Your vinyl records aren't as "analog" as you think—and that’s okay

Oh, you thought it was AAA all the way?

Your vinyl records aren't as "analog" as you think—and that’s okay

[Making music record, vinyl factory]

Credit: Stock Rocket/Shutterstock.com

Sydney Butler

Mar 1, 2026, 12:45 PM EST

Sydney Butler is a technology writer with over 20 years of experience as a freelance PC technician and system builder and over a decade as a professional writer. He's worked for more than a decade in user education. On How-To Geek, he writes commerce content, guides, opinions, and specializes in editing hardware and cutting edge technology articles.

Sydney started working as a freelance computer technician around the age of 13, before which he was in charge of running the computer center for his school. (He also ran LAN gaming tournaments when the teachers weren't looking!) His interests include VR, PC, Mac, gaming, 3D printing, consumer electronics, the web, and privacy.

He holds a Master of Arts degree in Research Psychology with a minor in media and technology studies. His masters dissertationexamined the potential for social media to spread misinformation.

Outside of How-To Geek, he hosts the Online Tech Tips YouTube Channel, and writes for Online Tech Tips, Switching to Mac, and Helpdesk Geek. Sydney also writes for Expert Reviews UK.

He also has bylines at 9to5Mac, 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, Tom's Hardware, MakeTechEasier, and Laptop Mag.

One of the key pillars supporting the vinyl fandom is the analog nature of the medium. Some audiophiles argue that because digital music is sampled, it sounds "choppy" and lacks perceivable detail compared to an analog recording.

Apart from the fact that no definitive empirical evidence or controlled blind-testing has shown this to be the case as far as I'm aware, a simple understanding of how that vinyl was produced completely destroys this particular narrative.

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The “all-analog” myth hasn’t been true for decades

Digital audio recording got its start in the 1970s. In 1971, Denon introduced the world to its PCM digital recorder. It was used to record a commercial release called Something by Steve Marcus with Jiro Inagaki and Soul Media, which is, as far as I can tell, the first commercial digital recording.

By the mid-1970s, 16-bit PCM became possible, and by the late 1970s, digital multi-track recorders saw the light of day. The first all-digital mainstream album is most likely Ry Cooder's Bop Till You Drop.

By the '80s, digital multi-track studio recordings using DAT tapes were the norm, and why not? The advantages in cost, quality, and control were undeniable and CDs made it possible for people at home to actually enjoy the precise, crystal clarity of the medium.

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The digital revolution hit vinyl during the CD era

[A man pointing his finger at the CD button of an in-car CD player as a disc is being inserted.]

Credit: Mdisk / Shutterstock

The rise of CDs in the 1980s is one for the history books, and anyone with ears ("golden" or otherwise) could tell the difference. However, plenty of people couldn't afford CD players, and vinyl albums were still being released for the millions of people with record players at home.

I guess I don't have to tell you that studios were not paying to have albums recorded and produced twice. So, since digital studio workflows were clearly the way to go, vinyl from the post-digital recording era was made from a digitally recorded master. So, even if you buy a vinyl from almost half a century ago, it's just an analog pressing of that same "cold," "choppy," and "lossy" digital audio vinyl fanatics claim to hate.

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Modern vinyl is almost always born in a DAW

[Sound engineer editing tracks with digital audio interface on computer.]

Credit: DC Studio/Shutterstock.com

By extension, vinyl pressings of modern music are almost all digitally recorded as well. Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) are the standard platform that studio engineers have been trained on. Even when some artists record to analog tape, it gets digitized somewhere along the way.

Remember, if the audio is digitized at any point before being pressed into a vinyl disk, you're hearing digital audio. Whatever additional presumed perceived detail that you think analog has would be lost at that point.

What people usually like about how vinyl sounds has more to do with how vinyls are mastered, a side effect of the inherent limitations in dynamic and frequency range in the medium. Nothing stops a digital recording from sounding exactly like a vinyl. You just have to use the right mastering process and plugins, but the digital medium itself can absolutely replicate vinyl. You don't have to take my word for it; just make a lossless digital recording of your own vinyls and tell me if you can hear the difference in a blind test.​​​​​​​

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Your playback chain isn’t purely analog either

[A Bluetooth turntable with a Bluetooth icon with noise.]

Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek

Let's say you've tracked down a true AAA (All Analog) vinyl pressing. So the music was recorded, mixed, and mastered using only analog technology. You're home free, right? Wrong! If your playback chain has even just one link in it that digitizes your audio, it's game over.

In some cases, this is pretty obvious. If you're listening to a vinyl record using one of those Bluetooth record players, then you're absolutely not listening to analog audio anymore. Even worse, Bluetooth isn't even in the same league as CD audio, unless you're using aptX Lossless.

However, it's easy to miss that your playback chain has one or more digital stages. Many modern receivers convert phono inputs to digital internally for room correction, bass management, or DSP effects. Some built-in phono stages include analog-to-digital conversion before any processing happens.

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And that’s completely fine

Does it matter? Well, if you live under the delusion that you can (all other things being equal) hear the difference between analog and digital recordings, you might want to purge all digital audio from your chain. So that takes any vinyl record off the table that started life as a digital recording.

What's funny to me is that there's a relatively recent case where a company called MoFi (Mobile Fidelity) that's beloved by high-end vinyl fanatics was exposed as having a digital step in the process of making records. So these were not AAA vinyls at all, as people had assumed. Though MoFi did nothing legally wrong, just to be clear.

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