Comment by thechao
1 month ago
My dad grew up in the 50s & 60s. During COVID he purchased my daughters' the, I quote, "shittiest briefcase record players" he could find. Both girls listen to their music on their devices, but also buy vinyl. The other day, my eldest came down from her room complaining that her vinyl "sounded awful". I told her to bring it up with their Grampy. His response: "you can't appreciate good playback until you've heard awful playback on shitty record players like I had to.". My eldest is now plotting a complete hifi system, and is learning all about how to transfer "vinyl" to "digital" without losing the parts of the vinyl she likes.
This was a 5 year play by my dad. Shout out.
>"you can't appreciate good playback until you've heard awful playback on shitty record players like I had to.". My eldest is now plotting a complete hifi system
This has strong energy of "Teach your kids how to play Magic, they won't have money for drugs."
"Teach your kids how to grow weed, they won't need money for drugs."
I got into hydroponics first because I wanted to research closed loop food production.
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Is this a metaphor for me learning how to fix old AV equipment in my basement when I was a kid?
I was going to ask, when are the youngsters going to discover CDs? Much less prone to degradation to vinyl, lossless ripping, superior quality.
I am the youngster in this case and I am going to tell you something but we really need to move off of spotify.
I never really got onto spotify. I was always the youtube kind of guy, although I recently started listening to youtube music when I realized that my youtube feed was being impacted and youtube music's a better way to listen I guess
We really need to get to pen-drives first before CD as well I guess. Like downloading songs from youtube to run them in pen-drive or just listen to locally would show us youngsters something
I have been recently thinking of downloading all of my songs and uploading it to some vps so that I can listen to from anywhere. I feel like steps like these with media ownership would gradually help rediscovery of CD perhaps as well as we people would really love supporting the artists then as well and buying their CD might be the way if we end up downloading their musics.
Pen-drives are ubiquotus as well so perhaps we might need the pen-drive era in between
Also computers are absolutely removing the CD port. Even my desktop doesn't have it. I think it has the slot but I had my PC built in the store so they didnt really add it but literally no devices have CD except perhaps our car but I think even some new Cars might not have any CD's
If someone is forced to buy a CD player just to play CD's, it just adds more friction and I would argue that Vinyl is much more so for the aesthetics itself as well which I feel like CD's aren't really that much for.
So my point is, People aren't really using Vinyl for quality, they are using it for aesthetics. If CD's have a chance, they really need to get more on the ease of starting and pen-drives can help start the local-music movement.
A couple of decades ago most people I knew were spending considerable time thinking about the best folder structure to use to manage large collections of MP3s (and then making them available on Limewire). Then you'd move over selections to your or someone else's MP3 player.
One great product of this among my friends was the MP3 mix tape swap parties. You'd select a bunch of your favourite songs and put them on a thumb drive, then go hang out at a friend's house. All the MP3s would be put together, virus checked and then copied to everyone's thumb drives. It was a great way of discovering new music.
> If someone is forced to buy a CD player just to play CD's, it just adds more friction
I recently had a relative complain that they have to find and buy a CD player to listen to their music when they aren't in the car. I pointed out that they already have several in their home. Multiple game consoles and their bluray player supported playing CDs. The loss of CD drives in computers is unfortunate, but the format is still supported in a lot of devices that take disks.
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2nd hand CD players are abundant and cheap. New CD players are also rather abundant and cheap (and also have burning capability + DVD read/write) and are available e.g. on Amazon - some are USB, some are standalone units (like we all bought in the 90s). There are tons of options, and as the article says, plenty of people are still buying CDs.
Otherwise I totally agree about aesthetics of vinyl. I have a rather large collection and still buy from time to time, but usually only 2nd hand. I threw away all my CDs because they stopped working after 20-30 years from being stored improperly, being scratched from being played too often, and overall I just prefer the convenience of MP3s.
Internet radio is also lovely (outside of Spotify of course), check out https://directory.shoutcast.com/ which works great with WinAmp (even the old versions from the 90s still run fine in Windows 11). There are of course other smartphone apps that use other directories, but Shoutcast was/is the first and still my favorite place to discover new music.
Come and join the resurgent Minidisc movement!
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No we don't.
We should stop fantasizing about CDs and Vinyl and shit and just enjoying listen to music.
