Is Vinyl Better Than Other Music Formats?

Vinyl records are an old beast. They were seemingly made obsolete with the invention of tapes, and those too were pretty much forgotten about when CDs came around, and so on.

Despite this, vinyl records have made something of a revival in the past few years. If you've never owned one before, then you're probably wondering what the big deal is. Is it all just snobbery, or does vinyl have something that other music formats don't?

We live in a time where instant gratification reigns supreme. With MP3 and other digital formats, you don't have to do much of anything. You can download the music from the comfort of your own home, or you can stream music from services like Spotify on your phone while you're out and about.

Vinyl is the complete opposite. You need to get a turntable, make sure it's set up right, take the time to clean the records and so on. There's something of a ritual involved with listening to music on vinyl.

And for some, that's a big part of the appeal. Rather than having music as a supporting background event to whatever it is you're actually doing, the music comes to the forefront of your attention, allowing you to appreciate it more. With vinyl records there's no song skipping, or making random playlists. You listen to the full album as intended by the artist.

By itself that doesn't make vinyl inherently any better or worse. After all, you could do that with other formats.

So let's take a look at the other equipment. When you play music from your phone or from a laptop, you're only getting a certain amount of power to drive your speakers or headphones. If you've never heard music with clear and crisp sound at all frequencies, you'll be amazed at what you can do with a decent sound system.

And that's where vinyl comes in.

Most music is saved in MP3 format. This compresses the information of the file, sacrificing quality to keep it smaller. This is great for streaming or if you want a huge collection of music on a device with only a few gigabytes of memory. You wouldn't really notice the loss of quality until you heard the same song on vinyl.

And that's why vinyl is so popular these days. Sure, there's a bit of retro fun to be had with them, but the real advantage is the perfect representation of the audio recording. Nothing is lost when a vinyl is encoded with sound. The only thing that can reduce this is bad equipment like a cheap turntable or cheap speakers. Damaging the vinyl itself will also reduce the quality, but that's up to you to take good care of them.

It might seem a little intimidating making the jump to vinyl, and getting all of the gear and accessories that goes with it. But trust me, it's worth it. If you love music, you'll wonder how on earth you managed to live this long without choosing vinyl every time.