Digital Versus Analog

Specific albums that may shed light on this controversial subject, pro and con.

Shouldn’t a Digital Recording Sound the Same on CD and Vinyl?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

UPDATE 2026

These comments are taken from a reddit thread that Geoff Edgers and I were on years ago talking about Hot Stampers. I would add that the audience seemed to have very little experience with high-end audio. Based on the comments I read, most of them, like most audiophiles, especially audiophile record collectors, thought I was selling snake oil.

(Doesn’t it strike you as odd that no one ever seems to bring up the fact that we make a point of explaing to you exactly how to find your own snake oil?)

Someone asked a question about vinyl for digital recordings. Discussing the difference I typically hear between CDs and vinyl pressings, I offered the opinions you see below. (We might have been talking about Brothers in Arms; I honestly don’t remember and don’t think it matters anyway.)

For those of you newer to the blog, please keep in mind that, unlike a great many fans of analog, I actually like the sound of the hundreds of CDs I own and make a point to play them regularly for enjoyment. Properly mastered CDs can sound shockingly good.

In my experience, a good CD will wipe the floor with the vast majority of Heavy Vinyl records being made today. If you are buying modern remastered records, I highly recommend you stop and instead make the effort to find a good CD player and buy vintage — and even some of the better gold — CDs.

My comments:

Well, a too short version would be something like:

On the vinyl and on the CD the tonality should be identical.

If it is not you have problems and you need to do some work to find them and fix them.

Assuming correct tonality, the CD should be big, lively and clear, assuming you have a good CD player and a good CD.

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“We Have Different Views of Digital”

Basic Concepts Every Audiophile Needs to Understand

A friend writes:

We have different views of digital. I think I’m more with Neil Young. When you have a choice, you go analog and find the best sounding record. But there is a world out there that uses digital. We’re not going to stop that. So the fact that digital is markedly better than it was years ago is significant. Now I think your view is… why would I want to bother with digital when I know the answer: The best sounding record I can find.

You don’t even use your car stereo to listen to music, right?

I used to really rock out in my 2002 3 series BMW outfitted with Harmon Kardon components. That was a killer system, the best car stereo I ever owned. (The Burmester in our new German SUV does some things well, but since it does not offer CD playback, and I’ve never hooked my phone up to it (or anything else for that matter), I’m sure I have never heard it at its best.)

In some ways my BMW system brought to light faults I did not know existed in my old tube home stereo, and that’s when I knew I needed to make a change. Talk about a wake up call! (More on that subject coming down the road I hope.)

I would take issue with modern digital being better. I am not sure if there is much evidence to support that. The best digital sound I have heard, and guys like my friend Robert Pincus swear by, are the CDs created in the 90s, before they learned how to “make them better.”

Back in the day we played them on the CD players we had picked up at reasonable prices (why spend the money?) that seemed to offer a more natural, analog sound. Out of the two dozen or so CD players I’ve tried over the years, I might have found three or four that offered sound that was strikingly similar to analog.

(None of the ones I heard with lots of fancy clocks and separate components ever did anything for me, but of course I would never say that that approach to digital can’t or doesn’t work. I just never heard one that did. If you have one, more power to you.)

I’ve thrilled to “digital that doesn’t sound digital” for thousands upon thousands of hours. Done a lot of work tweaking and tuning the stereo using CDs. Like the records we’ve listed that helped us dramatically improve our playback, there are plenty of CDs that fit that bill too.

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Folks, This Is Why We Love Vintage Analog

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer Available Now

This is ANALOG at its Tubey Magical finest. You ain’t never gonna play a CD that sounds like this as long as you live. I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade, but digital media are evidently incapable of reproducing this kind of sound. There are nice sounding CDs in the world but there aren’t any that sound like this, not in my experience anyway.

If you are thinking that someday a better digital system is going to come along in order to save you the trouble and expense of having to find and acquire these expensive original pressings, think again.

This is the kind of record that shows you what’s wrong with your BEST sounding CDs. (Best not to talk about the average one in your collection, or mine. The less said the better.)

This is the kind of record that somebody might hear in a stereo store and realize that the digital road he’s been going down for so many years is nothing but a sonic dead end.

