My dad grew up in the 50s & 60s. During COVID he purchased my daughters' the, I quote, "shittiest briefcase record players" he could find. Both girls listen to their music on their devices, but also buy vinyl. The other day, my eldest came down from her room complaining that her vinyl "sounded awful". I told her to bring it up with their Grampy. His response: "you can't appreciate good playback until you've heard awful playback on shitty record players like I had to.". My eldest is now plotting a complete hifi system, and is learning all about how to transfer "vinyl" to "digital" without losing the parts of the vinyl she likes.
>"you can't appreciate good playback until you've heard awful playback on shitty record players like I had to.". My eldest is now plotting a complete hifi system
This has strong energy of "Teach your kids how to play Magic, they won't have money for drugs."
I am the youngster in this case and I am going to tell you something but we really need to move off of spotify.
I never really got onto spotify. I was always the youtube kind of guy, although I recently started listening to youtube music when I realized that my youtube feed was being impacted and youtube music's a better way to listen I guess
We really need to get to pen-drives first before CD as well I guess. Like downloading songs from youtube to run them in pen-drive or just listen to locally would show us youngsters something
I have been recently thinking of downloading all of my songs and uploading it to some vps so that I can listen to from anywhere. I feel like steps like these with media ownership would gradually help rediscovery of CD perhaps as well as we people would really love supporting the artists then as well and buying their CD might be the way if we end up downloading their musics.
Pen-drives are ubiquotus as well so perhaps we might need the pen-drive era in between
Also computers are absolutely removing the CD port. Even my desktop doesn't have it. I think it has the slot but I had my PC built in the store so they didnt really add it but literally no devices have CD except perhaps our car but I think even some new Cars might not have any CD's
If someone is forced to buy a CD player just to play CD's, it just adds more friction and I would argue that Vinyl is much more so for the aesthetics itself as well which I feel like CD's aren't really that much for.
So my point is, People aren't really using Vinyl for quality, they are using it for aesthetics. If CD's have a chance, they really need to get more on the ease of starting and pen-drives can help start the local-music movement.
A couple of decades ago most people I knew were spending considerable time thinking about the best folder structure to use to manage large collections of MP3s (and then making them available on Limewire). Then you'd move over selections to your or someone else's MP3 player.
One great product of this among my friends was the MP3 mix tape swap parties. You'd select a bunch of your favourite songs and put them on a thumb drive, then go hang out at a friend's house. All the MP3s would be put together, virus checked and then copied to everyone's thumb drives. It was a great way of discovering new music.
> If someone is forced to buy a CD player just to play CD's, it just adds more friction
I recently had a relative complain that they have to find and buy a CD player to listen to their music when they aren't in the car. I pointed out that they already have several in their home. Multiple game consoles and their bluray player supported playing CDs. The loss of CD drives in computers is unfortunate, but the format is still supported in a lot of devices that take disks.
I was bummed to find out the PS5 cannot play CDs. Ended up buying an Onkyo CD player that I like and it wasn't very expensive, but it would be nice to not have another black rectangle in my living room.
2nd hand CD players are abundant and cheap. New CD players are also rather abundant and cheap (and also have burning capability + DVD read/write) and are available e.g. on Amazon - some are USB, some are standalone units (like we all bought in the 90s). There are tons of options, and as the article says, plenty of people are still buying CDs.
Otherwise I totally agree about aesthetics of vinyl. I have a rather large collection and still buy from time to time, but usually only 2nd hand. I threw away all my CDs because they stopped working after 20-30 years from being stored improperly, being scratched from being played too often, and overall I just prefer the convenience of MP3s.
Internet radio is also lovely (outside of Spotify of course), check out https://directory.shoutcast.com/ which works great with WinAmp (even the old versions from the 90s still run fine in Windows 11). There are of course other smartphone apps that use other directories, but Shoutcast was/is the first and still my favorite place to discover new music.
Sure the sound quality isn't great, but cassettes have a great user experience.
My kids listen to stories on CD and Cassette. With Cassettes you can just stop and continue later exactly where you were. On CD they have to remember the chapter and the number of minutes. Which they never do so they are less motivated to continue listening.
The same is true for VHS. One of the great benefits of Netflix is that you don't have to keep track of where you were in a series and can quickly continue. DVD or separate downloads never had this, with Netflix you can just continue. The same is true for VHS, you can just pop it back in and continue where you were.
Also, with both cassettes and VHS you could very easily record things. This was never easy with DVDs, so much so that it basically wasn't a feature. HDD recorders were also quite bad.
