after years of losing to vinyl, cds are making a comeback, apparently. the old men are arguing the young folk are just being cool and they're losing the game. vinyl's out of fashion; cds are back.

i want to provide a different argument.

let's reduce the debate. fundamentally, there's three format types - tape, vinyl and digital. each of them come in various quality levels, but i want to combine the various types of digital audio - from cds to 24 bit audio file - into a single audio type. this is key to my argument, and i'll make a scientific argument as to why you can't tell the difference between 16 bit and 24 bit audio in the end.

then, what sounds better - cds or vinyl? 

it's a complicated question because there's an objective answer and a subjective answer. usually, audio nerds will concede the objective point - that cds clearly sound better, technically - but defer to a subjective consideration, which is a personal preference for the sound of vinyl. the argument goes something along the lines that people that grew up listening to vinyl prefer it's "warmth" and can't adjust to the "crispness" of digital audio. these are adjectives to describe technical specs. what do they actually mean?

the "warmth" of vinyl records is a description of something called  harmonic distortion. digital audio lacks the "warmth" because it doesn't create distortion in key frequency ranges. instead, digital audio is "crisp" or "dry". what that means is that it produces accurate reproduction. you will get a similar effect from cassettes called tape saturation.

essentially, what baby boomers and some members of gen x have been saying since the 80s is that they prefer the inferior sound quality of analog reproduction - they like the harmonic distortion produced by the technology's inability to produce sound cleanly and get upset when you remove the noise from the end result. i guess that's their opinion, and it drove lingering vinyl sales in the 90s. then, records overtook vinyl. was that because millennials decided vinyl sounded better?

i think there's some complexity, here, but my understanding is that millennials were buying vinyl mostly for the cover art or to support their favourite artists as an act of charity. they were mostly actually listening to music on their phones. what happened is something more along the lines of that the collectors decided the vinyls were the more valuable commodity to put on a shelf. buying music as a commodity is not the same thing as listening to music; i do both, and i understand they're not the same thing. in fact, i'd guess that a huge percentage of the vinyl records manufactured and purchased new as commodities are still sitting in plastic because the owner didn't want to damage the commodity. instead, they downloaded 128 mbps mp3s or just streamed the music on their phone.

(https://consequence.net/2023/04/half-vinyl-buyers-record-player-study/

i do own a turntable and a handful of kept lps, after selling a pile of old lps at the height of their value, around ten years ago. i essentially never use it.)

...until their parents died. then, they inherited their audio systems. with cd players.

enter the younger generation, which neither grew up listening to cds nor to records but to digital audio, strictly, on digital devices. to most people under 30 today (in fact, to most people under 50 today), all music has always been digital. if you try to play a record to these people, and ask them what sounds better, even on your fanciful high quality system (which is mostly not upheld by science), it's not even a formed question. the record crackles and pops. it sounds warped and distorted and blurry. the difference is obvious and to them the truth is apparent: the analog source is not "warm" or "full", it's just distorted. because it is. that's objectively correct.

cds, on the other hand, sound like what they expect music to sound like, but better - especially on their parents' sound system, which is probably completely digital, and might even be high end.

there's some caveats to this. i have corellis as my main playback speakers. these are kefs from the late 70s. they're older than you or i are. they sound phenomenal from digital or analog sources (i feed them with cds coming from a dvd player) and i could never replace them with new speakers. they're analog speakers. i have celestions from the 80s in the other room, but i'm looking at finally buying digital studio monitors for the recording computers, where i mix in headphones anyways, because the gulf is too much. it's increasingly irrational to record in high end digital and play it back on 50 year old speakers. i need to modernize.

further, i'll concede that, sometimes, the distortion, the degradation, does sound good. it depends. the counter-example i usually provide is 70s kosmiche guitar/synthesizer music like mike oldfield, pink floyd or tangerine dream. one of these days does have a certain quirk on vinyl. hergest ridge sounds fantastic through a good vinyl setup. some subset of 90s alternative music - like siamese dream and loveless would maybe fit into that category. 

