Comment by dijit
16 hours ago
This is like saying “Candles are superior to lightbulbs because they burn out quicker and thats an advantage in some situations”.
I’m not sure how, its an aesthetic choice but an inferior technology by every metric that counts.
Candles still have a place, we still buy them, but we can’t reasonably call them superior either- even if, candles actually would have a real advantage of not requiring power. Vinyl doesn’t even have that.
Instead of "Candles are a superior way to light a room" you can say "Candles are a superior way to create a romantic vibe in a room".
Candles/Vinyl can be superior if you clarify the metric you're optimizing for.
Just so.
The advantages of vinyl are basically making up for lack of self-discipline in humans. (I much prefer vinyl for that precise reason!)
a) Since putting it on becomes more of a ritual - handling the album carefully, brushing off lint, placing the needle &c - I find I make more of an effort to actually _listen_ to the music I put on. I could listen as intently to Spotify or Tidal, too - but, alas, I most often don't.
b) Seeing as you'll get some 20-odd minutes of music before having to make another choice - be it playing the other side or another album entirely - it enforces having to decide on what you'd like to listen to, rather than just letting your streaming service of choice play things it thinks you may like. (That being said, streaming services are a great way to explore new music!)
c) Given the economics of streaming, buying physical media helps both the record stores - a good one is like an excellent library, in which the librarians give you all sorts of curated recommendations for things you may like, in addition to being great social meeting places with like-minded folk - and performing artists alive; I've no idea how many hours I would have to listen to an artist on Spotify before the payout is equal to their takeout from a single vinyl sale...
d) Besides, it is cosy.
That being said, you could easily DSP CDs or streaming to sound like vinyl if that's your idea of fun - just about any playback format is superior sonically to vinyl. However, to many, it is the whole ritual of putting on a record which basically makes it worth the sonic tradeoffs... (Call me a luddite if you like!)
In a similar vein, vinyl records make the unit of music an album, and I like it in situations where the artist has created "an album" rather than "a collection of ten-ish tracks".
I listen to most of my music on phones or computers and when I do, I like to pick out a track at a time or put together a playlist or just shuffle the whole damn thing.
When I purchase or put on a record, it's because I think the album is a cohesive work and I want to listen to it as a piece; the constrained format created the concept of an album, and using it enforces listening to the music as an album.
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That's very succinctly-put. Well done.
Rather less-succinctly: I never got into vinyl and have never owned a turntable that wasn't built down to a price. I do still have my shelves of CDs, and it keeps slowly expanding. I usually listen to Spotify because it is convenient and portable and -- these days -- lossless.
But my sister and her old man have put together a quite decent stereo system with a mix of vintage and modern gear in recent years, and also started a a rather serious vinyl collection. While there's certainly no romance there on my end, it's a lovely and deeply-involving experience to hang out with them in their tiny little city-dweller living room and spin records into the wee hours; sometimes for just one track, and sometimes for entire albums.
I definitely prefer the way my own stereo, which I've built over the course of decades, sounds. It's detailed and big and it does all the things; it is by all technical measures very superior. But we have a lot more fun listening to vinyl at their place than we have playing CDs and Spotify at my place. The process -- and indeed, the inconvenience -- of playing vinyl makes it all much more visceral.
I’m sure somebody posted a link to E-Prime here recently (a form of English where all forms of ‘to be’ are forbidden) and this conversation is a wonderful example of the kinds of conflicts that it helps avoid.
The metric being house fires
You have to look beyond the audio engineering on this one.
Using constrained mediums on purpose is often how the best artistic expression is achieved. For example, if the artist knows their channel is noisy and band-limited they can get a lot more liberal with the kinds of samples they use throughout. CD/SACD is kind of like 4K for television. The medium becomes so transparent that it causes upstream shocks in every other part of the process. You can no longer rely on the camera or audio chain to cover it up (unless you hobble yourself intentionally).
> Using constrained mediums on purpose is often how the best artistic expression is achieved
Artistic expression is not technology. Vinyl is strictly inferior as technology. That doesn't imply that it cannot have any advantages at all, but that wasn't the point being made.
> Artistic expression is not technology.
Technology is sometimes used by artists to express themselves. Sometimes that means lo-fi recordings of your music on a shit tape recorder when better tools ate around. Sometimes it means pressing vinyls.
