upwardspiral94 posted:Anyone picking up the vinyl for this? I've never had a vinyl collection before so how does it compare to FLAC? If it's really that much better than MP3 as people say it is...
i don't think you quite understand the difference between digital file formats and physical media.
FLAC is a lossless format, which means no audio spectrum content is removed from the source when it is encoded to a FLAC file.
MP3 encoding achieves its smaller filesize by stripping spectral audio content; how much audio content is lost is dependent on the quality setting (320kbps is the highest it can go). this is why it's called a lossy format.
vinyl audio quality is revered for sounding "warmer" because the physical format doesn't reproduce high frequencies as well as digital formats (including CD). it can, however, store frequency content far beyond the CD spec, and it can't be compressed as hard during mastering as digital audio can. (this is a different kind of compression from lossy digital encoding for MP3s.) however, vinyl has other drawbacks: pops and clicks from the needle hitting dust in the grooves tends to be #1.
two other things:
- vinyl doesn't necessarily carry the extra frequency content. record companies like to cut financial corners, which means they sometimes press vinyl using sources that don't actually have that content (like the CD).
- FLAC and MP3 can encode vinyl rips too, as well as DVD and Blu-ray audio rips. once you have a digital uncompressed audio file (usually WAV), you can encode it to any lossy or lossless format you want.