Apparently, there were two companies in the US that produced the lacquer but then consolidation happened and Apollo bought out the competitor and shut it down. [1]
>Gil Tamazyan, the owner of Los Angeles record pressing plant Capsule Labs, said he's been concerned for the industry since Apollo purchased competitor Transco in 2007.
>"The worst case from (the fire) would be if Apollo doesn't plan to return and doesn't share the intellectual properties with another new willing company. We all agree there needs to be more than one supplier for these materials," Tamazyan said. "All my industry colleagues are worried this might take a long time to figure out and, in the process, major delays may arise in the vinyl production market."
So now only the Japanese company, MDC, remains as the sole producer of the lacquer. Lacquer is basically a formulation of nitrocellulose and is highly flammable.
If you've never seen a lacquer master being cut, give this vid a watch [2]. Not surprisingly, the audio engineer uses the Apollo lacquer master in the video.
I haven't found an objective explanation for why some populations prefer vinyl analog over any digital renditions of a sound. Can anyone share some insight?
(I've listened to both, and the description of vinyl or even analog sound as being generally "warmer" never resonated with me.)
I do both. Digital music is way more convenient to initiate, continue, store and take with you -- so I use that the most. But, it's almost too convenient in some cases to the point where I often don't appreciate what is really happening and the music just becomes background noise. Although it's obviously possible, I rarely use digital music to sit and listen to an entire album anymore.
On the other hand, when I listen to a record, I sit down and I listen to the record. I mean, you kind of have to do that anyway because you only get a few songs before you have to flip it. I find it makes me more mindful of the music; I feel more in-the-moment; and it reminds me of my youth. That was a time when we couldn't just tell our phone to start playing an AI curated playlist while everyone talks over it anyway. I'm not convinced we would we have wanted to do that either...
People rarely talk about music anymore, compared to what it used to be like. We used to line up when a new album was coming out from a favorite artist. We'd take the tape or cd from our car, into our bedroom, over to our friend's houses, and blast it on our parent's floor speakers before they came home from work. We used to talk about that album for days, sometimes months as we got deeper into it after many replays. I can't remember the last time I had a good conversation about a new album... few seem to care anymore. A lot of people will blame the music, but there is still some great music being made today.
I think it's more likely your age group. When you were young listening to tapes on your parents' speakers, didn't it seem to you that kids and teens were much more into music than most adults?
I'm 20, I grew up listening to albums on YouTube, never owned a CD, tape, or record. But my experience is and was still exactly what you describe. My friends and I have countdowns on our phones ticking down the days to eagerly-awaited releases, we make plans to listen to it together at a 'premiere' hosted by whoever has the best speakers. If they live up to the excitement they get replayed to death, memorized backwards and forwards, and discussed endlessly. In middle/high school we'd write our own reviews to post online and sometimes get the artist replying to us on Twitter which made our month. The fact that we didn't have to buy a 4"-by-4" piece of plastic and put it into another piece of plastic before hitting play didn't prevent any of that and I can't imagine it making the music more exciting or engaging.
I agree, that's certainly part of it and I'm happy to hear that young people are still obsessed about music. I'm not suggesting you need physical media to do it, but I am saying the medium has changed things to some degree.
Back then, if we wanted a mix tape, we'd have to mix it. Now, spotify generates five new ones each day for each of us, or we can request a new one on the fly for any genre, mood, artist, etc. So, it makes me wonder how these tools have changed the way young people today consume music. For example, how much of your digital listening is to entire albums start to finish vs some kind of mix/random play? What are you doing (if anything) while you listen to a complete album? Are you buying albums specifically or listening to them on a subscription service?
When I tried spotify a few years ago, it was exactly this aspect that totally failed my expectations.
I wanted a service like Spotify as a replacement for genre radio. I wanted something that somehow figures out my tastes, and generates a mix for me.
In my experience, this totally fails unless you happen to like the most commercial pop music available.
Whenever I tried to coax it to play some alternative and undergroundy music, it ended up playing
the most commercial nonsense after 2 or 3 tracks.
I haven't tried a single streaming service since, because I dont feel I want to be poisoned by the most empty and stupid music in existance.
I suspect you didn’t use it for long enough for it to develop a good profile of your tastes. I’ve been using it for 5 years and the recommendations are my favourite feature, and on the whole very impressive.
I’d consider myself into quite underground music (electronic/techno, nothing mainstream or commercial at all, I’d wager even most people who consider themselves into electronic music wouldn’t have heard of a lot of the artists I listen to) and it usually gets it pretty right, sometimes amazingly so.
I’ve been introduced to some of my favourite music by Spotify, and the interface makes exploring related artists etc. really easy. Ideally I’d like better cataloguing (e.g. tagging) and metadata (e.g. more emphasis on labels) but I know I’m a niche user and I can work around these limitations.
My tips if you try it again would be:
- if it recommends something you don’t like, press thumbs down (if available) and skip - they use skipping as a signal you don’t like something
- build up a collection of music you do like, using the save button and/or playlists
- check out the feature which plays related music after you’ve finished listening to a track or album - this often finds the most interesting music for me
- check out the “related songs” area under any playlists you’ve created. If you have focussed playlists (e.g. I have ones for different subgenres), this can help you discover some great stuff.
I’d actually say the stuff Spotify plays after an album/song is the best part of their recommendations for me. The daily mixes it generates aren’t bad. Release Radar and Discover Weekly can be a bit hit or miss, sometimes for example it will recommend overly commercial stuff for my tastes, but it’s always worth scanning through (and I do thumbs down the really off recommendations).
It’s not perfect of course, for example sometimes I find it gets “stuck” in a small subset of artists after a while, but combined with other sources and some input to guide, Spotify is the best service I’ve found for discovering music, and is way above for example YouTube suggestions
I had this problem with Apple Music and Pandora, but Spotify worked for me. I had to skip a lot of stuff in the beginning, but it got way better than any other service I've used. I assume skipping is just training the AI on what you don't like (and like) so it takes some time.
