I got rid of most of my LP's over the past few years as I realized I'd gradually just started to play them from Spotify instead (convenience slowly converted me), over the same speakers. Then I sold my turntable.
But I kept around 20 of my favorites and just rotate them for display on my bookshelf. If I'm playing one of them on Spotify, I'll even rotate to show that LP while I play it. The really bizarre thing is, there's a particular old album I'm thinking of purchasing just to be able to display its cover, because of what it means to me.
It's the same with books -- my favorite ones are in my bookshelf, but even if I read a book I own physically, I pull it up on my iPad because I prefer to be able to highlight, look up words, adjust text size, read in a dark room, etc.
So I'm shocked to discover that I like having the physical artifacts even when I still consume them digitally. It's almost like bringing back souvenir knick-knacks from a vacation. This is not an outcome I ever would have expected.
Patience! Try putting on a record and listening with friends or dancing to the beat with your significant other. Don't try to cherrypick just one song or conversely listen to endless AI generated mix while your mind is elsewhere. Afterwards, have a conversation about what the artist was trying to express and moments in your own life the songs reminded you of. THEN tell me you didn't have a unique experience compared to what Spotify provides you with.
Why can't you do that EACT same experience on spotify? You realize you can pick a specific album and play it in order correct? The only difference between the two is that with spotify you have options if you lack the self control to go for the experience you are suggesting.
Deliberate restriction is the point of still using a lot of analog media. You can't pop open another app on your book, you can't look at the photo you just took on film, and you can't easily skip a song on a record.
Just admit that you don’t yet understand the other perspective. Resorting to this sort of snark really isn’t in service of reaching a shared understanding.
I find that hard to do myself. Spotify doesn't appear to have the same sequence as the LPs or even CDs. Another problem is finding original recordings on Spotify, mostly you find remasterings.
Of course, none of these matter if you just want to listen to music.
If digital liner notes were commonplace, you could at least look at them together on a tablet, even if that might still not be exactly the same thing.
As it is you can't really read the liner notes and admire any photos alone, either, unless you're hunting them down on Discogs or somewhere else, never mind together with somebody else, too.
The iTunes store in theory allows including a PDF booklet together with album purchases, but in practice it seems that albums that actually do include such a thing are almost as rare as hens' teeth.
You need to be on the distraction machine (your laptop), inside the distraction amplifier (your browser) on a very distracting site. Similar it using the app or a phone.
The turntable can work with a literal digital detox (it is analog).
I can probably also recreate a grill burger in a microwave, even complete with burn marks somehow. But the real thing is inexpensive and easy to use, so why should I jump through the hoops? Also I have to wonder how long Spotify is going to exist or carry the albums I like. I can still play records made in the 80s with no issues.
The very act, the very ritual of starting a record playing changes the experience, even if everything else is exactly the same. You don't interact with music the same way.
Great example - my Moccamaster since I bought it few months ago is used ten times more than capsule machine that stands next to it. And I'm not sure if the coffe is really better - but it does not matter because the morning ritual makes the experience so much better, that I cannot imagine going back to capsules.
Coffee capsules' business model relies on convenience to create unnecessary waste. Capsules of coffee taste worse and provide no improvement whatsoever. Why do this? Marketing creates a fake need, even though better solutions to brew coffee already exist. It's all about marketing convenience without innovation. You pay a higher tax for unnecessary capsule packaging, additional pollution, and waste.
I don’t think that’s a great example - with good beans and a good grinder and machine, you should be able to do miles better than Nespresso. Even the larger pod systems have quite a small quantity of grounds so tend towards over-extraction for a decent sized shot.
With records versus streaming it’s interesting because the experience during the “main event” is nearly identical. Certainly closer than a book versus an e-reader or a cigar versus nicotine. It’s the entry and exit that’s different.
The fact it's a record and you can't pause/rewind keeps you less distracted. It really is a different experience even if you "simulated it" and had the machine play the right digital file once you loaded a particular record.
It also completely gets rid of skips and shuffle-play. And a song can't "grow on you" if you always skip it.
In the case of many prog rock and similar albums of the late 60s 70s and 80s there are either significant (wrt to the pace of the audio tracks) 'silences' between tracks or no silences with fade out and fade in audio layers ...
The digital versions of a number of these albums have 'clipped' tracks - with a sharp start point | end point and some arbitrary generic silence length (of 0 - N ms) between them.
Seems like a minor thing but it is noticable to those of us that once listened to vinyl albums and the "between track" transition is arguably as much of the overall product as originally delivered as each individual track and track ordering.
Look into a suspension design like Thorens or AR. You can stomp on the floor, strike the platform supporting the turntable with a hammer, etc and it won't skip.
Club culture was built around people dancing to music played on turntables. Specifically Technics SL1200 mk2 or SL1210 mk2 which only have a very little suspension in their feet.
If you run in mono and there will be almost no feedback no matter how loud you play or how close to the speakers you are.
Since one of the audio channels is inverted when recorded any signal feeding back will be cancelled out when the re-inverted signal is combined.
This is why old DJ mixers from people like Pioneer used have a prominent Stereo/Mono switch.
There's no real soundstage on a dance floor so you don't miss the stereo.
In the really cool venues, back in the day, they used crossovers to move just the high-hats or percussion to a specific speaker array hanging over the centre of the dance floor and have the mids and bass somewhere else but it would always be from a mono signal never stereo.
Source: Phono.
Aux Source: I worked as a DJ way back when and have experience of very loud systems in front of large crowds of dancing people. I've also played many a sketchy flat where everything was balanced on milk crates on wooden floorboards.
Been DJing and running our own sound for years and years.
You 100% can get feedback from the sound when DJing. It’s guaranteed if you’ve enough bass. We put the decks on concrete slabs which in turn are on 4 squash balls to deal with it.
What do you mean by “one it channels is inverted when recorded”??
I mean on record one of the channels L or R is inverted (I forget which) before it’s cut.
The phono pre-amp will re-inver it as part of its function.
When you combine L+R after preamp to make mono the feedback signal from one channel will be combined with inverted feedback signal from the other channel and cancel out.
Try it and be amazed. Audio engineers have known this trick since the dawn of disco.
To avoid this outcome I started a family tradition where we play a record every time we sit down at the dinner table to eat. We take turns picking an album and let guests pick when we have guests.
Might I guess that the albums are either Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin? Even when I listen to those two digitally, I like to see the album cover. That has been ingrained as part of the experience for me.
I own one record, a used Chuck Mangioni record I bought as ironic art from a goodwill that sits in a frame on my wall. So I'm afraid I'm adding to this statistic somewhat inadvertently.
I have Judas Priest's "Sad Wings Of Destiny" and Dead Kennedy's "In God We Trust, Inc". I bought them back before vinyl died and have held on to them as keepsakes of years gone by. I haven't had a record player since the 90's so I guess I'm part of the 50% as well!
I bought as a record to play Small Faces Ogden's Nut Gone Flake back in 1978 (released in 1968) .. the cover is a gem, round carboard layers with a common one inch spine all modelled on an old school tobacco tin.
As one of the few not square record covers released I have it out in a double perspex holder and rarely handle it as it wouldn't take much to tear the hinging 50 years on after its creation.
I have bought CDs, cassette tapes, download from Napster, burn CDs, etc. but Vynil hasn’t really attracted attention to me. Turntable seems to be an inconvenient and overpriced device, I could be wrong though.
Limited edition type stuff or just eclectic music I enjoy.
I bought an Audio-Technica AT-LP120BK-USB (and a cartridge, because, the one which came with my 300 record player was "trash") after I had accumulated a handful of them. Picked out the TRON: Legacy soundtrack and got it all hooked up.
For some context, I have a nice sound system which is optimized for movies/tv though I listen to a fair bit of music too.
If you're not aware, the TRON: Legacy soundtrack was produced by Daft Punk and Daft Punk was made for TRON: Legacy and TRON: Legacy was made for Daft Punk and the result is magical.
Started playing and the sound was great. Flipped over to Spotify and played the same album and the sound was also great.
Honestly, couldn't tell the difference.
Played one or two other things, but, the record player went on a shelf that day and is still there.
I still collect records, especially rare or limited ones of things I particularly like, or ones where there's something unique or special about the vinyl copy, but, I don't listen to them anymore.
> the record player went on a shelf that day and is still there.
