As the word "distortion" in that link implies, where audiophiles go wrong is confusing "nicer" with "better."
70s dub-reggae records and the like would undoubtably sound worse if they were recorded straight to digital and pressed to CD. Similarly, lots of 21st century music would lose its edge if it were printed to tape and pressed to vinyl.
Most of this confusion stems from audiophiles borrowing terms and ideas from music engineers and artists, much like the neverending stream of badness from managers/MBAs taking ideas and terms they don't understand from engineers.
If you are listening to music, it is none of your business to decide that it needs to be "warmer." The people who made the record spent a lot of time and effort making it exactly as warm as they wanted it to be. Pushing it through a tube amp to make it warmer before you listen to it is like retouching a Monet print in photoshop before you hang it on your wall. As you can imagine, I'm not a fan of the EQ settings on ipods either.
When optimising your playback system, go for maximum transparency, and stop there. If you don't like how the record sounds, listen to better records.
If you're making records OTOH, it is entirely proper for you to be worrying endlessly about "warmth". Buy up crazy 70s gear from ebay, have the track pressed to 60g vinyl at a boutique german cutting house, whatever it takes. Warmth is tricky :)
>70s dub-reggae records and the like would undoubtably sound worse if they were recorded straight to digital and pressed to CD. Similarly, lots of 21st century music would lose its edge if it were printed to tape and pressed to vinyl.
There's nothing preventing audio engineers from introducing harmonic distortion, wow, flutter, pops and ticks, reduced channel separation or equalizing a CD master differently.
There's nothing magical about vinyls and they are inferior to CDs in all possible ways.
>There's nothing preventing audio engineers from introducing harmonic distortion...
Yes but if you want it to sound like vinyl you have to press it to vinyl. Introducing all those things in software will generally sound kinda crappy and it's fiddly. You can do it in hardware, but that's likely more effort than just sending it off to get an acetate pressed or something. I'm not campaigning for it, just trying to make the point that there are no rights and wrongs in a creative process.
And there is something magical about vinyl: the 1:1 correspondence between the physical medium and the stored sound means that DJing vinyl will always be a more satisfying experience for the DJ than any other playback technology. A turntable has almost no state to worry about: once can operate a pair of decks and a mixer blindfolded, by touch alone. The same is not (generally) true of traktor or CDJs. This promotes the "flow" state of mind, and therefore higher quality DJing.
This is the primary reason why vinyl still exists in 2013, and it's the only reason why countless twentysomethings like me have thousands of records stacked up in their bedrooms.
CDs are inferior to vinyl in album art quality, and the size of posters that can be included with the record. From a purely physical perspective, I prefer buying vinyl.
Something that doesn't get much mention is the shear weight of a decent vinyl collection. I helped a friend move his collection of several thousand records across the city a few months ago and, despite being a fairly fit guy, it was backbreaking. I was actually slightly concerned that his shelves would punch holes in his floor.
I think perhaps expectations for what a standard size music collection have changed as music media has become lighter and lighter.
21st century music is beyond loud. Is as loud as the medium allows it. You can't imagine how loud it is. There is no silence in this music. Every microsecond of it is recorded as if there are no bits in the quiet end of the loudness range.
This is one important reason why the music on vinyl sounds nicer. Not because of the harmonics, but because of the mastering. The medium does not allow very high dynamics and you need to compromise.
I agree with you that a lot of modern music (especially pop) is overcompressed. But the loudness war is not as simple as people would have you believe. It really depends on how you calculate RMS: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep11/articles/loudness.htm
Also, like I said above, it's about conveying the intention of the artist. While that recent metallica album sounded like shit and might have been better if it were mastered for vinyl, the wax pressing of the below-linked record sounds boring and lifeless because it lacks the downloadable version's obscene dynamic range:
This confuses the hell out of me. Why would you make a CD loud and distort the sound when there's a volume knob? It takes just as much (or little) effort to turn the volume to 30 as it does to turn it to 10.
Albums like Death Magnetic are particularly egregious examples of this, but I think that every CD suffers somewhat from this obsession with making the CD itself so damn loud. We have amplifiers for a reason.
But records aren't typically mastered to sound best on neutral equipment, since most people don't use monitor speakers or neutral amplifiers. Engineers use high quality neutral systems when mixing, but only because they're predictable and of high quality. They optimize for the typical systems of their target audience, mostly, no?
Yes, esoteric or 'accurate' sound reproduction equipment isn't preferred. For example, the famous Yamaha NS10 loudspeaker used for sound mixing is not a speaker that a music listener can bear for very long. Its tiring. But they are very useful for understanding how a recording will sound on televisions, radios, iPods and other common playback devices.
The idea is is that if you can make a mix sound good through them, they'll satisfy as a general purpose sound product.