“Digital is zeroes and ones, man, any way you look at it,” Chuck Leavell, keyboardist for the Rolling Stones, told Forbes. “Whether it’s a CD or a download, there’s a certain jaggedness to it. Vinyl wins every time. It’s warmer, more soothing, easier on the ears.”
Opinions aside, what we can all agree on is that there is indeed a difference in the sound that comes from vinyl versus that of digital media, both in the way it is produced and heard (although there are debates between experts and common folks about whether these differences can be audibly perceived by everyday listeners). On a basic level, a vinyl record is an analog recording and a CD is a digital recording.
“An analog signal is continuous, meaning that there are no breaks or interruptions,” writes Jonathan Strickland, Senior Editor of HowStuffWorks.com. “If you were to hum a descending note, people hearing you would be able to detect the change in pitch, but not point to specific moments when the pitch jumped from one note to the next. Digital signals are not continuous. They use specific values to represent information. In the case of sound, that means representing a sound wave as a series of values that represent pitch and volume over the length of the recording. In a primitive digital recording of that descending note you hummed, you’d hear a single long sound as a collection of shorter sounds.”
via Do Records Really Sound Warmer Than CDs? | Mental Floss
When Ashe visits Riley at her apartment, they talk about what they go all-nerd for. While Riley goes for books and old VHS tapes for the TV set that she inherited from her next-door-neighbor, Ashe admits that he’s into vinyl – vinyl records, that is.
There’s just something about analog sound that’s so much better to the ears. In fact, more people these days are buying vinyl records of brand new releases than ever before!
Loving Ashe 