Analog or digital: which is really better

In short: Analog sound is stored as a smooth wave, like the groove in a record. Digital sound is stored as a series of numbers. Measurements clearly show that well-made digital is more faithful: it has less noise, less distortion and it does not wear out with use. A record can still sound better to some people, often because it is mastered differently and because its slight coloration is pleasant. Both paths are legitimate. But the biggest influence on sound is not the format. It is the recording, the speakers and the room.

In this article:

1. What sound is and how you can capture it
2. A short history: from the cylinder to streaming
3. Digital is not a staircase
4. The formats compared in numbers
5. A copy of a copy: why digital does not wear out
6. How long a recording lasts
7. Dolby and dbx: how analog fought noise
8. So why does a record sound better to some people?
9. What about streaming and MP3?
10. Streaming services: what quality you get
11. Bluetooth: where quality is lost most often
12. Hi-res: is it worth it?
13. Where analog always stays
14. Digital in loudspeakers
15. The most common myths
16. How to get the best sound at home
17. So which is better?
18. A small glossary

What sound is and how you can capture it

Sound is air vibrating. Air pressure goes up and down very quickly, hundreds to thousands of times per second. A microphone turns this vibration into an electrical voltage that follows the shape of the sound wave. The question is how to store that wave so you can play it back later.

• Analog means storing the shape of the wave directly and smoothly: as a wavy line in the groove of a record, or as tape that is magnetized more or less strongly.
• Digital means measuring the wave many times per second and writing the measured values down as numbers.

Think of it like this: analog is like drawing a curve with a pencil. Digital is like a table of points from which the curve can be drawn again exactly. If there are enough points and they are measured precisely, the curve from the table is the same as the original.

A short history: from the cylinder to streaming

Year	What happened
1877	Thomas Edison records and plays back the nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb. For the first time in history, a recorded human voice is heard.
1887	Emile Berliner patents the gramophone, which uses a flat disc instead of a cylinder.
1925	The microphone and the amplifier replace the big recording horn. Suddenly the sound is much more faithful.
1935	The German company AEG shows off the Magnetophon tape recorder, using tape made by BASF.
1947 to 1948	The singer Bing Crosby pre-records his radio show on tape and invests in the company Ampex. The American tape recorder industry is born.
1948	Columbia launches the LP, short for Long Playing: about 23 minutes per side instead of 3 to 5.
1958	The first stereo records go on sale.
1963	Philips introduces the cassette. Its inventor, Lou Ottens, later also helped create the CD, which replaced it.
1968 to 1970	Dolby B arrives, and in 1970 it reaches cassette decks too.
1971 to 1972	The first commercial digital recordings are made in Japan (NHK and Denon).
1979	Sony starts selling the Walkman. The same year sees the release of Ry Cooder’s album Bop Till You Drop, the first digitally recorded pop album from a major label.
1982	The CD and the first player, the Sony CDP-101, go on sale in Japan.
1985	Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits becomes the first album to sell a million copies on CD.
1995	Developers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute give their files the .mp3 extension.
1999	Napster launches for sharing MP3s, and the SACD comes out the same year. Music splits into the convenient kind and the audiophile kind.
2001 to 2008	The iPod (2001), the iTunes store (2003) and Spotify (2008) arrive.
2014 to 2025	Lossless streaming becomes normal: Tidal (2014), Amazon (2019), Apple Music (2021) and Spotify (2025).
2020 to 2022	In the US, records earn more than CDs for the first time since the 1980s (2020), and in 2022 more of them are sold by count, too.

Two fun facts. Edison was not the first person to capture sound, only the first who could play it back. A Frenchman, Scott de Martinville, wrote down the song Au clair de la lune back in 1860 as wavy lines on soot-covered paper. Nobody heard it until 2008, when scientists turned those lines into sound. And why does a CD hold exactly 74 minutes? The story goes that it was so Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony would fit on one disc. It is a nice story, but nobody knows for sure. What is certain is that Sony pushed for a bigger disc with a longer playing time than Philips had proposed.

Digital is not a staircase

The most common myth about digital is that the sound is “blocky” like stairs and that it is missing whatever lies between the points. That is not true. The mathematicians Nyquist and Shannon proved that if you measure a wave at least twice as often as the highest tone in it, you can rebuild it from the points exactly. Not roughly. Exactly.