The organ captured here by Eddie Offord (of Yes engineering fame — we’re his biggest fans) and then transferred so well onto our Hot Stamper pressings (that’s partly what makes them Hot Stampers, right?) will rattle the foundation of your house. This music really needs that kind of megawatt reproduction to make sense.

It’s big bombastic Prog Rock that wants desperately to rock your world.

At moderate levels it just sounds overblown and silly.

At loud levels it actually will rock your world.

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Good Digital Beats Bad Analog Any Day

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

And this is some very bad analog indeed!

We here present our 2010 review of the Sonny Rollins Plus 4 album, the one remastered on two slabs of 45 RPM Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl.

It has everything going for it, right?

Steve Hoffman, Kevin Gray, 45 RPMs, Heavy Virgin Vinyl, fancy packaging — clearly no expense was spared!

The ingredients may have been there, but the cake they baked was not only not delicious, it was positively unlistenable — I mean, inedible.

I cannot recall hearing a more ridiculously thick, opaque and unnatural sounding “audiophile” pressing than this Rollins record, and believe me, I’ve heard plenty. (And it seems the bad news will never stop.)

As I noted in another commentary “Today’s audiophile seems to be making the same mistakes I was making as a budding enthusiast more than thirty forty years ago. Heavy Vinyl, the 45 RPM 2 LP pressing, the Half-Speed limited edition — aren’t these all just the latest audiophile fads, each with a track record more dismal than the last one?”

It reminds me of the turgid muck that Doug Sax was cutting for Analogue Productions back in the 90s. The CD has to sound better than this. There’s no way could it sound worse.

CD Update:

I managed to track down a copy of the CD and it DOES sound better than this awful record, and by a long shot. It’s not a great sounding CD, but it sure isn’t the disaster this record is.

Buy the CD, and whatever you do, don’t waste money on this kind of crap vinyl.

This is a very bad sounding record, so bad that one minute’s play will have you up and out of your chair trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with your system. But don’t bother. It’s not your stereo, it’s this record.

It has the power to make your perfectly enjoyable speakers sound like someone wrapped them in four inches of cotton bunting while you weren’t looking.

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Which Art Pepper Today Is Better: Phil DeLancie Digital or George Horn Analog?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

UPDATE 2024

This commentary was written in 2010 or thereabouts.

There is new information about the album as of 2024, which can be found here.

We’d wanted to do Art Pepper Today for more than a decade, but the original Galaxy pressings were just too thick and dark to earn anything approaching a top sonic grade. Thirty years ago on a very different system I had one and liked it a lot, but there was no way I could get past the opaque sound I was now hearing on the more than half-dozen originals piled in front of me.

So, almost in desperation we tried an OJC reissue from the ’90s. You know, the ones that all the audiophiles on the web will tell you to steer clear of because it has been mastered by Phil DeLancie and might be sourced from digital tapes.

Or digitally remastered, or somehow was infected with something digital somehow.

Well, immediately the sound opened up dramatically, with presence, space, clarity and top end extension we simply could not hear on the originals. Moreover, the good news was that the richness and solidity of the originals was every bit as good. Some of the originals were less murky and veiled than others, so we culled the worst of them for trade and put the rest into the shootout with all the OJCs we could get our hands on.

Now, it’s indisputable that Phil DeLancie is credited on the jacket, but I see George Horn‘s writing in the dead wax of the actual record, so I really have no way of knowing whether in fact Mr Delancie had anything to do with the copies I was auditioning. They don’t sound digital to me, they’re just like other good George Horn-mastered records I’ve heard from this period.

And of course we here at Better Records never put much stock in what record jackets say; in our experience, the commentary on the jackets rarely has much to do with the sound of the records inside them.

And, one more surprise awaited us as we were plowing through our pile of copies.

When we got to side two we found that the sound of the Galaxy originals was often competitive with the best of the OJCs. Which means that there’s a good probability that some of the original pressings I tossed for having bad sound on side one had very good, perhaps even shootout winning sound, on side two.

This is a lesson I hope to take to heart in the future. I know very well that the sound of side one is independent of side two, but somehow in this case I let my prejudice against the first side color my thinking about the second.

Of all the people who should know better…

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Workingman’s Dead is Dead as a Doornail on Rhino Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Grateful Dead Available Now

This review was written many years ago, shortly after the release of the album in the early-2000s.