When I moved I never plugged in my amplifier and speakers for my record player because I couldn't figure out where to put them. Eventually I realized that they didn't need to be on the floor "waiting" for me to set them up -now they're in the garage while the records/player are out on display. I just listen to music via a smart speaker and streaming most days.
I still buy the occasional vinyl though. I like them as gifts because they're physical and also personal. I tell everyone to give me a record of an album that means a lot to them so I can think of them when I play it (because gifts are about emotions, even if I don't play them directly).
I've tried to have a good sound system. I've been to friends' houses that have nice ones.
I got an array of Sonos speakers and ask an Echo to play things on them. It's a wonderful, maintenance-free experience and, combined with Spotify's access to most things I'd want, makes intentional listening a zero-friction experience.
Whether you can hear a difference is going to depend partly on the equipment and mostly on the particular album you’re playing. I don’t think tron legacy got a vinyl specific master/mix so it’s basically just a recreation of the digital mix - if anything you might lose a little detail because it takes a pretty high end turntable to be 100% as transparent as a decent digital setup. On the other hand, if you look at a catalog like Blue Note’s for example, all of their vinyl releases are remasters made specifically for the format. Especially compared to the Rudy Van Gelder 90s digital remasters on streaming, there’s a pretty immediately obvious difference in sound. Not really a “if know what to look for” thing either, on some recordings it is very obvious.
This goes beyond vinyl vs digital too. What mix/master was used can make a difference in any context with different formats. Giorgio Moroder’s From Here to Eternity hasn’t gotten a transfer from the master tapes in decades, and the version on streaming is actually a rip from a vinyl record or another poor quality or worn transfer. If you seek out a CD mastered directly from the tape, there’s an incredible difference in the dynamic range.
Maybe. Maybe my ears just aren't good enough to hear the difference (I don't have particularly good hearing).
Anyway, I'm not unhappy about it. I love the soundtrack (and the music on every Vinyl I own) and I love that I own the Vinyl copy. Some have really cool artwork/books included which just don't exist anywhere else.
I think, perhaps, the point you're making is that the master matters more than the medium, which I would strongly agree with.
Yeah, that’s my point - I have a small vinyl collection but it’s mostly jazz albums with vinyl specific masters. I haven’t noticed any special vinyl specific sound myself beyond whatever the engineers intentionally created but for whatever reason some albums get significantly different treatments for vinyl. I’m not sure if the better margins for the format pay for the remaster work or what - I’ve noticed some labels do SACD releases too. So I guess the format has charmed me after all, because I haven’t bought any SACDs :)
Funny enough there’s definitely some vinyl releases where the opposite occurred and they get a sloppy transfer or the label literally just presses an mp3 that already exists, especially now that they’re booming among people who won’t actually play them (or won’t play them on decent equipment.) So you can go out and potentially buy a vinyl record that just replays a digital master with poorer compression than what’s on streaming.
Definitely agree regarding everything else that comes with the package. I have the Myst box set because that game had such an impact on my life and it’s so well done with extra books, maps, etc.
Interesting trend overall. I got my dad a vinyl record for Christmas, and he only recently got a record player to listen to it. I wonder about vinyl buying vs listening demographics and how age correlates: my partner and I, along with some similar-generation friends, are avid vinyl listeners. We still use Spotify to listen to music together, either collaborative or generated playlists, and we generally set a high standard of matching the music we select to our mood, but the process of discovering and listening to records together has become one that we treat differently from digital listening. We are more forgiving and open (less “you picked this?” and more going with the flow) and have some irreverent discs that have established themselves as favorites through this process :)
It’s great that musicians can sell a high cost item (vastly greater revenue vs streams per customer), but I do worry the labels are over-indulging here and heading the market towards a Funkopop like crash. Most record stores I go into have reoriented towards very mainstream new releases and overpriced ‘rare’ vintage albums. Meanwhile the more serious collectors market has moved to Discogs and Bandcamp/direct. So when the market turns on vinyl, physical stores will be the biggest direct losers. And even an average shop in the neighborhood is better than none at all.
Crash as in they made too many and nobody is buying them. Funkopop has more vinyl characters than demand resulting warehouses full of inventory that isn’t moving.
Funkopop collections are a 2010s/2020s Beanie Babies. They released so many licensed lines that eventually the demand waned and collectors had ‘lost’ thousands.
I’m dubious. The same survey resulted in only 9% of vinyl record owners not having a record player in 2016. I’d like to see the actual questions asked.
For several years, I bought older vinyl not for the vinyl itself, but for the cover art, which I hung on my living room walls with Records on Walls: https://www.recordsonwalls.com/. Many of them have an aesthetic quality all of their own, like the gatefold of Led Zeppelin IV, or the subtle yet iconic "EKG" from Dark Side of the Moon.
It's much more recently that I acquired a turntable and a preamp, so that I can actually listen to them.
I have bought maybe 10 or so records over the years without having a record player. It supports the band more than streaming. It is a relatively cheap physical souvenir and is a better display piece than a cd. And they usually come with a download code for the same music. Actually listening to the vinyl wasn't even much of a consideration when making the purchases.
this is me - most shows I buy a shirt and/or a record. got the DL code... play it in winamp. I have had a turntable or two but not right now - but when I do, I'll have a great collection of records to listen to. Everybody wins!
I generally haven't seen an avenue to do that. Bandcamp has the pay what you want option, but I'm not aware of a donating option. I also listed multiple reasons for buying vinyl and supporting the artist is only one of them.
I bpught the Say She She vinyl off the band when they were in town (signed!). I have a turntable but the vinyl included a download album mp3s link, so I've never played the vinyl. Pretty common I suspect.
I have quite a lot of rare vinyl and a good turntable but it's a pain constantly getting up to change records unless you're in the mood.
I lived through reel-to-reel, vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, minidisc, and now digital files. Of those, only reel-to-reel came even remotely close to the sound quality of digital. I can now fit my entire music library onto a storage medium smaller than my thumbnail, at better quality than anything before it. I get that many people like the vintage aspect (like folks who carry around pocket watches or walkmans), but there comes a point where it crosses over from eccentric to just plain weird (like going out in a top hat and tails).
I am a proud owner of a top hat and tails. I also enjoy a somewhat direct mechanism for giving money to artists I admire, and having an attractive physical artifact of that transaction is a plus. For the (ahem) record, not all vinyl purchases are a somewhat-direct-to-artist transaction (though those at the merch table of a small-to-medium sized show probably are).
It sounds different than a pristine digital version of the same track, although often vinyl tracks are mastered differently due to the limitations of the medium.
If you were to digitally record the output of a record player and play it back, there would be no discernible difference.
Audio is audio? 4 bit mono sounds the same as 16 bit stereo?
Vinyl sounds blatantly different due to analog distortion in the vinyl mastering and playback mechanisms. The distortion, frequency response, dynamic range, are all significantly different. You must be practically deaf to not hear the difference between vinyl and CD quality.
Pointless conflation of quality and storage capacity.
CDs are stereo 16-bit @ 44kHz PCM with an upper limit of about 80 minutes. That's 80 * 60 * 2 * 2 * 44100 = 846,720,000 bytes = ~807 MiB / 80 minutes.
I can get a 1 TiB thumb drive and put 1200 CD audio ISO images on it. Of course, that's pointless because one can rip tracks as FLAC to get lossless compression.
Blu-Ray audio has options including 24-bit PCM @ 192 kHz. 2 channel stereo is 60 * 60 * 2 * 3 * 192000 / hr = 4,147,200,000 bytes/hr = ~4 GiB/hr. Even with FLAC, I wouldn't expect more than 500 albums per thumb drive.
You should really be more specific. Digital file sound quality can range from crap (<=64kbps MP3) to higher than CD quality (losslessly compressed 24 bit 96kHz audio) - BTW CDs are digital too.
There's no need to be more specific. Those who are interested in serious discussion will take the plausible interpretation. Those who seek a weaker interpretation for attack aren't worth talking to.
I only bought stuff on vinyl back in the 80s if I was pretty sure I’d never find it on CD (this was back when being able to buy music relied on it being in whatever record store you happened to go into). In the early 90s I sold it all and it turned out my expectation of not being able to find most of that stuff on CD was correct. On the plus side, there’s very little of that which I can even remember (the only ones I can remember are some Mike Rutherford solo albums from before Mike + the Mechanics).
I do still buy music, but it’s now almost exclusively in the form of digital downloads. I know a lot of what I have is not on most of the streaming services and quite possibly never will be.
