I grew up with records and cassettes, but got rid of the few that I still owned about ten years ago. MP3's and streaming were much more convenient and everything was available in an instance. I kept the ~50 CD's as they don't take up much room.
Three years ago, I started buying records again, the first being Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. My main interest in music nowadays is in Fusion Jazz, R&B, Funk and Soul Music from the early 1970's. I also got a decent Dual turntable from the 1980's to go with the nostalgic vibe.
To me, playing a record is a totally different and more conscious experience than playing a song on Spotify. Even just the necessity to remove the previous record before playing the next one feels archaic in these days where everything is available immediately. Limited availability is similiarly humbling: not owning every record I would like to, but also not even being able to acquire every record I'd like, as some are simply not available or expensive collector's items.
Then of course there is the haptic sensation, plus all the information you can get from studying the album cover. My generation's music discovery was full of surprises, when you had a record played for you at the record store that you mainly picked for the weird cover graphics or artist's name.
But the most important reason for me to buy records is to one day allow my daughter to discover this strange music from more than half a century ago that was always playing in the house when she was still young. Good luck trying to convince a teenager to have a listen at your Spotify playlist ;)
I think playing from CD or LP definitely puts you in a more intentional space for listening than dialing something up from your local server or a streaming service, but holy hell the convenience factor is enormous.
Also, it's super unpopular to say so, but fidelity and dynamic range from an LP, even on a relatively fancy turntable, lags what you can get from CD or high-bitrate digital by a measurable margin.
But hauling out the record is more fun. When we entertain -- or, when we WOULD do so, pre-COVID -- having guests pull out albums to play was a fun way to keep the music rolling.
Excellent call on Bitches Brew, btw.
--
I also wonder a bit as to your age. I'm 50, and when I grew up in the 80s the kids my age probably only had vinyl if they had music-fan parents or cool older siblings. Cassettes ruled the day for my cohort, and then pretty quickly CD was on the horizon so I remember consciously not buying my own copy of some things -- "Substance" by New Order comes to mind -- because I wanted to wait and have it on CD, and buying something twice is ridiculous.
I didn't start enjoying vinyl until after the dot-com crash. An ex-roommate had left behind a turntable, and my girlfriend and I would sift through used record bins at thrift shops on weekends since you could get a stack of records for like $5 or $10. Super cheap entertainment!
I disagree with the premise that an experience is inherently more intentional because it's more laborious.
When the last Tool album came out, there was an mp3 redemption code within the box of the physical album that I had preordered. I ended up using the mp3s to listen to the album for the first time (primarily because I have a nicer setup for my computer's audio than any CD player I have lying around), but it was still an "intentional" experience: I poured myself a drink, fired up ProjectM alongside the music player to give myself some graphical visualizations to look at while the album played (to keep myself from getting distracted), and routed the audio through a USB-DAC into my ATH-M50's. So that was 90 minutes of focused, uninterrupted listening, and it was done digitally.
Intentional space is a result of, well...intention. The potential of a medium to allow for less-focused listening does not inherently cheapen that medium, much in the same way that the added labor of having to go open up my vinyl player and drop the needle onto a record does not inherently mean that I'm going to pay more attention to it once it starts going than if I had just clicked a button on an app somewhere.
I think you miss me a little here. You can BE intentional with whatever approach you want. Most of my critical listening today is via Apple Music, my phone, an outboard DAC, and some fancy Sennheisers. But when I use that setup, I'm being just as intentional as I would be with vinyl.
However, a physical playback medium demands a certain degree of intentionality that isn't required if you're just Hey-Siri-ing some Tool (which I also do).
Great point. I do think physical product (especially vinyl) adds a three-dimensional, tangible, aspect to intentional listening. Vinyl has the act of placing the record on the turntable, flipping it over, looking through the artwork (which may be involved), etc. It enhances the experience even more than just staring at an MP3 playback would.
> fidelity and dynamic range from an LP, even on a relatively fancy turntable, lags what you can get from CD or high-bitrate digital by a measurable margin.
> Also, it's super unpopular to say so, but fidelity and dynamic range from an LP, even on a relatively fancy turntable, lags what you can get from CD or high-bitrate digital by a measurable margin.
While true, that doesn't necessarily mean it sounds better. Vinyl has a certain sound (commonly known as "warmth" that's different than digital. It may be quantitatively worse in things like bitrate butthe human ear may prefer it after going through all of the the messy, analogue, and physical steps that create "sound".
We've done (anecdotal, non-scientific tests) of playing the same song from Spotify and Vinyl through our stereo. About 90% of the time we could pick out which was which[1], and generally preferred the vinyl version.
1) We did mute the intro for several seconds to hide the needle drop. Some may have been given away by cracks and pops on older albums, but most were clean and in good condition.
I don't mean to say vinyl can't sound good. It totally can. But if you have a nice enough stereo system, it's not that hard to get to a place where you hit vinyl's ceiling vs. CD source on a couple of fronts.
The big one, at least for some genres of music, is dynamic range. There's a physical problem with vinyl that keeps it from even really approaching what's possible with CD, and this matters a LOT in classical music.
But the other issue is more universal. Absurdly good audio quality is really, really easy to get from digital media now -- either streamed or local digital or CD source. It'd mind boggling how good that can sound on a nice setup.
Vinyl can sound good, but it typically requires more dollars (or $local_currency) per unit of quality (so to speak) than the more modern approaches. There's so much that can go wrong with vinyl -- needle or cartridge issues, tonearm tracking, quality of the record itself, turntable motor interference, issues in the signal chain, etc -- that you can go nuts and spend a LOT chasing gremlins.
I threw some money at my setup -- nice Rega turntable, a few hundred at the phono stage, fancy receiver, etc -- and so really well engineered records sound ALMOST as good as well-engineered CDs. But if you're stuck with a Crosley or whatever vs. playing a local CD over the same setup, there's gonna be a very appreciable gap. At least in my experience.
(As an aside, I think the obsessive hunt for audio hacks to improve vinyl playback in the 70s is the direct reason so many in high-end audio are taking in by absurd claims of snake oil sales men. 40 years ago, you actually needed to know what you were doing to get good sound in your living room. Just having some money wasn't enough. People heard rumors about things that sound crazy, and tried them, and some of them worked and some of them didn't. Trouble is, most of those folks don't have any grounding in engineering or science, and so you ended up with shit like Tice clocks and $5,000 interconnects and whatever else.
Now, in 2020, anybody with a few hundred bucks can have really amazing sound (by 1970s standards) in their home this afternoon. But the (mostly boomer) 70s/80s audiophiles are still there, on the margins, hawking $250 power cables.)
> But the most important reason for me to buy records is to one day allow my daughter to discover this strange music from more than half a century ago that was always playing in the house when she was still young. Good luck trying to convince a teenager to have a listen at your Spotify playlist ;)
Sorry to be a spoilsport, but chances are she'll never care, and that your expectation that she'll come to appreciate your musical tastes and your collection will be a burden to her more than anything else.
She'll have her own life and her own tastes. Shared interests are great if they develop naturally, but they cannot be forced, and substantial collections very often end up only making the children feel guilty about disposing of them.
I’ve had a turntable in my life since I was six playing children’s 7”s on a Fischer price setup. My parents records were my introduction to music, basically. Learning how to operate the big turntable when I was old enough to be allowed to felt like a big deal, and I’d spend hours going through their small collection of 60s pop records, blues and random classical selections. They weren’t especially musical people but that experience made a big impact on me, and helped me get to know my parents better as well. Anyway, it happens.
My mother's and grandfather's musical tastes were huge for me. Also two of my old girlfriends' tastes. We're not so atomized that the only influences we have in life are marketers and tabloids.
Me too. I never listened to them, and in fact I got rid of them. But I took a list of them and added the ones I remembered with love to my own mp3 collection.
This is one of the most tricky things about the modern digital age. It will be much harder for my children to go through my "papers" than it was for me to go through my father's papers.
