Lens review are driven by specs, and it is easy to zoom in to 1000% in Photoshop and check whether a lens is sharp or not, and sharpness needs more glass, which is heavy. It is easy to test and easy to understand.
To me it is like the difference between LPs and poorly mastered CDs. It's easy to measure that the CD has more definition but sounds digital and lifeless. The scratches and pops of the LP give it personality.
CDs don't sound like anything - you can't hear the difference between a modern AD/DA system and a length of wire. When recorded and played back using good equipment, they're effectively perfect to the human ear.
Some people subjectively prefer the distortion imparted by vinyl, which is fine. Some people enjoy the theater of pulling a record from a big colorful sleeve and gently placing the needle in the groove, which is also fine. Vinyl isn't better - it's objectively worse as a means of accurately reproducing sound - but some people prefer the experience.
As parent alludes to, I don't think it's a matter of CDs sounding worse in an objective sense, but lacking an affectation of the medium that some people like in vinyl. Think about movies: ordinarily they're shown at 24fps. Higher framerates are objectively higher quality, but don't feel "cinematic" because they aren't what audiences are used to, and in some cases the additional detail makes special effects and makeup more obvious, diminishing the sense of reality.
From an information-theoretic perspective, a vinyl LP is garbage compared to a well-mastered CD. From an aesthetic perspective... people like what they like?
If the needle is good and the record is new the LP has a better theoretical dynamic range - new record is important here as each time you play the record you physically wear it, so after a few playing it will not be as good. This is the only one that is inherently better.
LPs are sold to "audiophiles", and often have a different mix. The CD will often be compressed until there is very little dynamic range. Even when the record is worn it can still be much better just because the mix on the CD wasn't good in the first place. This is the biggest advantage to LPs, but it should not be overlooked as it applies often.
So you're saying (correctly I think) that it doesn't have anything to do with the CD itself but everything to do with how the album was engineered. CD's don't magically introduce compression, it's about the production trends in mainstream music (which suck).
I'm confident that a good producer and engineer could make an album on CD sound extremely close to an LP, likely by mastering the album similar to the way you would for an LP.
Exactly. CDs can contain basically any audio you'd like... which is part of the cause of loudness wars, after all - you can put things on a CD that just wouldn't work on vinyl.
You can even add vinyl effects (warmness/clicks) in post-processing. I have a few songs in my library that really do sound like you're playing an LP, even though they're completely synthetic.
In the ripping community, there are some well-known albums that were mastered differently for LPs and are considered superior to their digital mastering. And so there are folks who spend $$$ on setups to play back the LP, record it, and then postprocess it to remove clicks. You end up with a digital audio file that has the better mastering. You could put that same file on a CD, after all.
Very much. Classical music often is mixed the same way as enough listeners are musicians who want the better mixes. I'm sure there are other odd (non-mainstream) music that gets good treatment as well.
There's nothing. It's something that's been made up by so called "audiophiles" to justify heavy investments in equipment whose performance does not help with anything.
Our ears are degenerating with every year, but the older those people get, the more expensive the equipment has to be, otherwise they can't grasp the soul of the music etc. pp.
The LPs basically required a standard mixing, the people able to change it and do something against the standards that sounded any good were rare and knew very well what they were doing.
CDs can be mastered by anyone with results that aren't horrible. So a lot of people that wouldn't touch LP production do produce CDs.
To me it is like the difference between LPs and poorly mastered CDs. It's easy to measure that the CD has more definition but sounds digital and lifeless. The scratches and pops of the LP give it personality.