> My friends and I have countdowns on our phones ticking down the days to eagerly-awaited releases, we make plans to listen to it together at a 'premiere' hosted by whoever has the best speakers. If they live up to the excitement they get replayed to death, memorized backwards and forwards, and discussed endlessly.
Wait, does that still happen or did you just describe what you used to do in the past?
As a music lover and collector on fridays my todo list is filled with numerous entries of new release I scheduled months and weeks in advance. And yet this kind of musical anticipation, exploration and discovery seems to be a rather solitary passion. For most people music has been relegated to background noise it seems. If you and your friends still enjoy and explore music the way you described, that's exceptionally wonderful.
I’m 35 and we grew up with music on the Television. My main CD player was a Play Station. Sometimes a friend brought a new CD over and we listened to it in my room on repeat. We would watch music shows when they were aired on programmed television, or tune into specific radio shows that had “the top 10 popular songs” or something. When we learned about Napster no one had high enough speed internet to download but the most popular songs, but yet we did, and bragged about owning so and so song.
I bet people that were 35 at the time had similar complaints about us not discussing and appreciating music like they did when they were had their mix-tapes playing on their parent’s stereo.
I have never used "AI Curated playlists", and I'm listening to music only by full albums (no shuffles, no random, nothing), because one unit of my favorite music is album, not track (still).
But I don't understand vynil records at all. It is worse than even CD, not to mention high-res downloadable albums. Dynamic range is worse, noise floor is worse, stereo separation is worse.
I'm old enough to listen A LOT of LP records in the past, before widespread of CDs in my country (ok, we have affordable CDs later than USA or UK or Eastern Europe, for sure), but, no, never again!
There was period of time, when mastering for CDs was much worse than mastering for Vynil, because CDs could bear "black wall" of sound and Vynil cannot. But, again, Loudness War seems to end about 15 years ago...
For me at least, the main appeal of vinyl records is that they are physical artifacts, tactile and cozy/nostalgic. I enjoy the physicality, the large cover art and the little rituals. It also forces me to listen to entire albums in order, instead of just shuffling random tracks.
The sound quality is somewhere between "good enough" and "genuinely good", no match for good digital formats, but certainly good enough to get lost in the music and enjoy it. And my turntable cost around $100 second hand, nothing too fancy.
I mostly buy rock and metal from the 70s and 80s, second hand. The only new records I buy are from bands that could easily fool people into thinking they are actually from back then, like Visigoth and Smoulder, old-school heavy metal. It just feels like vinyl is the right format for it.
I use playlists too much probably. One of my semi-resolutions is to get back to listening to albums more.
But, as with photographic film, while I have a certain nostalgia for vinyl records, I don't really miss the scratches and the warping and need to flip the record or put a new one on every 20 minutes or so.
Before the Internet, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit hobby forums it was your music that defined you.
If you listened to metal you dressed that way too, indie pop another way, your music defined who you were, your friends, the magazines you bought.
There are just so many ways for kids to define themselves these days, music is important but I don't think they feel defined by what they listen to (not to the same extent).
I am jealous of how cheap music is now, I wish it could have been cheaper in my youth.
Some of us still do the subculture thing. 99% of the music I listen to is hard rock and metal, and fittingly 99% of my clothes are black, mostly jeans and t-shirts and some cargo pants for festivals, and stompy boots.
I wouldn't say that I define myself by my taste in music, but it does influence my choices in clothes and so on.
That's probably just the groups you circle in. Our group chats were all buzzing after Lane8's latest release. People had opinions, posted their favourite remix, talked about songs that evoked similar feelings.
Fair enough, and I agree it is my groups. But, it didn't seem to used to matter which groups you were in. Sure, more than just the medium changed. But the Vinyl ritual is maybe even more rewarding today than it was when it was the popular option.
PS - I Loved Brightest Lights. I am also looking forward to Porter Robinson's next album -- it's been a long time since the last album and I didn't love this first single initially, but it has really grown on me (the ducking is still a little much in some areas).
Haha, wow, you made me think if there's any EDM or house vinyl and it blows my mind that this exists!
Honestly, I think Porter Robinson is sort of like Baynk in that they're both way better live. The latter especially feels less... 'tropical' live. Good stuff, though.
I love Anjunabeats, Above&Beyond, and I really dig what Lane8 is doing. "Howling Hand" seems to stick out for me and I've added it to the more relaxed of my top-tier playlists. But overall it's just a little too chill for me.
That was dope. Thanks, man. I wasn't able to make ABGT350 but This Never Happened in Oakland was pretty damn dope. I like the no-phones gimmick too. Brightest Lights is awesome. I like the original edit the most https://open.spotify.com/track/49jWS1fz7QZQa4mBIqB0mu?si=-9R...
If you haven't been, I recommend the Anjuna weekender they're going to have in 2021 at The Gorge.
Dude, Brainwasher is this track I think I've been searching for for a while. Mega thanks. That with Black Hole.
I think you’re referring to the commoditization of musical works with their treatment.
I listen to both, and still have a CD collection that gets less use.
I decided a long time ago I didn’t mind not keeping up with every new arts trend and just slowly wade through works I like, finding others along the way. I could talk at length about some of my favourites but I also don’t encounter those situations anymore with people. I do with my partner, though. I’m lucky she’s interested—though she’s also more current usually.
I hate everything about CDs. The flimsy jewel cases that break all the time, the tiny artwork, how easily CDs scratch, how choosing a song requires clicking stupid buttons, the delay after inserting CDs, the high pitched whine of the motor, the sound of the stepper motor as it moves the laser...
When I listen to music, I want to slow down and relax, and taking a record out of the sleeve is just so much nicer than fidgeting with CDs. I like that everything about playing records is analog. I like the crackle between songs when playing an old record, it's so much nicer than the random skipping when playing a scratched CD. When something breaks in my analog audio system, I can usually fix it myself with a soldering iron.
As for the sound, I think it's mostly because of a different style of mixing than the media itself.
I mean it can’t possibly be about CD issues because that’s trivially solved by using a digital music player. I can see the argument about the giant album art making it more of a ritual, but all of the CD complaints sound like lame justifications IMO.
Sorry, for some reason I assumed that the question was about Vinyl vs. CD, maybe because my preference for physical media seems like something obvious that needs no explanation.
