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.
> 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 don't see how this is different between a record and a CD.
The killer feature of CD players is shuffling and skipping tracks.
Heck, it used to be all the rage to get a three or five CD changer and shuffle the whole thing, comfortable unpredictability, forty or fifty songs you like but never knowing which is next.
You could likewise just listen to an album on your phone, in order, but it's too easy to let your distraction kick in and switch it halfway through.
As someone who grew up during the transition, the killer feature of the CD was amazing audio quality and the lack of degradation from every playback. The period where we started finding albums marked "DDD", for fully digital production, was also amazing.
It saddens me a little that, in spite of all the technology, actual Hi-Fi listening seems to have become less accessible or prevalent. I'm still not sure how much this is really for the commonly stated reason of convenience, and how much that is really cope and denial of a bigger socio-economic decline. I.e. it simply isn't as realistic for regular people to have a Hi-Fi listening space...
Anecdotally, I don't think hi-fi's decline has to do with cost - at least not cost alone. You can still get a more than decent system which will fit most living rooms for quite reasonable money - I just had a look at prices at a national retailer's website here in Norway, and you can get a pair of decent bookshelf speakers and a stereo amp delivering 2x60W into 8 ohms, built-in streaming support and a HDMI input to ease connection to the TV, covering the most common use cases nowadays, for less than $1,000.
For comparison, median income after taxes is approx. $50,000 a year, so we're looking at less than a week's net wages.
I think it is more likely that our media consumption habits have changed - when I was a kid in the eighties, a few - like, the bank branch manager, the dentist and a few others - had a VCR at home. The rest of us had TVs, meaning we watched what was on at the time, or (once in a while) rented a VCR and a movie.
That aside, our media choices were radio, going to the cinema (not very often!) or - drumroll - recorded music.
Hence everybody had stereos. I believe my parents were quite typical - when I was a toddler, they bought a number of LPs with radio dramas for kids on them, music for kids &c - the stereo was basically the entertainment hub.
Today my family and I - wife and three kids aged 10, 12 and 16 - have between us, let's see, 2xTVs, a 40" and an 85", the latter with a 5.1 system attached, both with Apple TVs, a stereo (making us an outlier!), three ipads, three smartphones, two dumbphones, a handful of radios, three - oops, four - laptops, a PlayStation, a couple of Nintendo Switches...
There's basically so many more options to spend our media time on, and at the same time there's way more leisure activities aimed at kids now than when I was a kid, so the kids are barely at home during the week (at least it feels that way!), leaving less time (methinks) for media consumption than only a generation ago, while at the same time having many more options.
So - basically, for many, only a generation ago, the stereo was the entertainment hub and you were kind of expected to have one. Nowadays the entertainment hub is some kind of internet-connected device, and a stereo is a niche product.
There's one (related) difference - an LP can hold approx. 45 minutes of music, a CD can hold 80-ish (The original spec called for 74, but I think the most I've seen on a single disc is 82-ish minutes).
Unless an artist is very disciplined, that means what would be a decent album at 40 minutes worth of music in LP days would be half an album today.
Again, this is a shortcoming in people, not in the medium itself - after all, a stellar 40-minute album can be released on CD, too.
I have heard expressed many times, though, the expectation that a CD should be 'full' in order to be a proper product - or, for that matter, the artist can be less severe in the cutting room, seeing as 'Oh, we've got room for that one, too ...'
I'd much rather have a condensed album which is mostly great than the same songs mixed with as many tunes which ought have been left in the archives pending a 'Collector's edition', 'Complete outtakes' or similar.
Then again (again!), at least a CD lets you skip the filler and listen only to the good stuff - at the risk of losing some of the recording artist's vision. Which, again, is a matter of (lacking) self-discipline. The LP raises the bar for skipping songs, hence forcing us weak souls (I count myself among them!) to listen to the full work, as the artist intended.
Or, at least as the artist intended before 'new release' meant uploading a new song to streaming services, making the album - as a somewhat cohesive collection of songs - a niche product.
Apropos nothing, the latest album I bought is a CD which arrived in the mail today, and it clocks in at 55 minutes and 20 seconds. Picked up a handful of LPs last week, though.
Additionally, vinyl has two sides. So you get this lead in and end track on both sides. The flow is different.
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.
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.
> There is no magic sauce killer feature unique to vinyl.
Old-school DJing! Imagine carefully positioning the laser on a CD...
Adressing your points:
Music may have been a bigger culturual force during the heights of vinyl record sales. Whether that translated to better music or whether it is some form of survivorship bias: I don't know. In fact I doubt it. But there is something to the music that happened when it was new, e.g. Punk music was better when everybody was still trying to figure out what is punk and what isn't, while today it feels like most bands just copy was has been made in the past. You can extrapolate the same idea to many other genres that developed. So was the music better on average? Probably not. Was it more exiting and had more impact on society, fashion, culture? For sure.
As for vinyl: I agree that digital is superior in terms of sound quality. Nearly every vinyl record is pressed from a digital master nowadays after all. Even those who want "vinyl warmth" could have that easily emulated in digital nowadays. Digital is endlessly flexible, you could theoretically envision (and some have done) a vinyl experience that is purely digital under the hood – or you could do whatever netflix is doing.
But in practise vinyl comes with the experience, forces you to do the ritual, to listen to the whole album, is immensly direct (just the waveform pressed into the material) etc. This is a limitation if vinyl is all you have, but in times where you could listen to 10 nameless streams of sounds at once for the whole day that limitation has become a popular feature. I have friends with pressing plants and all of them have more job offers than they could realistically fulfill for years now.
I'd advice against too easily dismissing the value of the ritual a technological dispositif forces onto the people interacting with said technology. Listening to a vinyl record in a time where people rarely ever sit down and just listen to music in a concentrated way is a thing people look for. Those who say it is because vinyl is technically superior are wrong, but the limitations and the listening habits a technology enforces are unseparably a part of the technology itself. And if you are looking for what vinyl gives you, vinyl is the thing that gives it to you best.
I have huge nostalgia for older analog audio and photo formats for many many reasons. I also don't really miss them. Had a lot of fun and memories with vinyl and processing B&W film in a darkroom--also shot a lot of slides--but you can't go home again and all that.
> Digital is endlessly flexible
Not really. Analog electronic instruments are based on non-linear feedbacks loops. Those are pretty much impossible to emulate digitally without emulating actual electric circuits and current flow.
(Yes, I know, irrelevant to the vinyl discussion.)
I used to think that, and indeed a computer can run any equations you want. However with analogue you're getting a bunch of interesting-sounding equations without having to think of them and write them down, and that's the "analogue sound." Analogue circuitry isn't a perfect math processor the way digital is, only an approximation, and the deviations from perfection are useful.
Especially if you get into synths. A digital sine wave oscillator is doing sin(time*frequency)*gain. An analogue one is designed to produce a close to perfect sine wave at a certain set point, but you make it able to be varied around that set point by replacing some of the components with adjustable ones in somewhat ad-hoc ways, and see what it sounds like. The frequency may be set by a 3-stage RC circuit, you replace all the Rs with vactrols and see what happens, now the impedance changes as well as the frequency and it might affect other parts of the circuit. You may one-point calibrate it to 1 volt per octave but it won't be linear.
I'm convinced that at least 90% of "analog sound" can be simulated by taking the ideal block diagram and replacing every link with a parametric EQ->waveshaper->parametric EQ chain. Configuring those added components correctly is left as an exercise for the reader.
Jim Lill's video on guitar amp tone is an interesting demonstration. Hear how close he gets to the original with an even simpler combination of EQ and distortion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcBEOcPtlYk
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.
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...
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.
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!