A CD measures sound 44,100 times per second, so it captures everything up to 22,050 Hz. The human ear hears up to 20,000 Hz at best, and that limit drops as you get older. A 2021 study measured the highest tone that at least 90% of people of a given age can hear:

Age	Highest tone that 9 out of 10 people hear
21 to 30 years	16,000 Hz (only about half hear 20,000 Hz)
31 to 40 years	14,000 Hz
41 to 50 years	12,500 Hz
51 to 70 years	around 11,500 Hz

So a CD covers the whole audible range with room to spare. The converter in your player (DAC) does not join the points with steps. It joins them with a smooth wave that is identical to the original. If you want to see it with your own eyes, watch the video Digital Show & Tell (Monty Montgomery, Xiph.Org, 2013). On a real oscilloscope he shows that a smooth wave comes out of digital, with no steps at all.

What about bits?

The second number, for example 16 bits, tells you how precisely each point is measured. Picture a ruler: finer markings let you measure more precisely. Coarser markings, though, do not make the sound “blocky”. The imprecision only shows up as a very quiet noise in the background, and each extra bit makes it 6 dB quieter. With 16 bits, which is what a CD uses, this noise is 96 dB quieter than the loudest sound. For comparison: the difference between a quiet bedroom at night and a loud rock concert is around 80 to 90 dB. With 24 bits the headroom is even bigger, but in practice the noise of the electronics itself sets the limit.

Jitter: when the clock does not tick evenly

A digital player needs a very precise clock that decides exactly when each sample is turned into sound. If the clock wobbles ever so slightly, that is called jitter. In audiophile ads it is a favorite bogeyman. The reality is calmer: today’s converters have jitter measured in picoseconds, or a few nanoseconds at most, so billionths of a second. A Japanese listening experiment from 2005 showed that trained listeners only started to notice it in music at several hundred nanoseconds, so at values a hundred to a thousand times bigger. With normal modern equipment, you cannot hear jitter.

The formats compared in numbers

Format	Signal-to-noise ratio (approx.)	Channel separation	Wear
Vinyl record	60 to 70 dB	20 to 30 dB in the midrange, 10 to 15 dB in the treble	a little with every play
Cassette	around 50 to 60 dB, with Dolby B to C 60 to 70 dB, more with dbx	40 to 50 dB	tape ages, speed wobbles
Studio reel-to-reel tape recorder	70 to 77 dB	50 to 60 dB	tape ages
CD (16 bits, 44.1 kHz)	96 dB, with so-called dithering effectively up to around 120 dB	over 90 dB	none
Hi-res (24 bits, 96 kHz)	limited by the electronics, around 115 to 125 dB	over 100 dB	none

Signal-to-noise ratio tells you how much louder the music is than the background noise. Channel separation tells you how little of the left channel “leaks” into the right one. In both, a bigger number is better. Digital wins here by a wide margin, and on top of that it does not change at all, no matter how many times you play it.

Wow and flutter: when the pitch drifts

Both a record and a tape have to spin at exactly the same speed. When the speed changes ever so slightly, the pitch wavers gently, as if the singer could not hold the note. A slow waver is called wow, a fast one flutter. A good turntable keeps it below 0.05%, ordinary machines 0.1 to 0.2%. You hear it most on long piano or flute notes. Digital does not have this flaw at all. Its speed is set by a quartz clock that is millions of times more precise.

A copy of a copy: why digital does not wear out

If you ever taped a cassette from another cassette, you know how it goes: each new copy hisses more and sounds duller. Every analog copy adds the noise of the new tape and a bit of distortion. If each copy adds the same amount of noise, the second generation has twice as much noise (3 dB more), the fourth four times as much (6 dB more) and the eighth eight times as much (9 dB more). On top of that you lose treble and get speed wobble.

A digital copy is different. What gets copied are numbers, and they either arrive complete or the copy fails. The hundredth copy of a FLAC file is exactly the same as the first, bit for bit. That is why even old analog recordings are archived digitally today.

How long a recording lasts

• Magnetic tapes age. Many tapes from the 1970s and 1980s suffer from so-called sticky-shed: the glue that holds the magnetic layer soaks up moisture, and the tape starts to get sticky and flake off. Archivists “bake” them at a low temperature before playing them, so they can be played one more time and digitized.
• Records last for decades if you look after them. With a properly set up turntable and a clean needle they wear only very slowly. A bad or worn-out needle, though, damages the groove fast.
• Digital files never wear out, but a hard drive or memory card can fail. The fix is a backup in two places. Then a recording really does last forever.

Dolby and dbx: how analog fought noise

The biggest enemy of magnetic tape is noise, that familiar soft hiss you hear in quiet passages. On cassettes you hear it most, because the tape is narrow and moves slowly. That is why noise reduction systems were invented. The best known are Dolby and dbx.