Another factor is that I have the same analog hifi system since 16 years. I've grown to like it.
I've also used (and still use) digital players (computers, iPods, smartphones, etc), but they either break, or the software changes every few years, making it kinda hard to get attached to.
Most classic albums released first on vinyl were released before the loudness wars, most CD (re)releases were during or after the loudness wars. That may explain much of the impression that vinyl sounds better.
Not an audiophile, so reading this through the lens of ux, what you describe is a form of pliancy: taking the record out etc. Something that isn’t reproduced properly in digital is feeling and operation (as in actual touch and manipulation) I presume there is something in our brains that responds to that (beyond simple nostalgia)
> ... how choosing a song requires clicking stupid buttons, the delay after inserting CDs, the high pitched whine of the motor, the sound of the stepper motor as it moves the laser...
Some of the earliest CD players are superbly constructed — and have some of the best sound. I have a couple of Sony decks from the mid-1980s that are quiet, quick, and have excellent controls, complete with 20-odd direct buttons for individual songs. Playing a CD on these machines feels just as mechanically satisfying as playing a vinyl record. You have to spend some time & money finding them, but it’s not hard to pick up a top of the line 1980s player for a few hundred dollars. For me, it’s absolutely worth it.
Because unless you're paying for an expensive service, it's uncompressed vs whatever bitrate your streaming service decides to use. It's usually cheaper just to buy the CD (and rip it if you want) if you're after quality.
I buy both. For the most part, it's nostalgia, not sound quality. In fact, if sound quality is the goal, CDs or losslessly compressed audio files are preferable. Virtually everything is mixed and mastered in digital now, so any notion of the "warmth of analog" is mostly horseshit.
But some of us have a soft spot for physical collections of things. I have around 500 CDs and 200 records (and 1000-ish books). Vinyl is prettier than a CD. They're big, there's a bit of a ritual to putting one one. They're nice to throw on when friends are over. I didn't even grow up with records: I was from the cassette and CD generation. I didn't start acquiring records until I inherited my dad's and started buying techno records.
Some people will spout some post hoc rationalizations about the sound of vinyl, but objectively, they're wrong. It's mostly just that we like collecting the things and that more often than not these days when you buy the vinyl you get a download code for the digital version, so you get the best of both worlds.
It’s a hobby like anything else. Why do people prefer stick/manual to automatic? Same thing imo. It’s just a little more “real” and involved with a hobbyist setup. I do enjoy the sound a little bit better but also the mastering is often different between digital and analog.
Manual transmission has clear advantage in responsiveness. Being used to manual, I've just driven an automatic for three days. Despite having 50% more power than my old car, it felt terribly slow because of the gear shift delays.
No, manual transmissions are a clear loser when it comes to responsiveness. You have to manually disengage the clutch, manually change the gear and manually engage the clutch.
For comparison, the dual clutch transmission in the Nissan GT-R can shift in 0.15 seconds and that's a 10+ year old car. The ZF 8HP, which is a conventional torque converter transmission used for example in the new BMW M5, is apparently able to do gear changes in about 0.2 seconds.
Sure, you can have an automatic that is incredibly slushy, but that's not an inherent quality to automatic transmissions.
But you can anticipate the correct gear from the road, rather than having to wait for the transmission to respond to a call from the engine. Going into a curve, you can set a manual gearbox up before you get there so you have the torque to pull the car all the way around, rather than finding the car losing power halfway around.
The ideal combination would obviously be a manually triggered automatic (ideally dual clutch - the torque converter also adds to the mushy feel). But not like in my parents' B-class (a real old people's vehicle) with dual clutch, which takes what feels like over a second to respond to manual inputs. Shifting back a few gears (out of seven) for engine braking is an exercise in frustration.
You're confusing speed with latency. The feeling of "responsiveness" leans a lot harder on the latter than the former.
Even traditional hydraulic planetary automatics, the ones associated with the term "slushbox", have been able to physically change gears faster than most humans could row a manual for a long time. They have a similar advantage to DCTs in that gear changes are just a matter of applying and releasing different clutches, so they can on paper be in the same ballpark at least as far as WOT upshifts go.
The biggest problem manual enthusiasts typically have with automatics has been the downshifts. Most obviously the old-school automatics that had no idea when you might need a downshift until the driver pushes the pedal down harder, but even the more modern ones with "manual" modes. For the most part these are just asking the transmission controller nicely to change gears when it has a moment. The actual gear change itself may take place faster than I could move a stick, but the amount of time between me deciding I want to change gear and the gear actually changing goes in the other direction. Sometimes it won't even let me downshift to a valid gear, many automatics in less sport-inclined vehicles won't downshift unless the engine would still be under 4500 RPM even if they redline north of 6000.
A good DCT is almost there. They still struggle with multi-gear downshifts so a tight corner off a high speed stretch is uncomfortable, but as long as you're going one gear at a time they work great.
The problem with e.g. DCTs is that it can't do 0.x seconds consistently. It can only do that if they are switching from an odd to an even gear or vice versa where the target gear has been pre-selected. If the wrong target gear is pre-selected, it takes 1.x seconds. There are extra delays from where you'd want the gear to be engaged to the TCU noticing that it needs to be engaged to the gear actually being engaged. The former delays were quite dominant, esp. in older implementations (I don't know how much progress has been made).
Both DCTs and converter transmissions require far more maintenance than manual transmissions (e.g. DCT requires oil change every 60k, overhaul after 180k).
Changing gears on a manual transmission arguably takes more time, at least when the DCT has guessed correctly, but it doesn't matter nearly as much, because you, as the driver, are able to initiate the process in advance, because you have more information than the TCU, which approximately only has a tuple of (vehicle speed, engine RPM, current gear, gas pedal position, brake pedal position, D/S mode) to guess which gear to switch to soon.
Also, automatics still mean you have to know and understand gears, unless you live in a very flat piece of land, or don't care about fuel consumption and wear.
It's not about outright speed of shifting, it's about the feel. While a DCT or automatic may boast better performance numbers, they are not nearly as satisfying as a well-balanced clutch and nice mechanical shifter. It just feels better to wring out the engine and nail the shifts than it does to pull on paddles.
