From my personal experience and articles I have read, I would say that vinyl sounds ‘nicer’ on some recordings because they were mastered wrong, assuming treble loss in the master cutting phase and precompensating for it. Some digital recordings in my experience are horrible, too bright and things got better when engineers forgot about vinyl being the target.
I absolutely agree about vinyl being nicer, in certain cases only though.
It is my belief that microphony if present can sound nicer because everyone likes reverb, so much so that performers add artificial reverb and in most situations all musicians seek natural reverb out. My wife is a singer, as was I after a fashion, although only an amateur unlike her, and she can attest to this love of all sources of reverb.
I have shouted into a valve amp and got microphony back and of course a turntable is more sensitive.
A high-end turntable will often use an expensive cartridge that requires a very high gain. This too increases the microphony. And the vinyl-internal stylus reverb is always present. Articles have been published on this subject and that is why some high end turntables have specially designed record mats some of which are sticky, many are damping felt. Record clamps also play a part although this is less clear and I don’t remember seeing much written about them. Didn’t the Oracle turntable come with a clamp? I always used one and a special sticky damping mat, on my Thorens.
But sevenlayermuddle is right to be sceptical as I have never seen anything published about human testing of record player microphony or amp microphony. I do have personal experience of it though and I can’t say anything about the reverb because of the possibility of reverb already being orsent in recordings and I didn’t do A-B comparisons with very high end headphones, but then in any case you would just be testing speakers vs headphones so the test would be hopeless. But I got the feeling that the bass was enhanced and warmer when there was more uncontrolled acoustic feedback and the sound retreated become colder and darker and more distant when the record player support was dramatically improved by the Humber Bridge and concrete blocks. One interesting test for anyone to do would be record player lid/cover-on-vs-off. (If you have one.) it seems to me that hinged lids are not clever as they are microphones unless the lid is fully closed and the whole thing is damped. A swinging wobbling lid on a part-closed hinge is very silly. A lid that is oversized and goes right over the outside of the whole turntable, like a bell jar, would be a better option surely. I just put a very heavy paperweight on my lid.
Actually forget headphones - a better test would be to put the turntable in the next room or in an insulated box, out of the way of the speakers. Then do a test with high gain.
God all of this is taking me back.
I don’t mind talking about audio _at all_ but I was interested in the future of dsl so I started something with a mention of a topic that we all love. Should perhaps have split the thread. Will we mourn dsl and copper? Anyone for COBOL? (Shudders.)
I did a lot of Z80 assembler for a living at work to begin with, 100% full time. I found it really annoying though, even though it is a capable 8 but processor but a but slow unless it’s strengths can shine. Other processors I all found enjoyable but not the Z80. Aside from that I really miss writing in assembler and mourn the transition into high level languages for pretty much absolutely everything. that’s why I have been writing a few very small bits of AMD64/Intel x64 asm code recently for a giant speed-up of certain algorithms wher compilers don’t have access to certain new instructions or don’t know to use them.