It’s not that I don’t get the appeal of having larger artwork. But the medium itself in the way it’s used and produced doesn’t make sense. The whole audio production pipeline is digital. Producers take analogue audio, introduce quantisation and digitisation errors immediately to be able to use their fancy computers to produce the music (which introduces even more errors due to all filters being digital) just to then dump that digital piece of sound into an analogue medium at the very end. Nothing is gained except the digital-analogue-conversion happens before creating the medium whereas with CDs you do it after reading from that medium. Which is a stupid idea, as dust and other issues will then mess with the result you’re hearing.
Now, if you’re a producer that actually uses an all-analogue workflow, ignore this, I don’t mean you. You also have my deepest respect for enduring that pain. Please point me towards some records that actually did this though.
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I have enjoyed how some vinyl’s are mixed differently than digital versions. Often, they are mixed a lot better.
Ah, the loudness war. I would argue that carrying music around with us is a primary cause. Can’t have quiet bits and loud bits in a recording if a lot of your audience will listen to it wearing headphones in a noisy area. They won’t be able to hear the quiet bits unless unless they blow their ears out with the loud bits.
So even though digital has truly epic dynamic range compared to vinyl, it doesn’t surprise me that more of that dynamic range would be preserved in a vynal mix. You can practically guarantee it’s being listened too indoors.
Yeah, I think you’re right when it comes to quality alone. Especially with that last text.
To me, vinyl has the following qualities that I like:
- I own it physically, no streaming service can revoke my records against my will
- It just works
- No funky formats, DRM or special technical requirements
- The ritual of putting on a record
- Listening becomes more intentional (putting on a good album vs your random 1000+ track “everything”-playlist)
I can probably come up with more reasons. These are not all unique to vinyl.
There are lots of downsides as well, like price, conveniance, dust, no streaming on the go and so on.
I still like my records though.
Not sure if I agree with you or not. I think technically you are right. But there is a lot more to it than pure quality and conveniance.
But… Aren’t all those reasons also applicable to a CD? I mean, yes - you need a drive to play it and some speakers, but that’s also true to some degree for a vinyl record
CDs still have a specific digital format that needs to be read in a specific way. The sounds on vinyl are literally etched sound waves. The needle is picking up those vibrations and increasing their volume. There’s not really any need for translation or decoding, the sound is just the sound.
That is not true. Records have a massive EQ curve applied before writing to vinyl, and after the stylus reads the waves on vinyl. Yes, there are errors with digital music but there is noise with analogue methods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
He isn’t talking about noise or quality I think.
He is talking about how there is no digital bullshit needed to play it in a time of rampant enshittification.
You could put it on pretty much anything made in the last century or even make it yourself and it will just play.
Yeah what I meant in my comment was that vinyl is so simple I can understand the full system from the record to the music reaching my ears.
Given enough time and resources I think I could build a really crap turntable + amp + speakers myself and explain every step of the way.
A CD player uses lasers, processors, DACs and a lot more that are way over my understanding.
The point being, low tech is nice. Keep it simple 😄
It is a textural element. Vinyl doesn’t play music at well as digital, but it plays it differently which may contribute a different feeling when listening to music.
I get the argument, especially in today’s single heavy streaming nature. I also completely understand the digital to analog complaint. Cds are superior, but there is something about being present for those 4 or 5 tracks and flipping it over to hear the rest, I just stay more plugged in to it. I have always been an album listener. I appreciate the layout of tracks, the thought behind an overarching story, the flow of music from one track to another. A single is great, but in context to the rest of an album, it can be elevated even more. Physical ownership is awesome too, and if the apocalypse actually happens, vinyl can still be played without electricity.
any extant quantisation error is mathematically corrected for utterly and completely thanks to the sampling theorem. 44.1kHz is theoretically enough to reconstruct a 20kHz waveform exactly, and we typically oversample by a factor of 5. of course you could use a shitty ADC to get the data in but with a normal 24-bit one you get 16 million possible positions of a waveform in one time slice. considering that the average JND in humans is around 1dB, giving you roughly 140 000 imperceptible steps between every perceptible one from “vacuum of space” to “head inside a jet engine”, this is a pretty big margin.
as for digital filtering, it works on a mathematically perfect version of the waveform rather than one distorted further for every step. it’s like being able to filter in parallel rather than in series, meaning the integrity of the wave is preserved until tapeout.
of course you can do analog filtering, both before and after. the noise and artifacts it introduces can make music a lot more dynamic and interesting. but the idea that digital workflows are somehow worse is completely false. if they were, the biggest producers in the world would have stopped using digital filters as soon as they were introduced in the late 70’s.
all that said, i completely agree that vinyl doesn’t make sense. who would want their music on a format that degrades with every use and is unable to represent the full range of volume humans can perceive?
Edit: flubbed a unit
I usually listen to stuff digitally encoded on some capable device
But there is just something with putting on a vinyl and listening to the whole album
I could do the same with digital media, but it just feels differentIt’s not really about the music quality, it’s just about the experience
You don’t need to like it, but some people do and that’s ok as well
I like some 80s punk (Ton Steine Scherben) and I got their whole work gifted in vinyl.
Usually I just listen to mp3/ogg of them, but from time to time, I like to spin up a vinyl and just let it run and listen
It’s…well, it’s a different experienceoh no i also like it! it’s the entire purposeful ritualistic thing that makes it good. i did that a lot when i was younger. and that’s why vinyl still makes sense for the experience. but the op was all about the quality, and there’s nothing special about the quality of vinyl other than nostalgia.
