It's actually one of the best reasons to buy old vinyl for music that wasn't very popular. So much stuff got put into CDs without being mastered for it and it does sound objectively worse, as you've pointed out. There's a lot of great music (to certain people anyways) that you can't get a great digital copy of because it was never made. Even the digital copies are often pulled from a record or from a master tape but never remastered. Anything that could sell was probably remastered for CDs and digital.
Of course, anything recorded with digital recording equipment and pressed to vinyl is simply for aesthetic reasons. Some people just like playing records and listening to music this way.
I'm not sure buying old vinyl helps all that much. The bass was cut from recordings so the needle would move less and not collide with the groove before it. Early CDs also lacked bass until trends changed.
I would guess that most of the time a CD made from the master tape sounds better than the vinyl even without a remaster. Of course the remaster is almost always the best bet.
It depends on how many minutes of music were out on each side. There’s a lot of 45s that sound great and they’re worth a lot in part because of that for example. A lot of mainstream stuff started to get pressed on thin, cheap vinyl and was packed with as many minutes as possible. So yeah, loss of fidelity there and remastered CDs may in fact sound better. I think you’re probably safe until late 70s before that became practice.
There’s no masters of a lot of rare, non-mainstream things, or at least not known masters. And a lot of great music that wasn’t going to be mainstream for a variety of reasons. Think regional funk, blues, punk, psych, etc. You just can’t get a great digital recording in many instances.
100%. If you can find a quality rip of the vinyl I'll take that for convenience (I have ~1000 vinyl records so I have my fill of that magic) but especially something from long ago transferred to CD in the 80's I'm going to be very skeptical of.
Another huge factor that affects the sound is the damned stylus. It's like switching speakers. Each one has its own signature. Then there's the phono preamp/RIAA filter too! I prefer our modern times where only the choice of speakers matters that much. Think of all the permutations of stylus, preamp, and speakers you had to consider in the early HiFi days.
There's an equalization filter built into every single phono preamp to deal with this.
It's called the RIAA equalization curve.
Basically when you master the record you put something down that has rolled off bass and lots of treble onto the vinyl LP. This is to encode the music in a form that is compatible with the physical disc + stylus.
> The crappy CDs were a result of dumping a phono mastering onto a CD without realizing that a CD player was not going to apply the RIAA curve.
I don't believe this is the case. The RIAA curve is a very aggressive curve (40db) and no one would tolerate an uncorrected signal (plug your turntable into the line in for a taste, all you hear is sibilance). Also the filter would be applied by the person mastering the vinyl - it would not be applied before the master tape.
IMO the thin sounding CDs were because producers were used to vinyl which still has issues with bass even with the RIAA curve in place. Also because CDs were new and we lacked the knowledge and tools to use them to their potential. For example my teachers in college would have me turn in my DAT tapes with peak levels around -18db (late 90's).
Of course, anything recorded with digital recording equipment and pressed to vinyl is simply for aesthetic reasons. Some people just like playing records and listening to music this way.