101–110 of 410 posts
A CD, and a FLAC-rip for me, please. I'd pick it over vinyl or any digital stream any day.
This. Just give me FLAC with vinyl artwork in PDF. Vinyl actually has less dynamic range than CD - it's the equivalent of around 12 bit dithered PCM.
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I think the "good enough" phrase you used really touches on the reason vinyl still exists. Streaming is "good enough." But physical media is a different experience. It's more intimate. You can touch, feel, and examine the music and the packaging. Some bands (REM is one) even put Easter Eggs in their physical media that can't be reproduced by digital. Streaming is fine for when you want to fill your space with sound.…
> Physical media is for when you want to really enjoy the music. Wow this is some condescending, pretentious nonsense. Also, every streaming service I've ever used is perfectly capable of playing an album in order.
Sitting down and listening to an album is different to playing your mp3 collection on random. You're listening to a collection of songs, as intended. You're listening to songs that perhaps aren't your first choice and in other circumstances would just skip over, but those songs often turn out to be the 'best' songs. I think there's also something to be said for having the physical disc. It just makes it more deliberate.
I don't think it's a limitation of streaming technology. If anything it's a limitation of physical media. Infinite, zero friction choice doesn't necessarily make us happier though.
As much as it pains me to say this, I think I'm a hipster. I put a lot of attention and care into my audio and vinyl setup, but now that you can find albums at Walmart, the hip factor has been sucked out of it like a vacuum. I've recently been downsizing, and this might be something that doesn't stay with me. I'll keep my signed albums, but maybe not the rest.
By revenue, not by units sold. Still interesting, and not really surprising based on my anecdotal experience of artists I follow. Streaming audio is good enough for most sound systems commonly in use. Vinyl serves as a better collectible from a favorite artist for a few reasons. - more room for cover art - physical analog medium (superficial, but has value to some) - requires more care than CDs (proves the owner’s de…
I think the "good enough" phrase you used really touches on the reason vinyl still exists. Streaming is "good enough." But physical media is a different experience. It's more intimate. You can touch, feel, and examine the music and the packaging. Some bands (REM is one) even put Easter Eggs in their physical media that can't be reproduced by digital. Streaming is fine for when you want to fill your space with sound.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Physical media is for when you want to really enjoy the music. Wow this is some condescending, pretentious nonsense. Also, every streaming service I've ever used is perfectly capable of playing an album in order.
You're discounting the value of physically experiencing the media you're consuming. Pretentious or not, it really is a different feeling, something that streaming can't replicate.
Enjoy the pleasure's you've found in life, but recognize they're not universal. I would also argue that the experience described has to do in part with nostalgia, since my young nephews feel very passionately about music and have never owned a physical album and I wouldn't dare tell them that an album they've loved or experienced and been moved by was some inferior experience because they listened while staring at their ceilings in their beds rather than looking at a gatefold.
Would some one please enlighten me as to what on God's green earth is going on with vinyl? It's less dense, lower-quality, degrades with use, and is more expensive. It's probably less environmentally-friendly, too (though I'm not sure what it's target demographic is, so I don't know if that means much). Why is vinyl popular, all of a sudden? I had to rip all my grandmother's vinyl records, once, and it was a pain in…
There is only one thing digital delivery can't do: satisfy the collector's itch. There's no rarity or difficulty. You can't keep it on a shelf and take pride in your collection. You can't trade or barter. You can't get it signed by the band or buy it at a show. You can't browse it in a shop. You can't pass it on to your children. There's no romanticism about it, and it doesn't engage any other senses.
It turns out however, that vinyl is great at all those things. It seems evident that its resurgence is because everyone who wants to collect music is consolidating on vinyl as a format, while those who just want to listen to music stick with streaming services. It's highlighting the fact that music consumption is actually highly bimodal, and delivering a product optimized for each modality.
Vinyl is one of those old-school technologies that seems like it's from the future. Somehow we turned sound into a disk. You can see and feel the sound and then a tiny needle will reproduce the original sound just by touching the disk. And in very high quality! Blows me away every time I think about it. And we could have kept going: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc
We kinda did keep going, except we put the grooves onto foil as little dots, and read them with a laser. Also, the whole thing is encased in polycarbonate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Physical media is for when you want to really enjoy the music. Wow this is some condescending, pretentious nonsense. Also, every streaming service I've ever used is perfectly capable of playing an album in order.
At a minimum they're different experiences. Sitting down and listening to an album is different to playing your mp3 collection on random. You're listening to a collection of songs, as intended. You're listening to songs that perhaps aren't your first choice and in other circumstances would just skip over, but those songs often turn out to be the 'best' songs. I think there's also something to be said for having the p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure there were early cases of bad audio engineers introducting digital clipping during the digital mastering process. You mention that "it's getting worse", but it's unlikely that you'd be able to find a release mastered/remastered with noticable digital clipping within the last decade. As one example of how basic a concern this is for digital mastering, Apple's "Apple Digital Masters" (formerly "Mastered for iT…
AFAIC, dynamic range compression is very nearly as bad as clipping. It just curves out the signal so you don't go straight off of a cliff, but you're still trying to fit 10 lbs of potatoes into a 5 pound bag.
Would some one please enlighten me as to what on God's green earth is going on with vinyl? It's less dense, lower-quality, degrades with use, and is more expensive. It's probably less environmentally-friendly, too (though I'm not sure what it's target demographic is, so I don't know if that means much). Why is vinyl popular, all of a sudden? I had to rip all my grandmother's vinyl records, once, and it was a pain in…
I like to collect vinyl for a few reasons. I like having a physical copy, it supports the bands I love, and it comes with the digital copy. There's a lot to be said about the imperfections in vinyl playback combined with the analog output.