OP didn't mention other types of gearboxes like DSGs. They have their advantages and disadvantages too and are only available on a limited number of vehicles.
Like some other posters, you're thinking speed where responsiveness is more about latency.
Even an ancient pre-electronic planetary automatic can be built to shift faster than a human can row gears. Drag racing guys have been doing it forever, to the point that most performance car communities will have a "fastest <x>" and a "fastest manual <x>" if their vehicles were offered with both. Due to shift speed and a few other reasons it's just assumed that a properly set up automatic is going to be faster on the drag strip as long as the vehicle has enough power that the parasitic loss is negligible.
The responsiveness problem comes when you want a downshift and the transmission wasn't expecting it. It takes time to respond, even a DCT has delay in some cases, where a manual transmission is mechanically connected to the driver and thus has effectively zero lag other than whatever tolerances may exist in the various linkages.
That's a current Volkswagen T-Roc, odo 5000km, that drove me nuts this week. Then, I'm not saying I can shift quicker than that. Instead, I can shift 20s before stepping on the throttle.
Depends on the car. Try a decent sports car with a performance gearbox. My previous car was an m140i. 0-60 for the automatic is actually stated as faster for the automatic gearbox, as the car is better at shifting than a human.
I don’t think Ferrari even make manual gearboxes with clutches any more?
The Tesla and the manual have something else in common; braking as soon as you let off the gas (at least if you configure 1 foot driving and downshift driving)
There are some genuine differences, but these are probably only discernible to a relatively small subset of humans, who have genuinely superior hearing to the rest of us - especially as we age. However, to the best of my understanding, the magic of vinyl also has to do with how some individuals consume music. From the appreciation of larger artwork on a physical medium to the act of making time for the process of listening to an album, almost like a little ritual - arguably helping the mind switch to “and now I’ll listen to good music and give it full attention” mode. While I don’t fit that demographic, I can definitely respect it.
Your totally on point. From an audio quality stand point, people will argue to the bone that it’s better because there is “infinite” resolution. In reality that doesn’t really matter because of the resolution things are pressed at, and since most music now a days comes from a digital source.
The way sound can differ from a digital release is in the mixing. (Since the stylus is physically moving, a mix that’s too “hot” can actually throw the needle off.) This mixing can sound better from a digital release (It could be because these engineers have more practice, or because of those physical constraints). The medium also generally sounds warmer.
As for me personally, I have a handful of records. I don’t really listen to them, but I like supporting the artist, along with having something physical to show off.
The "warmer" sound I kind of disagree with. When music is played from vinyl in clubs, I would describe the sound as slightly metallic. Digital is neutral.
I think digital is best for fidelity (it's pretty much a scientific fact), and I see vinyl playing as an effect like an effect pedal and there is nothing wrong with that. If the mastering of the LP is better, I'll prefer it, too.
Personally, as soon as people don't claim it sounds "better" I have no issue with it.
(The caveat, of course, is that some recordings only release properly mastered version on vinyl. Nothing stops the recording company to release the same version on digital media, they just don't.)
This is a pet peeve of mine, releases that happen only on vinyl (and, with a moment of perversity, cassette). Yes, let's use a medium that degrades with each use.
I have resorted to, for those situations where I cannot plead the masters out of the sound engineers, buying the still sealed, unplayed record where available so that it can be converted to digital while it is still pristine.
I play my records like crazy, some are new heavy vinyl, but most is crappy 70s and 80s vinyl. And I have never noticed the supposed drop in quality the usage is supposed to inflict on them. I think the stories might be overblown.
I understand that, there's a certain ritual to playing a vinyl that will appeal to some. Objectively from a sound quality perspective it's the same thing as plopping a CD or playing a (correctly compressed) file from your computer but the ritual and potentially the nostalgia make it significant.
I feel the same way with videogames: plopping a disc in my old PlayStation feels "better" than playing on an emulator. You get the sound of the system, the composite noise on the TV. It's not rational, it's actually generally a worse experience than using an emulator, but it feels like home.
I'm perfectly fine with that, most of what's fun in life is effectively pointless. What annoys me is when people make up pseudo-science to justify their tastes. Analog sound being warmer is nonsense, you can master a CD to be as warm as you want. CDs effectively have the range to reproduce anything we can hear[1], you could record a vinyl playback, master it on a CD and it'll sound exactly the same.
[1] Okay, technically the human ear has a higher dynamic range than a CD can reproduce, but that doesn't really matter in practice because in practice you never want to master a track where some parts are as loud as an airplane taking off and others are as quiet as somebody whispering at the other side of a stadium. And it's not like vinyl would fare better anyway, that's mostly an argument for the audiophile nuts who claim that 16bits per sample is not enough.
There’s a lot of music that is hard to find on popular digital distribution networks like Spotify. They have gotten better to be honest but I still have vinyl records where there’s either not a digital version or more likely there is somewhere but it’s taken from a record. Or even taken from the original mastering and not remastered for digital which does make it sound awful compared to the original mastering. This was a huge problem in the early 90’s with CD’s and why so many CD’s from that era sound awful. Most of the more popular albums and quite a few niche ones have since been remastered for digital. But there’s a lot of obscure music that hasn’t been remastered for financial reasons or the masters don’t exist.
For new music recorded digital a vinyl record will probably sound worse really.
I think it’s a combination of the oft spoken ‘ritualization’ that goes along with listening to the medium, along with the fact that modern digital (ie streaming) renditions are inferior. To my ears, a well mastered CD sounds much better than both vinyl and mass streaming, though.
I think there’s also a collecting otaku aspect to it, and among the most hardcore evangelists, a psychological need to justify the amount of money they’ve spent on $30 180 gram reissues and the gear to play them.
I suspect there’s also something going on that’s a value-based reaction to the availability of ‘everything’ on Spotify, etc. I haven’t quite figured it out, but I bet it’s related to vintage computer/console buffs preferring ‘real hardware’ to emulation. If you have to pay more and work harder for something, it’s worth more, even if the cheaper, more easily accessible version is identical (or even superior) to that thing.
