Dynamic Range Of Vinyl Compared To Cd

Dynamic range is the difference between the loudest signal and the noise floor.

Dynamic range of vinyl compared to cd. 16 bit cd digital audio has a technical dynamic range of 96 db though many argue the perceived range is higher when taking dithering into account. Thus the dynamic range is always going to be low. Here lp actually wins over cd. When i cut a master for vinyl and a cd master from the same digital master tape they sounded pretty much the same except for the noise floor.

With the above in mind i began exploring why some vinyl records have greater dynamic range rightly concluding that mastering lay at the heart of the issue. 1 for you techies out there cds have a sample rate of 44 1khz and a dynamic range of 16 bits. Vinyl s dynamic range is dependant on frequency because vinyl doesn t have a flat maximum output curve. Yes vinyl was noisier.

Compared to vinyl record it was noticed that cd was far more revealing of the acoustics and ambient background noise of the recording environment. That changed over time as mastering engineers were asked to take advantage of the. Now there are at times vinyl records that measure a better score on that site when compared to their cd counterpart but it s very rare. There was a mixed critical response to early digital recordings released on cd.

Most songs start hard are hard in the middle and finish with a punch. Vinyl has greater resolution than cd because its dynamic range is higher than for cd at the most audible frequencies. 2 robert points out that in the early days of cd the mastering job for vinyl and digital was the same. The dynamic range of vinyl when evaluated as the ratio of a peak sinusoidal amplitude to the peak noise density at that sine wave frequency is somewhere around 80 db.

Lp s difference between maximum to average is around 11 56db compared against the cd recording at 11 11db and even the digital rip at 11 35db. Vinyl records typically yield 55 65 db. Pcm of any flavor has a flat response to fs.