The portable CD player might be a thing of the past, but, believe it or not, big-time audio companies are still releasing CD players for the home. Because audiophiles are still craving them. In the past few years, companies such as Cambridge Audio, Panasonic, McIntosh, Rotel and Sony have all released new CD players or integrating them into digital streamers. Today's Best Deals. Type keyword s to search.
A perfectly adequate Sony Blu-Ray can be had for under 80 bucks, while a nice Sony DVD player comes in for less than that cheapo suitcase record player at Target. Like most folks, I listen to music on my smartphone while on the go. CDs are a snap to rip on your computer, using free built-in software on both Windows and Macs. If somehow the files you ripped get lost or corrupted, just go back and re-rip your CD.
Easy peasy. Want to record and distribute your own music? Of course you can completely D. A spindle of CD-Rs will only run you about 17 bucks, and can still be had at your local discount or office supply store.
Better make a weekend of it. And vinyl? Think more like two grand, and waiting for months. Cost and convenience still outweighs hip, even in indie rock. Share this comparison:. If you read this far, you should follow us:. Diffen LLC, n. CD vs. Vinyl Record. Sound Quality From a technical standpoint, digital CD audio quality is clearly superior to vinyl. Digital vs. Analog Format CDs are a digital music storage medium, meaning the music is encoded as binary data.
Follow Share Cite Authors. Comments: CD vs Vinyl Record. Related Comparisons. Contribute to Diffen Edit or create new comparisons in your area of expertise. Log in ». Terms of use Privacy policy. A CD is a Varying sized disk that is able to hold nano-sized digits formatted as digital files.
If notes get too low in pitch, that means less audio can fit in a given amount of vinyl. If notes are too high, the stylus has difficulty tracking them, causing distortion. So engineers mastering for vinyl often cut back on extreme high or low ends , using a variety of methods , all of which alter the music.
For example, one common cause of high pitches in recordings is "sibilance," or the hiss-y sound produced by pronouncing certain consonants, notably "s" or "z"s, in a quick, sharp way ex. This creates enough problems for engineers working in vinyl that they often have to "de-ess" recordings , either by making the pronunciation less sibilant through editing or by straight-up asking vocalists to pronounce lyrics differently.
De-essing is a common technique outside vinyl too, but then it's an artistic choice; vinyl forces de-essing upon you. If you want to keep aggressive sibilance in for aesthetic reasons, and want to press to vinyl, you're out of luck. And when de-essing is achieved through re-recording vocals, it can alter the music in subtler ways, making vocalists deliver lyrics less intensely and lose a degree of artistic expression in the process. Sound engineer mixing the audio behind the audio console.
Denmark Since CDs rely on sampling an original analog signal being recorded, they do have some frequency limitations. While vinyl records, in theory, directly encode a smooth audio wave, CDs sample that audio wave at various points and then collate those samples.
That's true. CDs work by taking a bunch of samples from a source audio wave and stringing them together. But this criticism is misleading on two counts. For one thing, vinyl pressing is not error-free, and the analog groove of a given record is not a precise replication of the audio wave recorded in the master, not least due to extreme high and low frequency limitations.
It's true that CDs can't exactly replicate the whole audio wave in a master, in every case update: in many cases, the Nyquist-Shannon theorem means it can — but neither can vinyl records. More importantly, the volume of sampling that CDs do should be enough to get a replica of the original recording that sounds identical to the human ear. The sampling rate for CDs is That is about the limit of what humans can hear; at least one experiment has confirmed that listeners in blind tests can't tell the difference between recordings that include frequencies above 21k and ones that don't.
You may think you can hear more than CDs are giving you. But you probably can't. And over time, engineers have come to make better use of those Scott Metcalfe, director of recording arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins's Peabody Institute, explains that engineers have taken to "oversampling," making digital files that use a much higher rate than Metcalfe brings up another problem with this line of CD criticism.
Even if an actual recording method can hold frequencies above 20kHz, that doesn't matter if there isn't a microphone capable of capturing them in the first place, or a speaker capable of playing them back.
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