Record Store Day’s Co-Founder Says CDs Embarrass Vinyl on the One Test Audiophiles Never Run

It’s simple enough to run at home and most premium pressings don’t survive it.

Tom “Grover” Biery has spent the last two decades at the center of vinyl’s commercial resurgence. He grew Warner Bros.’ vinyl revenue from $300,000 to over $5 million in 18 months, co-founded Record Store Day, and today produces one-step audiophile pressings, which a lot of people consider the best of vinyl craftsmanship.

His latest passion, however, points straight to the CD aisle.

His Red Line Isn’t the Format

Biery has produced one-step pressings, A.K.A. vinyl’s most meticulous format, from digital sources. And he doesn’t hedge about it.

That honesty matters because the audiophile vinyl world has spent decades treating analog tape as sacred. They believe that if a recording wasn’t sourced from the original master tape, something essential gets lost in the translation to digital.

While his career sits inside that tradition, he is less interested in the source format than in the choices made after it.

Where he draws the line, though, is compression, not format. Masters where engineers sacrificed dynamic range for volume are off the table, but “if it’s a digital source, fine,” as he put it. A recording tracked in Pro Tools can get the same consideration as one sourced from pristine quarter-inch tape.

On the other hand, a significant share of acclaimed 1990s and 2000s recordings were made in digital workstations, and traditional labels had ignored that catalog because, as Biery put it, “a lot of people are purist about that.”

When Mastering Went to War

Biery’s framework raises an obvious question. If mastering is what matters, why don’t all CDs qualify?

The simple answer is: because many weren’t mastered with care. During the 1990s and 2000s, mastering engineers increasingly compressed dynamic range on CDs to make records sound louder, exploiting a psychological reality where louder music consistently wins side-by-side comparisons. The practice, called the loudness war, created an arms race.

CDs that went through that process lost the quality Biery prizes most. Their dynamic range got flattened, and no amount of premium repressing can restore what the mastering destroyed.

But streaming soon killed the incentive. Services now normalize playback at roughly -14 LUFS, which means over-compressed tracks get turned down automatically while well-mastered recordings keep their full range. The war is over, and CDs that predate it or escaped its worst effects sound exactly like what Biery describes.

Biery illustrated the point with an example that predates the format debate entirely.

Those recordings, sourced from shellac with far worse specifications than CD or vinyl, remain among the most revered in music history. Biery applies the same logic to his own production decisions.

Ten Times the Price, Same Master

The price difference between vinyl and CD tells the rest of the story. On current retail prices, that difference is staggering.

At that spread, vinyl has to justify more than playback. The premium also buys the object, the scarcity, and the process behind the pressing.

Meanwhile, audiophile vinyl has its justifications. Biery has said one-step records commonly run around $100 for a single LP and $125 for a double, which puts them outside casual-listening territory.

And the process demands it. Each stamper wears out after just 500 to 750 copies, so a pressing like the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, limited to 6,000 copies, required cutting nine separate lacquers. That meant the mastering work had to be repeated across multiple lacquers, multiplying one of the most expensive parts of the production.

He doesn’t pretend the economics favor vinyl for every listener, though. The expense is real, and he is the first to acknowledge it. So for many buyers, the question isn’t whether a premium pressing sounds better than a CD but whether it sounds ten times better.

His CD enthusiasm sharpens the value test. Vinyl can have meaning, but the extra cost still has to buy enough extra experience to matter.

$25 Million Worth of Proof

Biery’s framework didn’t emerge in a vacuum. The audiophile world had already been forced to confront its format assumptions, and the lesson was expensive.

In July 2022, Mike Esposito of The ‘In’ Groove record store in Phoenix revealed that Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, one of the most respected names in audiophile vinyl, had been using a digital conversion step in its mastering process while marketing records as all-analog.

The company’s engineers confirmed that DSD, a high-resolution digital format, had been used on all of MoFi’s One-Step records. Then a class action followed, affecting roughly 40,000 customers, with a settlement north of $25 million finalized in October 2023.

This scandal matters here for one reason: listeners had praised those MoFi records for years before knowing a digital step was involved. It does not excuse the lack of transparency, but it does reinforce Biery’s point that execution can matter more to the ear than the analog-versus-digital label.

That’s why Biery doesn’t use MoFi as a gotcha, since his framework predates the controversy by nearly two decades. In fact, his reaction to MoFi itself was notably generous.

If the meal is good, the ingredients list is secondary. It is the same logic that leads him to hi-fi CDs.

Vinyl’s Insider Sends You to the CD Aisle

The architect of vinyl’s commercial revival now sends people to the CD aisle, but he sees no contradiction.

He still produces one-step pressings because the vinyl itself matters to listeners who value the object, the engineering, and the limited-edition craft that goes into each run. He just does not pretend those listeners are paying for superior sound. Instead, the premium buys ritual, craft, and scarcity.

Under his framework, sound quality comes from the master first. Vinyl still adds an experience, but it does not automatically win on fidelity.

That leaves an honest tension at the center of his career. He produces vinyl for people who want the physical artifact and the pressing process behind it, and he champions CDs for people who want the sound without the markup.

But his own quality test is simpler than the format wars allow.