The point is to offer an alternative form of music discovery compared to social media influences and advertisements, not about forcing my taste on my offspring. It's also about creating a body of cultural heritage that survives and counterbalances the fast moving and often shallow trends of our time. Same with books.
Before there was internet and Wikipedia I was taught "LP" stands for "long player". Each side of the record is expected to be listened to from start to finish, the sequence of songs is important. Not every album created in the LP-era was worthy of that, relatively few rose to the level of something like Bitches Brew. It was not the most efficient format, many albums having only 0-3 worthy tracks.
Anyway, that, along with album cover art, seems like something we have progresively lost with the move to digital. The "LP" as an art form.
It is interesting what you say about "not owning every album". That was why I used to borrow records from friends and record them. That whole process of making recordings and cataloging music by hand. Probably far fewer people doing that anymore. Exception perhaps being survival of the analog "mix tape" idea.
it's just "long play" and it comes from the length of the album indeed. Same goes for EP (extended play) and single. When the groves in vinyl albums are made, the engineers can decide how close and deep the groves are and what RPM the album is supposed to be played at.
Bass heavy tracks for example need deeper groves as they make the needle jump more and if the neighboring groves are too close, the needle might jump to them.
This is why 12" vinyls come in different weights and the playtime can vary quite a bit.
Sitting down and listening to an entire ~45 minute arrangement as the artist intended is a much difference experience than creating your "greatest hits" spotify playlist and jumping from singles from dozens of different artists.
I had a similar path as yours, but maybe 2 years earlier I started stocking up on vinyl, as you could get entire lots of donated records from goodwill.com for pennies on the dollar. Classic Jazz, Soul, Funk and Fusion re-ignited my passion for records and now I have a few IKEA BESTAs full of 'wax'.
Couple notes -
- re-release vinyl is not as good these days, especially when clear or multi colored.
- 180 gram vinyl is maybe a little better than yer average release from today, but the cheap pressings of the 60s and 70s (when well preserved) are much better than newer pressings.
- That said, Im glad they are re-pressing stuff today as some original prints or early prints are hard to come by/expensive...
In the US and Canada, records from the late 1970's and into the 80's were usually pretty poor quality. Oil was expensive and so vinyl was often recycled and tracks were sometimes pushed together to make longer records. I would guess reprints of those records would fix those shortcomings.
Sorry to delve off topic but I have recently found myself in a similar point in music but have very little background knowledge of the area as I have basically just relied on following the rabbit hole of hip hop samples.
Donald Byrd - Ethiopian Knights (1972)
Cannonball Adderley: The Black Messiah (1972)
The Cannonball Adderly Quintet - Country Preacher (1970)
Jimmy Smith - Root Down (1972)
King Curtis - Live at the Fillmore West (1971)
Donny Hathaway - Live (1972)
Baby Huey - The Baby Huey Story (1971)
Various Artists - Wattstax (1973)
Gil Scott Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1974)
Marvin Gaye - What's Going On (1971)
The Temptations - Masterpiece (1973)
The Meters - Rejuvenation (1974)
Miles Davis - Bitches Brew (1969)
Miles Davis - A Tribute To Jack Johnson (1971)
Miles Davis - On The Corner (1972)
Weather Report - Black Market (1976)
Jaco Pastorius - Jaco Pastorius (1976)
Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters (1973)
Herbie Hancock - Thrust (1974)
Billy Cobham - Spectrum (1973)
I will add:
Weather Report - Mysterious Traveler
Quincy Jones - I Heard That
(just because the breaks)
Bob James - 1 through 4...
Grover Washington Jr - Feels so good
Cannonball Adderley - Love Sex and the Zodiac
Cannonball Adderley - Soul Zodiac
The Meters - Look-Ka Py Py
A traditionalist might tell you to learn the head and chord changes to the 100 most recorded jazz standards as a core basis for listening/learning. Along that line consider creating play lists that are all the same tune from different artists.
Peter Gabriel is incredible. I'll be forever grateful for the hours in the garage and the car listening to music with my father. Outside of his love for ABBA, it's all be incredibly formative on my musical tastes.
I have only four albums left over from my collecting heyday but I do have somewhere near two hundred CDs gathering dust. All were ripped ages ago but I am not even sure of the legality of disposing of them and keeping the ripped tracks.
There is this movie called 'Threads' filmed in Sheffield for the BBC about nuclear war. Made back in the 1980's it has a scene in it with a record player that I can remember. The record player and records are not understood by the post-nuclear survivors, they don't know what it is for. It is a metaphor for culture and what it is to be human.
Early 90's dance music was the soundtrack to my student life.
The records of the 'rave era' didn't have much going on with the sleeves. Compared to the rock and roll records of the previous generation or guitar based 'Indie' music the sleeves were very different, you would be lucky to have 33 or 45 rpm written on the record correctly. Something had been lost in that the sleeve artwork didn't have the same value. However, the logo for the label (printed on the record's A-side label) did look cool rotating around at 33 or 45 rpm.
Having an actual record player was not strictly necessary as, in student life, you would be somewhere else most evenings where 'decks' existed. I knew a few people who had the latest and most hard to obtain records but had no record player. They certainly didn't do tapes either. Records could be bought unheard by them in the store and played for the first time in a venue with the big speakers and a crowd. People could DJ that way, all their money in vinyl, nothing spent on audio kit and willing to subject unsuspecting victims to new music.
In those days and in that genre it was £5 - £8 for a 12" single that would have one song and inevitable remixes. A £50 a week budget was reasonable on student means. Nowadays I can't imagine anyone paying that much for their music.
CDs were available but the reasons for not buying them were many. The mixing thing was one factor, you couldn't play a CD at 'plus 8' (rpm) unless you bought one of those CD players for DJ things. But the most compelling reason not to buy the CD was that you wanted the limited pressing of a thousand vinyl from a small label, not the printed by the million CD from a major label. By the time the successful original vinyl made it from the small label to the big label (and on CD) music had in fact moved on. Plus the major labels somehow washed all life out of the music they published.
Decks were important - Technics 1210's - but there was something cool about just having a basic record player that had no sophistication whatsoever, not even auto return. To get up, walk across the room, find the next track, swap the records over removing fluff from the needle and sit down again had something to it that you don't get with an mp3 player. The recall to find a song in a sizeable collection when all the sleeves were ambiguous was also a skill. There was also a certain amount of filing, putting everything back when every wall space had records stacked against it was inevitable tidying up after a good night.
Returning to 'Threads' and where the world is going with C19, I worry about students today not being able to get their music the vinyl way at house parties. Having every song ever made on Spotify is great, particularly when you have Discogs, but the mystique has gone.
I love records. There are plenty of reasons why records are great that don't usually get mentioned here.
* The big one: There is tons of music out there that isn't on streaming services. If you like punk, breakcore, UK dubstep, noise, really anything even a little bit out of the mainstream, or from the past - you can't find the best stuff on any streaming services. If I could only make one point, this would be it. Spotify! Doesn't! Haven't! Everything! You'll never dance around your living room to the good version of This Bike is a Pipebomb's 'Better Off Dead', because you don't have the split 7".
* Vinyl is a good value store. If you keep good care of your records - and you have good taste - you'll find that your collection _appreciates_ in value over time, unlike other forms which _depreciate_. Some of the records I picked up in high school are worth over a hundred bucks now! Not that I plan on ever selling them, but it's nice to know I could.
* Vinyl is something to do while traveling! It's great going to another country or city and browsing the record shops and finding something you're after, or something funky looking in the $2 bin. Random finds in dollar bins are a bit like Magic: The Gathering cards - usually crap, but occasionally brilliant. Plus, whenever you take it out, you get to remember the trip you got it on.
* Sampling. I make hip hop, and samples from vinyls just sound better with that real grit. They just do.