And if we think we need tokens in the real world, make them yourself or buy that one vinyl.
My daughter (16) and her friends are. She's asked for specific CDs as presents, and is now the guardian of my brother and mine CD stashes dragged out of the wardrobes and attics.
She'll trawl thrift shops for CDs too.
New CDs in shops now are much much cheaper than they used to be as well.
Giving up Spotify isn't on the cards yet though. I'll teach her how to rip songs next I reckon.
If it is to happen, CDs and CD packaging would need a rebranding. Part of vinyl popularity is the large sleeve surface that provides a large canvas for a piece of art. Another part is that you get a physically large analogue object that, while previously would be cumbersome, has become interesting in a heavily digital age.
Afaict this has already happened. Vinyl is about the big art, CDs are all about the pack ins. You get small books, pictures, stickers all packed into a cardboard box the size of a novel. Not jewel cases.
At least for the K-pop artists my daughter listens to.
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My daughter is in to K-Pop and they do an excellent job on CD packaging. It's sometimes a very high quality photo book.
But sadly often horrible mastering.
That’s not the mediums fault. I’m sure during the 70s and 80s there were equally horrible vinyl masterings.
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Introspect my favorite music media was cassette tape. I found them more robust and repairable then CDs.
Huh? IME cassette tapes often begin to stretch after fewer than a hundred plays, which permanently ruins them.
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Never. Now we have tiny music (digital), and big music (LPs), so no need for medium music (CDs).
I bought my kids all the songs on Tonie. Now I am buying them all the same songs on Yoto. I can't wait to just start burning CDs again.
It's about owning the physical object like a concert ticket stub only way more accessible. They already have the music on their phone they don't need to listen to it on a record
I was going to ask, when are the youngsters going to discover CDs? Much less prone to degradation to vinyl, lossless ripping, superior quality.
I think they are. There was an article in the newspaper in the last month or so saying that CD sales are on the rise, and mainstream pop stars are releasing their music on CDs again.
As noted in another comment, I see CDs in music (and other) stores more and more where I live.
> Much less prone to degradation to vinyl
huh... and I thought the vinyl craze happened because it's more durable out of ye old formats
CDs are well known to oxydize in the span of decades of storage
Pressed cds last well in general. Burned cds have a lot of issues. vinyl also wears out from using it, while cds are listen as much as you want with no issuse.
I have ripped all my cds to flac on my NAS and put them on usb in whatever format as needed.
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Vinyl was infamous for degrading during use to the point where you could identify whether an album had been played more than a dozen times by the reduction in sound quality.
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CDs can oxidize in the span of decades. I've got hundreds of burned CDs that are from 2003 that are fine (even if they have changed color) because i store them in a climate controlled environment.
A vinyl record degrades every time you play it in a normal turntable.
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Pressed CDs do not fail in this way.
CDs suffer from different forms of degradation. I wouldn't trust a 50 year old CD if there was one as I do a vinyl record I picked.
Using the same master a CD would always sound better than a vinyl record, but I and many people would always take vinyl over a CD because of the praxis. Set and setting is important, in the end. Vinyl is more demanding in every aspects, it imposes more care and respect for what you're listening to.
The oldest CDs are from 1982 (43 years old) and are still working perfectly fine.
I don't have any that old, but I have some from the late 1980s which my dad bought. All still fine, my parents listen to them in the car.
They don't, because just about anything available is better than CDs. Vinyl craze is actually not about "warmth", just genuinely more data.
The only additional data that (some) vinyl has over CDs is inaudible ultrasound. Ultrasound is intentionally omitted from CDs because they're intended for humans to listen to. In all audible aspects a correctly mastered CD release is closer to the original sound than any vinyl. And if you really want ultrasound (perhaps your dog enjoys it), you can get digital releases at higher sample rates.
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> just genuinely more data.
Mastering is mostly done purely digital, so only when they are pressed are they converted to analog grooves. This can never add new data / information.
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480i content, CRTs, analog signal chains, non-digital transports, film grain, et. al., provide opportunity for our imagination to step in and produce a better interpolation than the ground truth might otherwise provide.