For me there are two aspects. First is directly related to your question, which is that vinyl has stricter limitations on the mastering[1] compared to digital. Some might prefer the sound that results from these limitations, at least when well done.
But for me it's mostly about the ceremony around playing a record. You have to actively participate, preparing the player, and you sit down and listen to the record in linear order. No fast skipping. So when I listen to vinyl it's about relaxing and enjoying the music for what it is.
I'll bet dollars that this is the unqualifiable difference between vinyl-analog v. digital; if there are specific mastering constraints, it sounds like e.g. the timbre of certain sounds/instruments would be affected, likely to the benefit of our ears since the sounds most impacted tend to give the harshness that some people complain about with digital presentation.
> The vinyl medium does not “like” a lot of high frequency information — brightness/hotness of certain high frequencies are the most common issue we see on the audio masters we receive. Instruments such as hi-hats, cymbals and tambourines often cause distortion if all high end is allowed to pass through to the cutting lathe. Vocals that contain a lot of “SSSS” sounds (sibilance) will also cause a distorted sound on your master recording if not properly treated.
Maybe this is pretentious, but to say vinyl sounds "better" or "warmer" is missing the point for me. IMO one thing that records have is "personality". Those clicks and cracks of the old records I found for £2 in a jumble sale, and their stained jackets that have been passed around since the 1950s become part of the listening experience. You're connecting with the history of the music in some way.
The pure sound of those crackles are important to more modern music too. Think about how many modern records add record noise to add atmosphere. Burial's Untrue or Portishead's Dummy wouldn't sound the same without them.
1. I spend so much time with computers and virtual things, that there's something about the physicality of the thing that's incredibly refreshing.
This is the same reason people like fountain pens and watches. Do you need a watch when you always have your phone on you? Not really, but watches are cool.
2. Sound, which is tricky because it doesn't sound better. Vinyl has different strengths than digital music. When its done well, the artists will master the music to play to those strengths. There are albums I have both mp3 and vinyl versions of that are distinctly different versions of the same idea.
>I spend so much time with computers and virtual things, that there's something about the physicality of the thing that's incredibly refreshing.
I can relate to this, I've been restoring a sound system from the early 1970s that'd spent decades in a damp garage and it's immensely satisfying to see and hear it working again. There's not a single circuit board in there, it's all just old fashioned point-to-point wiring. The turntable is a gorgeous Lenco one that's so solidly built, compared to a lot of flimsy stuff today it's a huge contrast. I just replaced the motor which has run for nearly half a century and still did, I only swapped it because the motor's power supply had a noisy transformer and it was easier to just swap out the whole unit. It'll probably keep working just fine long after I'm dead.
Beats me. I still have a collection of LPs I bought in the 1970s and early 80s, and while many of them are pretty good pressings and I don't mind listening to them, some are pretty bad. I have a lot more CDs, and they almost all sound very good to excellent (any defects being in the master, not the medium, of course).
What I do get nostalgic for is music without compression. So many recent recordings I find unlistenable, even when I like the music, because they're compressed to within a dB of their lives. This is a much bigger deal to me than digital vs. analog.
There were a lot of very low quality records made during the late 70's and 80's. Poor quality vinyl and increased track density were the main culprits.
I own a jillion digital songs that I listen to in batches, shuffling them, creating playlists. Sometimes I'll listen to literally every song I own on shuffle; sometimes I'll listen to one song on loop for hours.
A good album presents a playlist arrangement by the artist. I could just listen to the digital copies in order, but I'm more likely to jump around and skip songs when given the option. The constraints of the vinyl format makes it more likely I'll listen the whole way through, at most selecting whether to listen to both A and B sides.
Unsurprisingly, I only own a few records, of artists and albums I particularly like. Otherwise I just pick and choose individual songs from a digital marketplace.
Vinyl editions of albums come with a lot of cool artwork, and are a nice physical token of ownership, they also often are mixed differently and avoid things like the loudness war style mixing. It doesn't matter how high definition your digital audio is if the spectrum analysis looks like a brick.
If you don't hear the difference, I am afraid I don't quite know how to answer your question.
From a hobbyist-producing viewpoint, I tried both: digital and analog producing. While digital is very convenient, it tends to sound hollow and empty without a lot of tr5icks or professionally-written plugins.
If you power on your favourite analog synth, it basically instantly sounds like something.
However, if you don't hear that difference yourself, I am at a loss how to explain it to you.
As a listener, I have the same feeling. Digital productions can be very sophisticated these days, but if I listen closely, I almost hear the bits.
-For me, two main reasons, none of which relate to the perceived superiority of the vinyl format -
a) In recent years, it has been a trend that the vinyl masters suffer from less compression than their digital counterparts. Hence, they may sound better, despite the inherent limitations of the physical format.
b) I note that the mere act of putting a record on the turntable makes me eager to listen more carefully than if I just find the same music on Spotify; this is just a lack of self discipline, but after all - if going through the ritual of readying a record for play is what it takes to listen attentively, then so be it.
Have you ever tried to watch a live event on a streaming service like YouTube, and found yourself a few milliseconds behind the action? Have you ever tried watching digital TV have frames dropped completely because the signal got weak?
If you were going analog, you would be watching real live action, and if the signal got weak you'd still be watching but there might be some "screen fizz".
Vinyl is like that :D what you see is what you get, the sound is right there in front of you, all you need is a needle -- much like all you needed was an aerial in olden times.
If you’re interested in ‘what you see is what you get’, CD is MUCH closer to the reality of what was heard in the studio than vinyl is. Vinyl is capped on the high end to prevent distortion, and cut on the low end to prevent volume drops. The frequency range of compact discs, by design, go from the upper range of human hearing to the lowest range of human hearing. To the extent that vinyl sounds warm, it’s a product of the constraints of the medium manifest through the mastering process.
It’s fine if you like the sound of vinyl better, but to argue that it’s somehow ‘more real’ is silly.
You're right of course, and I was being facetious -- yes it's true that CDs were supposed to be better (true copy of the Master, larger dynamic range etc.), but alas, no good deed goes unpunished since it didn't take long for Engineers to abuse that extended dynamic range and push louder/compressed mixes to the public resulting in what we refer to as the "Loudness Wars".