With this logic you can argue the best audio medium is dirt because if you made good music with dirt, the music must have been so incredible to have counteracted the flaws of dirt as a medium. Ignore the fact that dirt cannot be used as a music medium. (Vacuous truth)
Early Motown records were tracked in a room which had a dirt floor.
Yes, but your "IF" is doing the heavy lifting here and it would be your burden to proof how dirt would be a means of artistic expression before anybody could take your argument seriously.
As a musician myself I can assure you that the high stakes releases for any musician are vinyl releases. They also happen to be the ones with which most musicians earn the most money.
Now technologically vinyl isn't superior (and anybody who claims it is is an idiot in the sense of the word), but technology isn't everything. A noisy casette tape can evoke the same (and sometimes more) feelings than the digital recording. A vinyl record with a big cover, an inlay with band info, that you specifically chose to put on the record player while reading the liner notes and examining the design is in a ritualistic sense a thousand times more gratifying than having spotify select a song for you without knowing why, in the background of the daily life. That is like the difference between a candle light bath and getting wet in a rainshower.
Now that doesn't mean people will be binary either 100% vinyl or 100% digital. Vinyl is for the special occasion or for DJ sets, digital is for everything else.
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No, you can't argue that the best medium is dirt. Just like you can't argue that the best medium is vinyl.
But you could maybe argue that there are advantages to dirt (at least a hypothetical dirt which can be used as a musical medium somehow) which you lose by going to CD or vinyl. If this hypothetical dirt managed to be constraining in such a way that it produces kinds of musical works which would not have been produced for CD, is that not an advantage?
A CD is 100% technologically capable of having the duration and physical size of a vinyl.
A return to laserdiscs (with CD or BluRay technology and information density) would be wild.
> CD/SACD is kind of like 4K for television.
In theory. In practice most stuff is distorted and compressed to death and might as well be 12-bit ;)
Reminds me of the Autechre album Tri Repetae which was labelled as “Complete with surface noise” on vinyl and “Incomplete without surface noise” on CD.
If they really wanted to do so, they could take the vinyl, play it with all the surface noise they wanted, and record that to CD so they could have the surface noise there, too.
It would be the same surface noise each time, not getting worse.
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I think we can agree that vinyl sounds different than CD, right? Is it so hard to believe that some people actually prefer the sound of music on vinyl? For such a person, that might be the only metric that matters.
But, another example: when I was growing up (dating myself here), cassette tapes were superior to CDs in the only way that mattered (to me): they didn't skip in my portable music player (walkman) when I took them running.
The sound of vinyl is a subset of the sound of CD. If you take a high quality recording of a vinyl record playback and write it to CD, it will sound identical.
Okay, sure. But if I prefer the subset of CD sound that is the same as vinyl, and my favorite band comes out with a new album... I just buy vinyl, right?
Or are you suggesting that I buy the record, a blank CD, and all of the high quality recording playback equipment I need to write it to that CD?
Really deep bassnotes can't be reproced by vinyl. The grooves would get too wide IIRC, it's a physical limitation.
Candles are pleasant light, in a way difficult to acquire with other lighting types. That means there's a niche in which that facet is more valuable than the other technologies.
I had candles at my dinner table last Thursday, and am likely to do so date night tonight... but the bulbs I turn off to give the candles reign are LED...
Vinyl isn't about technology it is about musicality, art and taste. If you try to explain and reduce vinyl to something technically, you are leaving out the most important part, the artful content that will be enjoyed from it.
RAM shortages will never make vinyl more expensive. Anything digital requires a CPU to work.
AMPs: am I a joke to you?
RAM prices are such an infinitesimally small component cost of digital audio equipment that I can’t take you seriously here.
It was a stretch, so you're right to not take me seriously.
I imagine any large about of RAM in audio equipment would strictly be for devices/functions that buffer large amounts of data as opposed to just decoding it.
An old Akai S1000 sampler I had a long time ago had slots for memory modules (some weird proprietary slot IIRC), but that was a musical instrument, not really a player of any kind.
Candles are better than lightbulbs at melting the ends of frayed nylon strings and ropes. :)
And at PM2.5 and VOC output.
> advantage of not requiring power. Vinyl doesn’t even have that.
well actually...
Really good analogy!