Vinyl vs. Digital

This afternoon I got out my Philips LP of George Szell conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra in the Sibelius 2nd Symphony. This is indubitably one of the great recordings of the work, passionate, richly colored, gorgeously paced. It is plagued by one of the ugliest album covers of all time – a slate beach with a dark incoming wave – but it's Philips audio at its 1960s best.

My LP-playing setup is good, perhaps not great. I have a fine VPI Scout II turntable with a Grado Sonata cartridge, which outputs to a Musical Fidelity phono preamp hence into the upstairs sound system, a Marantz Home Theater receiver that plays into two B&W 805s speakers with a B&W 600-series subwoofer. There are also center and rear speakers (also B&W 600 series) but I don't use those when playing records. It's a more-than-decent system. The Marantz is more tuned towards TV and movie output, to be sure. But it's a perfectly respectable two-channel amplifier on its own.

However, the LP of the Sibelius 2nd sounded pretty thin. Surface noise. Not very much bass. OK but nothing I'd write home about. So I tried an experiment. I changed the input on the Marantz to my BDA3 digital-to-analog converter, fed by a Mac Mini running Roon. I did a quick search for the recording in question on Roon and came up with a number of hits, including a digital version from my own library.

Better yet, there were two from Tidal -- one in standard 44.1/16 CD-level audio, and the other a 2024 remastering in 96k/24-bit audio. So I selected that remastered one.

Better? Beyond better. We're talking orders of magnitude better here. As though I had gone from a handheld transistor radio to a fine audiophile system. And yet it was the same sound system, for the most part, and what's more important, it was the same recording.

Which simply hammers the nails in all the more for me on the coffin of vinyl vs. digital. I'll allow that perhaps with a better pressing of the LP, on a fancier turntable with a more expensive cartridge, with a fancier phono preamp, all that, the thing might have sounded better. But there was no way in hell that it was going to compete with this splendid remastered jobber that's available for streaming on Tidal.

And with the digital, there's no getting out the record and sliding it out of the sleeve and running it on the turntable and cleaning it off and positioning the tonearm. All of that is part of the allure of vinyl, I suppose. But to pull up Roon on my iPhone, do a quick search, and then have several versions immediately available?

And another thing you can't possibly with vinyl: I was able to tell Roon to play the beautiful digital file on the 'big' downstairs stereo with just one tap on my iPhone.

I am no kind of nostalgic audiophile. I love all the improvements that have been made. So you can take your vinyl, your tubes, your old-timey stuff, and enjoy if you will. But when I want to listen, I head for modern digital audio with all the trimmings, just as I prefer to drive to the store in my Toyota Camry rather than hitching up Dobbin and clip-clipping my way over there.