madogson

madogson t1_j203edu wrote

Short answer: No.

Vinyl is an analog format. This means it can store a near perfect representation of the sine wave recorded by the original recording equipment. CD is a digital format, meaning the analog signal from the audio equipment must be sampled from and stored as binary values. This sampling cannot ever perfectly recreate the sine wave that analog formats like a record have by default. You can think of the analog sine wave like a fractal that has an infinite amount of detail, while the digital format has to, at some point, round off the edges.

That's not to say that digital sampling can't get extremely close to the analog sine wave. However, it is an issue of diminishing returns. The more you sample of a sine wave, the less the audio is improved and the more space is taken up. Eventually, you need huge amounts of digital storage to store the most miniscule improvement in sampling. This is versus a single disk that has perfect sine wave recreation that will probably be a source of the digital sampling.

And if that wasn't enough, CD's are far from our best digital storage medium. The exact same data on a CD can be stored much cheaper now on a small flash drive or SD card. These devices have the added bonus of not being super fragile and susceptible to dust and scratches.

So no. There's no advantage to using a CD beyond pure nostalgia, which could easily be ruined by the smallest of scratches or dust.

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