CDs are just digital files plus waste. Vinyl is a musical ritual.
vinyl is cool, but cd is the digital recording, mastered in a known manner, to a high degree. It's the most consistent form of product you will get from music. Plus it's a physically collectable thing. And it's cheap.
I'm not made of money over here.
I’m not made of money
Capitalism: "Oh, yes, you are."
the thing that capitism doesnt understand about me, is that i don't care about money.
Vinyls break easily and sound kinda meh, even with decent equipment. CDs have fairly good quality and are easy to store and handle. Honestly I get why people like vinyl, big discs are fun and tinkering with analog stuff is its own hobby, but when it comes to collecting I prefer CDs.
I like old vinyl because these are my grandparents' and parents' records which I have heard myself a few times in my childhood.
I don't get recording digital data, then writing it to an analog medium which is then sold 15 times more expensive than it historically was.
No one can take the music on your CD's from you. I bought loads if sings and albums from Google Music and they are all gone now
This is a reason to avoid DRM, not digital files in general.
(My condolences for being bitten, though.)
Google Music had DRM free downloads, so the DRM wasn’t the problem - it was that they didn’t download them before Google Music was shuttered.
No one can take my flacs either. 🐷🧇
RIP
🐷🧇
😢
I'm glad I saved my CDs, as I was able to rerip them to FLAC and undo the mistake my juvenile self made of ripping to WMA. I still keep the CDs to play in my car from time to time
CDs are digital files plus ownership.
Once you download a music file, nobody is taking it away from you.
And CDs can have DRM just like any other digital media.
No, a CD that carries the actual CD logo cannot have DRM. It is true that the music industry has often pushed 'enhanced' formats that look like CDs that do; SACD, for example.
Ownership is different to possession, and I want to actually own my music, not just possess the files.
I download my MP3 and FLAC files and then I own them and play them on any device I want.
There certainly are some services where you can legally download MP3 and FLAC files. Bandcamp, for example. If you download your music like that then, yes, you do own it.
But I'm not aware of anywhere you can get music from the major music labels nowadays (Amazon used to sell MP3s and so did Google Play Music, but neither does any more). If you do, I'd love to know.
On the other hand, you can still - although it's getting harder - buy CDs for major label artists and then you own the music (that copy of it).
True, CDs are the most reliable way to get the digital file.
7digital is a site where I've bought major label music and get the files. If it's not on bandcamp it's often on 7digital. They don't have everything though.
Thanks for the tip - they do seem to have a lot. I had assumed that the labels had made it unprofitable for that type of service to exist. I guess maybe it's simply that there is more money to be made from streaming.
Amazon does still sell digital music files, you just need to find the "digital music" section in Movies, Music and Games if that link doesn't work for you.
But you're right about google music, it got turned into youtube music and I'm pretty sure it doesn't allow purchasing and downloads. I'd imagine apple also still lets you buy music, but I've never actually used them before and don't plan to start now.
What is everyone's opinions on the sound quality of vinyl?
I understand the collectibility of physical media, and the novelty of owning a vinyl and the machine that plays them. The large art piece that is the case (and often the disc itself). Showing support for your favorite artists by owning physical media from them.
Those are great reasons to collect vinyl.
But a lot of my friends claim vinly is of higher audio quality than anything else, period. This is provably false, but it seems to be a common opinion.
How often have you seen this and what are your thoughts on it?
Technically CD quality digital is superior, but the recording and mixing can have a lot to do with it. For example, it could be that an decades old Dark Side Of The Moon on vinyl (played on proper equipment) could sound better than a modern remastered CD with maximized loudness (See the "loudness wars").
It's not impossible, although the loudness wars are pretty much over nowadays. All major music services and players have volume normalisation, many by default, so there's not much point to it any longer.
Also it's pretty tough to find a decades old record still in mint condition, and the sound quality of vinyl gets worse every time you play it.
and the sound quality of vinyl gets worse every time you play it.
If you handle them correctly, it will not happen to any noticeable degree in any of our lifetimes or the following generations. It is durable material.
Higher audio quality than CD? No, that is demonstrably false.
More pleasant to listen to than CD or other digital formats? Yes, that I agree with. It's entirely subjective, but I'm definitely not alone in the feeling. The fact it is hard to quantify is why lots of people don't "get" vinyl until they've sat and heard it on a decent system. Something about it is pleasing. As another commenter mentioned, it might just be the imperfections.
So I guess it's a bit of a philosophical question. If CDs technically sound better, but vinyl sounds more pleasing: does the vinyl then sound better? People tend to chase pleasure, and in the time it takes someone to explain how much lower the noise floor is on CD or how we can only perceive so many samples, etc, etc -- you could have been chilling with multiple records and had a great listening experience.
If it was just about the sound, then you could get the exact same results by recording the vinyl player directly to a lossless format and playing that back, but it wouldn't be quite the same. Big part of it is just the fact that you are using a vinyl player and these huge fragile disks that makes it an enjoyable experience by itself.
Yes, totally agree. Vinyl rips still lack something. A lot of it is about practice, which makes it harder to quantify.
Of course. There is no doubt that the ritual of handling the record and playing it on the turntable is a huge part of it. Personally it makes me appreciate the music more because it is kind of an effort to get it playing in the first place, and you just want to listen to the record in a session, instead of just having it as a backdrop which so much streamed music is.
IMO is just placebo effect. In a blind experiment, all else being equal, I doubt you would be able to tell the difference between a vinyl and a CD. That's my two cents
I know for a fact I would hear the difference -- but primarily because of the imperfections in the vinyl, as well as the different bass response. I can rule out placebo.
Something about it is pleasing. As another commenter mentioned, it might just be the imperfections.
I think it's the slight hissing sound you hear as the needle drags. That faint, slightly pink noise isn't dissimilar from white noise people use to go to sleep, and I think human brains like that sort of sound.
I know it's not highest quality.
For me, the imperfect sound is what makes a nicer experience. Slight hum, little pop once in a while, teensy skip, etc.
Not to mention that I'm far more inclined to listen to an entire album because of the need to interact with the vinyl to set the needle and flip sides.
At the risk of sounding critical of your hobby, to argue the imperfections improve the experience sounds somewhat culty.
I understand there is something akin to "character" which you don't get from something highly polished. I know when things sound too clean it can feel sterile.
I accept vinyl has a collectors value, but anything claims regarding preference come across as either pretentious or deluded (to me, as someone who probably can't tell the difference).
I don't proclaim that vinyl is superior or something everyone should listen to.
Just trying to convey how I hear it.
98% of my listening is my MP3 playing from my phone's Bluetooth.
Vinyl has a slow progression in quality degradation due to friction that creates a certain kind of sound warmth that is pleasing to our ears. This can also be relicated digitally, but the imperfections and feelings associated with the physical ritual actions of loading a record can't.
Vinyl just has more engagement going on despite the sound quality being lower. Kind of like how some people have fondness for fireplaces despite central heating being technically better at maintaining a warm temperature.
Some people confuse the extra engagement with sound quality because a lot of people just don't think things through.
Vinyl has a slow progression in quality degradation due to friction
With conventional record players with a mechanical head. I suppose that you could probably use an optical one -- I remember reading about that being used by archivists.
The IRENE system uses a high-powered confocal microscope that follows the groove path as the disc or cylinder (i.e. phonograph cylinder) rotates underneath it, thereby obtaining detailed images of the audio information.[9] Depending on whether the groove is cut laterally, vertically, or in a V-shape, the system may make use of tracking lasers or different lighting strategies to make the groove visible to the camera. The resulting images are then processed with software that converts the movement of the groove into a digital audio file.[10]
An advantage of the system over traditional stylus playback is that it is contactless, and so avoids damaging the audio carrier or wearing out the groove during playback.[1] It also allows for the reconstruction of already broken or damaged media such as cracked cylinders or delaminating lacquer discs, which cannot be played with a stylus. Media played on machines which are no longer produced can also be recovered.[6] Many skips or damaged areas can be reconstituted by IRENE without the noises that would be created by stylus playback.[5] However, it can also result in the reproduction of more noise, as imperfections in the groove are also more finely captured than with a stylus.
considers
If you can get multiple physical copies of an analog recording, you could probably scan them and use statistical analysis to combine information from the physical copies, eliminate damage from any one copy.
Yes, I was referring to the most common way of playing vinyl records with a physical needle.
Combining multiple records could give you an average, but it would both lose the things that make vinyl and experience like pops from dust specs and imperfections. Plus a cleaner copy could be had from the masters used to press the vinyl records. You know, the same master that is used to make exact duplicates for CDs.
Recreating an approximation of a lost master recording from multiple vinyl records with voice reduction on the imperfections would be an interesting idea, so my guess is someone has already done that 😉
that engagement materially impacts sound quality because you're actively listening.
It impacts the perception of sound quality, not the actual sound quality.
You could get engagement through digital audio files too, though.
But I'd argue that it doesn't affect the sound quality, but the enjoyment of the sound. The sound waves themselves don't actually change because we're actively engaging.
The best explanation I've seen is that music is mixed differently for CD/streaming and vinyl.
For mass market, the move has been to mix for louder bass and similar things. The idea being that it makes the music more popular. But it also makes it difficult to appreciate anything but the bass.
On vinyl, you can't max out bass like that, it won't work on the format. So they have to give it a normal mix instead, making it sound better. In theory CDs should sound better than vinyl, but because of the music production trends, it doesn't currently.
This is correct, although it's not the bass that is limited on vinyl; it's the dynamic range compression (or 'loudness') in general.
I like this take. it's probably also why I'm gravitating towards cassettes now, you don't need a special mix but you also can't just max the volume because magnetic media saturates and distorts quite quickly.
A new record sounds pretty good when played on a good turntable with a good cartridge, but it's not as good as a properly mixed CD or lossless audio file. A worn or dirty record sounds like crap. A cheap turntable will also sound like crap and a ceramic cartridge wears out records fairly quickly.
With a CD, there is very little difference in sound quality between the cheapest player you can find and a high end player. The CD will always sound the same until it's too worn out to play at all.