The idea is simple. Imagine you are dictating a message to someone in a noisy room. You say the quiet words loudly, so they cut through the noise. The person reading the message knows which words were quiet to begin with and turns them back down. Along with them, they turn down the noise too. That is exactly what Dolby and dbx do: when recording they boost the quiet parts of the music, on playback they turn them down by the same amount, and the tape hiss gets turned down with them.

System	Year	Where it was used	How much it reduces noise (approx.)
Dolby A	1965	recording studios	10 to 15 dB
Dolby B	1968	cassettes, the most widespread	around 10 dB, only in the treble
Dolby C	1980	better cassette decks	around 20 dB
Dolby SR	1986	studios and film sound	up to around 25 dB
Dolby S	1990	top-end cassette decks	around 24 dB in the treble
dbx	from 1971	studios and some cassette decks	around 30 dB across the whole range

The difference between them: Dolby works gently, mainly on quiet and high sounds, where hiss is most audible. It leaves loud passages alone. dbx squeezes the whole sound at a 2:1 ratio and stretches it back out by the same amount on playback. It reduces noise much more, but with some music you can hear the background noise “breathing” along with the music.

The catch: it only works when recording and playback are precisely matched. A cassette recorded with Dolby and played without it sounds harsh and overly bright. The other way round, it sounds dull. If the deck has a slightly different head or sensitivity, the result is spoiled. Cassettes recorded with dbx are almost unlistenable without a decoder.

Digital does not have this problem. The noise of a 16-bit recording is lower from the start than what cassettes achieved even with the best Dolby, and nothing needs to be matched. Dolby and dbx were clever solutions that gained analog 10 to 30 dB. Digital offers that headroom all by itself.

So why does a record sound better to some people?

It is a real experience and it has real causes. But most of them have nothing to do with whether the format is analog or digital.

1. Different mastering

Since the 1990s there has been a so-called loudness war. Recordings for radio, CD and streaming are processed to sound as loud as possible. Quiet parts are boosted, loud parts are squashed, and the music loses its dynamics, the difference between quiet and loud. A record physically cannot handle that kind of processing: the needle would jump out of the groove. That is why records often get their own, more dynamic master. The same album on vinyl then really does sound more alive, but not because it is analog. It is because it was processed differently. If the same master came out on CD, it would sound just as good or better.

The best-known example is the 2008 album Death Magnetic by Metallica. The CD version was squashed so hard that fans wrote a petition with more than 12,000 signatures. Then they found out that the same songs in the game Guitar Hero, which had gentler processing, sounded much better. According to the dynamic range database, the CD scores DR3 and the game version DR12. A 9 dB difference in dynamics is huge: the game version breathes, the CD version is one wall of sound. Both were digital. The only difference was the mastering.

The good news: streaming services now automatically level songs to the same loudness, for example Spotify and YouTube to −14 LUFS. An overly loud master gains nothing anymore, and the loudness war is slowly fading.

2. Pleasant coloration

A record adds slight distortion, a little extra bass and soft noise. To many people this sounds “warmer” and “more natural”. That is a legitimate taste, a bit like liking photos from a film camera. It just is not higher fidelity. It is pleasant coloration.

Today’s recording studios show this nicely. They often add the sound of magnetic tape on purpose, but digitally: on the computer they use an effect that faithfully imitates famous studio tape machines. If the “analog sound” can be added with a digital effect, it is clearly a coloration, not information that digital could not capture.

3. Ritual and attention

You take the record out of its sleeve, put it on, lower the needle and sit down. You listen to a whole side without skipping. Music you listen to like this feels stronger, whatever the source. Research with blind tests shows how much what we see and what we expect affects our judgment. More in the article Hi-fi and high-end.

A story that shows it well

The American company Mobile Fidelity sold expensive “audiophile” records for years, marketed as made directly from the original analog tapes. Reviewers praised them as the peak of analog sound, and one gave a record a score of “11 out of 10”. In July 2022 a record store owner posted a video voicing his suspicions, and the company then admitted that it first transferred the tapes to digital (the DSD format) and cut the records from that. A class action lawsuit followed, and a 25 million dollar settlement.

The lesson is not that records are bad. Those records really did sound excellent, digital step and all. The lesson is that even experienced listeners could not hear whether there was digital in the chain. Experts estimate that the vast majority of new records today are made from digital sources.