Music doesn't need so much support from imagination. You could argue that 24 fps film is a good thing (I disagree), because special effects are expensive and the bad motion quality obscures the flaws, but the same doesn't apply with music. Every major city has an orchestra full of skilled musicians and a concert hall with good acoustics. Just record it as it sounds in the room and put it on CD. You can apply the same philosophy to popular music genres too. CD quality is good enough for this to work. The only imagination needed is to pretend that stereo audio is the full surround sound experience, and that's not difficult when you're sitting in the right position.
At least with CRTs, it's not just the imagination. It's the actual analogue interpolation creating a different image than the raw pixel-perfect without blurring/smoothing.
This video and timestamp comes to mind: https://youtu.be/2sxKJeYSBmI?si=ikuOuZl-Ho5_VK4k&t=1613
obligatory supplement: everyone used CRTs for monitors back then, albeit of different resolutions for PCs and for watching TVs. It's not like devs had to mentally simulate the effect.
There is the old quote "I like radio, the pictures are better"
> CRTs
Its only really recently that CRTs have been surpassed by modern screens in terms of colour.
However I'm not going back to CRTs anytime soon. Just a dumb OLED public signage display, and some high bitrate codec
You reminded me of how Marshall McLuhan called TV a "cool" (as opposed to "hot") medium.
My interpretation is that back in his day, TV was grayscale, grainy, and interlaced, and therefore demanded that the viewer exert their imagination to "complete the picture".
I imagine that if he were to see today's 4k full-color 120Hz panels, he would call TV a "hot" medium.
This is fine, but I'd encourage anyone to test all new audio setups with a blind triangle test at least, because most people can't distinguish most differences. If you can't tell a difference, using cheap equipment is great!
Also a lot of the fun of audio is that it comes down to taste more often than you’d think. There are full setups for a few hundred dollars that I love, and fancy expensive setups that I don’t care for. For me the most fun part is hunting for under appreciated equipment in thrift stores. It’s amazing what you can find without much looking
“There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.”
Sometimes I wonder how much INTENTIONAL engineering people's discontent for good or ill happens across the spectrum of human activity. One thing is for sure, people don't talk about it much.
I can think of many examples.
The Fremen.
Nobody would work if housing and food were super cheap, for instance.
Saving the economy by turning water into a luxury item. The op-eds basically write themselves.
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There are overwhelming examples of people who continue to work when all of their basic needs are met. Some work because they love to, some work because they have to; we, collectively, should be trying as hard as possible to make work optional (automation, etc), because the point of life is to live, not to work. Some combination of Abundance [1], Solarpunk [2], etc. The entire planet will eventually be in population decline [3] (with most of the world already below fertility replacement rate), so optimizing for endless growth is unnecessary. So keep spinning up flywheels towards these ends if we want to optimize for the human experience, art, creativity, and innovation (to distribute opportunity to parity with talent).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/12/supply-b...
[3] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
(think in systems)
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If people were broadly socialized for collaboration and collective good, people could and would achieve as much with many fewer hours of work, and with the many more hours available for personal creative pursuit and play. There is no innate human nature that prevents this, only a prevailing social order which reinforces individualism and competition at the expense of the many.
Or people would do things they were genuinely interested in rather than from desperation
There’s an equilibrium. If no one worked, housing and food would not be super cheap.
Reminds me of one other comment on a different thread about a person trying an old CP/M machine and seeing some restriction like I think it was 50x70 pixel restriction or similar.
The point I am trying to make is that nostalgia can seem really good as that comment also pointed that, we often only remember the good parts of the system.
It's only when we recounter them that the bad parts resurface again.
Now instead of taking the fair criticism and perhaps doing something about it if possible, your dad tried to use the old technique of "back in my day ..."
And I will tell you kids ABSOLUTELY hate this. It's more so, Gramps you were forced to deal with this thing, we got digital and you aren't willing to understand my problem so why should I be stuck with the problem or the countless other examples.
I don't know much about vinyl but if it's the record players, perhaps your father can buy them a good one which could help them solve the issue they are facing.
This! If you just care sound quality it becomes "product", no more an experience where you feel it. You tell me your story with your dad, all started by he buying his children "shittiest briefcase record players". An elderly woman gifted me a Brockhaus encyclopedia, making me see the stark contrast between Google's billion-dollar presence and the noiseless authority of the printed word.
Every child should start the technological hedonic treadmill at a low level and rapidly progress.
respect
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