I like to buy older albums that were mastered for vinyl, like Steely Dan, some prog rock like Yes or Pink Floyd. It gets a lot closer to listening to how the artists would have been hearing their product
CD sound is better. But I like how big the pictures of the albums are with vinyl. Vinyl is more about the ritual though. With all the pop sounds and stuff I wouldn't prefer it over CD.
Either 0 difference from digital or worse due to skipping/bad record quality. Rap records are especially bad and I stopped buying them.
Personally, I buy them because my internet is unreliable, it makes for some nice decoration and it's nice to actually own something in 2024 (especially since Spotify keeps deleting random artists/songs from my playlists).
I enjoy the warmer sound of vinyl but I buy the albums I love on it because of the lack o convenience. I can't shuffle and I have to actually interact with it every 20ish minutes to flip or change discs. It makes me actually listen to music, track order, mix, and properly enjoy the work that went into the whole album making process.
So I use streaming when I just want something on in the background and vinyl when I want to properly listen to an album.
Vinyl is worse quality, the vinyl disk's height is a physical constraint that CDs / DVDs do not have.
Not an audiophile, but had experience with vinyl and CDs while growing up in the 90s and imo vinyl COULD sound better if you spent a lot of money on high end equipment. But with the equipment us normies had, the cds sounded much better. It had a much lower barrier if you didn't have a large amount of time and money to invest. I'd suspect things are similar now.
Vinyl sounds good, but has too much noise to be the best. Although that could just be my cat's fault, realistically - i spend a lot time removing hair from records.
I read somewhere that about 50% of vinyl owners don't have a player. Presumably that 50% only have very few records and bought them for the looks, but still.
I want to know what “other” is that is also clobbering CDs. Can’t say it’s streaming because it’s physical media. The article mentions that half a million cassettes were sold, but that doesn’t really answer the question. That “other” takes up a lot of space relative to CDs so I’m pretty curious.
I dug into the RIAA Source PDF the article references for what "other" means:
"Includes CD Singles, Cassettes, Vinyl Singles, DVD Audio, SACD"
Ahh, perfect, thanks, I genuinely appreciate it. I should have done that myself, shouldn’t I?
Eh, I have a lot of questions after articles, few are worth going down the rabbit hole for unless others show interest, no worries!
Not something I follow, but I recall reading that SACD is favored as being the highest-fidelity format generally available today (well, physical format...if you get something online, could be at whatever resolution you want).
I also recall reading -- probably a more-meaningful factor than the actual physical constraints -- that because the people who were buying them were rabid about audio quality and were annoyed by dynamic range compression, that the people mastering didn't make hot recordings, so the media format avoided the "loudness war".
googles
Hmm. Apparently not any more, at least not always:
At least for a little while SACD/DSD/24bit 96k releases were immune to loudness wars. However over the last 5 years or so I'm noticing a lot of high res releases, either remasters, remixes or new releases in high res have become victims of the loudness wars. The latest release of Electric Lady land is a prime example, horrible clipping and single digit DR ratings.
Why? These releases are not meant for portable headphone consumption why are they doing this? Why are supposedly trained audio engineers going along with this? Clipping and low DR ranges is a quantifineable error. People that buy high res releases will want full DR to play on their home audio system.
Why has this horrible practice infected what should be audiophile class recordings?
Honestly, digital music vendors should just include a dynamic range metric. Hell, let artists sell different versions of a song if they want. MP3 and I think all other popular formats have ReplayGain or equivalent, so one should be able to optimize the recording for reproduction accuracy rather than to just achieve a desired volume.
I'd assume it is for digital downloads.
If I am not purchasing LPs, I try to purchase MP3s/FLAC that I can copy and move around as I please.
I knew piracy was eating into music sales but poor artists and distributors only generating less than $2 of revenue in the US per year? That’s like 1 CD in a clearance sale. They should start a charity.
If you’re curious, nearly half a million cassettes sold last year, too, according to Billboard.
I'm more curious about who's still selling music on cassette and who's willing to buy it.
Prisoners.
Someone else told me that. What bullshit. "You can't have audio technology that was developed in the 1980s" is a fucking stupid punishment. Why not just make them listen to Edison cylinders?
I see a lot of folks on bandcamp who sells cassettes for instance
Do you know why they choose to sell cassettes rather than or maybe along with other formats?
Cheap to produce and stand out for folks getting into some bands.
Not for sure, but I have a few leads.
I've heard and discussed with artists who mentioned that producing vinyl was very expensive compared to cassettes, which are cheap and easy to DIY.
Then I'd add that cassettes have a retro appeal nowadays. Lastly, they are an analog format, opposite to the CD which is the 1:1 copy of the downloaded FLAC album downloaded from Bandcamp.
I guess it's just a promotional thing then. That makes sense.
I think there was a 99% invisible podcast episode about that, it's prison inmates. For some never-changed rule they are only allowed music on cassettes, so they are probably the target audience mainly.
Just a few years ago I had an old car with a cassette player/radio, and from time to time I enjoyed the cassette player with some leftover stuff, but in most cases I just used an FM transmitter
The prison system sucks in so many ways. Legal slavery with archaic rules that would be considered hate crimes or human rights violations if they happened to people in the U.S. who aren't incarcerated.
As far as old cars with cassette players. Like you said, you can use an FM transmitter, but I also remember having a fake cassette with an aux cable so you could plug it into a CD player headphone jack. I would bet they have a bluetooth version these days, so you don't have to listen to cassettes even in those cars.
That reminds me of something though. When I was a kid, we had a Toyota Corona station wagon with an 8-track player. My father had this converter device that you plugged into the 8-track and it had a little tray that you laid a cassette into so you could play it. I don't remember if the sound quality was worse than playing a cassette in a player designed for it.
Sure, there are transmitters without Bluetooth. I somehow preferred the SD card, as it would hold a few Gb of music and needed no internet connection. The only downside was if I was driving short trips only for a while, and it stuck with a 20-min long Deep Purple concert track every time :)
I had a friend with the cassette adapter for his 8 track player. I just brought my boombox with me in high school. It sounded better than the shitty stereo that came with my dad's 1972 Mercury Capri.
some bands, and their fans. you can make a cassette look pretty dope.
and i've heard prisoners often only have access to cassettes.
Wow. What is that ‘other’ physical medium? Is MiniDisc also coming back and beating CDs?
Some artists in the punk scene are putting out cassettes.
There are things like Super Audio CDs and MACDs etc... I believe there may even be some blue ray audio releases.
Those are kind of rare, though; can they really be outselling CDs by so much? Or maybe the author mislabeled the key and ‘other’ is supposed to be the sliver on top?
I don't know how widespread it is outside of metal, but I've been seeing more and more bands offering tapes. Sometimes a release is only on tape, other times the tape might be $6, the CD $15 and the LP $25, so there are different ties available for those who want a physical copy. I probably got 10 tapes or so within the last year.
Vinyl, which tends to be pricier than the newer format, also far outstripped CDs in actual money made, raking in $1.4 billion compared to $537 million from CDs.
Vinyl is definitely overpriced these days. I do love all the art and care that artists seem to put into their vinyl releases, but typically I'm spending $30-$50 on a new vinyl release. But what am I going to do? Not buy that limited edition colored vinyl gatefold with art and lyric pages?
Well, you could always just download the music, art and lyrics from the internet, since it is the year of our lord 2024
Yeah, at this point you're paying because it's a collector item, or to support the artist, not for the actual content of the package.
I also just really like the physical media. Putting on a record is ritualistic at this point.
I buy mine from the merch stand at the artist's show, they usually go for 20€-30€, even the limited edition ones.
I view vinyls as collectors items, not something you actually listen to. I still buy CDs because I hate the idea of subscription services.
yeah, because if you buy something digitally, it will get stolen from you.
CD's are real objects and not digital goods.
That wasn't the point being made.
Please explain. I'm still not seeing the point. Vinyl is outselling CDs because.... digital goods will be stolen from you? I don't get it.
The comment above ignored the article and is just talking how digital media can be revoked.
Then why did it start with "yeah, because..."?
I always thought it had more to do with the aesthetic of vinyls rather than any sort of ownership dilemma. A good chunk of my friends own multiple vinyl records but no record player. I also wonder what the production rates are like for vinyls vs CDs, are we producing about the same quantity of them?
For some people it’s definitely the aesthetic/collectible nature of vinyl. Anecdotally, for me, it’s for the listening pleasure. I’m no audiophile. I’m listening on potato speakers on a sub par turntable, but I like listening to records like I did when I was younger.
I do also love the much larger album sleeve artwork, but my primary drive in purchasing an album is to listen to it on my turntable.
Me too...I hate it when a band releases a record and they don't do anything to the jacket though.
Yo...I love vinyl but just because it's nice to have an analog physical copy...it doesn't sound "better" or worse. I just enjoy records.
I listen to lots and lots of streaming on bandcamp.
Vinyls are great, but I can't copy them to my phone so I still have to buy a CD with it.
As someone who used to be a member of what.cd, and still has a bunch of incredible sounding FLAC vinyl rips of albums, this definitely is not true.
I still reminisce about my Oink ratio. Seeded Rosetta Stone on a university connection. Access to the school's radio station's library.
Probably the closest I'll come to generational wealth, my grandchildren could have leeched music on my account and I'd still be positive.
It's not true that I cannot copy my vinyls to my computer? Okay how do I do that then? It just has the red and white left and right cables going to an amp, and then my receiver. Kinda new to vinyls over here
Maybe try Google? As I said, I downloaded them I didn't rip them myself. There was this person with the username "PBTHAL" that always had to best lossless vinyl rips, if you do a search that includes that name, you might find alternate download sources for them. I think they ran their own site where they posted all of their rips outside of what, but don't know if it's still there. They were also very thorough while explaining the process, equipment, cables, etc. for each and every rip. This person was really a perfectionist, and boy did it show. There were albums that they ripped and then refused to upload because they didn't feel their rip was perfect enough.
Absolute fucking legend.