This is just more evidence that new technology never completely destroys old technology. It simply creates new formats that coexist with the older ones, but the older ones never go away and may even fetch a premium by collectors or people who need it.
I (sometimes) buy vinyl and don’t (currently) own a record player. I like to support artists however I can, and especially for works I particularly appreciate. I also like to have the physical liner notes and accompanying artwork, especially in large format. Having the actual recording on a physical medium which I control is a nice bonus and can come in handy even for lifetime purchases when access to digital purchases might expire or their providers might vanish (this happened with one of my albums before I ever got a download code, but since it came with the physical album I don’t need to go online to try to resolve it by whatever means I might need to).
Pretty sure there’s a lot of vinyl gifting going on. Rich dudes are hard to shop for, but they don’t shut up about their record collection, simple solution for secret Santa this year.
As a rich dude, there's pretty much zero chance that anyone is going to be able to buy me a record for my record collection that I don't shut up about unless I specifically tell them what to buy.
For the bands I really like, I mostly have everything I want. But if you did manage to figure out a record I want, you would need to know which version of the release I want. For some records there are dozens. Maybe I want the first release, maybe I want the first US release, maybe I want a higher quality reissue, maybe I want a colored vinyl release. But whichever one I want, if you get me a different one it goes in the trash and I keep the release I want on my want list.
Then you've got to figure out what condition to buy it in. If it is something I'm getting to collect rather than to listen to, it needs to be near mint. If you get me very good condition instead of near mint, it goes in the trash, and I keep it on my want list. If it is something I'm getting to listen to rather than to collect, VG+ is fine. You can get it near mint, but you just wasted $50 because near mint is hard to find, and it isn't going to be near mint after I listen to it a few times.
So skip the vinyl for Xmas, if you're going to get me a gift, money works. I'm not picky about condition or version. Cash, money orders, bonds, it's all good. Or real estate.
But if you insist on gifting vinyl, I'm looking for the Weirdos "We Got The Neutron Bomb" single, 1978 release, near mint, the unofficial colored vinyl Beastie Boy singles from Paul's Boutique, I want them all but if you can only get one, "Car Thief", near mint, and the 1987 "Gimme Fever" single by Shake Appeal (first band Adam Franklin from Swervedriver was in, along with his brother), VG+ is fine.
The artwork, notes etc. on LPs was often very cool. I could see buying favorite albums just to look at front and back while playing the music electronically...
There's an album I love that have the most amazing retro 60s, early 70s inspired cover design. I wanted to get the LP to have the cover in larger format, sadly it was never release on anything but streaming platforms.
I collect a significant amount of new vinyl and listen to it relatively frequently, but digital music is so much more convenient. That can be a detriment though, I find a lot of the value I get out of listening to vinyl is the "intentional listening" experience. I think Henry Rollins called it carbohydrate listening or something to that effect, listening to things you like that you've heard a million times and isn't exactly stimulating in the same way a new album or artist would be. Music feels a whole lot more consumable and disposable when its just on constant instant playback. Forcing yourself to flip the record and drop the needle keeps you more engaged I feel.
All that to say I mostly just like collecting colored vinyl, and supporting small bands and artists you like by buying a product significantly more profitable than millions of Spotify streams is pretty cool.
It's exactly the same for me. Yes, vinyl is more inconvenient, expensive and may even sound "worse" unless you have an expensive audio setup.
That said, the deliberate experience of sitting in your couch, doing/thinking nothing else but the music you're listening, is for me an invaluable ritual. It's like meditation.
> That said, the deliberate experience of sitting in your couch, doing/thinking nothing else but the music you're listening, is for me an invaluable ritual. It's like meditation.
Just imagine if you could do that with a CD or even an album of MP3s! But that's just not possible, it can only be done with vinyl records.
You're right, it's not vinyl that makes it possible, so I believe there's more to this than my original comment implies.
I think it's the physical aspect of the vinyl compared to streaming services. Some people do that with CDs, but I like vinyls more since they feel more "analog" to me. Also I like the warmth of their sound. Also GP has a point about the turntable engaging you more.
> Forcing yourself to flip the record and drop the needle keeps you more engaged I feel.
It's a physical process/ritual that a number of people still do and reinforce among each other. It's fine to call it what it is, and it's fine that it makes you feel more connected to the music. But it ain't the music.
A nice vinyl album with artwork shows a lot of care has gone into making it, where as an album in Spotify has been stripped of all uniqueness and identity in all but the sound itself.
A vinyl without sleeve and artwork and a carefully curated Spotify playlist sit somewhere inbetween.
"Spotify has been stripped of all uniqueness and identity in all but the sound itself."
There is at least the cover picture left, but yes, I would not recommend Spotify for mindful listening. It is designed for "engagement", I still have not found out, how to tell it to stop, after that one song I want to hear.
It insists on playing something else. Very rarely something interesting shows up, but usually I just get annoyed for it playing radio, when I wanted ONE song, nothing more.
So I love my own digital music collection and player that remains under my control.
I have a shuffle there as well, but conscious listening remains possible, even though surely the experience would be more powerful, combined with the ritual of going through the physical records, holding the artwork in my hands and putting the one record in. But for convinience, I stick to my digital collection. (I don't think all my music is on vinyl and I would need extra rooms then)
"How to get Spotify to stop playing music: Take headphones off."
And when the sound comes from the boxes? Then yes, I have to hurry back to the laptop to stop the not fitting next song (e.g. something fast, after I choose something chill). This is ridiculous.
The feature "stop after song" is avaiable in every serious music player I used (and also the one I programmed myself). But it is not in Spotify, even though it is trivial.. This is what I call "designed for engagement". I have to click more and find new things etc.
"I dont think I've ever listened to a song I didn't want to listen to on Spotify. "
So how do you achieve that? Do you only use custom playlists, or do just mostly don't care so much?
Because if I have one song in my head, then sometimes I just want this exact song and if I tell spotify to play this song - then afterwards it plays something totally different, even though it tries to fit the same genre, but this works badly. And even if it would be the same genre, some songs are just deep. And you want silence afterwards to process them - if you are consciously listenting in the first place. For some background noise spotify works great, no doubt about that.
I wonder why nobody thought about recreating album sleeves with the original artwork and no vinyl inside, just the housing capable of carrying one or more CDs, that is, giving a CD owner the ability to put their discs into a old-style sleeve. I'm all for digital music, but totally miss the old sleeves and prints. Would it be economically viable for a business to acquire only the rights for the prints, possibly plus lyrics, but not the music, so that they could sell the prints alone?
A '63 Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint GT is objectively worse than the latest VW Golf GTI by every measurable metric.
The driving experience, though, is completely different. There's some "grin factor" raw-ness, some analog-ness to the former that makes the latter comparatively feel like a muted couch-on-wheels.
Not really analogous. No matter how much you tune the GTI's ECU, throttle curve, ESC, etc., you won't be able to precisely replicate the handling of the classic car, though you might get close.
By contrast, one can digitally capture the output of a turntable + phono preamp and then store it, share it, and replay it with all the crackle and warmth of the original in perfect fidelity without ever having to touch the record again.
Vinyl isn't about crackle or warmth. Good vinyl rigs are usually not warm. It's about the fact that vinyl physically cannot support a super compressed mix.
Forgive my ignorance: I thought it was the other way around, and you needed some relatively high amount of compression on a vinyl master, since otherwise the grooves would swing too wildly, and the needle would have a higher chance of "skipping". Is this an incorrect understanding of mine?
Digital medium has a higher dynamic range and can be used for playback of completely uncompressed orchestral performances, but in practice it also can reliably play audio that is so compressed (maximising perceived volume) that vinyl playback of the recording would be impossible.
Pop producers went off the deep end with this trick during the loudness wars, once it became possible through CDs.
I think this is mainly dealt with by the RIAA curve which is standard across all recordings. The compression being referred to is likely the per-track compression as part of the production/mastering process.
It kind of is because you don't have an even frequency response throughout the vinyl. The closer to the center, the less high frequency response you get. Also higher frequencies in general require the cutting needle to to move faster and can introduce unpleasant distortion into the record, so you might attenuate higher frequencies on a vinyl record that you wouldn't need to for the streaming/radio/cd mix.
> It's about the fact that vinyl physically cannot support a super compressed mix.