Quality of sound and image is just one part of the equation. I would never listen to a music album on cassette, but the medium, from a usability point of view, is great for specific use cases such as stories and creating your own mixes.
They are fragile, they sound terrible. Unless you had a very expensive player, they also introduced a wobble in the sound that drives me fucking crazy.
Yes, there is cover art, I miss decent cover art and the thought that some people put into it.
VHS can also fuck right off. Sure I loved the stuff that was on them as a kid, but I fucking hated them as a medium. A nice Humax from the early 2000s obliterated VHSs.
Don't get me wrong, everything else about digital media suck arse, the shitty player and bollocks practices. But the experience of the media it's self is far far better.
We generally encourage people to buy a NetMD device as their first player, so they can simply drag-and-drop music onto disks via USB. Probably any working machine, except an Sony N1 or Sony N10.
My daughter (16) and her friends are. She's asked for specific CDs as presents, and is now the guardian of my brother and mine CD stashes dragged out of the wardrobes and attics.
She'll trawl thrift shops for CDs too.
New CDs in shops now are much much cheaper than they used to be as well.
Giving up Spotify isn't on the cards yet though. I'll teach her how to rip songs next I reckon.
If it is to happen, CDs and CD packaging would need a rebranding. Part of vinyl popularity is the large sleeve surface that provides a large canvas for a piece of art. Another part is that you get a physically large analogue object that, while previously would be cumbersome, has become interesting in a heavily digital age.
Afaict this has already happened. Vinyl is about the big art, CDs are all about the pack ins. You get small books, pictures, stickers all packed into a cardboard box the size of a novel. Not jewel cases.
At least for the K-pop artists my daughter listens to.
In my experience your average indie CD these days comes in a cardboard sleeve or a digipak, which are slim and more resilient than jewel cases (which love to crack) but idk how to store them neatly, since the sizes vary in at least two dimensions. And they tend not to come with anything outside the disk, you're lucky if you get a booklet.
It is partly the medium's fault. A lot of the sins of CD/digital mastering wont fly on vinyl because there's physical constraints around what you can literally press into the record groove.
Classical labels were recording digitally even before CD players existed, to avoid the generation loss of recording to tape before transferring to vinyl. These recordings were later released on CD and mostly sound great.
Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms (1985 release, first CD to sell over a million copies) also sounds great, and IMO better than most modern releases.
Some early CDs were recorded using pre-emphasis, similar to the RIAA equalization used with vinyl records. CDs using this have a flag set in the metadata to tell the player to apply a matching de-emphasis filter. I sometimes see people blaming digital production for early CDs sounding "thin". I think it's more likely they heard rips of CDs using pre-emphasis that didn't have the proper de-emphasis applied.
An average CD from the 80s sounds better than an average CD from any other era, because it pre-dates the loudness war, and because it's intended to be played on a good home stereo (which if you were buying CDs back then you could probably afford).
I have a record collection and a cd collection. It was not the same. So many CDs of older music sound bad on CD. Recordings made during the CD era sound fine though, but I'm not an audiophile. Maybe the "loudness wars" are a complaint for some.
The loudness war (in the usual sense of the phrase) on CDs was to not seem weak against other releases. The loudness war (if I may use that phrase very liberally now) on analog media is to not seem weak against hiss and surface noise. The desire to compress and limit dynamic range does exist for both, but for these different reasons.
However, a huge difference is that on CDs you're up against a fixed maximum (0 dBFS) so all peaks are equal, which is fatiguing; on vinyl you're up against the adjacent groove, so your maximum amplitude any given moment depends on the amplitude of things in the recent past and near future! Ways to optimize for this are prevalent, amazingly, and the result is less fatiguing.
There was a stretch of time between when specific mastering for CDs started and before the loudness war kicked in. Plenty of time for good recordings to happen.
I still have a working copy of AC/DC's Back in Black from 1996. I have older tapes that work fine too, but not sure how much they've been played since they're mostly from thrift stores.
It's about owning the physical object like a concert ticket stub only way more accessible. They already have the music on their phone they don't need to listen to it on a record
Pressed cds last well in general. Burned cds have a lot of issues. vinyl also wears out from using it, while cds are listen as much as you want with no issuse.
I have ripped all my cds to flac on my NAS and put them on usb in whatever format as needed.