I even have FLACs of reel-to-reel versions of all Zeppelin albums, as well as, Bowie, Dylan, et. al. and they sound fantastic. Don't ask me how it's done. And given the pedigree of that website, these people took the ripping process incredibly seriously.
Haha nice, that's an area of music collection as a hobby that I've never explored., and I can really appreciate that level of dedicstion. Thanks for letting me know, I'll see if I can even find my type of metal on there
There are usb turntables that let you rip your vinyl, but theyre usually not the highest quality turn tables. I like vintage tables because it adds to the atmosphere and there were fewer corners cut. You could probably get some separate equipment that would let your turn table talk to your computer.
TIL, thanks for pointing out the thing about quality. The table I've currently got sounds pretty nice (for never really having used anything else), so maybe I'll check out ones with USB and at least keep it around for copying!
Man do I miss what cd. I love RED. But what will always have a special place. I still have tons of merch I bought from what. T-shirts, coffee mug, koozie and so many rippy stickers. I still wear the shirts in my regular rotation
I've got a what.cd hoodie lying around somewhere. Wore that thing out for years, so it's falling apart at this point.
Well, there's still RED and it has almost has vinyl rip for every famous album. I wasn't a what cd member but RED has a huge collection. If you aren't in music trackers anymore you should checkout RED
Yeah but it's members only right? Frankly, I'm just too old and lazy and don't care enough about that stuff anymore to go through a whole interview process and shit.
Do they have PBTHAL vinyl rips? Those were my favorite by far. That person really knew WTF they were doing.
Such an amazing resource that was, not only did it have the albums available, but several different pressings, source media, and versions of each one. Something no commercial entity can come close to offering at any price.
I don't really buy vinyl to listen to it, but for the larger cover art and liner notes
The only vinyls I buy are from charity shops or because I love an album so much that I want it as a collection (I'd also buy the CD to actually listen to)
Yeah, I haven't bought a new record in a long time, and one of my most prized albums is a 1970 radio-played copy of The Kinks "Lola vs. Powerman and the MoneygoRound" complete with the dates and times they played Lola."
That is definitely something I loved about LPs. I used to have a big book of album cover art. I have no idea what happened to it unfortunately, but I used to pore over it. Liner notes are less of an issue with the internet, but the shrinking of art was a very unfortunate result of CDs.
I remember getting a copy of Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" that came with a whole-ass newspaper they made folded into the liner with lyrics and pictures. That's something you can only do with vinyl.
One of my favorite things about vinyl is having to flip the record over. I think it demands more active and respectful listening.
Many albums, especially comedy albums, relied on you flipping over the record. They would have jokes that talked about things on the other side. There's a Firesign Theater album where one of the characters says, "wait a minute, didn't I say that on the other side of the record?" There's a Monty Python album with a locked groove that says, "oh sorry, squire. I scratched the record." Which is brilliant.
Edit: There's another Monty Python album that has two sets of grooves and what you hear depends on which groove the needle hits first. Again, absolutely brilliant.
More famously, the end of the Beatles' peak album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band contains a locked groove which was snippets of recordings mashed-up in a bit of short multi-track recording experimentation. The CD only repeats it 2 or 3 times. The record was designed to play indefinitely.
So yeah, CDs took that away from recordings, but on the other hand, it's a lot harder to damage a CD and get an unintentional looping segment.
I love that on the CD version of Full Moon Fever they added a bit to the end of Running Down a Dream telling CD listeners they're going to take a break so that people on vinyl and cassette can switch to the other side.
I was thinking about investing in a vinyl player recently and was really sad to learn Vinyl is actually worse for audio quality. The standard thickness of the disk is a physical limitation for frequencies which means the sound gets "squished."
There's nothing stopping you still! I find the ritual of placing the disc and needle and turning it over halfway through is quite satisfying. It really makes me feel as though the music is more valuable and I'll be more likely to actively listen rather than if I just put it on my phone with the tap of a button
Not only that, but all the "better sound" arguments are just about all the mistakes in the audio, like scratches and bumps.
Digital has no mistakes, it will always sound the way it is intended.
But of course some times "the way it is intended" is not the preferable way (see my other comment to OP).
There's Audacity & co. for that.
Yeah, vinyl is more about the haptic experience of putting that giant black disc onto the player and watching the needle slowly scrape away that 30-40 dollar item. It's not about the sound quality. I think with listening to vinyl listening to music becomes more of an experience, because of all the manual steps involved. And with albums these days artists seem to put more effort into them then at the time the CD came around.
that 30-40 dollar item.
Woah. Weren't they, what, 2$ a piece before CD?
They were definitely cheaper than they are now. But most of them also were produced much cheaper than they are now.
And they were also sold at incredible volume back in the day, for a couple of generations just about every household had a record player or two and shelves of record collections to play on them.
Nowadays vinyl is regaining popularity among people who buy physical music, but that is still a small fraction of the general public who have largely moved on to soft formats.
That's because it's getting harder to find CD's plus the majority of people buy digital
This is only new vinyl, right? In my town, used records are king, by far. In fact, I probably buy 10+ used records for every new record.
I wish this was true for me, but I only have one record shop within 45-minute drive of my house (and their prices and selection are far from competitive), so I wind up buying pretty much all my records online through Discogs. Frequently, the new represses are just flat-out cheaper than the vintage vinyl, especially for a lot of the more esoteric albums I buy. For instance, even though they're not really hard to find, for Black Sabbath's first four albums I paid just as much for mediocre, water-damaged copies of Sabbath and Volume 4 as I did for brand-new represses of Paranoid and Master of Reality. If you actually buy your vinyl to listen to, buying used online can be a pretty big gamble as far as quality, so for the same price, I frequently wind up consciously choosing the new vinyl over the used copy.
Even though I do frequently manage to package one or two cheap used albums with each new album purchased to take advantage of that sweet "media mail" shipping, it's not even close to a 10:1 used:new ratio.
Edit: I suppose now that I think about it, I'm starting from a pretty decent used vinyl collection from my days in the early 2000's as a hipster music snob before used vinyl got nearly so expensive, so my collection overall has much more used vinyl than my current buying habits would indicate (I probably have 200 albums, of which 30-40 were purchased new in the past 3-4 years)
The only record store I ever go to is actually a front for a weed store lol . Even though weed is legal in Canada the legal stuff is the worst and most expensive.
Even though weed is legal in Canada the legal stuff is the worst and most expensive.
Give it time. I'm far from a connoisseur, as these days I mostly just partake in edibles 1-2 times per week, but California has some pretty sweet weed prices, at least compared to my college/grad-school days. I saw an ad on a billboard just yesterday for 10 USD Eighths at a pretty reputable shop in my town, and I think I usually pay 35 USD for a pack of 10 2-dose THC:CBD gummies (compared to 40 USD for an eighth of mediocre bud in the early 2000's).
As people get less paranoid about enforcement and local governments ease up on restrictions, the price should come down and the quality should go up (although this probably depends a lot on local government, so who knows, really)
I hope so. Right now I can get 3.5 grams of shatter for the same price as 1 gram at a legal place . And 500 mg of edibles for the same price as 50 mg . It's crazy high prices, mostly only casual users by from a legal source where I live and its been legal since 2018 .
I wanna go even further than retro. Gimme the hottest new single on wax cylinder for my phonograph..
I could get back into cassette tapes.
I love cassette tapes. I bought a bible on cassette at a resale store. Great way to get cheap tapes for recording over with music
ngl...
And on the fifth day, god said...I get knocked down, but I get up again. You are never gonna keep me down.
Not me, I don't miss rewinding them shits. CDs are still good though, I still buy those because you can't go wrong by having it on the most highly-detailed and durable medium.
My first CD I bought in the mid 80's still plays fine. The selection of CDs was paltry and the only thing I could find at my parent's town that I was remotely interested in was ZZ Top's Eliminator.
Haha that's funny because I bought that ZZ Top album on cassette as a kid, one of my first music purchases.
And later due to lack of options, I bought Fabulous Thunderbirds "Tuff Enuf".
I never purchased a single cassette the entire time they were popular. I would buy records and tape them ( I was a Maxell person but did have some TDK) so that I could listen in the car or in my giant boombox that had APLD which was skip to next song.
A few of the artists I follow put their new releases on cassette.
I'm fairly certain most people who likes vinyl is because of the collection aspect. The leaflets and photos are nice to look at while you're listening.
That's something with vinyl records is that they come in big sleeves with nice big prints of the album art and such. That's great stuff for a music buff to enjoy.
When my dad died, I told my brother, who is very difficult to deal with, to just take whatever he wanted from my dad's vast collection of things and I'd deal with the rest. One of the things he took was an original Edison cylinder phonograph with a bunch of cylinders. I was okay with him taking it since I gave him permission, but what annoys me is that the phonograph was missing the stylus and he has never replaced it. It's inside a wooden case with a lid, which he keeps closed, and the cylinders and the horn just sit next to it.
Why the fuck did he take it?
I don't even have room for it, but if he's not going to even display it properly, let alone get a single part that is needed for it to work, what's the point? Just sell it if you're not going to do anything with it.
Only a few more years now till the retro sound of CDs comes back into style. I realize vinyl is a great and unique user experience with a specific timber, and more enjoyable to collect.
It's kind of funny when you hear about the "analog warmth" when albums were being digitally mastered as early as the late 70s... And pretty much all re-releases are digitally remastered.
Only a few more years now till the retro sound of CDs comes back into style.
I liked the artwork on the disks themselves, and the feeling of opening a box, taking the disk out with that cracking sound, pushing a button on the drive and seeing and hearing it open, and then the sound of spinning when it's being read.
Every bit as "warm" as vinyl in my opinion (born in 1996, so of course it is).
the retro sound of CDs
Your mistake is equivocating digital with analog. There is nothing "retro sounding" about CDs, you can download lossless digital versions of albums that are identical to what you'll find on a CD.
I'm a professional audio engineer for a living, with a masters in the subject, it was sarcasm lol...