Yeah, true that
It has its uses. There’s a thing called ‘rap music’ where people just spoke drivel over bits of music they had stolen. Like olde fashioned AI it went viral with the kids and was largely focused upon scraping needles on plastic to make the noises.
There’s also another niche they called ‘dance music’ that’s been knee deep in this tech too.
It depends what you are doing, if you are just wanking at home to Coldplay with the heaphones on, vinyls might interrupt the flow of the evening. If you are doing the silver tongued devil routine at the local bar then having some bearded crusty on the vinyls might be just the ticket to success.
Wait til you hear about 4k blurays based on 2k digital masters
I heard about those and I hate them with a passion.
Vinyl also has a lot of difficulty with low frequency range, as too much intensity in the low frequency range will cause the needle to skip (momentum of it going up and down on the big sine waves), so it needs to be properly mixed to attenuate the low end. I wonder how many are actually mixed properly for vinyl…and a lot of modern music is intended to have that nice deep low end.
96kHz+ digital is really the way to go nowadays.
Edit: I also just realized if they’re doing an analog workflow to create the vinyl, the EQ won’t be linear phase and will massively distort the sound (particularly the low end) and now you’ve lost what the artist was intending to present.
I don’t have your answer, but what you said mirrors what happened when music on cd came out. The discs would be marked DDD or AAD to designate whether they had used an all digital pathway (DDD) which was the holy grail, but opposite of what you seek. Recorded digital, Mixed digital, Mastered digitally or analog. Spars codes. Wild. Now my cds are in a box in the attic.
Yep, I remember in the 90s we were chasing the DDD discs because they were perfect.
One thing that I can say that it is useful for is finding music that you will never find on streaming sites.
I love going to the thrift store and finding an album with interesting artwork or something that looks kooky or weird and then bringing it home and playing it.
Like, did you know that the original Dumbledore, Richard Harris, was also a musician and released a couple of albums? Now, I bought the album, not knowing who he was, realizing that his face looked familiar, looking him up and going, oh shit, this is Dumbledore music!
And after listening to it, it was pretty terrible, which explains why he went into acting, but it was still an event that never would have happened had I only relied on streaming services.
Just like shooting your photos on film, running your amp on tubes, or traipsing through the woods in the dark with an incandescent bulb flashlight, music on vinyl in this age is just hipsterism. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, if that’s what you’re into, and this is coming from someone who nearly exclusively writes with a fountain pen because of hipsterism (an opinion that did not make me popular on the fountain pen community recently). But at minimum people who do it ought to be honest about it.
Retro is cool and people want to feel cool by being retro and/or bucking the mainstream. Being “better” somehow doesn’t enter into it, and claiming otherwise is inherently disingenuous.
History is littered with formats that were contemporary to LP records that people don’t go all starry eyed over, other than occasionally for historical interest. Compact cassettes and eight tracks leap to mind.
It’s not necessarily hipsterism - it can be, but isn’t automatically.
Do you use a fountain pen for the image you present to the world, or because you genuinely like the experience of using one?
I used one a long time ago because I liked the way it wrote, and the technology had improved to where using one wasn’t an inconvenience.
I can understand someone wanting to use a modern incandescent flashlight for it’s color - all my good led flashlights use a similar color.
I can appreciate listening to vinyl as it’s a different experience (one which I’m very familiar with as I had a massive collection before CD’s existed).
All of these things can be done for “hipsterism” (i.e. Presenting an image) or because someone genuinely appreciates certain attributes of a thing.
I don’t agree with you that being hipster is the only good reason for it.
There are many benefits with physical and DRM-free media.
I just posted another comment on this post making my point though 😄
Compact disc, compact casettes, eight track, even reel-to-reel tape are also all DRM free physical media formats for the same type of content, too. And yet, there is no CD renaissance happening. Nobody is making daily posts of their cassette deck showing off the album art on the tape case propped against their stereo.
Maybe in another 10 or 20 years there will indeed be a CD renaissance, if it becomes retro enough to be fashionable. It’s already happening with video games (says the turkey with two entire bookcases full of old cartridges and disks).
If somebody likes vinyl records I’m certainly not going to stop them. Even if they like them for spurious reasons.
CDs are making a comeback already!
Albeit not as big as vinyl yet, but it might catch up given time!
A couple of months ago I overheard a couple guys in their early 20s who were happy for finding some specific CD in a local record store.
Lots of stuff doesnt make sense. If motorcycles were invented today they would never be allowed on public roads.
Amen.
People who had formative experiences of listening to music on vinyl associated the crackle/distortion (“warmth”) and the ritual of putting a record on with positive feelings. Eventually, this evolved into the idea that vinyl is inherently authentic in itself (even for music that wasn’t released on vinyl the first time around, like 90s grunge), an idea close to that of vinyl records having souls which CDs and digital files lack.
The recording companies did their best to help this along: other than the margins being higher now that it has gone from being an outdated technology to a luxury format, you can’t pirate vinyl (well, you can, but you just get the lower quality without the magic of the whole package, as anyone who listened to tapes recorded off vinyl records knows). Given how they tried and failed to make copy-protected CDs that play in CD players but cannot be ripped (there’s no provision for DRM in the Red Book CD standard, so any attempts depend on breaking the standard and hoping that it affects the pirates and only them), the death of CDs, and their replacement by collectible vinyl and DRM-encrypted streaming services couldn’t come a day too soon.
I mean, you’re right.
It’s why I respect Adrienne Lenker so much for using an all-analogue workflow.
She is a guitar goddess!