Records have physical limits too

• Bass has to be in the center. Deep bass that differs between the left and right channel would cut the groove too deep and the needle would jump out. That is why bass is summed to mono when a record is made.
• The last track on a side sounds worse. The record always spins at the same speed, but near the center label about 2.5 times less groove passes under the needle per second than at the edge. Treble and clarity get worse there.
• RIAA equalization. During manufacturing the bass is cut and the treble boosted so more music fits, and the turntable preamp reverses this during playback. That is why a turntable needs a special PHONO input.
• Pre-echo. Before a loud passage you can sometimes hear its faint echo about 1.8 seconds early, through the neighboring groove.

Even so, in 2022 more records than CDs were sold in the US for the first time since 1987: 41 million LPs against 33 million CDs. People do not buy records for the numbers. They buy them for the experience, and that is perfectly fine.

What about streaming and MP3?

Here you need to tell two things apart:

• A lossless format (FLAC, ALAC, WAV and lossless streaming) contains exactly the same data as a CD or hi-res. It is just packed differently.
• A lossy format (MP3, AAC, Ogg) throws away parts of the sound that, according to a model of human hearing, you will not notice, so the file gets smaller. At low quality, for example 128 kb/s, you may hear it as a “chirping” in the cymbals. Yet even at 128 kb/s listeners in a public blind test on the Hydrogenaudio forum rated the quality as very good, and at 256 to 320 kb/s most people cannot tell it apart from the original.

A fun fact: Professor Jonathan Berger of Stanford University played the same songs to new students for years, in full quality and as MP3. More and more of them preferred the MP3, probably because they were used to its faint “sizzle” in the treble. That also shows that “better” often means “more familiar”.

You can check whether you can hear the difference in the blind ABX test on Loudsmith: you load the same song as MP3 and as FLAC and guess which one is playing.

Streaming services: what quality you get

Today most people listen to music through apps. Here is how things stand in November 2026. Watch out: you often have to switch on lossless quality in the settings, because the default is usually lower.

Service	Default quality	Highest quality
Spotify Premium	lossy, up to 320 kb/s	lossless up to 24 bits / 44.1 kHz, has to be switched on (since September 2025)
Apple Music	lossy AAC 256 kb/s	lossless, including hi-res up to 24 bits / 192 kHz, has to be switched on
Tidal	lossless	hi-res up to 24 bits / 192 kHz
Qobuz	lossless	hi-res up to 24 bits / 192 kHz
Deezer Premium	lossless in CD quality	hi-res up to 24 bits / 192 kHz announced (October 2026)
Amazon Music Unlimited	lossless	hi-res up to 24 bits / 192 kHz
YouTube Music	lossy	lossy, around 256 kb/s, no lossless option

The free versions of these services are almost always lossy only. As we saw above, even good-quality lossy sounds the same as lossless to most people. But if you are paying, there is no reason not to switch on the highest quality.

Bluetooth: where quality is lost most often

Wireless headphones and speakers are convenient, but there is one thing worth knowing: Bluetooth almost always compresses the sound again. Even if your phone is playing a lossless track, what goes to your headphones is a lossy version. Lossless sound in CD quality needs around 1,400 kb/s, and ordinary Bluetooth cannot carry that reliably.

The way sound is packed for Bluetooth is called a codec. Your phone and your headphones agree on the best one that both devices know:

Codec	Approximate bitrate	Note
SBC	up to 345 kb/s	the basic one, every device supports it
AAC	around 256 kb/s	the main codec on iPhone and AirPods
aptX	around 350 kb/s	common on Android phones
aptX HD and aptX Adaptive	280 to 580 kb/s	better quality, adapts to the signal
LDAC	330, 660 or 990 kb/s	still lossy; the highest mode often drops out when there is interference
aptX Lossless	around 1,100 kb/s	the only common one that is truly lossless, but only at CD quality, with a good signal and on devices with Snapdragon Sound
LC3 (LE Audio)	lower, but very efficient	the new standard, comparable in quality to the higher ones

What this means in practice: when you listen on a walk or in the noise of a bus or tram, you will not hear the difference, because the sounds around you cover everything up. At home, listening quietly on good speakers, a cable or Wi-Fi streaming is better, because it does not squeeze the sound again. If you have an iPhone, Bluetooth always gives you AAC, even if you switch on lossless quality in Apple Music.

Hi-res: is it worth it?

Hi-res recordings have 24 bits and 96 or 192 kHz. They are useful in the studio, because they give headroom when the recording is being edited. For listening to finished music the benefit is small. A large blind test by Meyer and Moran (2007) found no difference between hi-res and CD quality. A later review of many studies (Reiss, 2016) found a small difference that trained listeners picked out in about 60% of trials. If a hi-res album sounds better, it is again usually thanks to better mastering.