Exactly, although CD isn't so much "retro" as it is a high frequency, high dynamic range audio recording. The only reason vinyl sounds "warm" is because their dynamic range & frequency is compressed so the needle doesn't bounce out of its groove.
While it's possible for a CD to receive a terrible master, if the mastering across formats is the same and other biases are eliminated (i.e. proper A/B testing) then CD will be objectively better sounding every single time.
Retro sound of a CD?
They sound exactly the same as the digital releases. Only audiophiles up there own arses believe that they can hear a difference. Vinyls sound different but for obvious reasons.
I think you missed my sarcasm...
Edited to add: most CDs sound the same as their digital releases (assuming they had the same master which I've found isn't always true), but occasionally you can actually get higher resolution, up to 96k/24 bit, which do sound different depending on your playback device.
Most of the difference is likely due to the nature of the DA filter being applied during playback, as I certainly won't notice the noise floor between 16-24 bit, and any frequency difference is far far behind my range of hearing.
If you aren't familiar with what I'm referring too, different DA implementations use varying filtering techniques, some have a slight roll off in the upper frequency range to improve the accuracy of transient response, while others use a flatter frequency response sacrificing the transient. Newer DAs from some manufacturers allow you to select which option you prefer. At double and quad sample rates this can largely become a moot point as any sacrifice to the frequency response is far out of the range of human hearing.
I'm a music collector and saw this coming. "Music" went from a product you buy, into a service you pay to gain access to. You don't pay for music, you pay daddy Spotify for access to HIS music.
Vinyl has turned back into the only form of physical music collection.
Depends what you're into. CD sales are more than alive and well in the kpop/jpop circles and there isn't a lot of vinyl to find there.
I don't buy vinyl, but I do buy CDs for albums I want. I have (what I believe are well-founded) trust issues with services supplying digital copies.
I will say I have bought some nice, normal mp3s in the past from Amazon. Those are fine. But generally I want the discs. I'm going to rip them immediately to mp3, and store the discs away, but I still want them.
I did recently buy a favorite band's entire back catalog on CD, because I want to own a non-revocable copy of their work. Plus it felt pretty good "I give you money, you give me music on CD" felt way less icky than "I watch commercials for fraudulent products and services chosen by a nakedly hostile algorithm, evil megacorporation optionally pays you."
I hate subscription services, for the cost of a Spotify subscription I can but one or two CD albums a month.
I buy a vinyl here or there but just to collect. I listen to my CDs.
I tried Spotify but it only has about 70% of the albums in my collection. I used to love google play music because you could upload your media and it would be included in your library.
I liked Google play too. I was not pleased when they moved to YouTube music and made accessing your own music a total pain in the balls.
Hm. "do you want 2 vinyl nuts" doesn't have the same ring to it.
This is dumb. Just going to be used for collectors editions with different songs and shit.
To each their own I guess.
Something something piracy doesnt matter, something something make a good product at a fair price, something something provide convenience. What was i talking about again?
Okay, is it just me or is the total global revenue for physical media music less than $2 USD a year? I must be reading it wrong.
It’s probably in billions.
Nah, that's about right, I paid like maybe 20 cents for a cd collection on graigslist, don't know who bought all those vinyls though
Poeple jerking off CDs here dont understand down sampling and the average quality of CDS. they think that just because it is digitally mastered that it therefore must be the master that is put on CDS, its not.
I can't hear anything above 20 kHz, and neither can most people. CD audio is passed through a 20 kHz lowpass filter. It is then sampled at 44 kHz. Due to the Nyquist Shannon Spamling Theorum, when sound is digitally sampled at just above twice the rate of the source audio, converting it back to analog perfectly reproduces the original waveform. And I do mean perfectly. The exact same waveform. (The extra 4 kHz is to prevent artifacts in frequencies very close to 20 kHz.)
Therefore CD audio is perfect unless you think you can hear above 20 kHz. (Spoiler: you can't) There are a few good YouTube videos on this topic, and the best ones are very mathy.
Is there something I'm missing? Do I need to educate myself some more?
I don't know shit about fuck, but you explanation seems correct.
I do remember hearing that precisely because of the limitations of vinyl compared to CD, music is mastered differently for each medium. So the CD master of a certain song might be more compressed (dynamic compression, not digital compression) to make it sound "louder", while the vinyl release has a wider dynamic range. So some people might prefer the vinyl version because it actually does sound different to the CD version.
Keep in mind tho, I might be spreading misinformation here.
The loudness wars were definitely a thing; you are correct. But that was a choice and not a limitation of the medium. Plenty of CDs were not produced that way. But that's not what the OC was talking about. They were talking about down sampling, not dynamic range compression.
You are correct, CDs can reproduce the human audio spectrum perfectly, IF AND ONLY IF certain rules are followed, and I think that's why earlier CDs sounded weird. For example: how good were low pass filters when digital sound first arrived?
I really don't care to comment anymore on your FUD.
I hate to tell you, but all that vinyl is digitally mastered as well.
yes, but generally the digital master is not what the recordings are made fromm you do not contradict a single thing i said.
Keep kidding yourself that you can hear the difference.
Vinyls have their appeal but they get dusty, scratched, they skip etc. Only snobs truly think that they sound better.
Digital music can be taken as easily as it can be given.
CDs are the best compromise. They have sound quality as good as digital but you also get the lyrics and artwork that come with a vinyl, they're also much easier to store. The best thing though, is that if I get bored of a CD, I can sell it or even just give it away for free, you can't do that with digital music.
I'm a (former) audio engineer and I can't tell the difference. My professors used to laugh at audiophiles who spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars for stereo equipment because we were taught to mix things so that they sound good in a car as well as a perfectly quiet room. In fact, we were told that after we finished a master, we should test it by putting it in our car and driving around to make sure the mix was audible in the ways you and the band wanted.
I still really like vinyl because I like the ritual of the whole thing, but I don't spend money on it because it's way too expensive and everything you hear is almost certainly mastered digitally and likely recorded and mixed digitally, negating the whole "warmth" factor.
Digital music can be taken as easily as it can be given.
Digital does not always mean DRM. You can pry my bandcamp FLACs from my cold dead hands. Physical media nowadays is more about the experience than functionality. Maybe there are snobs who claim that vinyls are somehow functionally superior, but generally the people who use vinyls or CDs or tapes instead of digital are really just looking for that physical experience in a highly digitalized world.
They have sound quality as good as digital
CD quality is actually superior to streaming services like spotify (I personally can't tell the difference tho).
Hipsters paying 2-3x as much for a vinyl LP which objectively has worse audio quality than a CD.
Most of the records I buy come with bandcamp codes. I can play the flac files if I want digital audio, physical media for me is about the thing itself. Often get full sized posters and patches. Shit I'll buy a tape over the cd too
Legit didn't know people still bought music. CDs though? How does anyone still have cd players, and why. Vinyl is a hipster fad now so I guess that explains records.
I have an external CD/DVD player that is used solely to rip CDs and add to my media server. I abhor renting music and ripping a CD gives me the format and quality I like (!1000kbps flac) and future proofs me if tech limits change down the road. I used to rip to ogg but a few years ago I reripped about 500 CDs to flac.
yup, sadly many of the bands/artists i listen to don't really offer their music as physicals, but there's also no way i'm gonna spend 20 bucks on an album just to listen to like 3 of the songs ever.
i have a weird way of listening to music.
My car has a CD player. It sounds a lot better than the radio or any streaming service's compressed audio. I used to have a SiriusXM subscription and their audio quality was absolute garbage. I don't pay for any streaming music services now, and have no plans to ever do so.
I buy CDs of every band I like, because I know that music will last in its perfect quality form for decades and nobody but burglars can take it from me. I use my blu-ray burner to rip them to high-bitrate MP3s for phone and Plex library usage.
I also have a pile of records that I don't listen to because I don't have room to set up my record player right now.
I don't think it's a hipster thing anymore, I understand why: aesthetically vinyl are nicer than cds. You have a large cardboard with artworks. I might buy one from an artist whom art I like, and never actually play it.
That's pretty hipster
:-D, fair enough
my dad has a huge collection of CDs he started in the 80s. and he's not gonna stop buying every single CD that his favourite bands release.
he rips them onto his ipod and his phone. great way to efficiently own music and get some pretty cool artwork.
so from what i can tell, no one (that i know of) buys CDs to play them out of a playback device, just to own your library.
I don’t think vinyls are hipster. In the age of music digitalization, it is nice to own a physical piece of media, in addition to being able to support your artist more directly. Also it looks nice.
concidering walmart doesn't sell normal cd players in store but does sell record players, I'm not surprized.
It's to bad there's no good record players made anymore. Or cassette decks. It's all the cheap bottom of the barrel mechanisms now. No quality Japanese equipment like there used to be.
Reloop/pioneer/insert 100 other brands here: am I a joke to you
I found this small community just a few days ago: !cd_collectors@lemmy.sdf.org
Thought it was interesting, and curious. I did not know that CDs are considered by some as collectible.
Nice find, it is weird that I'm now a collector because I still have all the CDs I've bought, and I still buy one from time to time
Indeed! Apparently I too have unwittingly been growing my collection since 1991. Of course back then we just called it "buying my music".
I would show it off to that community but it's just stacked in cardboard boxes (alphabetically, I'm not an animal), not nicely curated and organized and dusted weekly in pride of place. Also, I've never counted, but it must number in the several hundred; I wouldn't want to overwhelm any fledgling enthusiasts there. ;)
why have streaming and not radio?
Vinyls are purely treasured for their resell value.
CDs are just digital files plus waste. Vinyl is a musical ritual.
vinyl is cool, but cd is the digital recording, mastered in a known manner, to a high degree. It's the most consistent form of product you will get from music. Plus it's a physically collectable thing. And it's cheap.
I'm not made of money over here.
Capitalism: "Oh, yes, you are."
the thing that capitism doesnt understand about me, is that i don't care about money.
Vinyls break easily and sound kinda meh, even with decent equipment. CDs have fairly good quality and are easy to store and handle. Honestly I get why people like vinyl, big discs are fun and tinkering with analog stuff is its own hobby, but when it comes to collecting I prefer CDs.
