Bit rate of vinyl rips

[Dohjo]

Hey,

I've want to know how high the bit quality for vinyl rips should be. 192kbit seems ok for smaller venues, but that's talking regular mp3 tracks, not rips.

I have found some vinyl rips online because the tracks haven't been available as mp3. Is 192kbit good enough for vinyl rips?

[xs2man]

Nope. Vinyl, being analogue, has an infinite bitrate. The higher bitrate you rip your vinyl to the better. So rip it to WAV and compress to FLAC for the best quality.

192 should NEVER be used to DJ out. 320 is bad enough, WAV/AIFF or FLAC is what you should be using.

[Dohjo]

there's not much difference between 320 and WAV, most people can't tell the difference. (I hope this won't start a huge arguement)

[SlvrDragon50]

It's going to start an argument.

But yes, 320 kbps is good enough.

[Nick V]

I rip mine at 320. I can def tell the difference between the 2 but I think vinyl sounds different than anything else. I can hear the difference between vinyl and cd and yet cant tell between cd and 256. It may have something to do with hearing the actual needle making noise

[xs2man]

The sample rate of a CD is 44.1Khz.
For a WAV file ripped directly from CD, this is 16-bit stereo, so (44100 x 2 ) x 2 = 176400B/s or 176KB/s, which is 1411Kbps, over 4 times more information.

How is 4 times as much information not that much?

It really depends on the source quality admittedly, and the sounds on the source (genre of music), as to whether it's easy or hard to tell the difference between 320 kbps and 1411 kbps when listening on an mp3 player, or low end home hifi. You put the same sources on a stereo of decent quality, or a club sound system, and the difference is pretty obvious.

And, as your ripping vinyl, it's bad enough your compressing the sound down to 1411 kbps. If you look at torrent sites for example, dvd rips are dvd quality, hd rips are hd quality. So vinyl rips are never going to be vinyl quality, but for god sake, if your going to do it, do it as best you can, and FLAC it if space is such a concern.

[Era 7]

just rip it to lossless (WAV/AIF or alternatively FLAC). keep the lossless file for the archives and create a 320kbps MP3 version of it, if FLAC is still to big for you.

[Dohjo]

So in general, avoid 192kbit vinyl rips?

[xs2man]

Oh right. So your downloading vinyl rips? So in other words, piracy? Unless your ripping your own collection, avoid it all.

[Dohjo]

Maybe one or two have been pirated vinyl rips - admitted. But only if it isn't available as mp3. Mostly talking my own collection. Most places don't have TTs and no reason to use up space on my usb's if it doesn't matter with vinyl. But it does i see