Don't buy vinyl to make money in the future. You don't know how long the fad will last. I've seen many other collectors markets be strong for years and then die. Buy vinyl because you love it, and don't worry about long term value, if it goes down it just means you can get more for less money.
Don't confuse the above with making money now. There is currently a market for vinyl and there are a number of ways you can go into business selling to that market. However this is about flipping your inventory, not investing in it.
Also, note that if you were like me and bought records because of the music on them, and think digital music is a very recently unimaginable blessing; this is the time to sell. Don't wait until the bottom drops out (like baseball cards in the 90s.)
They paid me a fortune for my record collection. My mindset was 20 years old, and I only brought records to sell that I thought were "good" or "rare." The prices paid for even the marginal ones convinced me to go back and fetch the leftovers.
Yes, I tried it and it's not great. So I basically have Spotify and Plex now and have to switch between the two. Spotify is still great for discovery and radio.
I have a handful of records in a sturdy box for collection purposes, probably nothing fancy and it's all on Spotify and co as well, but I like having physical copies, and if you get physical copies because of collecting, vinyl is really good.
Should get a player sometime, maybe.
Anyway all of my vinyl is fairly modern (>2000's). I do scour the secondhand shops sometimes but all the good stuff will have been sniped by the staff (they'll just pay a token amount or just squirrel it away) for their own collection or to be sold on ebay.
Soulseek is the ultimate source of hard to find music. I'd have some rare things in my wishlist for months before they'd pop up for me to download. That's all I used for music for almost a decade.
They're not as good. They're fine, but not as good. Every time the new Oink gets destroyed, the replacement is a little bit worse. I think it's because most long-term users have all the music they want and have lost interest in restocking (or heavily participating in) new trackers. Also, the audiophile number-maxing flac people dominate, driving out the casuals.
People who are very invested in hearing the latest music are well-served by the streaming services. Other than the OCD datahoarders, they're not going to be saving the tracker ecosystem, either.
> I love records. There are plenty of reasons why records are great that don't usually get mentioned here.
> * The big one: There is tons of music out there that isn't on streaming services. If you like punk, breakcore, UK dubstep, noise, really anything even a little bit out of the mainstream, or from the past - you can't find the best stuff on any streaming services. If I could only make one point, this would be it. Spotify! Doesn't! Haven't! Everything! You'll never dance around your living room to the good version of This Bike is a Pipebomb's 'Better Off Dead', because you don't have the split 7".
> * Vinyl is a good value store. If you keep good care of your records - and you have good taste - you'll find that your collection _appreciates_ in value over time, unlike other forms which _depreciate_. Some of the records I picked up in high school are worth over a hundred bucks now! Not that I plan on ever selling them, but it's nice to know I could.
> * Vinyl is something to do while traveling! It's great going to another country or city and browsing the record shops and finding something you're after, or something funky looking in the $2 bin. Random finds in dollar bins are a bit like Magic: The Gathering cards - usually crap, but occasionally brilliant. Plus, whenever you take it out, you get to remember the trip you got it on.
> * Sampling. I make hip hop, and samples from vinyls just sound better with that real grit. They just do.
> Records! Yeah!
I've bought a few albums with the purpose of flipping them and I've made a 2500% return with those. What you say is correct, soundtracks and smaller runs or limited editions tend to grow in value.
Been buying records pretty much non-stop since 97. Aside from a few pictures, photos and gig ticket stubs, they're pretty much the only physical form of reference to my cultural interests I have from the last 25 years.
This is probably anecdotal, but I can recall a huge amount of my collection pretty much instantly when someone asks me which records I have by artist X, or which records did I buy in 2019. I have the complete opposite for books I read on my Kindle - if someone asks me which books I read last year or who the author of the last book I read was then I find it a challenge to recall.
The tangibility of physical media just seems to give me a better connection to the album, artist, label and songs.
But yes, moving house is an absolute pain and it's a ridiculously expensive hobby.
> but I can recall a huge amount of my collection pretty much instantly when someone asks me which records I have by artist X, or which records did I buy in 2019.
When I first started buying CDs, in 1992 or so, I kept them in the order purchased. By the time I went to college, I had about 150 albums on one long rack. No groupings by artist, or publish date, or genre, or anything like that. Just ordered by when I acquired them.*
It was a strange system, but I was surprised how easily I could locate any of them, and I think you're right. The tangibility of it.
Now I have probably 20 times as much music on my phone (plus access to everything else on Apple Music). And It's harder than ever to decide what I want to listen to. I strongly suspect I wouldn't have this issue if my entire library was physically in front of me.
(* Things got muddy when I'd get 10 or 12 CDs at a time, by repeatedly joining Columbia House or BMG under new fake names. Those just grouped together in the rack in a random order within the subset)
> Now I have probably 20 times as much music on my phone (plus access to everything else on Apple Music). And It's harder than ever to decide what I want to listen to. I strongly suspect I wouldn't have this issue if my entire library was physically in front of me.
I got rid of Spotify a couple of months ago and started fresh with Tidal. I purposely haven't build a single playlist and just have a collection of 20/30 albums on rotation saved. I've found the whole thing really liberating - I was so reliant on the playlists that I'd built up on Spotify over the last decade and was pretty bored with my own taste.
A lot of people I know rely on their Spotify playlists for music so much that if you put them in charge of the music at a party then they would barely be able to think of 5 songs off the top of their head.
Makes sense to me, I do similar for music I download- remembering that I got an album approximately x months ago and it was definitely before I heard that EP I just scrolled past is often easier then recalling an artist's name.
I've read on r/shortcuts today some people put NFC tags on their CD cases so they can listen them albums on phone because they like physically experience...
No it isn't. Sailing is ridiculously expensive. Competitive rally driving is ridiculously expensive.
Buying your music in physical form is cheap as chips in comparison. Even if you're buying limited run LPs made by one of the few engineers who still know how to get the best out of the format.
I’ve found it’s really a spend what you want hobby. I’ve got a turntable and powered speakers and it sounds great. You can build a setup with more features or more vintage equipment but that’s not actually necessary to enjoy it. And certainly not as a barrier to entry.
This is probably anecdotal, but I can recall a huge amount of my collection pretty much instantly when someone asks me which records I have by artist X, or which records did I buy in 2019.
I used to be the same, but then with CDs. I could still remember where I bought a particular album and the emotions first listening to it.
I probably had ~1000 CDs. Of some single artists I had 50+ CDs (e.g. Frank Zappa and John Zorn). Two years ago I put an ad on a local site that someone could pick them up for free, except for stuff that is not on Spotify et al., like most John Zorn.
To be honest, I haven't regretted it for a single moment. It became annoying every time we had to move (takes a few boxes and they are very heavy). It takes up a lot of space, in our previous house I had already put half of the CDs in the basement. I wanted to rip the albums in FLAC format, but always gave up after 40-50 albums, since it was so much work.
Now it's one less thing to care about. I have pretty much every album in my pocket through Spotify. It's much easier and especially more affordable to discover new music. And if I want to 'connect' to an artist, I can go to a concert, buy a t-shirt, of subscribe to their mailing list.
Can't speak for the OP, but in the early 2000s, I was buying new-pressing indie, electronic, and some classic rock musicians (e.g. Neil Young) on vinyl. But mostly I was buying older used records, which at the time were cheap (they've gotten much more expensive around here). Some of the new pressings I bought back then go for a fair amount used now, because they were pressed in very limited quantities and there were way fewer people buying vinyl.
Can’t speak for the OP, but I have quite a few albums released in the ‘00 in my shelf. A limited edition pressing of portisheads “Third” (which came with a p-shaped USB-Stick with digital copies), Nine Inch Nails, Queens of the Stone Age, quite a bunch of electronic titles, some jazz. Vinyl hasn’t really gone away, but a lot of the pressings were not intended for the mass market. It was often for enthusiasts, heavy presssings, often with gorgeous full-size booklets that rivaled an art book. Colored vinyl or even prints. The Portishead Album comes with three disks in a box that’s about 5cm thick. I have prints from a small hamburg label that are wrapped in linen cloth and tied with a tarred rope (impractical as hell and smelled like harbor the first few years)
So you’d not find LPs in the large chains back then, but it was always available in small record stores or on order.