I like old vinyl because these are my grandparents' and parents' records which I have heard myself a few times in my childhood.
I don't get recording digital data, then writing it to an analog medium which is then sold 15 times more expensive than it historically was.
No one can take the music on your CD's from you. I bought loads if sings and albums from Google Music and they are all gone now
This is a reason to avoid DRM, not digital files in general.
(My condolences for being bitten, though.)
Google Music had DRM free downloads, so the DRM wasn’t the problem - it was that they didn’t download them before Google Music was shuttered.
No one can take my flacs either. 🐷🧇
RIP
😢
I'm glad I saved my CDs, as I was able to rerip them to FLAC and undo the mistake my juvenile self made of ripping to WMA. I still keep the CDs to play in my car from time to time
CDs are digital files plus ownership.
Once you download a music file, nobody is taking it away from you.
And CDs can have DRM just like any other digital media.
No, a CD that carries the actual CD logo cannot have DRM. It is true that the music industry has often pushed 'enhanced' formats that look like CDs that do; SACD, for example.
Ownership is different to possession, and I want to actually own my music, not just possess the files.
I download my MP3 and FLAC files and then I own them and play them on any device I want.
There certainly are some services where you can legally download MP3 and FLAC files. Bandcamp, for example. If you download your music like that then, yes, you do own it.
But I'm not aware of anywhere you can get music from the major music labels nowadays (Amazon used to sell MP3s and so did Google Play Music, but neither does any more). If you do, I'd love to know.
On the other hand, you can still - although it's getting harder - buy CDs for major label artists and then you own the music (that copy of it).
True, CDs are the most reliable way to get the digital file.
7digital is a site where I've bought major label music and get the files. If it's not on bandcamp it's often on 7digital. They don't have everything though.
Thanks for the tip - they do seem to have a lot. I had assumed that the labels had made it unprofitable for that type of service to exist. I guess maybe it's simply that there is more money to be made from streaming.
Amazon does still sell digital music files, you just need to find the "digital music" section in Movies, Music and Games if that link doesn't work for you.
But you're right about google music, it got turned into youtube music and I'm pretty sure it doesn't allow purchasing and downloads. I'd imagine apple also still lets you buy music, but I've never actually used them before and don't plan to start now.
While I agree with you, I still want to be able to buy CDs.
I do miss caring about my CD collection. I still have them but I have nothing to play them on.
What is everyone's opinions on the sound quality of vinyl?
I understand the collectibility of physical media, and the novelty of owning a vinyl and the machine that plays them. The large art piece that is the case (and often the disc itself). Showing support for your favorite artists by owning physical media from them.
Those are great reasons to collect vinyl.
But a lot of my friends claim vinly is of higher audio quality than anything else, period. This is provably false, but it seems to be a common opinion.
How often have you seen this and what are your thoughts on it?
Technically CD quality digital is superior, but the recording and mixing can have a lot to do with it. For example, it could be that an decades old Dark Side Of The Moon on vinyl (played on proper equipment) could sound better than a modern remastered CD with maximized loudness (See the "loudness wars").
It's not impossible, although the loudness wars are pretty much over nowadays. All major music services and players have volume normalisation, many by default, so there's not much point to it any longer.
Also it's pretty tough to find a decades old record still in mint condition, and the sound quality of vinyl gets worse every time you play it.
If you handle them correctly, it will not happen to any noticeable degree in any of our lifetimes or the following generations. It is durable material.
Higher audio quality than CD? No, that is demonstrably false.
More pleasant to listen to than CD or other digital formats? Yes, that I agree with. It's entirely subjective, but I'm definitely not alone in the feeling. The fact it is hard to quantify is why lots of people don't "get" vinyl until they've sat and heard it on a decent system. Something about it is pleasing. As another commenter mentioned, it might just be the imperfections.
So I guess it's a bit of a philosophical question. If CDs technically sound better, but vinyl sounds more pleasing: does the vinyl then sound better? People tend to chase pleasure, and in the time it takes someone to explain how much lower the noise floor is on CD or how we can only perceive so many samples, etc, etc -- you could have been chilling with multiple records and had a great listening experience.
If it was just about the sound, then you could get the exact same results by recording the vinyl player directly to a lossless format and playing that back, but it wouldn't be quite the same. Big part of it is just the fact that you are using a vinyl player and these huge fragile disks that makes it an enjoyable experience by itself.
Yes, totally agree. Vinyl rips still lack something. A lot of it is about practice, which makes it harder to quantify.
Of course. There is no doubt that the ritual of handling the record and playing it on the turntable is a huge part of it. Personally it makes me appreciate the music more because it is kind of an effort to get it playing in the first place, and you just want to listen to the record in a session, instead of just having it as a backdrop which so much streamed music is.
IMO is just placebo effect. In a blind experiment, all else being equal, I doubt you would be able to tell the difference between a vinyl and a CD. That's my two cents
I know for a fact I would hear the difference -- but primarily because of the imperfections in the vinyl, as well as the different bass response. I can rule out placebo.
I think it's the slight hissing sound you hear as the needle drags. That faint, slightly pink noise isn't dissimilar from white noise people use to go to sleep, and I think human brains like that sort of sound.
I know it's not highest quality.
For me, the imperfect sound is what makes a nicer experience. Slight hum, little pop once in a while, teensy skip, etc.
Not to mention that I'm far more inclined to listen to an entire album because of the need to interact with the vinyl to set the needle and flip sides.
At the risk of sounding critical of your hobby, to argue the imperfections improve the experience sounds somewhat culty.
I understand there is something akin to "character" which you don't get from something highly polished. I know when things sound too clean it can feel sterile.
I accept vinyl has a collectors value, but anything claims regarding preference come across as either pretentious or deluded (to me, as someone who probably can't tell the difference).
I don't proclaim that vinyl is superior or something everyone should listen to.
Just trying to convey how I hear it.
98% of my listening is my MP3 playing from my phone's Bluetooth.
Vinyl has a slow progression in quality degradation due to friction that creates a certain kind of sound warmth that is pleasing to our ears. This can also be relicated digitally, but the imperfections and feelings associated with the physical ritual actions of loading a record can't.
Vinyl just has more engagement going on despite the sound quality being lower. Kind of like how some people have fondness for fireplaces despite central heating being technically better at maintaining a warm temperature.
Some people confuse the extra engagement with sound quality because a lot of people just don't think things through.
With conventional record players with a mechanical head. I suppose that you could probably use an optical one -- I remember reading about that being used by archivists.
google
Yeah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable
The thing I think I remember reading about was apparently this related thing:
IRENE
considers
If you can get multiple physical copies of an analog recording, you could probably scan them and use statistical analysis to combine information from the physical copies, eliminate damage from any one copy.
Yes, I was referring to the most common way of playing vinyl records with a physical needle.
Combining multiple records could give you an average, but it would both lose the things that make vinyl and experience like pops from dust specs and imperfections. Plus a cleaner copy could be had from the masters used to press the vinyl records. You know, the same master that is used to make exact duplicates for CDs.
Recreating an approximation of a lost master recording from multiple vinyl records with voice reduction on the imperfections would be an interesting idea, so my guess is someone has already done that 😉
that engagement materially impacts sound quality because you're actively listening.
It impacts the perception of sound quality, not the actual sound quality.
You could get engagement through digital audio files too, though.
But I'd argue that it doesn't affect the sound quality, but the enjoyment of the sound. The sound waves themselves don't actually change because we're actively engaging.
The best explanation I've seen is that music is mixed differently for CD/streaming and vinyl.
For mass market, the move has been to mix for louder bass and similar things. The idea being that it makes the music more popular. But it also makes it difficult to appreciate anything but the bass.
On vinyl, you can't max out bass like that, it won't work on the format. So they have to give it a normal mix instead, making it sound better. In theory CDs should sound better than vinyl, but because of the music production trends, it doesn't currently.
This is correct, although it's not the bass that is limited on vinyl; it's the dynamic range compression (or 'loudness') in general.
Published 1989, posted on YouTube 17 yards ago:
https://youtu.be/3Gmex_4hreQ
I like this take. it's probably also why I'm gravitating towards cassettes now, you don't need a special mix but you also can't just max the volume because magnetic media saturates and distorts quite quickly.
A new record sounds pretty good when played on a good turntable with a good cartridge, but it's not as good as a properly mixed CD or lossless audio file. A worn or dirty record sounds like crap. A cheap turntable will also sound like crap and a ceramic cartridge wears out records fairly quickly.
With a CD, there is very little difference in sound quality between the cheapest player you can find and a high end player. The CD will always sound the same until it's too worn out to play at all.
I like to buy older albums that were mastered for vinyl, like Steely Dan, some prog rock like Yes or Pink Floyd. It gets a lot closer to listening to how the artists would have been hearing their product
CD sound is better. But I like how big the pictures of the albums are with vinyl. Vinyl is more about the ritual though. With all the pop sounds and stuff I wouldn't prefer it over CD.
Either 0 difference from digital or worse due to skipping/bad record quality. Rap records are especially bad and I stopped buying them.
Personally, I buy them because my internet is unreliable, it makes for some nice decoration and it's nice to actually own something in 2024 (especially since Spotify keeps deleting random artists/songs from my playlists).
I enjoy the warmer sound of vinyl but I buy the albums I love on it because of the lack o convenience. I can't shuffle and I have to actually interact with it every 20ish minutes to flip or change discs. It makes me actually listen to music, track order, mix, and properly enjoy the work that went into the whole album making process.
So I use streaming when I just want something on in the background and vinyl when I want to properly listen to an album.
Vinyl is worse quality, the vinyl disk's height is a physical constraint that CDs / DVDs do not have.
Not an audiophile, but had experience with vinyl and CDs while growing up in the 90s and imo vinyl COULD sound better if you spent a lot of money on high end equipment. But with the equipment us normies had, the cds sounded much better. It had a much lower barrier if you didn't have a large amount of time and money to invest. I'd suspect things are similar now.
