In my early 20s I used to spin dance music (melodic and tech trance) and have accumulated a pretty large vinyl collection before Technics mk2s went largely extinct and I moved on to CDJs. But I could have sworn that vinyl sounded some much richer and warmer than digitized formats. A part of me is happy vinyl is making a comeback.
Sony plans to make vinyl records again
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Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again
#162As someone who started collecting vinyl about 3 years ago, it's about the difference between passive and active involvement in music. So much of our music consumption these days is a largely passive activity. We have music in our headphones while we work. We have music on in our cars while we drive. We have music on in the background of social events. While modern digital formats have given us true ubiquity of music…
I think my "moment" with this passiveness/ubiquity thing was the day when I noticed music was "on" in every store in the mall too, audible as you walked past, serving as an advertisement of sorts, maybe conveying something (the merchants hoped) about what their business was about. And if you walked in the store, of course it would become the soundtrack, influencing your emotions for a perfectly curated retail consumption experience!
That's the day I realized music had become plentiful and cheap, in both the Econ 101 sense and others. It was also the epitome of listener passivity, as the customers didn't choose to have music on at all, didn't choose which music was on, and might even have had their buying influenced by it. (Though there's a counter-argument to the last bit, that anyone who didn't like the music might just self-select outta there.)
Anyway it didn't make me go back to vinyl... it just made me buy a nicer and more impenetrable pair of headphones. And it made me get the hell out of the music biz.
Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again
#163As someone who started collecting vinyl about 3 years ago, it's about the difference between passive and active involvement in music. So much of our music consumption these days is a largely passive activity. We have music in our headphones while we work. We have music on in our cars while we drive. We have music on in the background of social events. While modern digital formats have given us true ubiquity of music…
You've hit on a very big part of listening to music that appears largely lost today. Composers would know that they had a captive audience for so long a time and would be able to create large narratives in their music that just can't be pulled off today. I have a hard time imagining just sitting down to listen to music. Not listen to music and converse or eat. Not listen to music and browse the web. Just listening to…
There's still a lot of narrative-based music, it's just not heavily pushed in music stores and on the radio. A lot of it sits on bandcamp - the New Albion trilogy, The Mechanisms' sets, etc etc.
Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely. Well, ok, not really :) I debated including it because it's not something I do very often. I do think it's true though. On a CD you hold the skip button and have to guess where you are (pretty sure none of my CD players showed a timecode when skipping but it's been a while). With vinyl you can see a physical representation of the length of the track and estimate much better (i.e. the solo is half way thro…
The first CD player I used, which my parents bought in about 1988, showed the current time when you held down the "Fast Forward" button. I don't think I've ever owned one that didn't do this. Nowadays, a good professional CD player (or DJ equipment) will have something like an infinite-turn knob, which you can use to seek.
Hmmm maybe I'm just remembering wrong then. It's been a long time since I had a dedicated CD player.
Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again
#165Why not instead focusing on reinventing the LP? One side disc, large format, laser pickup, analog recording. Bring together the good parts from both LP and CD / DVD.
Lol.. other than the one side part (turtle anyone?) what you're proposing is a laserdisc. Ie an actual thing. They're not coming back either because they died. Vinyl never died it just declined. Simplicity of playback equipment is a big reason why. Also nothing stops anyone from putting a CD in a 12 inch jewel case or sleeve of some sort.
Laser disc never died either; just ask my 8th grade science teacher and his collection of documentaries. Still (!) evidence of use today.
Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again
#166I confess, I am part of this trend. And I just got into it, so I get no "before it was cool"-claim to fame. Not sure where that leaves me on the hipster-scale. Buying CD's used to be a weekly ritual for me and I missed it for years. Putting on a new album on a Saturday afternoon with a beer or glass of wine while I start cooking is a very enjoyable moment for me. Now, obviously this was for the most part because I wo…
But why buy vinyl instead of buying CDs? I understand your point about listening to a whole album being preferable to singles, I feel the same way but I'd still much rather listen to a CD than an LP.
