One of the most common questions I am asked to answer is why the same music/recording sounds so different on vinyl as opposed to digital.
Over the years I have endeavored to answer that question in various ways: different mastering, dynamics, and the added flavors of various cartridges quickly come to mind.
But on a much broader scale I might throw the question back and ask, how could it not sound different?
What possibly would prompt us to wonder how an electro-mechanical-analog system would be different than one of math and silicon?
How could they not be different?
Of course it is tempting to conflate the two. After all, 56.73 is the square root of 3,219 regardless of whether the answer came from a slide rule or a calculator.
Mathematics and the reproduction of sound are two very different disciplines. Arithmetic always has the same answer while sound never does.
Just as every microphone and every set of ears interprets sound differently, so too does every reproduction method ever devised.
The question then isn't why vinyl sounds different because that implies the possibility of eliminating differences and eventually matching the two.
A better question/thought is how best to embrace the differences.