Vinyl sounds good, but has too much noise to be the best. Although that could just be my cat's fault, realistically - i spend a lot time removing hair from records.
I read somewhere that about 50% of vinyl owners don't have a player. Presumably that 50% only have very few records and bought them for the looks, but still.
And I bet horse carriages outsold the Ford Model-T this year too
i wouldnt say vinyl is comparable to horse drawn carriages.
Because CD is a medium for data shrinking in popularity and vinyl is a token of being cool growing in popularity, of course it does.
Just waiting for wax cylinders to come back
Hello Internet tried it out once.
I think of this clip every single time Chris Pirillo pops up in pop culture somewhere.
I want to know what “other” is that is also clobbering CDs. Can’t say it’s streaming because it’s physical media. The article mentions that half a million cassettes were sold, but that doesn’t really answer the question. That “other” takes up a lot of space relative to CDs so I’m pretty curious.
I dug into the RIAA Source PDF the article references for what "other" means:
"Includes CD Singles, Cassettes, Vinyl Singles, DVD Audio, SACD"
Ahh, perfect, thanks, I genuinely appreciate it. I should have done that myself, shouldn’t I?
Eh, I have a lot of questions after articles, few are worth going down the rabbit hole for unless others show interest, no worries!
Not something I follow, but I recall reading that SACD is favored as being the highest-fidelity format generally available today (well, physical format...if you get something online, could be at whatever resolution you want).
I also recall reading -- probably a more-meaningful factor than the actual physical constraints -- that because the people who were buying them were rabid about audio quality and were annoyed by dynamic range compression, that the people mastering didn't make hot recordings, so the media format avoided the "loudness war".
googles
Hmm. Apparently not any more, at least not always:
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/why-have-the-loudness-wars-creeped-into-high-res-releases.865982/
Honestly, digital music vendors should just include a dynamic range metric. Hell, let artists sell different versions of a song if they want. MP3 and I think all other popular formats have ReplayGain or equivalent, so one should be able to optimize the recording for reproduction accuracy rather than to just achieve a desired volume.
I'd assume it is for digital downloads.
If I am not purchasing LPs, I try to purchase MP3s/FLAC that I can copy and move around as I please.
I knew piracy was eating into music sales but poor artists and distributors only generating less than $2 of revenue in the US per year? That’s like 1 CD in a clearance sale. They should start a charity.
I'm more curious about who's still selling music on cassette and who's willing to buy it.
Prisoners.
Someone else told me that. What bullshit. "You can't have audio technology that was developed in the 1980s" is a fucking stupid punishment. Why not just make them listen to Edison cylinders?
I see a lot of folks on bandcamp who sells cassettes for instance
Do you know why they choose to sell cassettes rather than or maybe along with other formats?
Cheap to produce and stand out for folks getting into some bands.
Not for sure, but I have a few leads.
I've heard and discussed with artists who mentioned that producing vinyl was very expensive compared to cassettes, which are cheap and easy to DIY.
Then I'd add that cassettes have a retro appeal nowadays. Lastly, they are an analog format, opposite to the CD which is the 1:1 copy of the downloaded FLAC album downloaded from Bandcamp.
Cheap short runs. National will do 50 unit orders and you can sell em at 5-7$ and you’re still doubling your money on tour tapes.
But do enough people still have functional cassette players?
idk how many people have functional tape decks but you can still buy new production component and portable ones and there's a healthy used market.
I've seen a few bands release a limited number of cassettes recently. For example, Rancid is selling Honor Is All We Know on cassette.
https://rancid.store/product/17864/honor-is-all-we-know-cassette
I guess it's just a promotional thing then. That makes sense.
I think there was a 99% invisible podcast episode about that, it's prison inmates. For some never-changed rule they are only allowed music on cassettes, so they are probably the target audience mainly.
Just a few years ago I had an old car with a cassette player/radio, and from time to time I enjoyed the cassette player with some leftover stuff, but in most cases I just used an FM transmitter
The prison system sucks in so many ways. Legal slavery with archaic rules that would be considered hate crimes or human rights violations if they happened to people in the U.S. who aren't incarcerated.
As far as old cars with cassette players. Like you said, you can use an FM transmitter, but I also remember having a fake cassette with an aux cable so you could plug it into a CD player headphone jack. I would bet they have a bluetooth version these days, so you don't have to listen to cassettes even in those cars.
That reminds me of something though. When I was a kid, we had a Toyota Corona station wagon with an 8-track player. My father had this converter device that you plugged into the 8-track and it had a little tray that you laid a cassette into so you could play it. I don't remember if the sound quality was worse than playing a cassette in a player designed for it.
Sure, there are transmitters without Bluetooth. I somehow preferred the SD card, as it would hold a few Gb of music and needed no internet connection. The only downside was if I was driving short trips only for a while, and it stuck with a 20-min long Deep Purple concert track every time :)
I had a friend with the cassette adapter for his 8 track player. I just brought my boombox with me in high school. It sounded better than the shitty stereo that came with my dad's 1972 Mercury Capri.
some bands, and their fans. you can make a cassette look pretty dope.
and i've heard prisoners often only have access to cassettes.
Wow. What is that ‘other’ physical medium? Is MiniDisc also coming back and beating CDs?
Some artists in the punk scene are putting out cassettes.
There are things like Super Audio CDs and MACDs etc... I believe there may even be some blue ray audio releases.
Those are kind of rare, though; can they really be outselling CDs by so much? Or maybe the author mislabeled the key and ‘other’ is supposed to be the sliver on top?
I don't know how widespread it is outside of metal, but I've been seeing more and more bands offering tapes. Sometimes a release is only on tape, other times the tape might be $6, the CD $15 and the LP $25, so there are different ties available for those who want a physical copy. I probably got 10 tapes or so within the last year.
Vinyl is definitely overpriced these days. I do love all the art and care that artists seem to put into their vinyl releases, but typically I'm spending $30-$50 on a new vinyl release. But what am I going to do? Not buy that limited edition colored vinyl gatefold with art and lyric pages?
Well, you could always just download the music, art and lyrics from the internet, since it is the year of our lord 2024
Yeah, at this point you're paying because it's a collector item, or to support the artist, not for the actual content of the package.
I also just really like the physical media. Putting on a record is ritualistic at this point.
I buy mine from the merch stand at the artist's show, they usually go for 20€-30€, even the limited edition ones.
I view vinyls as collectors items, not something you actually listen to. I still buy CDs because I hate the idea of subscription services.
A whole $1.91!! Wow!
yeah, because if you buy something digitally, it will get stolen from you.
CD's are real objects and not digital goods.
That wasn't the point being made.
Please explain. I'm still not seeing the point. Vinyl is outselling CDs because.... digital goods will be stolen from you? I don't get it.
The comment above ignored the article and is just talking how digital media can be revoked.
Then why did it start with "yeah, because..."?
I always thought it had more to do with the aesthetic of vinyls rather than any sort of ownership dilemma. A good chunk of my friends own multiple vinyl records but no record player. I also wonder what the production rates are like for vinyls vs CDs, are we producing about the same quantity of them?
For some people it’s definitely the aesthetic/collectible nature of vinyl. Anecdotally, for me, it’s for the listening pleasure. I’m no audiophile. I’m listening on potato speakers on a sub par turntable, but I like listening to records like I did when I was younger.
I do also love the much larger album sleeve artwork, but my primary drive in purchasing an album is to listen to it on my turntable.
Me too...I hate it when a band releases a record and they don't do anything to the jacket though.
Yo...I love vinyl but just because it's nice to have an analog physical copy...it doesn't sound "better" or worse. I just enjoy records.
I listen to lots and lots of streaming on bandcamp.
Vinyls are great, but I can't copy them to my phone so I still have to buy a CD with it.
As someone who used to be a member of what.cd, and still has a bunch of incredible sounding FLAC vinyl rips of albums, this definitely is not true.
I still reminisce about my Oink ratio. Seeded Rosetta Stone on a university connection. Access to the school's radio station's library.
Probably the closest I'll come to generational wealth, my grandchildren could have leeched music on my account and I'd still be positive.
It's not true that I cannot copy my vinyls to my computer? Okay how do I do that then? It just has the red and white left and right cables going to an amp, and then my receiver. Kinda new to vinyls over here
Maybe try Google? As I said, I downloaded them I didn't rip them myself. There was this person with the username "PBTHAL" that always had to best lossless vinyl rips, if you do a search that includes that name, you might find alternate download sources for them. I think they ran their own site where they posted all of their rips outside of what, but don't know if it's still there. They were also very thorough while explaining the process, equipment, cables, etc. for each and every rip. This person was really a perfectionist, and boy did it show. There were albums that they ripped and then refused to upload because they didn't feel their rip was perfect enough.
Absolute fucking legend.
I even have FLACs of reel-to-reel versions of all Zeppelin albums, as well as, Bowie, Dylan, et. al. and they sound fantastic. Don't ask me how it's done. And given the pedigree of that website, these people took the ripping process incredibly seriously.
Haha nice, that's an area of music collection as a hobby that I've never explored., and I can really appreciate that level of dedicstion. Thanks for letting me know, I'll see if I can even find my type of metal on there
There are usb turntables that let you rip your vinyl, but theyre usually not the highest quality turn tables. I like vintage tables because it adds to the atmosphere and there were fewer corners cut. You could probably get some separate equipment that would let your turn table talk to your computer.
TIL, thanks for pointing out the thing about quality. The table I've currently got sounds pretty nice (for never really having used anything else), so maybe I'll check out ones with USB and at least keep it around for copying!