I don't buy a ton of vinyl, but when I do, it typically falls into one of a few categories:
Either it's something newer that I just really love and want the big cover art and physical "object" for collecting and appreciation. Often times I'll be at a show and buy the band's new album instead of a T-shirt as a way to support the band I like. Those often come with download codes so I can still get a high quality digital version for portability.
If it's something older I find at a Goodwill or a yard sale, I tend to buy it because it looks interesting enough to be worth the $0.50-$2.00 asking price. It's almost like buying some small novelty or other impulse purchase. It may be great. It may be awful. It may just be fun to have a bunch of old comedy records on my shelf. And if they are uninteresting, the cost is low so the risk is as well.
And occasionally I've purchased the vinyl versions of albums I copied from friends' tapes in high school or downloaded illegally years ago. As with buying the record instead of the Tshirt at a concert, it's a way to support the band I discovered for free but has since earned my payment.
Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again
#167As long as nobody is claiming they sound better, and it's just for fun and nostalgia, I'm all for it. It really bugs me when vinyl buffs try to argue their rig sounds better or warmer or whatever than the same rig with a digital (or non-vinyl analog) source.
You forget production values.
Compare vinyl to CD editions of some tunes.
There are real differences and it's not about how perfect the reproduction actually is. It is about how the music was mastered, the art of it.
Those vinyl limits bring out some really great art.
That is a lot of where "better" comes from in these discussions.
A similar thing happened when AM radio was a music medium. It's all about the production values. Some 70s era music just feels great!
Of course one can put that all on a CD, or digital track and enjoy it.
Honestly, more producers should be exploring these things. Perfection isn't what most people crave.
I see this trend toward vinyl as a value add to music. With the return of more if the art also comes more value.
We nailed audio reproduction long ago. All but the most crappy gear can perform better than humans can.
It's just not about that, and this trend seems to resonate with what people like, not what is technically superior.
Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if this would work for you, but I like Spotify's Discover Weekly. Every Monday you get a playlist of 30 songs that you've never heard before. I listen to it from beginning to end without skipping and I often find songs that I end up liking a lot
Discover weekly is Spotify's key to that sweet payola, and it really shows. You can't remove songs from the weekly recommendation, and somehow it repeatedly gives you well-marketed artists completely outside your listening preferences.
Either my playlist is the outlier or yours is, because this is completely opposite of what I experience in that playlist. Mine is pretty much all +20/30/40 years old "niche" music.
Edit: And it almost always is something I really love. That playlist is the killer feature on Spotify for me at the moment.
Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if this would work for you, but I like Spotify's Discover Weekly. Every Monday you get a playlist of 30 songs that you've never heard before. I listen to it from beginning to end without skipping and I often find songs that I end up liking a lot
Discover weekly is Spotify's key to that sweet payola, and it really shows. You can't remove songs from the weekly recommendation, and somehow it repeatedly gives you well-marketed artists completely outside your listening preferences.
I also haven't found that to be the case...maybe, I guess. I don't really know which artists are heavily marketed and most of what turns up for me is pretty old. Only exception that comes to mind was "blood in the cut" which I liked so
Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again
#170I think there's something to the analog hiss, even the scratches.
Tangentially, someone on Hacker News mentioned Cathode (http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/), a terminal program that emulates old analog monitors. Screen glow, burn-in, noise, even occasional sync hiccups, can all be tuned to the nth degree, which I have, and now I'm hooked. I think it's also the sounds that can be added, but that's another psychological topic.
I don't own a record player and usually aim for consolidation, digitization, and the annihilation of clutter. But you can only go so far before it gets too cold. Even Google's Material Design and similar UI fashion is too sterile. There is evidence that the constantly circulating, subtle film grain in movies used to pleasantly tickle the retina, and I think vinyl background noise is similar.