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and a Heavy Vinyl disaster if there ever was one (and oh yes, there are plenty. Here are some of the more recent examples we’ve played).

The 2003 Rhino reissue on Heavy Vinyl of Workingman’s Dead is absolutely awful. It sounds like a bad cassette.

The CD of the album that I own is superb, which means that the tapes are not the problem, bad mastering and pressing are.

This pressing has what we call ”modern” sound, which is to say it’s clean and tonally correct for the most part, but it’s missing the Tubey Magic the originals and the good reissues both have plenty of.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? The pressings on the last WB labels are pretty awful, but this awful? Who can say.

Rhino Records has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino bills their releases as pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl”. However, if they are using performance to refer to sound quality, we have found the performance of their vinyl to be quite low, lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins.

The CD versions of most of the LP titles they released early on are far better sounding than the lifeless, flat, pinched, so-called audiophile pressings they did starting around 2000. The mastering engineer for this garbage actually has the nerve to feature his name in the ads for the records. He should be run out of town, not promoted as a keeper of the faith and defender of the virtues of “vinyl.” If this is what vinyl sounds like I’d switch to CD myself.

And the amazing thing is, as bad as these records are, there are people who like them! I’ve read postings on the internet from people who say the sound on these records is just fine, thank you very much. I find this very, very sad. More proof, as if we needed it, that the audiophile record collecting world has lost its mind.

Their Grateful Dead titles sound worse than the cheapest Super Saver reissue copies I have ever heard. The Yes Album sounds like a cheap cassette as well, a ghost of the real thing.

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Robert Brook Revisits a White Hot Stamper Pressing of The Eagles

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Here is a posting Robert wrote many years ago and has recently updated.

EAGLES: WHITE HOT and SOARING HIGHER!

A quote I rather liked:

You can throw a Hot Stamper onto your rig and hear that it sounds better than your crappy “audiophile” 180g reissue, but when you compare it to your high res digital file, you’re not quite sure which one you like better.

The digital vs. analog debate, perhaps the most enduring in all of audio, persists because only a handful of audiophiles have truly realized the full potential of analog in their systems.

You may be reading this thinking “hey whad’ya mean! My analog system sounds great!.” And it very well may sound great, but I thought and still think that my copy of Eagles sounds great, and let me tell you, the White Hot Stamper is a WHOLE new platter of wax!

The tubey jangle of the guitars, the room filling weight of the drums and bass, the airy, spacious, luscious vocal harmonies, and every last sumptuous element of the mix, unmoored, liberated from obscuration so completely that the music, freed from every conceivable resolution constraint, SOARS to life in the listening room.

That’s what this White Hot Stamper of Eagles sounds like, and that’s what analog is ALL ABOUT!

This record, The Dude be damned, is one of my all time favorites. It’s a delicious recording on even a decent copy. My current copy, which bested several others, was competitive on side 1, but laid to waste by the White Hot on side 2. And that was the side I thought mine had nailed!

Eagles lives and dies by the vocal harmonies, and when the backing vocals are as clear and present and alive as the lead vocal is on most other records then you know you’re hearing a very special copy.

Here is our description of a recent copy that is up on the site at this time.

Super Hot and $699 — affordable maybe for some, certainly not cheap, but as Robert makes clear in his review, one of the most amazing sounding recordings in the history of popular music on the right pressing, and the right pressings are the only ones we offer.

The notes for our Shootout Winning copy from 2024 can be seen at the very end of this post. Side two was a “strong 3+, ” which we would have called 4+, Beyond White Hot, way back when, but we stopped doing that many years ago.

Side two was HTF — Hard To Fault. This may have been the side two that Robert is raving about in his review.

My current copy, which bested several others, was competitive on side 1, but laid to waste by the White Hot on side 2. And that was the side I thought mine had nailed!

Eagles lives and dies by the vocal harmonies, and when the backing vocals are as clear and present and alive as the lead vocal is on most other records then you know you’re hearing a very special copy.

Can’t argue with any of that! That’s what we heard too.

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Is Digital Really the Problem on this Cowboy Junkies Album?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Digital Recordings with Audiophile Sound 

The RCA domestic pressings cut at Sterling are not worth the vinyl they’re pressed on.

Don’t be one of those die-hard analog types who point fingers at the fact that there was digital in the recording chain when their pressing doesn’t sound good.