If you look through Discogs [0] there were over 2.7m records released in the 00's - pretty much everything that's been released between 1950 and maybe 2010 was pressed to vinyl at some point. Now it's probably the opposite way around since the democratisation of music publishing.
The tricky part is getting a copy because the pressings are usually fairly limited outside of the more mainstream stuff.
Most of the music I was DJ'ing at the time (underground house and techno) was only available on vinyl to people who weren't friends with the producers who could burn you a CD copy.
Guy I know owned (owns) a music store. In the late 90s, he thought he knew were things were going. He started saving up for his pension, thinking that by 2015 or so no one would be buying cds anymore.
Now, he says, his music store is doing better than ever. He was correct in that no one buys cds anymore, but vinyl is selling like crazy. The store, which has always been popular ever since the 1980s, is making crazy amounts of money and his pension is becoming very comfortable.
Only thing he can’t come to terms with, however, is that his younger patrons for some reason insist on buying Dire Straits records. He can’t for the life of him figure out how something that used to be a signifier of having absolutely no taste in music has become so popular with music connoisseurs.
Twisting by the Pool? :-) I don't dislike any others. I think this poor taste thing seems to occur if something becomes too popular, it becomes poor taste in the eyes of many people, even if that thing is actually good. I'm not convinced anyone can seriously listen to Telegraph Road and say that doesn't have artistic merit. Similarly there is Phil Collins that has a huge background in prog rock and is a top class musician, that is now maligned by many people because he wrote some highly catchy and accessible pop songs.
Dire Straits is better if you forget that they made anything past Brothers in Arms, just like U2 probably should have stopped somewhere around Rattle and Hum.
> figure out how something that used to be a signifier of having absolutely no taste in music has become so popular with music connoisseurs.
A) They make good music.
B) They are ignorant of the popular opinion about bands who haven't been relevant in at least 20 years.
Like with Nickelback: it's popular to hate them so everyone hates them. In another 10-15 years, young people who never learned that they were supposed to hate Nickelback will judge them on their merits alone, and maybe they will see a brief surge in popularity.
Also, I think most of the hate in music industry is manufactured anyway. Popular bands earn too much sway with audiences and start dictating terms to record labels, so the execs put together an anti-marketing campaign to knock them down a few pegs.
Well, it was only a "signifier of having absolutely no taste in music has become so popular with music connoisseurs" only to snobs.
Similar to how disco and electronic music was supposed to be for people with no taste, and then all those e.g. post-punk groups admitted 15 and 20 years later to liking it all along...
Brothers in Arms was the poster child for an album that was recorded/mastered for CD. Slightly too long to fit on a C-90, way to clean and antiseptic for vinyl, came out right as CD players went from the first experimental 14-bit and $1k+ to production 16bit and affordability.
Many many cd players were sold on the basis of that album.
> The supremacy of vinyl over CDs is the result of several factors.
And then goes on to cover none of those factors. I like the topic and am interested in more info, but this tiny article is written very poorly.
I would love to read a deep dive on the pros and cons of the two, especially about how each medium holds up over the long term. Isn't vinyl much better for archival purposes because cd's can start to disintegrate over time? Or have manufacturing processes improved?
The other aspect of vinyl that hasn't been mentioned is the listening experience itself is very different. You don't get the option of being an ADHD music listener. You throw some vinyl on, and you listen to it from the beginning to the end.
What's funny is that I've purchased LPs that I "loved" and after listening to it on vinyl, I discover some new track that I've never actually given a real listen to.
My reasons for collecting vinyl:
- Supporting my favorite musicians
- Collecting things is fun, especially when it's something as meaningful as music
- Forces you to listen to an LP the way it should be (beginning to end)
- Good presses are some of the easiest ways to get access to high quality recordings
- The ceremony around putting a favorite LP on is quite nice
- Admiring the simplicity of the tech compared to the quality of the output
- Seeing the vinyl + artwork + any extras the artist may have included as a single piece of art. The effort that goes into the design on some LPs is absolutely amazing.
Speaking anecdotally: people I know who buy vinyl tend to do it for the novelty/because they're audiophiles. These are the kind of people who buy/build fancy sound systems specifically for listening to music. They usually get a vinyl record player to go with it.
Whereas CDs are stuck in this awkward middle-ground: they're not as evocative/interesting as records for the enthusiast, but they're not as convenient as streaming or even MP3's for the casual listener.
Personally I still buy a CD on occasion when I want to actually own an album, because it's a high-quality source that's easy to get onto a computer. But there aren't a ton of usecases for doing so these days.
Agreed. Another use case for CD's over vinyl used to be in your car while driving, for which vinyl is unsuitable, but that has become almost entirely digital now. If the physical media are for at-home listening only, then there's not as much advantage to CD's smaller size and greater resistance to small shocks.
I wonder - does anyone produce and distribute streaming audio at a higher quality than CD? A lot of people talk like CD audio is a definitive source, but I mean it's still a limited sampling rate and a limited bit-depth.
Radiohead sold downloads of their recent album at 24bit96khz for download. Neil Young invested in the "Pono" player which was supposed to be an iPod replacement with a high-bitrate lossless audio store/ecosystem but it failed I believe.
> The full bit-depth is present on the audio cd. You can buy 24-bit 196 hz flac from tidal as a download or you can rip it from a cd.
Well this is exactly what I mean... what do you mean by 'full' bit-depth? It's finite. It's 16-bit on a CD. It could be higher.
If you rip 24-bit audio from a 16-bit CD... you don't actually get any more data, do you? What would be the point in doing that?
I'm asking - does anyone sell audio mastered and distributed at 24-bit? Or 32-bit? Better than CD quality. According to the comments here 'yes' so it clearly isn't 'full'.
24bit audio makes sense in the studio to avoid compounding errors from all the effects used to produce the track, but it doesn't make sense for the final piece because 16-bit perfectly represents everything we humans are able to hear [1].
> Thus, 16 bit audio can go considerably deeper than 96dB. With use of shaped dither, which moves quantization noise energy into frequencies where it's harder to hear, the effective dynamic range of 16 bit audio reaches 120dB in practice [13], more than fifteen times deeper than the 96dB claim.
> 120dB is greater than the difference between a mosquito somewhere in the same room and a jackhammer a foot away.... or the difference between a deserted 'soundproof' room and a sound loud enough to cause hearing damage in seconds.
> 16 bits is enough to store all we can hear, and will be enough forever.
I don't buy vinyl, because a) they are incredibly heavy and take up far more room in large quantities, b) they damage easily leading to more pops and scratches when playing (check out used vinyl in stores, see for yourself), c) they don't sound better (unless the mastering on a version of the disc has poor DR, but better versions are usually out there), d) they are more expensive. Discs are a more optimal way for me to collect, though I rarely do so and opt for digital purchases more often.
Everything you said is true, but for collecting vinyl seems superior to me because disc rot is basically unavoidable, whereas well cared for records can last over a hundred years (maybe more?)
It's hard to predict. There have been improvements since the first generation "bronzed" CDRs such that they won't deteriorate as nearly as quickly. Most of mine will stay stored in their cases the majority of the time. I don't see my small collection as an appreciating asset so if it only lasts my lifetime, fine.
As a casual buyer of a few vinyl records, I feel they're mostly popular for two reasons:
1. physical aesthetic reasons
2. audiophile selection simplicity w.r.t. dynamic range (a higher ratio of available vinyl has reasonable DR characteristics compared to CDs/downloads)[0]
... number 2 above is more oft-cited, but I think number 1 above is significant (probably moreso).