This is false. Vinyl's physicality limits its dynamic range. If you have too high of an amplitude the cuts in the vinyl will be deeper and depending on the track could lead to the needle literally jumping off the player creating skipping. A super compressed mix doesn't create issues, a heavily limited one does. Clipping and brickwall limiting create problems for vinyls and introduce unpleasant distortion. You can still have a very compressed track on vinyl.
If a vinyl mix ends up with more dynamic range than the CD mix, it's because it was an active choice made by the mixing/mastering engineers, not because vinyl can't handle compressed mixes. In fact due to avoiding limiting as much as possible, you'll encounter plenty of cases where there is less dynamic range due to added compression to bring out the detail in quieter sections.
Unpopular opinion: Vinyl is not really about the sound. The sound is different, Yes, but that's not it. Vinyl is about displaying the cover, pulling the disc out of it, feeling the weight of the object as you align it on the turntable, pushing the button and watch it spin up, then delicately drop the needle at the right place. Vinyl involves a _ritualistic_ consensual experience which modern medium entirely lack. You can share your appreciation of the cover art and printed lyrics with other people in the room while the music plays. There's no distraction or suggestion coming from a computer screen. When the music stops, what happens is entirely up to you. Vinyl lets you feel the void and puts you entirely in control of the listening session.
Cassette tapes have made a similar niche comeback for a very similar reason. There's the tactility in the experience of fast forwarding, rewinding, pressing play. If you're using a walkman, you can even feel the tape turning as it plays in your hand or in your pocket. The rituals involved with using a tape are so intentional in a way that it just isn't when listening to music on a streaming service.
It also is basically the epitome of DIY ethos so popular in punk and indie music, what with creating your own mix tapes, sometimes imperfectly. The relatively low fidelity of the medium also adds to the charm. "stealing" music by taping it from the radio, another cassette, or from a cd.
It just plays heavily towards nostalgia in a way that I don't think CD will ever be able to. Though I do have fond memories of burning mixed CDs, it just doesn't have the same charm as sitting at a tape deck and carefully pressing record and stop.
I got rid of all my vinyl (much of it with some water damage) years ago, but I do sort of understand the tactile appeal, the retro-ness, and the listening intentionality. In these days of lossless digital formats, CDs are mostly just a medium to buy/transfer a bunch of bits. I can't say I really understand interest in cassettes at all. Obviously it was the only way you could copy someone's album or make a mix tape at one point but that doesn't apply today.
I certainly had cassettes as a teenager and college student and made plenty of mix/party tapes using them (and copied albums my friends owned). I guess I just look back at them as a utilitarian tool to accomplish something I had no other means to accomplish.
You don't have the large format artwork and liner notes, you have objectively inferior sound quality, you don't have random access, it's just an object that you stick in a player. So, no I don't, beyond a nostalgic I used to make mix/party tapes in this format.
I grew up DJing with vinyl, it is as much about the wicky-wicky as it is the ritual of carefully and delicately placing a needle before going off to smoke your cigar.
Though for me its more about blending and beatmatching... the feeling of a perfectly timed double-drop or blend or whatever simply isn't the same with digital. And most new DJs can't even beatmatch by ear any more!
If you go to a party and the DJ is spinning wax and he's got two tracks going perfectly in-sync... due to vinyl's inherent instabilities, that takes some serious skill. On a modern setup you just drag the pitch fader til the BPMs are the same and hit play at the start of the phrase, and the worst you have to worry about is the bass knocking your cheaply-made faders around
Vinyl also has no low end to speak of. Hence the RIAA curves which define how the low end is stripped out before cutting, and "restored" during playback. If you ever get a chance, listen to some vinyl on gear that can have the RIAA curves defeated/disengaged.
The mixes are optimized to a different set of constraints. (Or they should be, chances are much of the collectibles for modern music are just bad vinyl pressings of the mix for digital.) It's not "more careful mixes", the digital one will likely have seen just as much care or more, but the analog one can strike compromises between dynamics and minor distortion that the digital simply can't. Because all digital distortion is major distortion and avoided at all costs. That's why the mix for digital usually throws far more dynamics under the bus to achieve loudness than the mix for analog.
A CD version of the vinyl mix would sound great, but you'd be surprised how silent it is if you leave your amp at the usual setting.
> The mixes are optimized to a different set of constraints.
From what I heard, a lot of vinyls are just recorded from CD. No source, just a YouTube video a long time ago so take it with a grain of salt.
> Because all digital distortion is major distortion and avoided at all costs.
Not a signal processing expert but from what I read, all the quantization noise is pushed into the >20kHz frequencies where it can't be heard via dithering/noise shaping.
Loudness/compression is a deliberate choice and has nothing to do with noise.
> Loudness/compression is a deliberate choice and has nothing to do with noise.
Agree. Personally I find the amount of compression used in many of today's releases highly objectionable. I'm a big Duran Duran fan, and was really looking forward to listening to "Future Past" in 2021 after pre-ordering it. But within a minute into it I thought there was something wrong with my headphones. Turns out they compressed the hell out of it - the album is unlistenable, even in a car going down the road.
The large amount of compression is commonly known as the Loudness War:
What i meant with digital distortion is what happens when your levels leave the good regions: on vinyl, the resulting distortion will gently ramp in. The medium keeps representing those higher levels, just not very well. A good vinyl mix will consider allowing some of that the lesser evil over achieving the same amount of general loudness with more dynamics compression.
The clipping you'd get in the digital realm however isn't gentle or subtle at all and the levels beyond the good range simply don't exist. That's a hard no-go.
Quantization noise is an entirely different non-beast. Loudness/compression has everything to do with it. Yes, sometimes ccompression is also employed as an intentional creative element, but that's not even the tip of the ice berg.
I do agree with the suspicion that many vinyl pressings these days are just pressings of the CD mix. But this has everything to do with business and nothing with technology. It's a shame that back when the industry went through that phase of experimenting with formats beyond 2x16@44.1, they did not do a multichannel format with one stereo pair holding the loudness-optimized mix for radio, driving and the like, and another pair shifted 48dB lower to add more headroom. (or 24dB, to allow half of the additional bits of a 16 -> 24 expansion to go to where people usually expect it)
As mentioned I’m not an expert but what kind of distortions can there be in properly mastered 16 bit 44.1kHz PCM? I know there is distortion from quantisation but that’s a solved problem with dithering and noise shaping, no?
Clipping is just bad mastering, no?
I also find it hard to believe that vinyl will have less distortion as it’s analog where physical imperfections in the medium will affect the sound far more than in the case of digital mediums like CDs - with the latter it’s either a 1 or a 0; as long as wear and tear / damage doesn’t flip a 1 to a 0 or vice versa, you are good (and even if you do get a flip, ECC will normally fix it).
Vinyl also has it own set of restrictions with the frequencies it can reproduce and dynamic range since it’s all encode physically as tiny groves with bumps on the vinyl.
Yeah, clipping is bad mastering. But you'd be surprised what happens when you simply reduce levels to the point where the odd freak wave outlier does not clip. People mock the loudness wars, but the amount of effective volume you'd get after naive "just make it not clip" mastering would be too low for even the loudest loudness decriers.
Levels on vinyl don't have a clear maximum beyond which the levels are cleanly clipped: they keep going, just not as good. It's more like the red zone on an engine's rpm, you wouldn't want to operate up there for prolonged periods, but a race driverwho never ever dipped the needle in there for even the shortest time wouldn't be good at their job. A good CD mix will achieve target loudness exclusively by dynamics compression, a good vinyl mix can achieve the same with a mix of noticeably less compression and the occasional flirt with the red zone.
Personally I would file the loudness wars under bad mastering too.
Properly mastered CD audio is the near the best audio you can get as a consumer - you have 24 bit 96kHz audio but that's really overkill as the noise floor with 16 bits is already very very low even without noise shaping dither.
Vinyl as an audio storage medium I honestly don't see the appeal. Noisy, lower dynamic range than CD, low durability and longevity, ... etc.
Do vinyl and CDs of the exact same album have different mixes? I find this very hard to believe, or the amount of human involvement must be very low -- software automation. My point: In 2023, what record label could defend the cost of expensive audio engineers to remix an album just for vinyl. The realized, absolute profits on vinyl must be tiny at this point. And when I wrote profit, I do not mean profit margin, which will be very large on small sales revenue
Usually, yes. Albums have the RIAA curve applied. CDs typically do not, except for many of those produced in the mid-1980's when the studios were producing CDs as fast as they could and didn't want to spend the time to remaster a recording for the flat response of the CD.