Add to that the advent of streaming services and compression (MP3 etc) and we now find ourselves with those "clipped to death" digital masters compressed to an inch of their lives so I can listen to Spotify on the bus.
So is it any wonder people are going full circle and returning to Vinyl?
It's not uncommon for the engineers put more effort into the vinyl mix because it's a much harder medium to get right. It's actually vinyl's flaws as a medium that make it sound better in a lot of cases as you can't get away with sloppy mixing as much. Things like the "loudness war" (where the industry demanded engineers increase the overall level at the expense of dynamic range - it's why a lot of recordings from the '90s until about 2005 sound absolutely rubbish) just can't happen to the same extent with vinyl, if they tried that nonsense the needle would literally jump out of the groove. It's also associated with audiophiles these days which is another reason modern vinyl mixes often sound better, the market they're targeting values high quality audio more than the average consumer. If you don't believe me, compare the original CD pressing of Led Zeppelin's Presence with the vinyl. It's honestly night and day.
Obviously this doesn't matter if you're comparing a naff Crosley record player from the supermarket with a naff bluetooth speaker playing 128kbps MP3s. These kind of distinctions don't really matter if your setup isn't great to begin with but it really does make a difference with decent kit. A sound system is only as good as the weakest link in the chain and there's a certain point at which that becomes the storage medium. Overall, a well-mixed lossless file or something like reel-to-reel tape is going to beat vinyl every time in theory but in practice the vinyl mix is often the best.
I never really had vinyls but tapes before CDs. Something was very different, even more with the shift to MP3. I stipped to listen the full album, started to skip the "bad" songs. So the experience is different. So I did play the "good" tracks much more and many times, which was cool. But at the same time, I felt they lost some of there magic. On tape you had to "earn" the good songs a bit more. Of course you could fast forward also on tape, but with the CD, MP3s some magic got lost for me.
For me it's similar to the reason why I like having a mechanical pendulum clock on my wall. A quartz clock keeps much better time, but there's something cool about being able to see the gears turning. Vinyl isn't quite like that, but it's a lot closer than an MP3 player. There's also something about the imperfections of vinyl, the noise, clicks, and pops, that is a valuable part of the experience for me, probably because I came of age in a pre-digital world.
Vinyl records have a mechanical limitation: you cannot put everything as loud as possible on them, else the needle will jump off track.
So mastering for vinyl, even when done digitally, preserves more dynmaic range and finer detail. Ironically, vinyl has a narrower dynamic range than a digital recording, but the "loudness wars" made it use relatively less of that range.
Some people prefer this kind of sound mastering. (Also, the whole ritual and concentration aspect.)
If you only care about sound quality then digital music is a superior format. I prefer CDs over sound files since it is more fun to pick from a catalog of CDs on the shelf then a list of artists on a display.
That said, if you care about the album or the art vinyl records are superior. A CD has very limited visuals and seeing it disappear into the machine feels disengaging (although it is handy not to have to turn a CD over half way through).
Also old vinyl is really cheap and plentiful. You can go to the thrift store and buy and old Beatles album for half a dollar. It is really easy to start a collection from old cheap records. Old CDs only go back so far and it’s hard to find good CDs among all the trash in the thrift store. I usually have to go to the record store and buy a good used CD for $10 a piece (which I do, but not as often as a thrift store record). Meaning that casual lovers of music that don’t like to spend too much money probably have a greater vinyl collection then CD collection (although they probably have an even greater mp3 collection).
Others have given good replies and I think they're mostly correct. But...
>I've listened to both, and the description of vinyl or even analog sound as being generally "warmer" never resonated with me.
I feel like this is the sofar unaddressed dimension. I grew up with my grandparents so I've heard a lot of vinyl by virtue of one of them having a love for classical music. When I was younger (29 atm) I felt like the audio quality was better on vinyl. Back then, in the Walkman days, it probably was.
Now...? I think digital gets good enough to fool most would-be audiophiles in a blind test. It fools me well enough for the most part anyway. That said, I think part of the appeal of vinyl is the simplicity of setup. A good home entertainment system is expensive and even more so if you lack the skills to coordinate and install it yourself. A solid sounding record player is far from cheap but it's a lot less intimidating or laborious than a hi-fi system and it contributes to the retro aesthetic as well.
I listen to both and one stuff i actually enjoy is the one purpose object. When listening to a record, as the record player can only do one thing, I don't get side-tracked like on a phone or on a tv where you find yourself randomly looking stuff online.
I did realise while browsing in recors shops that, even if i never had access to that much music in my life as nowdays, i never known less about new bands. I haven't found the equivalent in streaming services. In the end, what comes closest online is music blogs.
In term of sounds, i guess it's a question of taste. I do enjoy music both ways so, in the end, that's not what's make a difference for me. I'm not sure i could tell the difference between a vynil and a digital version if it was not from the sound of dust.
Does there need to be an objective explanation? Some populations have even embraced the cassette tape medium. The physical medium itself (and not the quality of the recordings, or the fidelity of the audio on its associated players) can be enough to be compelling.
On top of what everyone else has said: reliability.
My record player + amp have never had any problems I couldn't fix on the spot. Only things I've had to repair/replace were needle cartridges and the belt, both of which take under five minutes to fix. My vinyl setup has outlived my smartphones and will likely continue to do so.
Streaming music can have problems I can't easily fix. It's like the difference between an old car which still uses carbs compared to a new BMW: you can tear the former apart in your garage and rebuild it, but you have to pay someone to help you for the latter.
That isn't the primary reason I use vinyl, but all of the better reasons have been covered already.
Everything sounds great to me. A lot of my older records have cracks and pops and minor scratches and I’ve heard them so much during the opening and gaps between songs that I actually recognise the patterns and it becomes part of the anticipation. Albums that are continuous pieces of music despite the tracks (e.g. Lovesexy, Parade) sound terrible on digital because there’s always a gap between the tracks and that doesn’t happen on CD or record. Also, it’s a lot less friction to pull out a record and play it than finding the phone, opening Spotify, searching for the album, switching to play through the remote Spotify connect, adjusting the volume in two places.
