Reply To: Cd, Mp3, Vinyl

Well, I vote here for the wav – or aiff – format stocked on hard drives.
The main and bigger argument in favor of vinyl – in the endless war "vinyl vs CD" – is that you get an hotter and more dynamic sound with vinyls than CD’s. This is true, but not always. The apparent loss of dynamic in CD’s is caused by today’s abusive digital mastering techniques (brick-wall limiters, hard digital compression…) – an absurd process called the "Loudness War", well described here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war.
The colder sound of CD’s is due to poor quality DJ / Home-Studio rigs (pure crap AD/DA converters at first place).
So, if the sound material is recorded through an hi-grade AD converter, if the dynamic range is well used in a soft mastering process and, finally, if your DA converter is a REAL pro one (Apogee, Prism, Weiss…) and not some of those 10$ Radio Shack-types integrated in Soundblaster cards, DJ’s CD players and even in Native Instruments Audio 4/8, then you will never go back to vinyl.

EDIT : Nice little video about "Loundness War" :

http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Loudness-War