The problem in the 1980s was they were starting with master tapes that already had the RIAA equalization whereas today the masters are digital and don't. So for a modern title the RIAA curve would be added for a tape to be sent to the lathe, and probably would be done when the signal is analog.
I think typically there's only one mix, but there will be as many masters as the mediums you're targetting: one master for CD, one for Spotify, one for vinyl, etc.
What would you do differently mastering for a CD versus Spotify?
(I'm in the middle of releasing an album, and we don't have different masters for these, but I could imagine that the situation is different for more professional groups)
Spotify compresses it anyway but for digital audio you'd want to encode in 48 kHZ/24 bit whereas CD only supports 44.1 kHZ/16 bit. Anyone who can hear the difference would be an exceptional listener with an exceptional sound system though, at least assuming the masters are generated with proper dithering.
I'm a professional musician who makes a good portion of my "living" selling recorded music. You use the same mix for all mediums but need to master differently for vinyl. (Mix refers to levels of individual microphones, mastering is the frequency levels of the finished mix)
I'm sure some people master different for digital outlets, but we don't. Regarding profitability,it's so much easier to sell vinyl than cds it's a challenge keeping them in stock, and pretty much every vinyl plant on earth is backlogged right now. Also the return of an lp vs. spotify is orders of magnitude higher; our Spotify income is barely quantifiable. (maybe bc we didn't specially master for it ha?)
> Amazing recording! The sonic mastering on this one is outstanding. Make sure you have your stylus and needle prepared for the canon blasts in the 1812 overture! Take a look at how wide the grooves are near the end of Side 1! I had to adjust my tone-arm weight so the needle didn't get thrown off the track or skip. This is a great listen and sounds amazing.
> Do vinyl and CDs of the exact same album have different mixes?
Certainly sometimes. In fact probably always - you can't just take analogue masters and dump them to digital - you have to do at least some mixing and filtering.
As a single datapoint, Frank Zappa's Hot Rats was remixed for CD; I hated the CD remix, which I thought was too harsh (I'm not the only person who felt that way). Also, there are differences in the actual music: the intro to Gumbo Variations, for example, is a couple of bars longer in the CD remix than the original vinyl.
I've got used to the CD remix now, and I appreciate the extended into to Gumbo Variations.
[Edit] Am I the only person that found the article impossible to read, because it was jiggling around so fast?
> Well, the objective sounds quality is always _worse_ than eg CDs.
Not necessarily true. If you have a good pair of speakers, a good amplifier, but a bad DAC[1], a CD can sound worse than vinyl (whose output does not need to go through a DAC). Old CD players (like mine) have dated built-in DACs, so this is not too exceptional a situation.
The above comment holds even if the vinyl was made from a CD source, since the vinyl maker could have used a quality DAC that's better than your CD player's.
For a long time, I didn't understand why my FM radio channel (WQXR) sounded better than my CDs. Turns out my CD player's DAC was poor in comparison to what the radio station was using to play their CDs.
And if you have a shitty record player, it will sound even worse. I don't think this can count in any way, reasonable CD players are easy to obtain and in the worst case you can always pull a FLAC play through whatever high-quality DAC you have available. Vinyl on the contrary is physically constrained regarding sound quality.
Good DACs are cheap now, e.g. the Apple USB-C to 3.5mm "adapter" is actually a DAC. It sells for 9GBP on their website, and sound quality is so good that you're unlikely to be able to hear any flaws. Basically any modern DAC that was designed with quality in mind will exceed vinyl audio quality.
A fresh record on a clean needle with a good turntable will sound identical to a CD, if not slightly better, because the physical grooves will not have the same quantization as digital
Nyquist’s sampling theorem tells us that sound sampled at 44kHz will reproduce all frequencies in the range of human hearing. There is no “quantization”.
Further the act of mastering and creating the record, and playback using a needle, will inevitably affect the sound somewhat. In the scenario you describe the music is likely to sound very good, but it will never be identical to a CD.
There is too quantization, you cant get to any bitness without quantizing the raw waveform at some level.
A signal that exceeds the maximum amplitude allowed by the media will behave dramatically different as digital bits vs an analog groove. There are also very subtle transformations that occur as a byproduct of the needle physically moving around and through the groove, in addition to any properties imparted on the sound by cabling, connectivity, or the preamp's response curve.
Nyquist theorem simply says we can reproduce the original waveform with enough bandwidth. But it does not take into account other properties of the medium.
Subjectively I find the bass on vinyl to be smoother and more buttery given the same recording available digitally. Maybe its the mastering. Maybe its because the music isn't clipping. But for bass music it is definitely a bit of a je ne sais quoi, its definitely there with a good needle, preamp, pressing, and speaker.
It might also sound much worse for a number of reasons that would prevent the proper cutting of the laquer master. I have my studio next door to a vinyl mastering studio and it is truly a fascinating craft. The cutter might have to narrow the stereo image to prevent the needle from jumping out of the groove. Often this is done by mono'ing the low end. The tool he uses will gradually mono the low end on a slope from i.e 150hz and down. This can lead to less low end especially if there are phasing issues that will cancel out signal when collapsing to mono. They will also high pass from 20-30hz and low pass (can't remember how low he went), and sometimes even de-ess the entire mix!
Also if the sides of the vinyl are too long, the sound quality will suffer badly.
And if they screw up the cut, it's a lot of $$$ for each laquer master and the diamond needle for cutting doesn't last many records either.
> That said, the deliberate experience of sitting in your couch, doing/thinking nothing else but the music you're listening, is for me an invaluable ritual. It's like meditation.
This is what we did with cassettes and then CDs. I had dates where we sat on the floor and just thumbed through our CD catalogs and played music for hours. Even today, I still prefer to listen to whole albums.
Me too to all. Listening to full albums and not using infinite playlist is why, for me, Spotify is not really any different than the older tech and I don’t feel the need to jump on the vinyl train. I’m not a collector/hoarder of physical objects, I know I’d actually listen less if I had to search the shelf and drop a needle. Maybe because I developed these habits earlier in life, well before streaming or even Napster. It is interesting to see how the younger digital natives are interested in analog music now.
“Supporting the artist” is a commonly cited reason. In the part, we bought posters, shirts and concert tickets to to accomplish this.
This is exactly why I have a turntable, too. Just buying the records of my most loved albums, setting aside some time to listen them intently and enjoy the process.
It’s not like meditation. It is meditation. As a meditation teacher, I can definitely say that.
Good points. Just to expand, I find with instant on digital music I never really listen to it with as much attention as vinyl.
In fact I love everything about vinyl except the sort durarion of each side, but even that makes me focus more closely on the experience. I know I'll have to turn it over shortly...
Vinyl is a completly different experience: the smell, the look(!), the age(!), the masting and care for the production, the cover(!)- these things matter.
Yes. People think vinyl is for snobs (especially the silicon valley type) but they don’t seem to realize a) music went digial before the iphone (CDs) and b) most of them don‘t even know much music.
Really? You can appreciate playing, touching, looking at vinyl or watching vinyl beeing played out without beeing a collector or owning some. But it is hard for me to imagine somebody not appreciating vinyl and all the things attached beeing a true pop music lover. With classical music it may be a completely different story.
Sometimes I prefer the original vinyl sound compared to the digitally remixed version of the old songs.
But most of my vinyl is of old albums that nobody bothered to re-release on CD. It's fun to buy them cheap at the thrift store, wash them, and see what's on them.
Thanks for making the Henry Rollins' carbohydrate reference. It's a great way to label these two modes of listening that we all experience.
----
"I have two basic food groups of music: protein and carbohydrate.
The protein listening is new music, where it’s unfamiliar to me so I’m listening, sometimes taking notes, researching the band while the music is playing. I do quite a bit of this, usually during the week.
On the weekends, I will allow for some carbohydrate listening, which would be records I’m familiar with, that I’ve been playing for years. This music is not exactly background, but more of an environmental asset for elevation of mood."
Dedicating time to listen to a specific album. My kids may never understand it. An album is an interesting art form, it captures a few pieces of time: when it was made and then then it was consumed. The cover art and liner art. The order of the songs. All assembled with intention. There are albums I’ve heard hundreds of time and I will still hear little new bits I never quite noticed before.
I do love digital music and having it everywhere, but it is special to just listen and take it I’m.