SACD and DSD: a different kind of digital

Besides ordinary digital, there is also the DSD format, which Sony and Philips brought out in 1999 on SACD discs. Instead of measuring the sound 44,100 times per second with great precision, it measures it almost 3 million times per second with a precision of just one bit: each time it only notes whether the wave should go up or down. The result is about as good as hi-res. It is still digital, even though it is sometimes marketed as “the closest thing to analog”. DSD is exactly the format Mobile Fidelity used for the records we talked about above.

Where analog always stays

Even in a fully digital setup, the start and the end of the chain are analog, and there is no other way:

• The microphone turns air vibration into voltage.
• The amplifier at the end always delivers analog current to the speaker, even when it is digitally controlled.
• The speaker moves its cone, and the cone moves the air.
• The room and your ear are purely analog.

So the question “analog or digital” is really a question of where in the chain the sound travels as numbers. With today’s technology that is an advantage wherever sound is stored, transmitted or processed. The part that moves the air has to stay analog.

Digital in loudspeakers

For a speaker builder, the most interesting part is digital signal processing, known as DSP. A small computer can act as a crossover, flatten a driver’s response, align the drivers in time and protect them from overload, and do it more precisely than coils and capacitors could. We cover this in detail in the articles Passive or active crossover and Hypex FusionAmp.

The most common myths

• “Digital sound is blocky.” No. The converter creates a smooth wave that is identical to the original.
• “CD cuts off the treble, so it has no air.” A CD captures everything up to 22 kHz, which is above the limit of human hearing.
• “A record has infinite resolution.” Its resolution is limited by the noise of the groove and the needle, which is higher than the noise of a CD.
• “An expensive USB cable improves the sound.” USB carries numbers. The cable either delivers them all, or you get dropouts that you hear as crackling, not as “better treble”.
• “Digital sound is cold.” Digital adds nothing and takes nothing away. If it sounds cold, blame the recording, the mastering or the speakers.

How to get the best sound at home

Whether you love records or streaming, these few steps make the biggest difference:

1. Switch on the highest quality in your music app. Many apps default to lower quality on mobile data to save data.
2. At home, play over a cable or Wi-Fi, not Bluetooth, if top quality matters to you. For example through a streamer, a computer or a TV connected to your amplifier with a cable.
3. Leave loudness leveling switched on between tracks. You lose nothing, and jumping between loud and quiet songs will not bother you.
4. With a turntable, check the needle and the setup. The right tracking force, a clean needle and a dust-free record make a bigger difference than a pricier cable.
5. Take care with your speakers and where you put them. Distance from the wall, tweeters at ear height and the same distance to both speakers do more than changing the format. The room planner will help you.
6. When you are not sure whether you can hear a difference, try the blind test.

So which is better?

If what matters to you is…	Better choice
the most faithful playback of the recording	digital, ideally lossless
convenience, access to all the music in the world	streaming, lossless or good-quality lossy
the experience, the ritual, collecting, cover art	records
a specific album with better mastering	whichever version has the better mastering, whatever it is
better sound for sensible money	better speakers and room treatment

For a home builder the advice is simple: use a decent, lossless source, and put your time and money into the speakers and the room. That is where the differences are biggest. The Loudsmith designer and the room planner will help you with that.

A small glossary

• Analog: sound stored as a smooth wave, like the groove in a record.
• Digital: sound stored as a series of numbers.
• Sample rate: how many times per second the sound is measured, for example 44,100 times for CD.
• Bit depth: how precisely each sample is measured; it sets how quiet the background noise is.
• DAC (converter): a device that turns the numbers back into a smooth sound wave.
• Mastering: the final processing of a recording before release, which sets its loudness and dynamics.
• Dolby, dbx: systems that boost quiet sounds when recording to tape and turn them back down on playback, which also turns down the tape noise.
• Dithering: adding a tiny amount of noise when converting to fewer bits, so that even the quietest details stay audible.
• Dynamics: the difference between the quietest and the loudest parts of the music.
• Lossless / lossy format: a file that keeps all the data, or throws part of it away to be smaller.

Sources: Wang et al., hearing by age (2021); M. Montgomery, Digital Show & Tell (Xiph.Org, 2013); dynamic range database of recordings (DR Database); RIAA, 2022 year-end report; Hydrogenaudio, public blind codec listening tests; E. B. Meyer and D. R. Moran (JAES 2007); J. Reiss (JAES 2016); reports on the Mobile Fidelity case (2022 to 2023); Y. Ashihara et al., jitter (2005); websites of the streaming services and Bluetooth codec makers (November 2026); Library of Congress and other sources on the history of sound recording.