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I am a life-long Beatles fan, but since I am only 29, I grew up hearing the Beatles on cassette tape or CD until I started collecting all of their albums on vinly back in the late '90s.  After hearing everything on both vinyl and CD, I have to say that the Beatles sound best on Vinyl.  The digital remastering of their music for CD seems to have lost the freshness of their sound.  This is especially true of their early years.  A vinyl copy of Revolver in Mono is superior to the stereo CD.  What does everyone else think?  Do they sound better on vinyl or CD?

[Geoff]

CD quality compared to vinyl depends on how good the remastering job for the CD was (or how long ago it was done in the case of The Beatles), and how comparatively good the  master tape for the original vinyl release was. It can vary. The Beatles catalog desperately needs to be reissued because the original remastering job was done twenty years ago and there is much better transcription equipment available today. For that reason, I agree with you that the old vinyls can sound better, depending on which pressing you have. Parlophone pressings were usually quite fine, but North American pressings were much less so, at least in my experience. A good Parlophone pressing might well sound better than the current CD's, but the CD's would sound better than any Capitol release.

Done properly (or recently!), CD issues can be quite an improvement: compare the reissued Imagine from about 2001 or so with an old vinyl copy or the 1980's CD.

In my opinion anyway; I'll defer to the more knowledgeable members of the forum on this one.

[Geoff]

Ooop... and I'm muddling up remixing and remastering. The Imagine CD's been remixed, too. A better example would be comparing the 1989 The John Lennon Collection CD to the very similar Lennon Legend from 1997. Both discs use the old mixes, but the sound is a lot better on Lennon Legend: whether that's owing to better EQing or a whole new transcription job from the analog tapes- or both- I can't say.

[JimmyMcCullochFan]

I am 20 and vinyl basically own cds any day of the week.

[Kevin]

It's not all to do with the sound - I think another important distinction is that much thought was given to songs that would open and close sides of vinyl. As an example, I think to not have heard Helter skelter/ Long Long Long as the end of side three of The White Album must greatly diminish the experience. And I've said before, I think Within You Without You takes on a whole new life as opening side two of Pepper. And She's So Heavy as Abbey Roads big closer for side one - how can it be heard as anything else?
Albums weren't designed to be heard as a continious stream of music.

[Kevin]

I am 20 and vinyl basically own cds any day of the week.

May we have that in english please  

[Geoff]

Something else I probably should have mentioned is that the noise reduction filters used on some of those early CD's to reduce tape hiss could really flatten the sound, too; so much so that the CD ended up sounding murky and inferior to the LP it was intended to replace.

[Bungalow Bill]

There has often been a misconception that CD's and digital media are somehow an improvement over analog. Although clearer, and highly portable the problem with CD's is they do not have the dynamic range of vinyl.. they are flat compared to analog recordings because they do not allow for any "warmth", which is caused mostly by a small amount of tape distortion which the tape evens out naturally. Many engineers of that era would record past the 0 db level which digital media is limited by. This recording "In The Red" allowed for much more dynamic fuller sounding masters which when put on a medium like vinyl which has a fuller dynamic range allows the listener to hear something as close as possible to the master recordings themselves. This is a case where bigger is better.. the larger medium actually allows for a better bigger sound. The CD is exactly that a compact disc... the sound has been compressed and compacted.  Although i do very much agree that a new remastered CD is a great choice largely because technology and techniques used to maximize the sound of a CD, the best choices remain Vinyl and possibly DVD-Audio which has a much higher sample/bit rate than CD.

[Bungalow Bill]

Albums weren't designed to be heard as a continious stream of music.

Very good point that's why i tend to prefer EP's to many bands full length albums as it seems that it holds up better than a grandiose 21 track attempt at a cohesive package.

[harihead]

You guys are making me so glad I held onto the vinyl for my teenage years record collection. I'm the only one among my friends who still owns a turntable.

[Kevin]

You guys are making me so glad I held onto the vinyl for my teenage years record collection. I'm the only one among my friends who still owns a turntable.

I do love it, and tried to convert my girlfriend, but even I found it a real p*sser having to get up every fifteen minutes (six if you're listening to Ringo's greatest hits.) to flip the things over.
Plays havoc with the concentration (which is important for a gentleman) if you're trying to have a "romantic" evening.

