Sony plans to make vinyl records again • Hacker News Board

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#341

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jul 02, 2017, 2:22 PM UTC

shuntress wrote: post #224

empath75 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the only explanation for this that I could actually understand. Anyone telling me that they think it sounds better just triggers eye rolling.

It doesn't automatically sound better. But the main reduction in quality from most digital storage comes from sacrifices made in encoding/compression to achieve more efficient storage. Since you simply cannot do this on analog storage, vinyl will not have these compromises and will usually sound better. But compared to good lossless digital storage that makes the opposite sacrifice (ie: Take up more space to retain m…

[deleted]

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#342

Post by joshschreuder » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 12:17 AM UTC

gjem97 wrote: post #41

It always makes me cringe when people say that records "sound better". Here's my unsolicited theory on why vinyl was preferred (by some) to CDs in the 90s and 00s. It wasn't the form factor, it was the dynamic range of the masters. I don't know if it was caused by the advent of digital recording, but the loudness war [1] certainly got going around the time that CDs were becoming popular. So comparing a classic vinyl…

There are notable examples of vinyl editions being objectively better, for example, Icky Thump by the White Stripes, where it was mastered by a different person (Steve Hoffman), and contained slightly different recordings on some tracks.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Icky_Thump#/section_Promotion_an...

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#343

Post by joshschreuder » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 12:21 AM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #28

api wrote: post #9

I feel like this is what happens when you reach the enlightenment stage with technology. I have a phone with eight 64-bit CPU cores built with 10nm lithography, and I cook on cast iron. "New" or "old" doesn't matter. We have things that do things. Pick one.

Yeah, I definitely prefer the opposite. I cook my food with a WiFi enabled microwave and route all my phone calls through a cast-iron IBM 1401. (What does "enlightenment stage" mean?)

What does WiFi add to your microwave cooking experience? Genuinely curious.

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#344

Post by gorkonsine » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 3:06 PM UTC

k-mcgrady wrote: post #306

gorkonsine wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- CD's scratch and then skip easily Only if you mishandle and abuse them. Doing that to vinyl records is going to make them sound lousy too. Both of them are fairly delicate. >- CD's come in horrible plastic covers that break if you look at them wrong. Those jewel boxes are easily replaced, because most of them are standard (the exceptions are weird ones, like the double-CD ones). The plastic boxes keep the booklets…

Regarding cases/CD damage - I agree that if you're careful those things won't happen but I'm not exactly clumsy and I've ruined many CD's. It just doesn't seem to happen to vinyl on the same scale for me (I've never scratched a record or broken the cover but can't count how many times I've done that with CD's).

How exactly have you ruined "many" CDs?

I have a few hundred CDs in my collection which I started collecting around 1990; the large majority of them were acquired during the 90s. I have precisely one CD where there's actually any damage that causes playability problems (at one point on one track), from one of my earliest ones. All throughout the 90s, I played these CDs over and over, countless times, both at home and in my car. I never stopped in the car until I finally got an MP3-CD player for my car and started making MP3 CDs (somewhere in the late 90s), and at home when I finally ripped them all to Oggs and just started playing them on my PC or my portable MP3 player, so there's at least 10 years there in my teens and 20s where I was constantly handling these things. Somehow I managed to never cause any major damage to them, even when I was changing discs while driving. What's your problem with handling CDs?

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#345

Post by shuntress » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 6:23 PM UTC

__david__ wrote: post #320

shuntress wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't automatically sound better. But the main reduction in quality from most digital storage comes from sacrifices made in encoding/compression to achieve more efficient storage. Since you simply cannot do this on analog storage, vinyl will not have these compromises and will usually sound better. But compared to good lossless digital storage that makes the opposite sacrifice (ie: Take up more space to retain m…

Of course vinyl has the same issues. How close are your groves? How rigid is your material? If you spin it faster you can het higher frequencies but then the needle has more chance to grind down those physical grooves each time you play it. Uncompressed digital audio is going to sound equal to or (more likely) better, and it doesn’t have the degradation problem.

That is completely true, I hadn't really thought about that.

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#346

Post by gorkonsine » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 7:23 PM UTC

maldusiecle wrote: post #286

gorkonsine wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- CD's scratch and then skip easily Only if you mishandle and abuse them. Doing that to vinyl records is going to make them sound lousy too. Both of them are fairly delicate. >- CD's come in horrible plastic covers that break if you look at them wrong. Those jewel boxes are easily replaced, because most of them are standard (the exceptions are weird ones, like the double-CD ones). The plastic boxes keep the booklets…

> But that's not a big problem; in the CDs, it's just shrunk down to 1/4 its LP size. Get some reading glasses if you have problems seeing that. By the same reasoning, I suppose I should throw out my tablet and replace it with an iPhone and a magnifying glass.

That's a very strange comparison. How often do you look closely at the artwork for an album? If you're spending countless hours staring at a single album cover, you probably have some issues.

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#347

Post by maldusiecle » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 6:37 PM UTC

gorkonsine wrote: post #346

maldusiecle wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that's not a big problem; in the CDs, it's just shrunk down to 1/4 its LP size. Get some reading glasses if you have problems seeing that. By the same reasoning, I suppose I should throw out my tablet and replace it with an iPhone and a magnifying glass.

That's a very strange comparison. How often do you look closely at the artwork for an album? If you're spending countless hours staring at a single album cover, you probably have some issues.

I don't know if you've bought an LP before, but many of them have what's called "liner notes," which are long textual notes about the album's contents. If you shrink these down to 1/4 of their size, they are almost impossible to read. (I have several jazz CDs which reproduce the original LP covers at a smaller size, and they're terrible to try to read.) Even if it weren't for liner notes, though, there's a difference between large album art and small. Many LPs have elaborate, detailed artwork that loses a lot by being shrunk down.