Anyone investing not just money, but also space and inconvenience (they're not "synced" to all your devices, it's more difficult to listen to tapes/CDs/vinyl while running or driving) in any physical media is doing so at least in part because of the physical nature of that object, and CDs are just not in any way an aesthetic object. Even casettes are much moreso, in a DIY/retro way.
...and at the end, add "by the way none of this matters because digital". I got the strong impression that the person(s) writing this article was doing it because they had been told to, not because they found it interesting.
Makes sense. Vinyl and cassettes are both cool retro tech. CDs are just... meh.
I have one friend who listens to music on (or at least collects) vinyl. I have another friend who listens to casettes and makes mixtapes. I don't know anyone who uses CDs.
Personally, I consider CDs to be retro tech, after all they go back to 1977. Though not perfect, they are the ideal audio format - uncompressed, high resolution, excellent dynamic range, DRM-free, and compact enough to reduce space while being large enough for at least some artwork. I do enjoy the “experience” of vinyl records more, but after years of messing with finicky turntables, expensive cartridges, and preamps to achieve marginally better sound, I realized CDs had perfect sound in the first place with no fuss aside from the occasional scratched discs. One of the problems I have with vinyl is that with every usage you’re degrading it. For that reason I’ve stopped playing some of my most valuable and treasured vintage records for fear of making them unplayable. I typically make a high-res recording of the vinyl and listen to that instead (and yes I realize that defeats the purpose of the all-analog signal chain, but my ears can’t tell the difference).
I’m not an audiophile, but many of them think that keeping all
parts of the signal chain completely analog, regardless of the particular format, is more “pure” because apparently digitized audio misses information because of how it’s “sliced”. Technically this is true, but with a sufficiently high sampling rate, such as the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem inspired rate of 44.1Khz, the original the signal can more or less be perfectly reproduced.
Analog is continuous and digital is discrete and that implies a loss information. Theoretically at least, any digitalization in the signal chain involves a significant, if not perceptible, loss in signal information content.
Personally I'm borderline tone-deaf so I can't tell the difference, but I'm not going to call the people who say they can tell the difference liars.
>Analog is continuous and digital is discrete and that implies a loss information.
Analog loses even more information.
First, something being "continuous" doesn't make it an accurate representation of the original continuous signal, or a better than digital representation. Among many factors, how deep/heavy the head goes into the groove for one affects the fidelity of the signal and how much DR you can have (that's why heavier vinyl is for more expensive/premium releases).
There is other loss of information between the signal (e.g. voice) and its transfer to the vinul, more so than with digital.
Vinyl also has more compression and more equalization thrown in to cut frequencies (heavy bass can make record player heads skip, so it's cut at mastering).
Cassete tape also has more compression (loss of signal dynamic range), more noise (loss of signal), than CDs, plus wow, flutter, etc. It's not even comparable, despite being "analog".
Also, contrary to popular belief, and simplified "layman" posts, digital doesn't produce "square-ized" versions of waveforms due to quantization.
If you digitally sample a pure sine wave, it comes out as a pure sine way when you play it (you can check that on an oscilloscope).
What vinyl does offer better than CD/streaming is lack of convenience (I consider it a pro: it forces more focus and dedication when listening), better tactility, better collectible value, better sentimental value (patina, etc), and extremely better showcase for the cover art.
It is a misconception that digital is lossy but analog is not. In digital recording, the finite bit depth of the sampling process effectively adds a small amount of white noise to the signal (the difference between the sampled value and the true value).
In analog recordings there are also plenty of noise sources, for example the grain size of a magnetic tape or the surface roughness of a vinyl. The difference is that the sampling noise level of a CD is way lower than what is physically possible for any analog medium. This is why we hear "tape hiss" and "vinyl crackle" during quiet parts of the music, but we don't hear "CD hiss". On top of that, nonlinearities anywhere within the analog signal chain introduces distortions that don't exist for a digital signal. Overall, a signal reproduced from a CD is much closer to the true signal than any analog medium could ever achieve.
>but I'm not going to call the people who say they can tell the difference liars.
They're not liars, there are just 2 cases:
(a) They confuse harmonic and other types of distortion (e.g. from tube amps) or the extra compression applied to vynil as better than cleaner signal. Which, subjectively, might be.
(b) They are delluded (as opposed to liars), and wouldn't be able to perform their "tell the difference" in a blind A/B test.
On (a), the distortion arising from electromechanical systems tends to be mainly second harmonic, which people don't seem to mind. It gives a sine wave some "body" or "warmth".
Badly designed DACs tend to produce third harmonic distortion, which sounds "harsh" or "bright" (= like a cafe with lots of hard surfaces and people crashing their cutlery around).
There are very few badly designed DACs being manufactured any more, but the loudness wars have made music sound both bright and "lifeless" (lacking in dynamic range).
So yeah, (b). (B) has been found to be the case even among people who make audio equipment for a living. People hear what they expect or want to hear, just like with vision.
Edit: main reference: Floyd Toole, Sound Reproduction. Toole worked in an acoustics research lab for a Canadian government, and then ran Harmon Kardon's research lab for many years.
> Analog is continuous and digital is discrete and that implies a loss information.
No. Digital audio with 44.1 kHz sampling rate is capable of perfectly reproducing all sound waves in the human hearing range. If any information is lost during the conversion from analog to digital, it is due to the quality of the recording hardware.
Can't speak for the OP, but if you buy records for the physical experience of taking a record from its sleeve, putting it on a turntable and then watching it play, being forced to use a digital recording instead for the records you play most often sure sounds like a bummer...
If you like the spinney bits, there's always the Rega Planet.
> Playing discs on the $795 Rega Planet is a lot like playing LPs: You can read the CD label as the disc sits inside the player, and you can see the disc spin as it plays.
My prediction is that they will be by the next generation. In Guardians of the Galaxy for example, the obsolete-but-nostalgic format is the cassette tape and Walkman. The CD and Discman will fulfill that role in 20 years, if not sooner.
I think the problem with Discman is they didn't stay fashionable for as long. My first Walkman was my dad's old one from high school. And they didn't really fade completely until the 2000s.
The early model of Discman skipped really bad, so anyone listening to music while doing some physical activity mostly stuck with Walkman. It wasn't until memory was cheap enough that they could have decent buffers that people started using CD players more, but not long after that, MP3 players started to become popular.
CDs were more of a car thing. Everyone at my high school had those big ass books of CDs in their cars, even if they all also Rios for personal listening. Then the big 20GB HDD-based MP3 players came out and that's what everyone had.
It probably helps that most vinyl releases also include a free FLAC download. So you get your collector's deluxe edition with inlay signed by the band, plus a lossless quality (or even 24-bit better-than-CD) version without having to rip the download yourself.
I'm sure there are some people playing vinyl, but I also bet a lot of these are never being played, it's just decorative.
That's done to make up for one of the major disadvantages of vinyl records: that you can't easily rip them. Ok, ripping CDs is also getting more difficult - I upgraded my desktop PC recently and then found out I need a PATA adapter card to connect my old DVD-RW drive if I want to rip CDs, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Laptops have also gotten rid of CD/DVD drives completely. Fortunately Amazon has an "AutoRip" feature for most CDs where you can download an album digitally after you have bought it from them...
Yep, I know exactly what you mean - I've got a cheap portable LG USB CD/DVD drive on my desk right now, so I can convert any CDs I buy to FLAC and progressively re-rip my MP3 collection. Buying CDs is getting harder too, Amazon Australia doesn't carry many new CDs and AutoRip isn't an option in Australia.
I occasionally buy vinyl, I have some vinyl Super Deluxe editions around me, and getting the free FLAC makes the purchasing decision much easier for me. I get the album in full quality to play, plus all the bonus tracks & physical merch and something to put in my display cabinet.
USB CD+DVD burners are nearly disposable-cheap and very convenient to use, now. The "good" ones are under $30 and crappy ones as low as $15. They're barely larger than a CD jewel case, weigh ~nothing, and are powered entirely over USB, so no external power brick.
