Comment by bob1029
16 hours ago
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.
Yes that's my point with the "if"! And in general I largely agree with you.
The parent comment basically argued vinyl is superior because when artists used vinyl the resulting music was creatively better (because of whatever process). Sure, but then you can't selectively ignore the great music that has been made with other recording technologies. I can point to a lot of good music recorded on tape or digital. Unless we are arguing that music back in the vinyl days was broadly better than now? (Different argument then...)
As for artistic choices, I totally agree that vinyl can be a valid choice! Then it's silly to say one thing is "better" than another.
But in terms of raw technology, I say it's just copium to claim vinyl is in any way superior to digital. Digital's recording capabilities are a superset of vinyl's. There is no magic sauce killer feature unique to vinyl.
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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.
We need a new consumer audio format with the ability to contain playback algorithms! :P
> It would be the same surface noise each time, not getting worse.
Interestingly, not always getting "worse".
A large portion of vinyl surface noise comes from static rather than groove wear.
So you can zap it with a little petzo-electric gun and it goes away again. At least for a little while.