I'm curious why one would care in the first place.
But to answer your question- in my family we find vinyl a fun way of discovering artists and songs we would never be served by either a DJ on the radio or some algorithm used by a service.
usually vinyls are not impacted by the loudness war[0] they are mastered for people who care about audio quality, have good audio equipment and listen to music in a silent environment.
music mastered for radio/streaming is for people with earbuds who listen to music in a noisy environment and as a second activity (listening while driving, exercising, working, dancing)
It makes listening to music an experience. Similar to the focus and immersion holding a heavy hardcover provides over attempting to read a PDF on your phone.
Something that hasn't been mentioned so far: Some forms of DJ'ing kinda rely on vinyl. You can speed up or slow down the vinyl on the player by hand.
There are devices that try to simulate this experience, I think they've gotten better over time. I think vinyl DJ'ing has been in decline in the past decade, however it's definitely still one factor that's been keeping vinyl alive.
I personally mix on vinyl for the feeling its provides. No screen to look at, you have to really be "in" the music, the touch is stellar.
Using CDJs or similar have clear advantages (weight when travelling, fewer chances to fuck up or hear imperfections, no skipping, etc) and I use them when performing for others, but I just don't like using them.
People forget that while sure computers are not climate neutral at the same time all the previous media that were used to sell music were straight up petrolium industry products. Like sure Spotify has a big electric bill however we have solar, and wind, both tapes and records require extremely toxic petrolium industry products and processes.
I recently digitized videos from VHS tapes and noticed that they too looked much better on CRT than on a modern LCD. The source was equally poor in quality, but the experience somehow much better on a CRT.
It's also trivially recycled, AIUI vinyl records can simply be shredded to bits and put right back into the pressing process to make new ones.
I saw a documentary a while back about a region where new local songs were pressed into records on a weekly basis, I think it was in Jamaica. The local music scene was highly ephemeral, and people's records were constantly being recycled for this week's new tunes.
Spend us$300 for a vacuum tube and small real loudspeaker, even Bluetooth play is different. Then add a vinyl from time to time, it is music all over again.
Btw may be not all human are the same. As said someone meat is ... it is not about human rights. Just music. Let us be different.
Only one item on your list faithfully follows the soundwaves. The rest are inaccurate in their own unique way. Microphones throw out sound you don't want. The entire cutting needle thing has some pretty fundamental accuracy limits. The record player introduces all kinds of distortion, my favourite being the 'wow' of a motor turning at an inconsistent speed, causing minor fluctuations in pitch. The speakers, if they were actually accurate, would make the flaws in most recorded music really obvious (which is why those speakers never make it outside recording studios/aren't marketed to consumers). Not even the soundwaves do, if you're in a room.
You missed the point of vinyl, which is that the inaccuracy sounds good. Digital inaccuracy, like what you get out of most crappy builtin DACs, doesn't sound good. If you have to have inaccuracy, which you do, vinyl folks prefer the vinyl kind. It doesn't bring you closer to the original sound, it just sounds old, and old must be closer to the past, right? But it sounds better, so you are right to enjoy it.
How does CD suck among digital formats (at least, from a sound quality perspective)?
For what it's worth, I am a member of a private music tracker and there are plenty of vinyl rips available. I've found that in many cases, the vinyl rips (which are digital files, by the way) sound better than the CD. This isn't because a) vinyl is better and b) CDs suck, it's because the CD masters in many cases compress the audio more and there's less dynamic range. Ironically, CDs have a lot more dynamic range than vinyl!
Don't forget that some "obscure" music is marginally cheaper/easier to obtain on vinyl. For example space age pop, which is one of things in the sweet spot for collecting (for pleasure, not for money): used to be popular and mass-manufactured, now almost no one cares, so the market has a lot of this relatively cheap. Living in the former communist country, I regret not having easy access to heaps of Western vinyls in Goodwills and such, but at least seller awareness is not that high.
Also, records are psychologically so much nicer to own. They are large and so is the artwork. Pretentious/ridiculous liner notes are great. Having them set up to sound on par with digital (I don't claim to have means or ear to achieve true "audiophile" sound) is a PITA and requires some money or hustling/tinkering (that's me). You have gear maintenance, cleaning etc. But it's a little hobby in itself.
There is also interesting things about the vinyl itself you start to notice. Up to about 1960s the material was thicker, and then starts the progression toward the "floppy" vinyl from 1980s (although some state publishers in my country used the old style even then, great production quality also). Nowadays vinyl is thick and heavy again and probably better produced than ever. But it also became a semi-luxury product so it's almost never worth it, at least for me. I have some new records that they messed up in manufacturing but I'm sure it also happened back in the day.
I think a lot of millennials who formed their music taste in the age of Napster, LimeWire, Torrents and Spotify seem to think the internet has everything (given the illusion of limitless choice).
This is of course not the case and there's so much music that's only realistically available on vinyl.
The situation is even crazier if you look at fragile shellac 78-RPM records. The Internet Archive teamed up with the George Blood company to preserve as many as they can - and they're up to 165,000 records available for streaming from the Archive! https://archive.org/details/georgeblood
The entire mainstream music industry moved on from vinyl records decades ago and a vinyl-only release today is going to exclude most people in any generation. At least the people that grew up pirating will likely be aware that a vinyl rip is a thing!
And millennials seem to have been largely responsible for vinyl's limited resurgence anyway.
Yes, non-streamable music has a specific flavor to it nowadays. But I appreciate that YouTube is now putting a lot of old obscure stuff on "Topic" channels en masse, good quality as well. But it's probably still limited to whatever is owned by big labels.
Like, if you compare film to digital photography, but film was represented by ISO160 monochromatic Kodak, and all the digital photographic technology was represented by a 640x480 prototype camera from 2001, instead of a RED or even a yesteryear phone, then it’ll be immediately obvious that analog far outperforms digital full stop.
That’s how vinyl remains “superior”. CD is terrible, not digital quantization playback in general, but because it represents “digital” somehow anyway, analog wins.