I play vinyl! There’s something special about the the experience of taking a record out of its sleeve, the white noise while you wait for the pin to pick up, and then listening through the entire album.
It’s not something I do every day. Most of my music is streamed. But I find when I stream I rarely listen to a full album. Apple killed the full album.
I guess we never know if we're typical or not, but I tend to add an album at a time to my collection and listen to them that way as well.
If anything is killing the album, it's that it is a somewhat artificial medium, dictated by the constraints of records and later, CDs.
It seems like it's surviving on its own merits, there are a couple of albums from this year I really enjoy. But it's bound to be less popular now that it's just another way to listen to your choice of music, instead of the only way.
Well, everything in art is artificial, and most things are dictated by this or that physical constraint. That doesn't make it less important once they materialize.
Nothing you are saying is inaccurate. People bought albums because that’s how music was historically sold and they had no alternative. My understanding is that artists also embraced that constraint and created albums to create a specific experience (vibe, song order, etc).
Apple started selling individual songs and for the first time people were able to buy music without buying the whole album. So yes, Apple killed the album.
Though I gotta say: I was around and listening to music at the time, and it was Napster which struck the death blow. Apple came along a couple years later to put the album out of its misery.
The album doesn't seem dead, so much as diminished, but I know a harmless rhetorical flourish when I see one...
If you had a MP3 capable CD-disc change with say 6 CDs in your car, you had 60 CDs at your disposal. Usually that's way more than the number of tapes had in their cars. And the quality was a lot better than tapes.
Plus if you're into audiobooks you could get away with 64kbit mono MP3 which doubles the capacity.
Thank god CDs are gone. Their only use these days is to serve as sources for perfect FLAC copies. A flash drive with digital audio files is objectively superior in every way. At least vinyl and cassette have the quality of being analog.
I much prefer CDs than records. At least you can skip the songs with a remote control, sound quality is far superior than records and the entire thing is compact and lasts forever. Relatively speaking.
Those advantages are specific to digital audio, not CDs. You get the same features if you have a FLAC collection on a flash drive.
What you said is true when compared to analog mediums like vinyl. Even the dust that's sitting on top of the record can color the audio and that's before we even consider the quality of the turntable hardware. People actually perceive vinyl as the better medium because of this.
As much as I liked CDs, they don't last forever. I've lost a few already, due to damage to the reflective layer, probably from small errors during manufacturing. Bad handling can of course damage them too.
CDs have two layers of error correction, and with special equipment you can monitor the Block Error Rate.
CD players attempt simple interpolation to hide errors, so the sound has started to degrade long before you start getting clicks and skips. Clock jitter is also an issue.
I started ripping my CD collection to FLAC in the mid-2000s, because it was obvious that ripped FLACs were cleaner and more accurate than the audio from my not-cheap CD deck. Now all my music is on a NAS in a spare bedroom with RAID and a separate occasional manual backup to yet another drive.
I have no interest in vinyl in at all, or in analog nostalgia, or in having yet more stuff to manage in my space. I spent too many hours moving huge boxes of vinyl around and trying to hear music through crackles and pops. So I wouldn't care if every LP and turntable in the world disappeared overnight.
While a lot of vinyl fans would be very upset if this happened, I wouldn't be one of them.
I mostly rely on digital music in various forms, but there is one advantage to vinyl: it removes choice.
It's one of those "paradox of choice" things; the more decisions you have to make, the less happy you are. When listening to a record, I just have to decide to put the record on, and then all choice is removed from me and I just sit back and enjoy the ride. I don't have to decide whether to skip a track or whether to jump from a playlist to a specific song I just thought about; the "would I rather be doing something else?" part of my brain takes a break.
I always found these artificial constraints weird. So the problem is not with the media but with the brain. Then fix the brain problem through self control. Why justify the presence of an inferior medium because of the problem with personal discipline! I know it works on a lot of people but that doesn’t make it more rational.
It’s like keyboards without printed keys for those aficionados who prefer to learn to type without looking down. Just don’t look down, problem solved.
There is definitely mental frustration in the brain when I can't skip shitty tracks that I don't resonate with and having to forcefully listen to it. That makes my brain way more agitated than relaxing with the ability to skip tracks.
When everything works, I am relaxed. When I am artificially constrained, I am not relaxed.
For subconscious and things your parasympathetic nervous system does without engaging the brain - We need assistance. For example, when learning how to ride a bicycle, training wheels help until balancing yourself is “learned”.
But things like “I don’t buy junk food because if I do, I’ll eat it right away and gain weight”. This... this is a problem with self control. My point was that justifying records because it forces me to listen to the whole album without skipping is an artificially constructed self imposed problem.
Indeed. As a medium CDs outdo vinyl in every way. There is no point using vinyls if CDs are available other that wanting to 'play' with a turntable like in "the olden days".
I can listen to the exact same record my mom listened to 50 years ago, complete with her initials on the sleeve. I can’t do that with CD’s. Since she passed, this has taken on even more meaning.
A lot of people also love the large format artwork on the album cover and sleeve. Playing a record while studying the liner notes was a favorite activity of mine in the olden days.
If somebody has gone to the effort and expense to listen to a physical record, they probably aren't going to want to scroll around on their phone to see digital liner notes. The physicality of it all is a big part of the appeal of vinyl.
I used to write cdrom driver software. I've been organizing my stuff and came across my old references for the redbook, yellowbook, and bluebook specs.
I got into the whole thing and now my records are shelved in the attic and tone arm has been dead for over 5 years. Records are a real pain in the ass. I understand its a hobby, good for you.
I got into vinyl in my teens (I'm in my mid 30s now), before the "vinyl revival" really started. I still listen to and buy it as much as I ever did, and my collection is quite large. I also listen to digital music, both streaming and stuff ripped from my CDs, downloaded from download cards that come with vinyl, and digitized directly from my LPs. There's certainly room for both. But when I put music on for the family, or want to sit down and really listen to a record, it's always on vinyl. To each their own, but this statistic itself shows that there are plenty of people who truly enjoy and find value in vinyl.
Does vinyl work well for classical music (what I listen to mostly)? I've seen posts like the following saying that the large dynamic range isn't captured well (in particular, soft sections sound too noisy):
The selection of classical music on vinyl is very poor. There's basically only stuff from prior to the CD era and that's it, so if you want a newer composition or a recent performance you won't find it on vinyl. The usual arguments in favor of vinyl don't really apply, either. There's no interesting artwork on the cover, etc. Although, sometimes there are detailed liner notes on some older vinyl releases.
I have a decent vinyl selection with a few classical pressings.
Honestly, I only really enjoy classical in ultra-hi-fi 5.1. Even better if there's a video of the orchestra. (Then again, I don't listen to classical very often.)
The thing with "classical" music is that, before the we had recorded music, when someone listened to classical they were at a live performance in a silent room, and they gave the music their full attention. The music can get loud and quiet, much more than "modern" music that we listen to while driving, while vacuuming, ect.
So, IMO, if you're doing classical with vinyl, look at the records as collector's items. But, IMO, if you're really trying to get into classical, get a nice TV and a nice surround sound system and buy (or borrow) great performances on bluray. Try to set it up in a very quiet space so you can hear music that gets quiet.
BTW: If you've ever noticed a "sparkle" to the sound at a live classical concert, you probably can hear slightly over 20khz. A good bluray recording (at 96khz) will have that "sparkle" that's just slightly above 20khz, but filtered out of CD.
The saturation applied to a lot of pressings (which gives vinyl its supposed warmth) usually adds weight to the low frequencies and rounds off some of the high frequencies so I can't really see that translating too well to something with such a wide dynamic range. It's far from a perfect representation of the recording.
Perfect sound quality isn't really why you should be buying vinyl - there's far too many points of failure in the signal chain from the pressing of the record, the stylus, the preamp and the speakers.
