Welcome to brain stuff front House, stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hi. I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, is the sound on vinyl records better than the sound on c d s or DVDs. The answer to this question lies in the difference between analog and digital recordings. A vinyl record is an analog recording, and CDs and DVDs are digital recordings. Original sound is analog by definition, so a digital recording takes snapshots of that analog signal
at a certain rate. For CDs, it's forty four thousand, one hundred times per second. It also measures each snapshot with a certain accuracy. For CDs, it's a sixteen bit number, which means that the value must be one of sixty thousand, five hundred thirty six possible values. This means that, by definition, a digital recording is not capturing the complete sound wave,
it's approximating it with a series of steps. Some sounds that have very quick transitions, such as a drumbeat, will be distorted because they change too quickly for the sample rate. A vinyl record, on the other hand, has a groove carved into it that mirrors the original sounds wave form This means that no information is lost. In theory, the output of the record player is also analog and it can be fed directly to your amplifier with no conversion.
So the wave forms from a vinyl record should be more accurate and that can be heard in the richness of the sound. But there is a downside. Any specks of dust or damage to the disc can be heard as noise or static during quiet periods and songs. This noise can be heard over the music. Digital recordings don't degrade over time, and if for digital recording contains silence,
then there will be no noise. The main ways to improve the quality of a digital recording are to increase the sampling rate and or to increase the accuracy of the sampling. The recording industry has a standard for DVD audio discs that could greatly improve the sound accuracy. There are more than four times as many samples on a DVD audio disc than there are on a c D, and the samples are twenty four bit instead of sixteen bit like on a CD. But the DVD audio format
has never really taken off. Apparently, CD quality sound is good enough for the vast majority of listeners, do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast, If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the brain Stuff block on the how stuff works dot com homepage. Jack Threads has
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