"Ethan Winer" ethanw at ethanwiner dot com wrote in
message
Arny,

I agree with all of that, and here's an alternate thought
on one item:

Audio McGurking might explain why so many perceive that
vinyl sounds better than good digital.

When people prefer the sound of vinyl (and analog tape
too, especially if you hit it hard) I think it may be
some aspect of the distortion that's appealing.

To me, the colorations of vinyl and analog tape are vastly
different. So much so that in the days of, they made good
complements to each other. Analog tape shaved off the
dynamics, making a lot of wide dynamic range *safe* for
vinyl and the limited dynamic playback gear of the day.

I've taken mixes from my DAW and recorded them to a
cassette
and noticed an "improvement" of sorts. Obviously this is
an effect, and not higher fidelity. But for some reason
the music can sound more coherent, for lack of a better
word. This works best with sparse music. With dense busy
mixes the added distortion tends to muddy things up
further, especially the IM components.

Most likely cause of music sounding tighter and more
coherent after a trip through a cassette seems to me to be
the compression that is build into analog tape.

Or maybe people grew up listening to music full of
scratches and pops, and when those are missing the music
somehow seems lacking?

I've heard enough vinyl with the tics and pops digitally
removed quite effectively, to doubt that.