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Basics-Adapter-Subwoofer-Gold-Plated/dp/B01D5H8JW0/ref=mp_s_a_1_1_ffob_sspa?crid=2HSIHFN4VC1TB&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.eVe91o4SjbqJOWJWNzj2sI1JvEVmrGD-8HQuGvUliKh7WkT7ktE76Qa4nOizEjKs4_TzIpL51iDrLnYSIVzuJJZfE2zC9tM5Kv2CergZNtvQ0ElZ40VLcpl2YZLBNilIEzpmXX7VD5-X9UsXPtP0BFjyePVMEMJmBQhw26jEMigj-QC_WdwITKHFGEED-hJEkKMx47IV1jAAwfJl_25oag.OGp_undiEYaYOnZ65PztJ1WUHvIbiHEt1l-VCrrQcyY&dib_tag=se&keywords=rca+to+stereo+adapter&qid=1711624657&sprefix=rca+to+ster%2Caps%2C73&sr=8-1-spons&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9waG9uZV9zZWFyY2hfYXRm&psc=1
Man do I miss what cd. I love RED. But what will always have a special place. I still have tons of merch I bought from what. T-shirts, coffee mug, koozie and so many rippy stickers. I still wear the shirts in my regular rotation
I've got a what.cd hoodie lying around somewhere. Wore that thing out for years, so it's falling apart at this point.
Well, there's still RED and it has almost has vinyl rip for every famous album. I wasn't a what cd member but RED has a huge collection. If you aren't in music trackers anymore you should checkout RED
Yeah but it's members only right? Frankly, I'm just too old and lazy and don't care enough about that stuff anymore to go through a whole interview process and shit.
Do they have PBTHAL vinyl rips? Those were my favorite by far. That person really knew WTF they were doing.
Yes, there is a collage of 578 pbthal rips
🤤
Such an amazing resource that was, not only did it have the albums available, but several different pressings, source media, and versions of each one. Something no commercial entity can come close to offering at any price.
I own a USB turntable with an ADC in it. It's got a USB cable sticking out the back. I can rip vinyl to whatever digital format you want.
ION TT-USB master race!
My record player has a USB port...
Aux cable from the out port to input on PC. Open recorder app and hit record. Save files. Upload to phone.
Why though? Just rip a CD or download the file. It's better quality and less effort.
Well ya, but I thought the we were talking about ripping vinyl
I don't really buy vinyl to listen to it, but for the larger cover art and liner notes
The only vinyls I buy are from charity shops or because I love an album so much that I want it as a collection (I'd also buy the CD to actually listen to)
Yeah, I haven't bought a new record in a long time, and one of my most prized albums is a 1970 radio-played copy of The Kinks "Lola vs. Powerman and the MoneygoRound" complete with the dates and times they played Lola."
That is definitely something I loved about LPs. I used to have a big book of album cover art. I have no idea what happened to it unfortunately, but I used to pore over it. Liner notes are less of an issue with the internet, but the shrinking of art was a very unfortunate result of CDs.
I remember getting a copy of Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" that came with a whole-ass newspaper they made folded into the liner with lyrics and pictures. That's something you can only do with vinyl.
One of my favorite things about vinyl is having to flip the record over. I think it demands more active and respectful listening.
Many albums, especially comedy albums, relied on you flipping over the record. They would have jokes that talked about things on the other side. There's a Firesign Theater album where one of the characters says, "wait a minute, didn't I say that on the other side of the record?" There's a Monty Python album with a locked groove that says, "oh sorry, squire. I scratched the record." Which is brilliant.
Edit: There's another Monty Python album that has two sets of grooves and what you hear depends on which groove the needle hits first. Again, absolutely brilliant.
More famously, the end of the Beatles' peak album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band contains a locked groove which was snippets of recordings mashed-up in a bit of short multi-track recording experimentation. The CD only repeats it 2 or 3 times. The record was designed to play indefinitely.
So yeah, CDs took that away from recordings, but on the other hand, it's a lot harder to damage a CD and get an unintentional looping segment.
I love that on the CD version of Full Moon Fever they added a bit to the end of Running Down a Dream telling CD listeners they're going to take a break so that people on vinyl and cassette can switch to the other side.
I was thinking about investing in a vinyl player recently and was really sad to learn Vinyl is actually worse for audio quality. The standard thickness of the disk is a physical limitation for frequencies which means the sound gets "squished."
There's nothing stopping you still! I find the ritual of placing the disc and needle and turning it over halfway through is quite satisfying. It really makes me feel as though the music is more valuable and I'll be more likely to actively listen rather than if I just put it on my phone with the tap of a button
Not only that, but all the "better sound" arguments are just about all the mistakes in the audio, like scratches and bumps.
Digital has no mistakes, it will always sound the way it is intended.
But of course some times "the way it is intended" is not the preferable way (see my other comment to OP).
There's Audacity & co. for that.
Yeah, vinyl is more about the haptic experience of putting that giant black disc onto the player and watching the needle slowly scrape away that 30-40 dollar item. It's not about the sound quality. I think with listening to vinyl listening to music becomes more of an experience, because of all the manual steps involved. And with albums these days artists seem to put more effort into them then at the time the CD came around.
Woah. Weren't they, what, 2$ a piece before CD?
They were definitely cheaper than they are now. But most of them also were produced much cheaper than they are now.
And they were also sold at incredible volume back in the day, for a couple of generations just about every household had a record player or two and shelves of record collections to play on them.
Nowadays vinyl is regaining popularity among people who buy physical music, but that is still a small fraction of the general public who have largely moved on to soft formats.
Investing? You want to sell it again?
That's because it's getting harder to find CD's plus the majority of people buy digital
This is only new vinyl, right? In my town, used records are king, by far. In fact, I probably buy 10+ used records for every new record.
I wish this was true for me, but I only have one record shop within 45-minute drive of my house (and their prices and selection are far from competitive), so I wind up buying pretty much all my records online through Discogs. Frequently, the new represses are just flat-out cheaper than the vintage vinyl, especially for a lot of the more esoteric albums I buy. For instance, even though they're not really hard to find, for Black Sabbath's first four albums I paid just as much for mediocre, water-damaged copies of Sabbath and Volume 4 as I did for brand-new represses of Paranoid and Master of Reality. If you actually buy your vinyl to listen to, buying used online can be a pretty big gamble as far as quality, so for the same price, I frequently wind up consciously choosing the new vinyl over the used copy.
Even though I do frequently manage to package one or two cheap used albums with each new album purchased to take advantage of that sweet "media mail" shipping, it's not even close to a 10:1 used:new ratio.
Edit: I suppose now that I think about it, I'm starting from a pretty decent used vinyl collection from my days in the early 2000's as a hipster music snob before used vinyl got nearly so expensive, so my collection overall has much more used vinyl than my current buying habits would indicate (I probably have 200 albums, of which 30-40 were purchased new in the past 3-4 years)
The only record store I ever go to is actually a front for a weed store lol . Even though weed is legal in Canada the legal stuff is the worst and most expensive.
Give it time. I'm far from a connoisseur, as these days I mostly just partake in edibles 1-2 times per week, but California has some pretty sweet weed prices, at least compared to my college/grad-school days. I saw an ad on a billboard just yesterday for 10 USD Eighths at a pretty reputable shop in my town, and I think I usually pay 35 USD for a pack of 10 2-dose THC:CBD gummies (compared to 40 USD for an eighth of mediocre bud in the early 2000's).
As people get less paranoid about enforcement and local governments ease up on restrictions, the price should come down and the quality should go up (although this probably depends a lot on local government, so who knows, really)
I hope so. Right now I can get 3.5 grams of shatter for the same price as 1 gram at a legal place . And 500 mg of edibles for the same price as 50 mg . It's crazy high prices, mostly only casual users by from a legal source where I live and its been legal since 2018 .
I wanna go even further than retro. Gimme the hottest new single on wax cylinder for my phonograph..
I could get back into cassette tapes.
I love cassette tapes. I bought a bible on cassette at a resale store. Great way to get cheap tapes for recording over with music
ngl...
And on the fifth day, god said...I get knocked down, but I get up again. You are never gonna keep me down.
Not me, I don't miss rewinding them shits. CDs are still good though, I still buy those because you can't go wrong by having it on the most highly-detailed and durable medium.
My first CD I bought in the mid 80's still plays fine. The selection of CDs was paltry and the only thing I could find at my parent's town that I was remotely interested in was ZZ Top's Eliminator.
Haha that's funny because I bought that ZZ Top album on cassette as a kid, one of my first music purchases.
And later due to lack of options, I bought Fabulous Thunderbirds "Tuff Enuf".
I never purchased a single cassette the entire time they were popular. I would buy records and tape them ( I was a Maxell person but did have some TDK) so that I could listen in the car or in my giant boombox that had APLD which was skip to next song.
A few of the artists I follow put their new releases on cassette.
I'm fairly certain most people who likes vinyl is because of the collection aspect. The leaflets and photos are nice to look at while you're listening.
That's something with vinyl records is that they come in big sleeves with nice big prints of the album art and such. That's great stuff for a music buff to enjoy.
When my dad died, I told my brother, who is very difficult to deal with, to just take whatever he wanted from my dad's vast collection of things and I'd deal with the rest. One of the things he took was an original Edison cylinder phonograph with a bunch of cylinders. I was okay with him taking it since I gave him permission, but what annoys me is that the phonograph was missing the stylus and he has never replaced it. It's inside a wooden case with a lid, which he keeps closed, and the cylinders and the horn just sit next to it.
Why the fuck did he take it?
I don't even have room for it, but if he's not going to even display it properly, let alone get a single part that is needed for it to work, what's the point? Just sell it if you're not going to do anything with it.
Offer him some money for it?
Only a few more years now till the retro sound of CDs comes back into style. I realize vinyl is a great and unique user experience with a specific timber, and more enjoyable to collect.
It's kind of funny when you hear about the "analog warmth" when albums were being digitally mastered as early as the late 70s... And pretty much all re-releases are digitally remastered.
I liked the artwork on the disks themselves, and the feeling of opening a box, taking the disk out with that cracking sound, pushing a button on the drive and seeing and hearing it open, and then the sound of spinning when it's being read.
Every bit as "warm" as vinyl in my opinion (born in 1996, so of course it is).
Your mistake is equivocating digital with analog. There is nothing "retro sounding" about CDs, you can download lossless digital versions of albums that are identical to what you'll find on a CD.