You'd be better off getting a nice soundcard and playing CDs or 24 Bit WAV/AIFF files from your laptop.
Quote by John Peel.
“Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don’t have any surface noise. I said, ‘Listen, mate, life has surface noise'”
I’m no expert audio engineer, but the dynamic range of vinyl is limited by the space between the grooves. That being said, it shouldn’t have any effect on the quality of the audio, just the difference in volume of the loudest and softest parts.
It's luxury consumption. The fact that it's annoying to deal with records lets people think on some level that they're participating in the creative process rather than just loading an awkward machine. Pop music has always been sold as an identity.
edit: It's also merch, people are just buying them to support the band. I bet a surprisingly large proportion of records are being sold to people who don't have record players.
> I bet a surprisingly large proportion of records are being sold to people who don't have record players.
I wouldn't bet that, but I agree with your idea - I like supporting bands somehow and usually buy tshirts and merchandise. They never do a show in our city or I would buy tickets.
I think the main reason CDs outpaced vinyl records in sales in the last decades was convenience. CDs are smaller, players are more compact and they can be read and burnt by computers easily and on the cheap.
Nowadays you can just connect your phone to your car and stereo using bluetooth, or stream everything everywhere from Spotify or Apple or Youtube, so physical media such as the CD or a record has become more of an experience than a necessity, and I think that taking a record out of its sleeve and playing it is much more satisfying than just popping a CD in; it's a pleasurable experience in itself, and not just a way to play music.
I think it's like how riding a horse has become a leisure activity nowadays, because people don't need them as a tool for their daily activities any more.
...and as CD burners and players become less ubiquitous, it follows that CD's are becoming less convenient. New cars still have CD players, but not necessarily new computers or home audio players. In the mid 90s, there were at least 5 CD players in the house: 2 stereos, 1 discman, PSX, PC. Now I have 1: PS4.
If only they would master CD's properly... The loudness wars really killed the audio quality and persists to this day. That's probably one of the reasons why people associate harsh and sharp to digital audio, even though CD made before the loudness wars sound absolutely brilliant.
It is a shame. CDs have a number of real advantages over vinyl records and dynamic range is a big one. But most pop/rock CDs take no advantage of it at all. I have some classical CDs that would never work on vinyl, though.
No, the very earliest brick-wall filtered CDs were far, far worse, and largely where the CD's poor reputation came from. The ability to oversample and downsample largely dealt with the truly grating effects of phase shift in the higher frequencies (harmonics being nowhere near in proper phase with the fundamental tones). The godawful remasters once the technical problems were overcome just added insult to injury, really.
Either way, it seems like the whole debate is kind of misplaced. Analogue and digital systems have pros and cons, but crappy mastering will make almost every single one of them irrelevant in terms of sound quality.
Personally I think vinyl often sounds better simply because it takes a higher quality of engineering to make it work at all. It's the limitations of the medium that mean you can't just compress it halfway to buggery and crank the loudness up like you can with a CD.
I bought Ladytron's new album, i got FLAC+Cassette.. I have a cassette player in my car, and was looking forward to listening to it there.
I was very dissapointed to find the tape of absolutely horrible (by tape!) quality, it sounded so bad I couldn't use it.. Totally a gimmick. I ended up just recording the flac files onto another, blank tape and they sound just fine (by tape standards, actually, by most standards).
I hope the new-vinyl is not as gimmicky as new-cassette.
The mastering of the newer generation of metal records is usually done for digital, and they don't really re-master anything for the vinyl release. Most new vinyls sound OK, but in most cases a record released in the late 70's or late 80's will blow a new one straight out of the water.
Many, many vinyls come with digital downloads, though. Personally, I like having a physical media to hold on too. I'm almost too old to hear any actual difference anyway. :D
Cassettes are kind of a unique creature. Dolby invented a lot of technologies that greatly improved the sound quality of cassette tapes. However, my understanding is that none of these technologies are widely used anymore in the consumer market. So anything you buy made after like 2000, be it cassette or player, will have terrible sound quality unless it's designed for studio use.
Is it possible that you used an old, higher-end cassette player to record the blank tape?
Yeah, I agree that's misleading, but I don't know about extremely. The fact that sales are within a few 10s of percent is pretty remarkable, and I say that as someone who has been avidly buying vinyl since the early 2000s when CDs were still selling an order of magnitude or more units. Of course, vinyl sales have grown, but just as importantly online music sales and streaming have caused CD sales to decrease sharply over the past 10-15 years.
I'm a DJ that likes pretty underground house and techno. Most of the vinyl I purchase isn't available in any other form, and will tend to be made in a limited quantity. I find that this creates much more memorable performances that make them stand out from others. Vinyl's fun to DJ using turntables but I can't say the same with CD's. They're just inconvenient and I'd rather use an USB that stores more files. I think there's also a pretty big myth around vinyl sounding better, which might contribute to the popularity of it.
For me the trend of labels releasing vinyl-only limited edition feels quite elitist, i.e. if you’re somehow not ‘in the know’ than you don’t get to enjoy the music. I prefer labels offering the choice between a limited edition vinyl and an unlimited edition digital download. That way the people that care about owning and spinning the rare object still get that experience and those who discover the record two months later can still buy the digital version and experience it.
It happens all the time that I discover music on Bandcamp, and since I’m not a super connoisseur it has been released for some time and the vinyl has long since sold out, but I can buy the digital version and enjoy it and spin it at parties and thus share the experience.
Back in the day, it wasn't done due to elitism but rather necessity. Vinyl was the only distribution format for club tracks because of the unique way the DJ can physically manipulate the record for the purposes of beat matching, cutting and scratching. Since a mass production of vinyl incurs a large initial overhead lower quality "white labels" were produced in small numbers for newer releases.
Nowadays I'm sure it's just done for marketing purposes, though, as there's no reason not to release the track digitally.
I wouldn't be so sure about all of this. I just bought a copy of the You Only Live Twice soundtrack in physical CD format because my streaming provider (Spotify) only offers 3 tracks from the album. Repeat this story for anything not created in the last 20 years.
The realization that I could permanently lose access to some older media just by way of my streaming providers not caring to continue carrying the tracks has reignited my datahoarder spirit animal.
For some reason the thought of losing access to movies and TV shows is substantially less troubling to me than the thought of losing access to more obscure forms of music.
I recently made the decision to only buy 2nd hand vinyl (and thus not often), and for all my new music to be digital. Bandcamp, Bleep.com and Beatbport are simply amazing in their own ways.
Digital music is easier to carry (I sometimes DJ). I also wonder if digital has a lower environmental burden overall, compared with new vinyl. I've not done any research; in fact, I don't even know how to begin such research.
I used to love "albums". I've definitely moved to playing more singles. Partly through DJing again, partly through the convenience of Spotify... but I think mostly because there's so much new music that if I'm listening to an album and don't enjoy half of it, that's time I could have used finding the good singles from another album. I don't claim this is a good practice, only that it's a novel perspective I've gained recently and offer it up for inspection.
For me it's vinyl for the albums I _really love_, and digital/streaming for anything else. I understand buying digital ultimately supports the artists more, but as a library/collection, digital files just can't compare to LPs or even CDs.
I do the same. And most new LPs come with digital downloads anyway.
These days I have kept my existing album downloads but I sub to Apple Music so I can grab almost anything on the fly, download it so I’m not constantly streaming (I listen to whole albums, not shuffles or playlists really) and listen to that often at work or on the move but buy LPs for everything else. It can just be an expensive hobby so it’s usually pretty filtered.
Also used LP shopping is just a hell of a lot of fun. Seeing how much good stuff you can find for what it would cost for a new copy elsewhere.
Well, with psycical formats dwindling to little as a total of sales, it makes sense that the more collectible/nostalgic/hip(ster) one will win over the other that mainly had covenience on its side (and which is now better served by streaming)
I remember reading a story about some folks setting up a manufacturing/pressing shop a year or two ago. From what I remember, pressing vinyl has a high error rate/low yield and that newer equipment improves upon this, driving down the costs significantly.