[alexis]

I do love it, and tried to convert my girlfriend, but even I found it a real p*sser having to get up every fifteen minutes (six if you're listening to Ringo's greatest hits.) to flip the things over.
Plays havoc with the concentration (which is important for a gentleman) if you're trying to have a "romantic" evening.

I assume your concern here is having too short a period of time to set set the mood, rather than to accomplish anything, uhm, tangible.

 Clearly, there are two options here.

One is to take the 15 minute interval as a goal, a challenge of sorts. "I've got 15 minutes to set the mood, or it ain't going to happen". Might be a bit difficult for the "Ringo 6", but hey, aim high! (So to speak).

Option #2 is to go totally retro: Buy one of those turntables that can stack 4 or 5 vinyl discs (called records in the old days), so that when one is finished, the next one drops down and starts to play. This yields 1 hr or more of continuous music. If the mood can't be set in that period of time, there are likely other  significant factors involved.

Option #2a - Some of those retro turntables had a "replay" switch - it'd play one side, then play it again, and again. I suppose one could time certain domestic activities so that they occur in syncrhony with the music each time ...

[Geoff]

Option #2a - Some of those retro turntables had a "replay" switch - it'd play one side, then play it again, and again. I suppose one could time certain domestic activities so that they occur in syncrhony with the music each time ...

My Mum's got one of those; maybe I'll ask her if I can borrow it.

[walrusgumboot]

It's not only the medium that's important, it's what you use to "extract" the music.

 A 300 quid record deck kicks the s**t out of a 300 quid cd player any day of the week...cheap  hardware gives a cheap sound.

The difference between what you hear in analog and what you hear in digital was once explained to me by a sound engineer..because analog was recorded, mixed and mastered by hand ( remember the names near the hole on albums in the 70's?) "sounds beyond or below human hearing range were recorded and these have an effect on what you actually hear.
 On the other hand, the computers filter out these "sounds" hence the flatness of CD.
 Now this might have been BS, I don't know...but it does make a weird kind of sense.

   WG

[Andy Smith]

i own all the beatles albums on cd along with the solo material, but recently i've started to collect vinyl,
y'can't beat a bit of old crackle! i just makes it more special & that's what it would have sounded like for
the people who bought the albums when they first out.

[Geoff]

The difference between what you hear in analog and what you hear in digital was once explained to me by a sound engineer..because analog was recorded, mixed and mastered by hand ( remember the names near the hole on albums in the 70's?) "sounds beyond or below human hearing range were recorded and these have an effect on what you actually hear.
 On the other hand, the computers filter out these "sounds" hence the flatness of CD.
 Now this might have been BS, I don't know...but it does make a weird kind of sense.

   WG

I heard (or read) that somewhere, too, and it makes sense to me as well. Probably back in the late eighties out of one of those stereo magazines when CDs were replacing vinyl. And speaking of flat sounding CDs, remember Paul's Tug Of War, which was an early digital mix from 1982? Those horns!

[alexis]

As I understand some of this, a big part of bad sounding CDs has to do with the equipment used to convert the analog signal to digital (the A-D converters). The way the conversion is done is that the instruments take "snapshots" of the sound every so often, and then convert that to a digital piece of information.

The early A-D converters took snapshots a whole lot less frequently than the newer ones, and so the early CDs weren't as detailed-sounding.

That's just one of the reasons the older CDs sound really badly compared to vinyl, others have been mentioned, and there are others still! I think the bottom line is that the technology is probably there nowadays to have a CD made that is pretty darn near impossible to distinguish from vinyl, and even harder to pick if one is "better" than the other.

Disclaimer: I am not a sound recording engineer. But I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night!

[Geoff]

The early A-D converters took snapshots a whole lot less frequently than the newer ones, and so the early CDs weren't as detailed-sounding.


Disclaimer: I am not a sound recording engineer. But I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night!

That's my understanding, too- modern sampling rates are much higher or something to that effect.

I'm a very unsound recording engineer myself- and I've never been let into anything as good as a Holiday Inn; I'm lucky if I can get into a Motel 6.

[walrusgumboot]

 I'm not a sound engineer either..I'm lucky if they let me in anywhere!!

   WG

[Geoff]

I'm not a sound engineer either..I'm lucky if they let me in anywhere!!

   WG

Truth be told, I usually just park behind a bush somewhere and sleep in the back of the car.