces of wood were slapped together across the room, the square wave would be rounded off by the time the sound reached our ears. Turntables cannot reproduce square waves due to through time it takes for sound to get though the length of wire and the magnet that the wire is wrapped around in the cartridge. By the time the signal gets through that the sharpness, he ugliness, has been rounded and that, he says, is what people are talking about when they describe vinyl as "warm" sounding. Interesting!

I find there are a bunch of digital manufacturers, like Lumin, that are striving for a vinyl sound. I wonder if they are somehow rounding off the square waves in the digital signal to do so? If this is the case, "perfect" reproduction may NOT actually be beneficial to the sound...at least for someone who really wants a vinyl sound experience. Better may not actually be better when it comes to digital sound reproduction!
camb
Interesting take on 'warm'. But, that does not explain why digital into tube amps produce 'warm'. Any thoughts on this?
"Interesting take on 'warm'. But, that does not explain why digital into tube amps produce 'warm'. Any thoughts on this?"

TUbe amps, with their soft clipping nature and unique impedance characteristics among other things also tend to have a "rounding" effect compared to SS, much like vinyl versus digital.

THat makes tubes an attractive ingredient to add into many audio soups to help take an edge off to various degrees when needed.

The physics (heavily mass and inertia related) involved with a cart stylus and tonearm tracking a record is a big reason why vinyl sounds the way it does (rounded/smoother) compared to digital, where playback occurs exclusively in teh electronic domain with no physics of mass, inertia, etc. involved to inherently damp things from the start.
Sanity, cognitivity and normal desire to learn should definitely dominate "Someone said..." information to avoid this endless clownade and heresy.
MP3s reproduce square waves like crazy
Interesting perspective but there's one problem. There are digital sources that sound pleasingly naturally round and conversely there are some analog sources that can sound edgy, hard and sharpe (cartridge choice? ). There's definitely overlap involved with both approaches.
Charles,
I'm guessing digital done well in theory is better able to "pass a square wave" than vinyl, again due to the absence of natural physical damping factors like inertia, FWIW, similar to how wave bending (as opposed to pistonic motion solely as per most dynamic driver operations) in a pure Walsh driver has historically shown itself to lend itself well to the task, but just a guess.

Maybe AL or some of our other trusted EEs out there can shed some light on that one?