I'm a professional audio engineer for a living, with a masters in the subject, it was sarcasm lol...
Exactly, although CD isn't so much "retro" as it is a high frequency, high dynamic range audio recording. The only reason vinyl sounds "warm" is because their dynamic range & frequency is compressed so the needle doesn't bounce out of its groove.
While it's possible for a CD to receive a terrible master, if the mastering across formats is the same and other biases are eliminated (i.e. proper A/B testing) then CD will be objectively better sounding every single time.
Retro sound of a CD?
They sound exactly the same as the digital releases. Only audiophiles up there own arses believe that they can hear a difference. Vinyls sound different but for obvious reasons.
I think you missed my sarcasm...
Edited to add: most CDs sound the same as their digital releases (assuming they had the same master which I've found isn't always true), but occasionally you can actually get higher resolution, up to 96k/24 bit, which do sound different depending on your playback device.
Most of the difference is likely due to the nature of the DA filter being applied during playback, as I certainly won't notice the noise floor between 16-24 bit, and any frequency difference is far far behind my range of hearing.
If you aren't familiar with what I'm referring too, different DA implementations use varying filtering techniques, some have a slight roll off in the upper frequency range to improve the accuracy of transient response, while others use a flatter frequency response sacrificing the transient. Newer DAs from some manufacturers allow you to select which option you prefer. At double and quad sample rates this can largely become a moot point as any sacrifice to the frequency response is far out of the range of human hearing.
CDs are already showing signs of a comeback! https://www.axios.com/2024/01/06/gen-z-cds-buying-collection
Lol, knew it was coming!
I'm a music collector and saw this coming. "Music" went from a product you buy, into a service you pay to gain access to. You don't pay for music, you pay daddy Spotify for access to HIS music.
Vinyl has turned back into the only form of physical music collection.
Depends what you're into. CD sales are more than alive and well in the kpop/jpop circles and there isn't a lot of vinyl to find there.
I don't buy vinyl, but I do buy CDs for albums I want. I have (what I believe are well-founded) trust issues with services supplying digital copies.
I will say I have bought some nice, normal mp3s in the past from Amazon. Those are fine. But generally I want the discs. I'm going to rip them immediately to mp3, and store the discs away, but I still want them.
I did recently buy a favorite band's entire back catalog on CD, because I want to own a non-revocable copy of their work. Plus it felt pretty good "I give you money, you give me music on CD" felt way less icky than "I watch commercials for fraudulent products and services chosen by a nakedly hostile algorithm, evil megacorporation optionally pays you."
I hate subscription services, for the cost of a Spotify subscription I can but one or two CD albums a month.
I buy a vinyl here or there but just to collect. I listen to my CDs.
I tried Spotify but it only has about 70% of the albums in my collection. I used to love google play music because you could upload your media and it would be included in your library.
I liked Google play too. I was not pleased when they moved to YouTube music and made accessing your own music a total pain in the balls.
Plex and plexamp is how I listen to music now.
Hm. "do you want 2 vinyl nuts" doesn't have the same ring to it.
This is dumb. Just going to be used for collectors editions with different songs and shit.
To each their own I guess.
Something something piracy doesnt matter, something something make a good product at a fair price, something something provide convenience. What was i talking about again?
Okay, is it just me or is the total global revenue for physical media music less than $2 USD a year? I must be reading it wrong.
It’s probably in billions.
Nah, that's about right, I paid like maybe 20 cents for a cd collection on graigslist, don't know who bought all those vinyls though
Poeple jerking off CDs here dont understand down sampling and the average quality of CDS. they think that just because it is digitally mastered that it therefore must be the master that is put on CDS, its not.
I can't hear anything above 20 kHz, and neither can most people. CD audio is passed through a 20 kHz lowpass filter. It is then sampled at 44 kHz. Due to the Nyquist Shannon Spamling Theorum, when sound is digitally sampled at just above twice the rate of the source audio, converting it back to analog perfectly reproduces the original waveform. And I do mean perfectly. The exact same waveform. (The extra 4 kHz is to prevent artifacts in frequencies very close to 20 kHz.)
Therefore CD audio is perfect unless you think you can hear above 20 kHz. (Spoiler: you can't) There are a few good YouTube videos on this topic, and the best ones are very mathy.
Is there something I'm missing? Do I need to educate myself some more?
I don't know shit about fuck, but you explanation seems correct.
I do remember hearing that precisely because of the limitations of vinyl compared to CD, music is mastered differently for each medium. So the CD master of a certain song might be more compressed (dynamic compression, not digital compression) to make it sound "louder", while the vinyl release has a wider dynamic range. So some people might prefer the vinyl version because it actually does sound different to the CD version.
Keep in mind tho, I might be spreading misinformation here.
The loudness wars were definitely a thing; you are correct. But that was a choice and not a limitation of the medium. Plenty of CDs were not produced that way. But that's not what the OC was talking about. They were talking about down sampling, not dynamic range compression.
You are correct, CDs can reproduce the human audio spectrum perfectly, IF AND ONLY IF certain rules are followed, and I think that's why earlier CDs sounded weird. For example: how good were low pass filters when digital sound first arrived?
I really don't care to comment anymore on your FUD.
I hate to tell you, but all that vinyl is digitally mastered as well.
yes, but generally the digital master is not what the recordings are made fromm you do not contradict a single thing i said.
Keep kidding yourself that you can hear the difference.
Vinyls have their appeal but they get dusty, scratched, they skip etc. Only snobs truly think that they sound better.
Digital music can be taken as easily as it can be given.
CDs are the best compromise. They have sound quality as good as digital but you also get the lyrics and artwork that come with a vinyl, they're also much easier to store. The best thing though, is that if I get bored of a CD, I can sell it or even just give it away for free, you can't do that with digital music.
I'm a (former) audio engineer and I can't tell the difference. My professors used to laugh at audiophiles who spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars for stereo equipment because we were taught to mix things so that they sound good in a car as well as a perfectly quiet room. In fact, we were told that after we finished a master, we should test it by putting it in our car and driving around to make sure the mix was audible in the ways you and the band wanted.
I still really like vinyl because I like the ritual of the whole thing, but I don't spend money on it because it's way too expensive and everything you hear is almost certainly mastered digitally and likely recorded and mixed digitally, negating the whole "warmth" factor.
Digital does not always mean DRM. You can pry my bandcamp FLACs from my cold dead hands. Physical media nowadays is more about the experience than functionality. Maybe there are snobs who claim that vinyls are somehow functionally superior, but generally the people who use vinyls or CDs or tapes instead of digital are really just looking for that physical experience in a highly digitalized world.
CD quality is actually superior to streaming services like spotify (I personally can't tell the difference tho).
also the CDs dynamic range is far greater then that present in most music, so it makes little impact in practice. unless you intentionally utilize it.
Hipsters paying 2-3x as much for a vinyl LP which objectively has worse audio quality than a CD.
Most of the records I buy come with bandcamp codes. I can play the flac files if I want digital audio, physical media for me is about the thing itself. Often get full sized posters and patches. Shit I'll buy a tape over the cd too
Legit didn't know people still bought music. CDs though? How does anyone still have cd players, and why. Vinyl is a hipster fad now so I guess that explains records.
I have an external CD/DVD player that is used solely to rip CDs and add to my media server. I abhor renting music and ripping a CD gives me the format and quality I like (!1000kbps flac) and future proofs me if tech limits change down the road. I used to rip to ogg but a few years ago I reripped about 500 CDs to flac.
yup, sadly many of the bands/artists i listen to don't really offer their music as physicals, but there's also no way i'm gonna spend 20 bucks on an album just to listen to like 3 of the songs ever.
i have a weird way of listening to music.
My car has a CD player. It sounds a lot better than the radio or any streaming service's compressed audio. I used to have a SiriusXM subscription and their audio quality was absolute garbage. I don't pay for any streaming music services now, and have no plans to ever do so.
I buy CDs of every band I like, because I know that music will last in its perfect quality form for decades and nobody but burglars can take it from me. I use my blu-ray burner to rip them to high-bitrate MP3s for phone and Plex library usage.
I also have a pile of records that I don't listen to because I don't have room to set up my record player right now.
I don't think it's a hipster thing anymore, I understand why: aesthetically vinyl are nicer than cds. You have a large cardboard with artworks. I might buy one from an artist whom art I like, and never actually play it.
That's pretty hipster
:-D, fair enough
my dad has a huge collection of CDs he started in the 80s. and he's not gonna stop buying every single CD that his favourite bands release.
he rips them onto his ipod and his phone. great way to efficiently own music and get some pretty cool artwork.
so from what i can tell, no one (that i know of) buys CDs to play them out of a playback device, just to own your library.
I don’t think vinyls are hipster. In the age of music digitalization, it is nice to own a physical piece of media, in addition to being able to support your artist more directly. Also it looks nice.
concidering walmart doesn't sell normal cd players in store but does sell record players, I'm not surprized.
It's to bad there's no good record players made anymore. Or cassette decks. It's all the cheap bottom of the barrel mechanisms now. No quality Japanese equipment like there used to be.
Reloop/pioneer/insert 100 other brands here: am I a joke to you
CD fans right now:
Apparently CDs are trending up as a nostalgia format in some demographics! https://www.axios.com/2024/01/06/gen-z-cds-buying-collection
I found this small community just a few days ago: !cd_collectors@lemmy.sdf.org Thought it was interesting, and curious. I did not know that CDs are considered by some as collectible.
Nice find, it is weird that I'm now a collector because I still have all the CDs I've bought, and I still buy one from time to time
Indeed! Apparently I too have unwittingly been growing my collection since 1991. Of course back then we just called it "buying my music".
I would show it off to that community but it's just stacked in cardboard boxes (alphabetically, I'm not an animal), not nicely curated and organized and dusted weekly in pride of place. Also, I've never counted, but it must number in the several hundred; I wouldn't want to overwhelm any fledgling enthusiasts there. ;)
why have streaming and not radio?
Vinyls are purely treasured for their resell value.
Not really though.