Ask John Schaefer Anything: Which Format Sounds Better -- Vinyl, CD's Or MP3's?

By most anyone’s standards, John Schaefer knows a lot about music. Yet despite his two radio shows and various other music-related projects, we get the feeling he's withholding some of that knowledge. So now's your chance to ask Soundcheck's famously brainy host anything as long as it has something to do with music.

Also: Join us on Thursday, Sept. 11, at 1:30 p.m. for a special Reddit AMA (or Ask Me Anything) edition of Ask John Schaefer Anything! Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for updates.

John Siowa from New Jersey asks: “I am a vinylphile. I’m 51, I grew up with vinyl, I’ve played vinyl all my life, and I just wanted to know your perspective on vinyl versus CD’s versus digital recording media. What is the best media? Is there a best medium for a casual listener such as myself?”

John Schaefer: Well you can’t play a vinyl record in the car. I do most of my listening these days either on CD’s or digital streams. I’m on the go a lot and it’s nice to be able to take my music with me. Like you John, I also still have a lot of my old records, but I would not say I’m a vinylphile. Surface noise always bothered me, especially when I started broadcasting. I would say for a casual listener, I would probably go with CD’s.

But because you’ve asked an important question, I want to bring in an expert: Steve Guttenberg, who writes as The Audiophiliac for CNET, and works as a freelance writer for Home Theater, Inner Fidelity, Tone Audio and Stereophile.

Steve Guttenberg: It is a complicated issue, it is a personal choice. One of the great things about vinyl, it winds up you’re more engaged listening to music on vinyl. You have to take the record out of the sleeve, put the needle in the groove. There’s a lot of physical involvement. And it’s interesting when I talk to young people who didn’t grow up with it, they tend to listen because they’re not multi-tasking. They’re not tweeting and texting when they’re listening to vinyl and they tend to play the, get this, the entire side of a record. The experience of how people take in music is completely different when it’s analog versus digital.

JS: Is there a material difference between all these formats when they’re all coming from the same tape source?

SG: It does depend where it came from. If it’s a pure analog recording, and the only way to know for sure is if it’s a record before 1980 or 1982. Almost all recordings before the '80s were 100 percent analog. But nowadays, people can record analog but the chances are that it’ll be dumped to Pro Tools or digitally mastered. Even though people who make LP’s now proudly, the chances of it being all analog are less.

JS: What do you think people should really care about--sound quality or is it trumped by convenience?

SG: Sound quality is always trumped by convenience. If you’re the person who sits down and listens to music as opposed to having it on in the background, then those things would matter. Recordings that are too pure, too quiet are unnatural. Music is always played in a room, with reverb, it’s never in dead silence.

JS: Let me bring our listener John back. John, when you grew up listening to vinyl did surface noise bother you?

John Siowa: When I grew up, I had an old kid style record player, the only thing that really bothered me was that I would get a skip. The most awful skip was on The Beatles Abbey Road. I still have that album and it still skips. That’s the part that bugs me about vinyl. But now I have a better sound system and I found tricks to avoid the skips, like putting a penny or nickel on the needle. Albums that are crisp and clean seem to have what I’ve heard many people mention as a deep groove sound. I’m wondering if lower frequency sound resonates with me better than CD’s, which I’ve heard as a rumor, tend to emphasize high frequency sounds.

SG: I actually think digital is more accurate. I think they can be more accurate in the low end when we’re talking about these differences, I’m really talking about how the recordings were made, not necessarily digital or analog. How it was mixed, processed. All those other things play a much bigger role than the analog or digital-ness of it.

JS: It seems though you may already know the answer as far as you’re concerned. For you is it still vinyl?

John Siowa: I think it depends, I think it depends on the environment at which you’re listening to the music in. Obviously if you’re in your car it’s going to be digital or CD. If you’re in your house and really trying to get the experience of listening, you want the touch and the feel, for me I love the vinyl.

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