Vinyl was infamous for degrading during use to the point where you could identify whether an album had been played more than a dozen times by the reduction in sound quality.
this is perhaps a language barrier, but I'd call "measurement of getting worse during use" *durability*, while degradation is exactly about not-in-use deterioration...
CDs can oxidize in the span of decades. I've got hundreds of burned CDs that are from 2003 that are fine (even if they have changed color) because i store them in a climate controlled environment.
A vinyl record degrades every time you play it in a normal turntable.
Most of my CD collection is from the 80's and 90's and I've never done much to take care of them. Many have spent a decade or more of their life in a car. Most of them spent ten years in my attic that gets very hot and very cold.
Out of 100 disks, only five or six have failed and all have been because of scratches on the foil side (or whatever the media that the music is encoded into is called).
Note that if you don't store your records in a climate-controlled environment, they'll melt. You don't need to play a record to degrade it; just keeping it around is enough to render it completely unplayable.
I was going to ask, when are the youngsters going to discover CDs? Much less prone to degradation to vinyl, lossless ripping, superior quality.
I think they are. There was an article in the newspaper in the last month or so saying that CD sales are on the rise, and mainstream pop stars are releasing their music on CDs again.
As noted in another comment, I see CDs in music (and other) stores more and more where I live.
CDs suffer from different forms of degradation. I wouldn't trust a 50 year old CD if there was one as I do a vinyl record I picked.
Using the same master a CD would always sound better than a vinyl record, but I and many people would always take vinyl over a CD because of the praxis. Set and setting is important, in the end. Vinyl is more demanding in every aspects, it imposes more care and respect for what you're listening to.
The only additional data that (some) vinyl has over CDs is inaudible ultrasound. Ultrasound is intentionally omitted from CDs because they're intended for humans to listen to. In all audible aspects a correctly mastered CD release is closer to the original sound than any vinyl. And if you really want ultrasound (perhaps your dog enjoys it), you can get digital releases at higher sample rates.
It's not really about the data on the vinyl, and not really about sounding closer to the original. The vinyl flavor comes from the equipment. It's an analog device interacting with the real world, so the process of getting the sound from the vinyl to the speakers introduces a different sound. And some music sounds more pleasing with that process. Could you achieve something similar by using the digital release and running it through a filter? Probably.
But it definitely does impart a sound difference.
Since CDs are digital sound, there's not really the same reason reason to use CDs over a digital release.
edit: fwiw, I don't agree with the parent talking about more data, either. Since pretty much all the music these days is digital pretty much right through the entire recording process, I don't think this is all that relevant. I guess maybe sometimes they might use a different master for vinyl though? But regardless; if you're looking for "more data", you're not going to use either a CD or a vinyl.
Much of the vinyl noise and distortion is pressed into the vinyl itself. Even if you play it using an optical player it will still sound worse than a good CD.
My point was more that vinyl has a distinct sound, whereas CDs are just the digital files in a physical package. So if someone decides that distortion suits a particular album better, it's not going to "sound worse" to them.
And some do. But music listening is a personal experience, and sometimes the preference of the artists doesn't match that of the listener. Should an artist also prescribe the correct speakers/headphones to listen to their album?
Saying that vinyl doesn't have a distinct sound is a pretty wild take. It's pretty obvious if you've ever listened to vinyl and switched to a lossless version on the same setup. But here's some reading, nonetheless:
CDs have no distinct sound. CD quality (assuming correct dithering) is transparent to human hearing. You could play a vinyl record into a good ADC, dither it to 16 bits, then burn it to CD-R. It will sound 100% identical to the original vinyl in a blind test. The only way to tell the difference is that the vinyl continues to degrade with each playback, while the CD-R will last decades if stored correctly (pressed CDs last even longer).
Phonograph records tend to top out around 20,000 Hz. It's limited by groove and stylus size. CDs top out around 21KHz.
There's some audiophile content on Blu-Ray disks encoded at 24-bit/192 kHz, intended for people who subscribe to The Absolute Sound.[1]
(Typical TAS review: "Their Crystal Cable Infinity power cords markedly lower background noise; increase resolution, density of tone color, and dynamic contrast; and add a more substantial third dimension to images." US$34,000 for a 2 meter AC power cable.)
And vinyl has no sub bass, unlike digital formats. They would run it through a high-pass filter (disturbingly close to where the fundamental frequency of a kick drum is) in the mastering process, because record player needless jump from low frequency energy.
People used to say human eyes can't perceive >60fps.