however, the arguments about digital sampling that vinyl supporters use are broadly wrong in respect to old recordings recorded on analog equipment and completely wrong in respect to new recordings recorded on digital equipment, which includes old recordings that have been transferred to digital to preserve them (which in 2026 means virtually everything ever recorded on analog equipment). for old recordings in 2026, the sampling process already happened at the remastering stage; for new recordings, it's a question of recording quality itself. the vinyl record is just being dumped to analog from digital. you're just introducing noise into the signal when you do that. it's utterly irrational and is being done to produce a commodity for an irrational market, not to adhere to sound quality.

your vinyl setup only makes sense in 2026 if you're playing old records manufactured before the year 2000, which are going to sound bad today because old vinyl doesn't retain it's quality. it degrades. cd does rot, but it doesn't warp or crackle or pop. young people want the digital remaster to cut the noise out (those old beatles records are in fucking mono, which is insane to a young person) and they don't want to pay for something that is going to degrade and sound worse in 30 years, because it will. that's rational. that's correct. that makes sense.

if you're listening to anything at all recorded in the last 30 years, transferring it from digital to analog can only make it sound worse. to a young person, 30 years is a long time. it's still a minority of the total recorded output available, but it's the vast majority of music that's relevant.

so, to a young person buying music today, a cd is of better audio quality than a vinyl record and it's not even a debate worth having. it's unquestionable. it's obvious.

i would, however, suspect that the uptick in physical cd sales is likely connected to digital focused stereo systems, some high end, being inherited. the millennials and gen z kids may have spent most of their lives to the point of inheriting these systems without much of a playback system at all, excepting their phones and any pcs they may have had. 

but dad had a system. dad listened to cds. now, dad is dead, and i have his system and his cds. and, hey, it sounds pretty good. it sounds clean, like the digital audio i'm used to, but bigger and louder and fuller and less compressed than my phone. wow. maybe i could get some more of these shiny discs. i kind of remember them, but not really.

is it a downgrade from 24 bit audio?

not if you stream at 128 mbps or worse on your phone. it's certainly an upgrade to that. but not generally, either.

you can't upsample to higher digital audio. again, the question is what commodity consumers want to buy, not what sounds better. people are recording in at 16 bit and selling it at 24 bit. that adds nothing but zeroes and there is no difference in sound. 

there should be a law that says you can't sell or market audio at a higher quality than you recorded it as. that should be banned as a deceptive business practice.

but you're probably not benefiting from 24 bit audio anyways unless you're recording with specialized software on specific hardware and you're recording very complex music, like symphonies. yes, a symphony will sound more full in 24 bit audio, specifically the quieter parts. an example of a popular musician that would actually benefit from using 24 bit audio would be peter gabriel, specifically his soundtrack work (rabbit proof fences or passion), and maybe some very select recordings by son lux or trent reznor. a day in the life might in theory have sounded better in 24 bit if it wasn't initially recorded on today's equivalent of a handheld recorder. almost nothing recorded for a pop music audience is going to benefit from being recorded in 24 bit.

worse, the daw you're using was probably not written for 24 bit audio. the plugins you're using were not written for 24 bit audio. in 2026, your sound card might not have to downsample anymore (that's recent), but your operating system probably does.

functionally, then, what recording in 24 bit audio actually means - still - is constantly resampling up and down. the plugin downsamples from 24 bit to 16 bit, applies the transform, and upsamples back to 24 bit. the daw mixes it down to 16 bit and upsamples to 24 bit. then your soundcard downsamples to 16 bit to play it.

which means what?

it means adding and removing piles of zeroes. it might create clicks, like a bad mp3, because you're basically doing the same thing you'd be doing when you're compressing mp3s, and then playing them back.

again, there's caveats, but they're still very expensive and apply to very limited circumstances. if you legitimately have the equipment to record in 24-bit - the hardware, the daw, the plugins - and complex enough compositions to justify it then do it. you probably don't. you should probably stick with 16 bit to avoid the constant resampling.

and that's what a cd is - it's the highest quality, cleanest quality audio realistically available to most people. it's the standard. 

it makes sense that it's what the kids want.

it didn't make sense for vinyl to outsell cds and that should be seen as a weird blip that happened as a result of weird circumstances. the return of cds is a renormalization of the music market. it's good news for the music industry.