It’s got nothing to do with digital. It has everything to do with Sterling doing a bad job mastering the domestic vinyl.

(Keep in mind that a very large group of audiophiles, including some well-known reviewers, had no idea there was a digital step used in the process of making some of the records they had raved about. Apparently the only way to hear it is when you already know it’s there.)

Our notes for the domestic pressing below read:

  • Flat and dry vox.
  • Shifted up [tonally]
  • A bit scooped [or “sucked out” in the midrange, meaning the middle of the midrange is missing to some degree]

The midrange suckout effect is easily reproducible in your very own listening room. Pull your speakers farther out into the room and farther apart from each other and you can get that sound on every record you own. I’ve been hearing it in the various audiophile systems I’ve been exposed to for more than 40 years.

Why Defend the Indefensible?

When good mastering houses like Kendun and Sterling and Artisan make bad sounding records, we offer no excuses for their shoddy work. The same would be true for the better-known cutting engineers who’ve done work for them, as well as other cutting operations.

Individuals working for generally good companies sometimes produce substandard work product.

How is this news to anyone outside of the sycophantic thread posters, youtubers, and self-identified record experts who write for the audiophile community?

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Revisiting the Analog Vs. Digital Debate with Donald Fagen

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

Many years ago we did a big shootout for this album. Afterwards we asked this question:

Do all the pressings of The Nightfly sound like CDs?

The average copy of this digitally recorded, mixed and mastered LP sounds just the way you would expect it to: like a CD.

It’s anemic, two-dimensional, opaque, thin, bright, harsh, with little extreme top and the kind of bass that’s all “note” with no real weight, solidity or harmonic structure. Sounds like a CD, right? (That’s the way many of my CDs sound, which is why I rarely listen to them these days.)

But what if I told you that the best copies of The Nightfly can actually sound like a real honest-to-goodness ANALOG recording, with practically none of the nasty shortcomings listed above? You may not believe it, but it’s true.

How do I know it’s true?

The same way I came to learn practically everything I believe about the sound of equipment and records. I heard it for myself. (Keeping in mind that I am sure to be wrong about some things. Not to worry. When I find out which things those are, I will post them in this section of the blog where they can join the other 175+ entries.)

I heard a copy sound so natural and correct that I would never have guessed it was digital. On my honor, that’s the truth. The best copies of The Nightfly can actually be shockingly analog.

Simply put, the question before the house is: Can this record sound analog? We’ll be taking the affirmative.

The problem with the typical copy of this record is gritty, grainy, grungy sound — not the kind that’s on the master tape, the kind that’s added during the mastering and pressing of the record. When that crap goes away, as it so clearly does on a copy we played recently, it lets you see just how good sounding this record can be. And that means really good sounding.

On most copies, the CD-like opacity and grunge would naturally be attributed to the digital recording process. That’s the conventional wisdom, so those with a small data sample (in most cases the size of that sample will be one) could be forgiven for reaching such a conclusion. Based on our findings it turns out to be false.

The bad pressings do indeed sound more like CDs. The best pressings do not.

If you like having your biases confirmed, then by all means, keep your digital-sounding copy and pretend you know why The Nightfly sounds bad on vinyl.

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Two CDs that Sound Nothing Like Their Vinyl Counterparts

Reviews and Commentaries for Sticky Fingers

Reviews and Commentaries for Back in Black

I made the mistake of buying both Back in Black and Sticky Fingers on CD to listen to in the car, and both are a disaster — no bass, no rock weight, with boosted upper mids, no doubt in a misguided attempt to provide more “clarity” and “detail.”

But trying to achieve more clarity at the expense of the rock and roll firepower that makes both of these albums Must Own Rock Records is beyond foolish.

These albums did not need a new sound or a more modern sound. The sound of the original pressings of both of them is superb, as close to faultless as you are likely to find in this world.

Mobile Fidelity managed to get more transparency in the midrange for their pressing, and look what it got them: our award for the worst version ever.

On both of these CDs, even in the car I couldn’t get past the third song.

If this is what the digital lovers of the world think those albums actually sound like, they are living in some kind of parallel universe.

The best pressings on vinyl sound nothing like them. In fact the best pressings sound so good they are on our Rock and Pop Top 100. Rest assured that you don’t get to be on our Top 100 with anemic, upper midrangy sound.

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