Why would your kids not understand it? My son certainly has no problem exploring album art and reading liner notes while he enjoys one of his favorites.
It seems like a fairly universal human quality to want to intentionally listen to music.
Because the comment makes the assumption that it'll conflict with their apparent low attention spans from years of skipping through songs on their music streaming platforms of choice, rendering them unable to sit down to consume an entire album.
I think both if you are reading too much into his comment and seeing things that aren't there. I don't think it was a jab at younger generations inability to appreciate things due to short attention spans, but more expressing sadness that streaming has killed the traditional experience/concept of an album and that it's probably never coming back.
It might not have been intended as a jab, but journalists frequently repeat that x songs on Spotify are skipped after y time, and the conclusion the journalists arrive at is that between this example, and the likes of TikTok and Snapchat, the younger generations have short attention spans.
Cool story, not my point. I'm not questioning the validity of what you're saying or the existence that people think what you're saying, but how you jumped straight to ascribing those views to the original commenter. You can make your own point without the accusations, is my point.
Digital music resparked my interest in vinyl. With streaming you have a great tool to figure out what you really love and need to have on vinyl. Less is more.
315 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadIn micro-econ, these are called “ironically uncorrelated commodities”.
But I kept around 20 of my favorites and just rotate them for display on my bookshelf. If I'm playing one of them on Spotify, I'll even rotate to show that LP while I play it. The really bizarre thing is, there's a particular old album I'm thinking of purchasing just to be able to display its cover, because of what it means to me.
It's the same with books -- my favorite ones are in my bookshelf, but even if I read a book I own physically, I pull it up on my iPad because I prefer to be able to highlight, look up words, adjust text size, read in a dark room, etc.
So I'm shocked to discover that I like having the physical artifacts even when I still consume them digitally. It's almost like bringing back souvenir knick-knacks from a vacation. This is not an outcome I ever would have expected.
Just admit that you don’t yet understand the other perspective. Resorting to this sort of snark really isn’t in service of reaching a shared understanding.
However that is a fool's errand: you can't convince me that I don't like chocolate, for example. I do!
True, most people doesn't find meaning in using vinyl records, others. Why do we have to prove that either of them is right/wrong?
Trying to understand the other's perspective is the way to go, if you care about getting closer to the truth.
Of course, none of these matter if you just want to listen to music.
As it is you can't really read the liner notes and admire any photos alone, either, unless you're hunting them down on Discogs or somewhere else, never mind together with somebody else, too.
The iTunes store in theory allows including a PDF booklet together with album purchases, but in practice it seems that albums that actually do include such a thing are almost as rare as hens' teeth.
vinyl is like deciding not to buy the chocolate in the first place.
The turntable can work with a literal digital detox (it is analog).
The very act, the very ritual of starting a record playing changes the experience, even if everything else is exactly the same. You don't interact with music the same way.
Although I like to tell myself that the old fashioned way is objectively better with coffee.
People enjoy smoking because of many other elements besides the nicotine fix.
It also completely gets rid of skips and shuffle-play. And a song can't "grow on you" if you always skip it.
Some small rituals can be calming and centering.
The digital versions of a number of these albums have 'clipped' tracks - with a sharp start point | end point and some arbitrary generic silence length (of 0 - N ms) between them.
Seems like a minor thing but it is noticable to those of us that once listened to vinyl albums and the "between track" transition is arguably as much of the overall product as originally delivered as each individual track and track ordering.
That usually causes the needle to skip! And the danger with disco records is feedback from the speakers to the needle.
Club culture was built around people dancing to music played on turntables. Specifically Technics SL1200 mk2 or SL1210 mk2 which only have a very little suspension in their feet.
If you run in mono and there will be almost no feedback no matter how loud you play or how close to the speakers you are.
Since one of the audio channels is inverted when recorded any signal feeding back will be cancelled out when the re-inverted signal is combined.
This is why old DJ mixers from people like Pioneer used have a prominent Stereo/Mono switch.
There's no real soundstage on a dance floor so you don't miss the stereo.
In the really cool venues, back in the day, they used crossovers to move just the high-hats or percussion to a specific speaker array hanging over the centre of the dance floor and have the mids and bass somewhere else but it would always be from a mono signal never stereo.
Source: Phono.
Aux Source: I worked as a DJ way back when and have experience of very loud systems in front of large crowds of dancing people. I've also played many a sketchy flat where everything was balanced on milk crates on wooden floorboards.
You 100% can get feedback from the sound when DJing. It’s guaranteed if you’ve enough bass. We put the decks on concrete slabs which in turn are on 4 squash balls to deal with it.
What do you mean by “one it channels is inverted when recorded”??
The phono pre-amp will re-inver it as part of its function.
When you combine L+R after preamp to make mono the feedback signal from one channel will be combined with inverted feedback signal from the other channel and cancel out.
Try it and be amazed. Audio engineers have known this trick since the dawn of disco.
I speak from experience!
As one of the few not square record covers released I have it out in a double perspex holder and rarely handle it as it wouldn't take much to tear the hinging 50 years on after its creation.
https://www.discogs.com/release/2980551-Small-Faces-Ogdens-N...
https://www.amazon.com.au/OGDENS-GONE-FLAKE-SMALL-FACES/dp/B...
Limited edition type stuff or just eclectic music I enjoy.
I bought an Audio-Technica AT-LP120BK-USB (and a cartridge, because, the one which came with my 300 record player was "trash") after I had accumulated a handful of them. Picked out the TRON: Legacy soundtrack and got it all hooked up.
For some context, I have a nice sound system which is optimized for movies/tv though I listen to a fair bit of music too.
If you're not aware, the TRON: Legacy soundtrack was produced by Daft Punk and Daft Punk was made for TRON: Legacy and TRON: Legacy was made for Daft Punk and the result is magical.
Started playing and the sound was great. Flipped over to Spotify and played the same album and the sound was also great.
Honestly, couldn't tell the difference.
Played one or two other things, but, the record player went on a shelf that day and is still there.
I still collect records, especially rare or limited ones of things I particularly like, or ones where there's something unique or special about the vinyl copy, but, I don't listen to them anymore.
When I moved I never plugged in my amplifier and speakers for my record player because I couldn't figure out where to put them. Eventually I realized that they didn't need to be on the floor "waiting" for me to set them up -now they're in the garage while the records/player are out on display. I just listen to music via a smart speaker and streaming most days.
I still buy the occasional vinyl though. I like them as gifts because they're physical and also personal. I tell everyone to give me a record of an album that means a lot to them so I can think of them when I play it (because gifts are about emotions, even if I don't play them directly).
I got an array of Sonos speakers and ask an Echo to play things on them. It's a wonderful, maintenance-free experience and, combined with Spotify's access to most things I'd want, makes intentional listening a zero-friction experience.
This goes beyond vinyl vs digital too. What mix/master was used can make a difference in any context with different formats. Giorgio Moroder’s From Here to Eternity hasn’t gotten a transfer from the master tapes in decades, and the version on streaming is actually a rip from a vinyl record or another poor quality or worn transfer. If you seek out a CD mastered directly from the tape, there’s an incredible difference in the dynamic range.
Anyway, I'm not unhappy about it. I love the soundtrack (and the music on every Vinyl I own) and I love that I own the Vinyl copy. Some have really cool artwork/books included which just don't exist anywhere else.
I think, perhaps, the point you're making is that the master matters more than the medium, which I would strongly agree with.
Funny enough there’s definitely some vinyl releases where the opposite occurred and they get a sloppy transfer or the label literally just presses an mp3 that already exists, especially now that they’re booming among people who won’t actually play them (or won’t play them on decent equipment.) So you can go out and potentially buy a vinyl record that just replays a digital master with poorer compression than what’s on streaming.
Definitely agree regarding everything else that comes with the package. I have the Myst box set because that game had such an impact on my life and it’s so well done with extra books, maps, etc.
Interesting trend overall. I got my dad a vinyl record for Christmas, and he only recently got a record player to listen to it. I wonder about vinyl buying vs listening demographics and how age correlates: my partner and I, along with some similar-generation friends, are avid vinyl listeners. We still use Spotify to listen to music together, either collaborative or generated playlists, and we generally set a high standard of matching the music we select to our mood, but the process of discovering and listening to records together has become one that we treat differently from digital listening. We are more forgiving and open (less “you picked this?” and more going with the flow) and have some irreverent discs that have established themselves as favorites through this process :)
Could you explain this?
