> 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.
> 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.