You can probably assume that people are setting these up in most every mid-sized or larger city, possibly even some small ones as well. So it's likely that with a mature supply chain and a distributed manufacturing base, vinyl will be able to have a wider variety of music and low prices (even more so than now).
I doubt that CD manufacturing facilities are seeing any expansion at all; probably still consolidating and controlled only by the large labels.
I don't buy CDs any longer, I certainly don't buy LPs (the last time I bought an LP was in the early 90's), and I don't stream. I do buy a lot of music on iTunes. I've stopped buying select songs too, preferring to buy albums. You get to know the artist and their work better. When listening to music I tend to listen to albums. For better or for worse my iPhone is now my sole music player. The audio engineers mastering for iTunes are doing an excellent job.
One thing I've noticed is that the quality of vinyl presses for recent songs is not good. It seems worse with colored records like pinks and reds and the like. I had to return an album three times to get a record that wouldn't skip all over!
My favorite thing about vinyl collecting is that there's no digital obsolescence. You can build a record player out of a motor and a piece of paper. It's like having a paper book vs. an e-book or photographic slides vs. a terabyte of JPEGs.
This is a good point, I think only a handful of factories are still making CD transports. They are readable in computers but only because of compatibility with the DVD disc and those are already disappearing from most new devices.
It seems entirely possible that within our lifetimes it may no longer be possible to buy a CD player.
The text in the book whether paper or electronic is digital, like PCM or JPEG. The slides and vinyl decay gradually and irrecoverably even within a lifetime.
You can illustrate the principle well enough with your player built "out of a motor and a piece of paper" but the music will be too distorted to want to listen to it. So I don't think this has much practical meaning.
The use of digital data means the CD transport is completely independent of the music on a CD, if you aren't interested in spinning plastic discs and laser diodes you can dispense with that part and keep all the audio as it was - and indeed of course in fact we mostly did. The sound of vinyl is wedded to the physical manifestation, the grooves, the stylus, the rotating disc, but PCM data doesn't care how it is stored.
True all this. But still there's a joy in holding a record or photographic slide because there's no inscrutable digital device in between the artifact and its sensory experience. If you have a hard drive of photos you need a device that you can't build, can't see (at the transistor level), and probably can't fully understand to see the photos. And a hard drive of photos looks the same as a hard drive of songs -- the specialist media has a form molded to its content. Can't describe the joy. Just like it.
it's great that it's selling more than cds, but that's like being the best in the losers bracket. i don't know a single person in my life who actually buys vinyl records. everyone i know has a spotify or panadora account.
This doesn't really surprise me. Between music streaming, cars more commonly having extra inputs (AUX, USB, Bluetooth), the market for CDs is probably shrinking while vinyl appeals to the same enthusiasts year after year.
I think this is really interesting information. As Vinyl has less quality than CDs, uses more space and its way more expensive. But I guess some people like to get the immersion of buying a piece of music and enjoying it in a more vintage way, of course there is nothing wrong with it.
On the other hand i find also interesting the discussion between streaming vs physical and what motivates people to go physical when there are less and less motivation to keep people buying physical. I speak even for myself where i hate the idea of paying 10 Euros a month to have all "borrowed" music i want as long as i keep paying it. On the other hand buying 1-2 CDs per month exceeds the 10 Euros budget but at least i own the media, after one year would be more expensive than Apple Music 1y subscription.
Difficult to decide which one is more reasonable.
> As Vinyl has less quality than CDs, uses more space and its way more expensive.
Owning and listening to vinyl is a different experience. Parts of it is show. The modern vinyl pressings often come in a beautiful packaging, nice booklets, something to marvel at. You can look at your shelf and contemplate what you’d like to listen to, in a way that scrolling through a playlist doesn’t. You also pretty much have to listen to the album in the order the artist intended to - no shuffle, no playlists, no skip.
CDs to the contrary offer little difference to digital and still use space. So if you’re buying for the physical experience, it makes sense to go for vinyl.
> So if you’re buying for the physical experience, it makes sense to go for vinyl.
I still buy CDs because I want to own a physical medium and CDs are far superior and more practical than vinyls.
It's also actually easier to 'contemplate' a shelf of CDs than one of vinyls. ;)
I think it is that practicality that actually makes CDs less desirable than vinyls by some. Vinyls are not very practicals and require a ritual to play, and that's what some people are looking for and that is visible in other trends (coffee, tea brewing, etc.). I think that 'less practical' is often seen as 'more authentic'.
I'm sad that I clicked on this article and the parent one and neither had a basic line graph showing the trend. It would answer so many questions I have about whether on is trending up etc
There is the concept that constraints drive artists to make better art within the defined limits. Vinyl has so much less tonal and dynamic information recording capacity than CDs... today’s artists spend more effort and energy “exploring the limits” rather than creating great art. Outside of classical music and opera, what forms of music are unquestionably better on CD than vinyl or cassette?
I have some Dire Straits albums from around 1990 on CD, and they sound amazing. Mastering seemed to go way downhill in the late 90s.
Cassette has no advantage for me other than nostalgia, and the fact that a lot of music wouldn't exist without such a cheaply available recording medium.
The remastering for CD would be from the original recording which were usually 24 IPS (or was it 39?) AMPEX tape. Those tapes held massive amounts of sonic data so remastering for CD was really a step down. Since the target medium was one where you didn’t have such strict dynamic limits in the last ten minutes of a side (eg: you weren’t going to make the needle jump out of the groove of the dynamics exceeded the limits of vinyl) you can get a fuller sound all the way through the album. This attention to detail of the constraints was something that was in the minds of the songwriter, composer, the performers, and the engineers. These day... “record at 96khz and we’ll fix it in post” but no amount of post-production can fix an inferior composition.
Humor isn't frowned upon, but comments that are limited to pure wit are, just because everybody likes them in the small, but nobody wants them to dominate the discussion in the large.
While I do agree that mixing for records produces a pretty good sounding final product (and for many people the best sounding album), you are still constrained to the laws of physics. If you have a track that’s mixed too hot, you’ll just throw the needle out and get skipping. I’ve heard of this happening with some rock and electronic albums. With a digital release, the whole album can be mixed however the artist wants.
I’m pretty sure most artists don’t really think about the limitations of vinyl when creating the album. It’s not a constraint for them, after all digital version is going to be the most consumed one.
There is a bit of a sad downside to vinyl: it seems to release toxic chemicals into the air where its being played or even just stored [0]. I hope there are ways to find alternative materials because I thoroughly enjoy the medium overall.
Anecdote: I acquired a crowdfunded, limited run LP earlier this year, and it's one of the two audio recordings I've ever bought in physical format during the fifteen years I've managed my personal finance. I already owned the same album in FLAC and only wanted to support the artist.
The other one was a CD album that I also owned in a digital format, but which had to exist as a physical copy in order to be eligible for radio playback under the bulk license at that time.
Three years ago, I started buying records again, the first being Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. My main interest in music nowadays is in Fusion Jazz, R&B, Funk and Soul Music from the early 1970's. I also got a decent Dual turntable from the 1980's to go with the nostalgic vibe.
To me, playing a record is a totally different and more conscious experience than playing a song on Spotify. Even just the necessity to remove the previous record before playing the next one feels archaic in these days where everything is available immediately. Limited availability is similiarly humbling: not owning every record I would like to, but also not even being able to acquire every record I'd like, as some are simply not available or expensive collector's items.
Then of course there is the haptic sensation, plus all the information you can get from studying the album cover. My generation's music discovery was full of surprises, when you had a record played for you at the record store that you mainly picked for the weird cover graphics or artist's name.
But the most important reason for me to buy records is to one day allow my daughter to discover this strange music from more than half a century ago that was always playing in the house when she was still young. Good luck trying to convince a teenager to have a listen at your Spotify playlist ;)