This doesn't make any sense. You haven't explained how CD is "terrible"; you just made some comparison to an obsolete digital camera. You put the CD in, press play, and a nearly perfect representation of the source signal with enormous dynamic range and clarity comes out of your DAC. How is this like a 20 year-old digital camera?
The more I think about it, the better metaphor is: CD is the RED 32K camera from 2025 whose product is video indistinguishable from seeing it with your own eyes, but it came out in 1982 and all the theaters can project it.
Well, at very least, Compact Disc is a 1980 standard... not like 20 years old, more like 40 years old. I don't understand why statement like above is met with a response like yours. It's a shitty '80s format that beat vinyl in affordability, why defend it as if CD is the pinnacle of digital recording technology? It is not, never was. Just say yeah CD sucks you gotta try DSD, and move on.
Anecdotal but I feel some sort of acoustic 'odor' to CD, that no other digital formats have: CD rips and even CD-DSD conversion has distinct tone that tells the data had been on a disc. Something's wrong with the standard and/or its mastering.
I said your example digital camera was 20 years old ("640x480 prototype camera from 2001"), not the CD format. I used primitive digital cameras in the mid 1990s and CDs in the 1980s so I remember the chronology here.
You still haven't told me why CD is a "shitty" format. The audio quality is essentially perfect for human ears listening to recorded music. With a good DAC you're able to reproduce the source with accuracy well beyond the limits of human hearing. This is an incredible feat for the early 1980s, and I think it's still incredible today! The CD is pretty much the pinnacle of home audio reproduction! You'll want higher sample rates and bit depth for mixing and mastering, but that's for the recording studio.
If you think the compact disc audio standard is deficient in some technical way, back it up with some facts or measurements, not just your feelings about "acoustic odor." It's true that not all CDs are mixed or mastered well, but that's also true for vinyl records. What, specifically is so bad about the CD?
CD may be 40 years old, but human ears didn't change at all in that time. If you can tell CD from other recordings, it is almost certainly because the mastering (which is not something intrinsic to the standard) was deliberately changed for CD because it could reproduce sound better, so no format-specific mastering hacks were needed to make it sound good. Face it, you don't have golden ears.
For example, if a studio today were to master something for cassette, it would dramatically turn up the high end to compensate and probably bypass some saturation or exciters because the format has its own. Similarly, any studio not tweaking their masters for the perfection of CD was probably doing the material a disservice. Heck, today, some tracks are deliberately mastered to sound good on iPhone earbuds.
The Shannon-Nyquist theorem doesn't assume or apply just to sines (that's a gross mischaracterization of the proof and it's implications). It assumes ideal samplers and reconstruction filters can exist, which they can't.
In the real world, ADCs and DACs' inherent filtering, noise, and distortion characteristics are quantifiably superior to any analog storage media and reproduction system.
Records don't have infinite bandwidth either. I'd actually love to see a comparison of vinyl vs digital reproducing a triangle wave, it would be a lot more illuminating than blindly quoting Shannon Nyquist.
If you were to redo CD today, really the biggest change would probably be upping to 48kHz, not that it makes a noticable difference, but to better align with DVD (also 48k) and digital telephone (8k) to avoid sampling jitter when playing across other formats. Possibly actually supporting 4-channel audio (it's in redbook, but afaik, unused) and adding 1-channel audio so you could have longer audiobooks.
Standardizing everything to 48kHz and then scale down in clean multiples of 8 would be the logical way to do it.
Offering more than 2 channels in a pure audio format has been tried countless times and failed every time. It doesn't do anything for headphones, and surround-mixed music has always been a gimmick at best.
1-channel can already be done on existing CDs, the left and right channels are fully discrete and can each contain a separate mono track. This trick was used on VCDs, to have two different languages on the same disc. The player can be set to only play one channel.
Here's a Techmoan video about using two mono tracks to squeeze twice the amount of music onto a CD: https://youtu.be/5fG1crhGqI0
- It was the only consumer format that provided standard NTSC/PAL SD video without reformatting. Macrovision didn't work on them either so there's no copy protection.
- Most LD's have digital sound, which literally is CD audio - not just the bitrate but the analog encoding and digital metadata as well.
- The disks were expensive to produce (a dual-sided disk in low/moderate quantity was about $20) and if the glue wasn't done Just Right, the disk would degrade/rot over time. (The majority of surviving disks are just fine today... but some of particular interest to people, like the Domesday disks, aren't!)
Yes, I know. That's why I wrote that. It would be perfectly feasible to record analog audio on a LaserDisk. You could even record it as FM, since you have lots of extra bandwidth, to get more dynamic range and less noise.
Vinyl records are perhaps one of the best examples of commodity fetishism; in fact, they perfectly illustrate Mark Fisher's notion of "lost futures" (by way of Derrida's hauntology). Even the discussion and detailed analysis of vinyl (so as to justify its supposed acoustic superiority) is to miss the forest for the trees.
Of course the rabid capitalists on this forum would fall over themselves to exploit this for financial gain. There may even be quite a few who see this sociopathy as a badge of honour.
> Vinyl records are perhaps one of the best examples of commodity fetishism
Could you spell this one out because a vinyl record, in and of itself, wouldn't be an example of commodity fetishism because the fetishism depends upon social relations.
>Gil Tamazyan, the owner of Los Angeles record pressing plant Capsule Labs, said he's been concerned for the industry since Apollo purchased competitor Transco in 2007.
>"The worst case from (the fire) would be if Apollo doesn't plan to return and doesn't share the intellectual properties with another new willing company. We all agree there needs to be more than one supplier for these materials," Tamazyan said. "All my industry colleagues are worried this might take a long time to figure out and, in the process, major delays may arise in the vinyl production market."
So now only the Japanese company, MDC, remains as the sole producer of the lacquer. Lacquer is basically a formulation of nitrocellulose and is highly flammable.
If you've never seen a lacquer master being cut, give this vid a watch [2]. Not surprisingly, the audio engineer uses the Apollo lacquer master in the video.
[1] https://www.desertsun.com/story/life/2020/02/07/apollo-maste...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl8bhzob0fQ