Particularly the jump from "crash" to "Crash Bandicoot like figurine".
I am really sad that even high quality discussion platforms are flooded with low quality, non-content AI comments like this.
84% of surveys aren't statistically significant (clickbait.edu)
It's much more recently that I acquired a turntable and a preamp, so that I can actually listen to them.
I have quite a lot of rare vinyl and a good turntable but it's a pain constantly getting up to change records unless you're in the mood.
If you were to digitally record the output of a record player and play it back, there would be no discernible difference.
That’s probably true, but nobody does that.
I also have some which are not available digitally otherwise (or only in remixed or remastered versions)
Vinyl sounds blatantly different due to analog distortion in the vinyl mastering and playback mechanisms. The distortion, frequency response, dynamic range, are all significantly different. You must be practically deaf to not hear the difference between vinyl and CD quality.
CDs are stereo 16-bit @ 44kHz PCM with an upper limit of about 80 minutes. That's 80 * 60 * 2 * 2 * 44100 = 846,720,000 bytes = ~807 MiB / 80 minutes.
I can get a 1 TiB thumb drive and put 1200 CD audio ISO images on it. Of course, that's pointless because one can rip tracks as FLAC to get lossless compression.
Blu-Ray audio has options including 24-bit PCM @ 192 kHz. 2 channel stereo is 60 * 60 * 2 * 3 * 192000 / hr = 4,147,200,000 bytes/hr = ~4 GiB/hr. Even with FLAC, I wouldn't expect more than 500 albums per thumb drive.
I do still buy music, but it’s now almost exclusively in the form of digital downloads. I know a lot of what I have is not on most of the streaming services and quite possibly never will be.
Might be sooner rather than later if Valve hurries up with official Australian distribution of the Steam Deck.
Buyer doesn’t have a turntable.
For the bands I really like, I mostly have everything I want. But if you did manage to figure out a record I want, you would need to know which version of the release I want. For some records there are dozens. Maybe I want the first release, maybe I want the first US release, maybe I want a higher quality reissue, maybe I want a colored vinyl release. But whichever one I want, if you get me a different one it goes in the trash and I keep the release I want on my want list.
Then you've got to figure out what condition to buy it in. If it is something I'm getting to collect rather than to listen to, it needs to be near mint. If you get me very good condition instead of near mint, it goes in the trash, and I keep it on my want list. If it is something I'm getting to listen to rather than to collect, VG+ is fine. You can get it near mint, but you just wasted $50 because near mint is hard to find, and it isn't going to be near mint after I listen to it a few times.
So skip the vinyl for Xmas, if you're going to get me a gift, money works. I'm not picky about condition or version. Cash, money orders, bonds, it's all good. Or real estate.
But if you insist on gifting vinyl, I'm looking for the Weirdos "We Got The Neutron Bomb" single, 1978 release, near mint, the unofficial colored vinyl Beastie Boy singles from Paul's Boutique, I want them all but if you can only get one, "Car Thief", near mint, and the 1987 "Gimme Fever" single by Shake Appeal (first band Adam Franklin from Swervedriver was in, along with his brother), VG+ is fine.
All that to say I mostly just like collecting colored vinyl, and supporting small bands and artists you like by buying a product significantly more profitable than millions of Spotify streams is pretty cool.
That said, the deliberate experience of sitting in your couch, doing/thinking nothing else but the music you're listening, is for me an invaluable ritual. It's like meditation.
Just imagine if you could do that with a CD or even an album of MP3s! But that's just not possible, it can only be done with vinyl records.
I think it's the physical aspect of the vinyl compared to streaming services. Some people do that with CDs, but I like vinyls more since they feel more "analog" to me. Also I like the warmth of their sound. Also GP has a point about the turntable engaging you more.
> Forcing yourself to flip the record and drop the needle keeps you more engaged I feel.
A vinyl without sleeve and artwork and a carefully curated Spotify playlist sit somewhere inbetween.
There is at least the cover picture left, but yes, I would not recommend Spotify for mindful listening. It is designed for "engagement", I still have not found out, how to tell it to stop, after that one song I want to hear.
It insists on playing something else. Very rarely something interesting shows up, but usually I just get annoyed for it playing radio, when I wanted ONE song, nothing more.
So I love my own digital music collection and player that remains under my control. I have a shuffle there as well, but conscious listening remains possible, even though surely the experience would be more powerful, combined with the ritual of going through the physical records, holding the artwork in my hands and putting the one record in. But for convinience, I stick to my digital collection. (I don't think all my music is on vinyl and I would need extra rooms then)
Its fucking wild to imply that Spotify prevents mindful listening to music, what the hell does it mean that its designed for engagement?
I dont think I've ever listened to a song I didn't want to listen to on Spotify.
And when the sound comes from the boxes? Then yes, I have to hurry back to the laptop to stop the not fitting next song (e.g. something fast, after I choose something chill). This is ridiculous.
The feature "stop after song" is avaiable in every serious music player I used (and also the one I programmed myself). But it is not in Spotify, even though it is trivial.. This is what I call "designed for engagement". I have to click more and find new things etc.
"I dont think I've ever listened to a song I didn't want to listen to on Spotify. "
So how do you achieve that? Do you only use custom playlists, or do just mostly don't care so much?
Because if I have one song in my head, then sometimes I just want this exact song and if I tell spotify to play this song - then afterwards it plays something totally different, even though it tries to fit the same genre, but this works badly. And even if it would be the same genre, some songs are just deep. And you want silence afterwards to process them - if you are consciously listenting in the first place. For some background noise spotify works great, no doubt about that.
Well, the objective sounds quality is always _worse_ than eg CDs. (In the same sense that lower mp3 bitrate is always worse in some objective sense.)
But often the sound engineering and mixing is done more carefully for vinyl; and aesthetically you can prefer whatever you like.
The driving experience, though, is completely different. There's some "grin factor" raw-ness, some analog-ness to the former that makes the latter comparatively feel like a muted couch-on-wheels.
By contrast, one can digitally capture the output of a turntable + phono preamp and then store it, share it, and replay it with all the crackle and warmth of the original in perfect fidelity without ever having to touch the record again.
Pop producers went off the deep end with this trick during the loudness wars, once it became possible through CDs.
It kind of is because you don't have an even frequency response throughout the vinyl. The closer to the center, the less high frequency response you get. Also higher frequencies in general require the cutting needle to to move faster and can introduce unpleasant distortion into the record, so you might attenuate higher frequencies on a vinyl record that you wouldn't need to for the streaming/radio/cd mix.
> It's about the fact that vinyl physically cannot support a super compressed mix.
This is false. Vinyl's physicality limits its dynamic range. If you have too high of an amplitude the cuts in the vinyl will be deeper and depending on the track could lead to the needle literally jumping off the player creating skipping. A super compressed mix doesn't create issues, a heavily limited one does. Clipping and brickwall limiting create problems for vinyls and introduce unpleasant distortion. You can still have a very compressed track on vinyl.
If a vinyl mix ends up with more dynamic range than the CD mix, it's because it was an active choice made by the mixing/mastering engineers, not because vinyl can't handle compressed mixes. In fact due to avoiding limiting as much as possible, you'll encounter plenty of cases where there is less dynamic range due to added compression to bring out the detail in quieter sections.
It also is basically the epitome of DIY ethos so popular in punk and indie music, what with creating your own mix tapes, sometimes imperfectly. The relatively low fidelity of the medium also adds to the charm. "stealing" music by taping it from the radio, another cassette, or from a cd.
It just plays heavily towards nostalgia in a way that I don't think CD will ever be able to. Though I do have fond memories of burning mixed CDs, it just doesn't have the same charm as sitting at a tape deck and carefully pressing record and stop.
1. win friends (and influence people)
2. convince the target of my affection that I am truly super-awesome, and they should fall in love with me because of incredible mix tapes.
Cassette tapes FTW!
Though for me its more about blending and beatmatching... the feeling of a perfectly timed double-drop or blend or whatever simply isn't the same with digital. And most new DJs can't even beatmatch by ear any more!
If you go to a party and the DJ is spinning wax and he's got two tracks going perfectly in-sync... due to vinyl's inherent instabilities, that takes some serious skill. On a modern setup you just drag the pitch fader til the BPMs are the same and hit play at the start of the phrase, and the worst you have to worry about is the bass knocking your cheaply-made faders around
> [...] often the sound engineering and mixing is done more carefully for vinyl; [...]
A CD version of the vinyl mix would sound great, but you'd be surprised how silent it is if you leave your amp at the usual setting.
From what I heard, a lot of vinyls are just recorded from CD. No source, just a YouTube video a long time ago so take it with a grain of salt.
> Because all digital distortion is major distortion and avoided at all costs.
Not a signal processing expert but from what I read, all the quantization noise is pushed into the >20kHz frequencies where it can't be heard via dithering/noise shaping.
Loudness/compression is a deliberate choice and has nothing to do with noise.
Agree. Personally I find the amount of compression used in many of today's releases highly objectionable. I'm a big Duran Duran fan, and was really looking forward to listening to "Future Past" in 2021 after pre-ordering it. But within a minute into it I thought there was something wrong with my headphones. Turns out they compressed the hell out of it - the album is unlistenable, even in a car going down the road.
The large amount of compression is commonly known as the Loudness War:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
The clipping you'd get in the digital realm however isn't gentle or subtle at all and the levels beyond the good range simply don't exist. That's a hard no-go.
Quantization noise is an entirely different non-beast. Loudness/compression has everything to do with it. Yes, sometimes ccompression is also employed as an intentional creative element, but that's not even the tip of the ice berg.
I do agree with the suspicion that many vinyl pressings these days are just pressings of the CD mix. But this has everything to do with business and nothing with technology. It's a shame that back when the industry went through that phase of experimenting with formats beyond 2x16@44.1, they did not do a multichannel format with one stereo pair holding the loudness-optimized mix for radio, driving and the like, and another pair shifted 48dB lower to add more headroom. (or 24dB, to allow half of the additional bits of a 16 -> 24 expansion to go to where people usually expect it)
Clipping is just bad mastering, no?
I also find it hard to believe that vinyl will have less distortion as it’s analog where physical imperfections in the medium will affect the sound far more than in the case of digital mediums like CDs - with the latter it’s either a 1 or a 0; as long as wear and tear / damage doesn’t flip a 1 to a 0 or vice versa, you are good (and even if you do get a flip, ECC will normally fix it).
Vinyl also has it own set of restrictions with the frequencies it can reproduce and dynamic range since it’s all encode physically as tiny groves with bumps on the vinyl.
Levels on vinyl don't have a clear maximum beyond which the levels are cleanly clipped: they keep going, just not as good. It's more like the red zone on an engine's rpm, you wouldn't want to operate up there for prolonged periods, but a race driverwho never ever dipped the needle in there for even the shortest time wouldn't be good at their job. A good CD mix will achieve target loudness exclusively by dynamics compression, a good vinyl mix can achieve the same with a mix of noticeably less compression and the occasional flirt with the red zone.
Properly mastered CD audio is the near the best audio you can get as a consumer - you have 24 bit 96kHz audio but that's really overkill as the noise floor with 16 bits is already very very low even without noise shaping dither.
Vinyl as an audio storage medium I honestly don't see the appeal. Noisy, lower dynamic range than CD, low durability and longevity, ... etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
The problem in the 1980s was they were starting with master tapes that already had the RIAA equalization whereas today the masters are digital and don't. So for a modern title the RIAA curve would be added for a tape to be sent to the lathe, and probably would be done when the signal is analog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc2LA9kC-4U
(I'm in the middle of releasing an album, and we don't have different masters for these, but I could imagine that the situation is different for more professional groups)
(I initially tried uploading 24bit and they rejected it.)
Tchaikovsky*, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Erich Kunzel – 1812 : https://www.discogs.com/release/2205254-Tchaikovsky-Cincinna...
> Amazing recording! The sonic mastering on this one is outstanding. Make sure you have your stylus and needle prepared for the canon blasts in the 1812 overture! Take a look at how wide the grooves are near the end of Side 1! I had to adjust my tone-arm weight so the needle didn't get thrown off the track or skip. This is a great listen and sounds amazing.
https://www.talkbass.com/threads/mccartney-and-old-time-need... also has some discussion about the mixing of bass for records.
So there are very real reasons why a record would have a different mix than a CD.
Certainly sometimes. In fact probably always - you can't just take analogue masters and dump them to digital - you have to do at least some mixing and filtering.
As a single datapoint, Frank Zappa's Hot Rats was remixed for CD; I hated the CD remix, which I thought was too harsh (I'm not the only person who felt that way). Also, there are differences in the actual music: the intro to Gumbo Variations, for example, is a couple of bars longer in the CD remix than the original vinyl.
I've got used to the CD remix now, and I appreciate the extended into to Gumbo Variations.
[Edit] Am I the only person that found the article impossible to read, because it was jiggling around so fast?
Not necessarily true. If you have a good pair of speakers, a good amplifier, but a bad DAC[1], a CD can sound worse than vinyl (whose output does not need to go through a DAC). Old CD players (like mine) have dated built-in DACs, so this is not too exceptional a situation.
The above comment holds even if the vinyl was made from a CD source, since the vinyl maker could have used a quality DAC that's better than your CD player's.
For a long time, I didn't understand why my FM radio channel (WQXR) sounded better than my CDs. Turns out my CD player's DAC was poor in comparison to what the radio station was using to play their CDs.
[1]Digital to Analog Converter.
All the flaws will be from, in order:
- the speakers
- the speakers' interactions with the room
- the amplifier
- the source
Nyquist’s sampling theorem tells us that sound sampled at 44kHz will reproduce all frequencies in the range of human hearing. There is no “quantization”.
https://youtu.be/cIQ9IXSUzuM
Further the act of mastering and creating the record, and playback using a needle, will inevitably affect the sound somewhat. In the scenario you describe the music is likely to sound very good, but it will never be identical to a CD.
A signal that exceeds the maximum amplitude allowed by the media will behave dramatically different as digital bits vs an analog groove. There are also very subtle transformations that occur as a byproduct of the needle physically moving around and through the groove, in addition to any properties imparted on the sound by cabling, connectivity, or the preamp's response curve.
Nyquist theorem simply says we can reproduce the original waveform with enough bandwidth. But it does not take into account other properties of the medium.
Subjectively I find the bass on vinyl to be smoother and more buttery given the same recording available digitally. Maybe its the mastering. Maybe its because the music isn't clipping. But for bass music it is definitely a bit of a je ne sais quoi, its definitely there with a good needle, preamp, pressing, and speaker.
Also if the sides of the vinyl are too long, the sound quality will suffer badly.
And if they screw up the cut, it's a lot of $$$ for each laquer master and the diamond needle for cutting doesn't last many records either.
But the result, while a less accurate reproduction, might aesthetically be more pleasing to some.
The only thing we can measure objectively is how accurate the reproduction is, and in that vinyl will always come second.
What you're describing is mindfulness meditation.
This is what we did with cassettes and then CDs. I had dates where we sat on the floor and just thumbed through our CD catalogs and played music for hours. Even today, I still prefer to listen to whole albums.
“Supporting the artist” is a commonly cited reason. In the part, we bought posters, shirts and concert tickets to to accomplish this.
It’s not like meditation. It is meditation. As a meditation teacher, I can definitely say that.
In fact I love everything about vinyl except the sort durarion of each side, but even that makes me focus more closely on the experience. I know I'll have to turn it over shortly...
But most of my vinyl is of old albums that nobody bothered to re-release on CD. It's fun to buy them cheap at the thrift store, wash them, and see what's on them.
----
"I have two basic food groups of music: protein and carbohydrate.
The protein listening is new music, where it’s unfamiliar to me so I’m listening, sometimes taking notes, researching the band while the music is playing. I do quite a bit of this, usually during the week.
On the weekends, I will allow for some carbohydrate listening, which would be records I’m familiar with, that I’ve been playing for years. This music is not exactly background, but more of an environmental asset for elevation of mood."
https://www.discogs.com/digs/music/henry-rollins-food-groups...
Dedicating time to listen to a specific album. My kids may never understand it. An album is an interesting art form, it captures a few pieces of time: when it was made and then then it was consumed. The cover art and liner art. The order of the songs. All assembled with intention. There are albums I’ve heard hundreds of time and I will still hear little new bits I never quite noticed before.
I do love digital music and having it everywhere, but it is special to just listen and take it I’m.
It seems like a fairly universal human quality to want to intentionally listen to music.
Except I hate coloured vinyl. But hey each to their own :)
NFTs just contain a link to the content elsewhere.