It's also just CDs, not digital formats in general. Grab an audiophile and ask their opinions about digital PDM/PCM formats, high bitrate AACs even, against true vinyls. They wouldn't have as much opinions as they do against CDs.
Also: 44.1kHz sampling rate != arbitrary waveform up to 22050Hz, unless music you're listening to consists of pure sine waves(and not even classic Yamaha FM sound chip signals).
But in the case of analog recording, nobody can distinguish a pure analog recording from the same thing but with a good ADC/DAC pair in the signal path in a blind test. It's theoretically possible to hear undithered 16 bit quantization noise if you turn the volume up extremely loud, but correctly mastered CDs should be dithered from higher bit depth.
And 44.1kHz sampling rate can theoretically represent arbitrary waveforms up to 22050Hz. The only complication is that this requires a brickwall filter, which is impossible to implement. That's why the sampling rate is set higher than needed to exceed the 20kHz limit of human hearing (in practice the limit for adult hearing is almost always lower). The higher sample rate allows for a practical filter with a shallower transition band to be used.
No, because a reconstruction filter is used to remove the stairsteps. This does not lose any information. I recommend watching the xiph.org videos explaining it:
EDIT: Also, consider that true square/triangle/sawtooth waves are mathematical abstractions that can't exist in reality. If you try to move a real loudspeaker cone in a square wave, you have to reverse direction in exactly zero time. This requires infinite acceleration and therefore infinite force. If you take the Fourier transform of these waveforms you get an infinite series of harmonics.
A real-world "square" wave only contains the lower harmonics within some frequency band. When you limit it to audio frequencies, all square waves above 6.67kHz are identical to sine waves because the only harmonic within that frequency band is the fundamental.
Mastering is mostly done purely digital, so only when they are pressed are they converted to analog grooves. This can never add new data / information.
So is mixing and recording. Nobody is dropping $100K for a decades-old mixing console and tape recorders when a couple thousand dollars worth of computers and software will not only suffice but blow away the other for flexibility and fidelity.
Gain staging against an analogue noise floor, not having nonlinear/nondestructive editing, etc. would be, to use a technical term, "fucking stupid."
480i content, CRTs, analog signal chains, non-digital transports, film grain, et. al., provide opportunity for our imagination to step in and produce a better interpolation than the ground truth might otherwise provide.
Music doesn't need so much support from imagination. You could argue that 24 fps film is a good thing (I disagree), because special effects are expensive and the bad motion quality obscures the flaws, but the same doesn't apply with music. Every major city has an orchestra full of skilled musicians and a concert hall with good acoustics. Just record it as it sounds in the room and put it on CD. You can apply the same philosophy to popular music genres too. CD quality is good enough for this to work. The only imagination needed is to pretend that stereo audio is the full surround sound experience, and that's not difficult when you're sitting in the right position.
At least with CRTs, it's not just the imagination. It's the actual analogue interpolation creating a different image than the raw pixel-perfect without blurring/smoothing.
obligatory supplement: everyone used CRTs for monitors back then, albeit of different resolutions for PCs and for watching TVs. It's not like devs had to mentally simulate the effect.
You reminded me of how Marshall McLuhan called TV a "cool" (as opposed to "hot") medium.
My interpretation is that back in his day, TV was grayscale, grainy, and interlaced, and therefore demanded that the viewer exert their imagination to "complete the picture".
I imagine that if he were to see today's 4k full-color 120Hz panels, he would call TV a "hot" medium.
This is fine, but I'd encourage anyone to test all new audio setups with a blind triangle test at least, because most people can't distinguish most differences. If you can't tell a difference, using cheap equipment is great!
Also a lot of the fun of audio is that it comes down to taste more often than you’d think. There are full setups for a few hundred dollars that I love, and fancy expensive setups that I don’t care for. For me the most fun part is hunting for under appreciated equipment in thrift stores. It’s amazing what you can find without much looking
Reminds me of one other comment on a different thread about a person trying an old CP/M machine and seeing some restriction like I think it was 50x70 pixel restriction or similar.
The point I am trying to make is that nostalgia can seem really good as that comment also pointed that, we often only remember the good parts of the system.
It's only when we recounter them that the bad parts resurface again.
Now instead of taking the fair criticism and perhaps doing something about it if possible, your dad tried to use the old technique of "back in my day ..."
And I will tell you kids ABSOLUTELY hate this. It's more so, Gramps you were forced to deal with this thing, we got digital and you aren't willing to understand my problem so why should I be stuck with the problem or the countless other examples.
I don't know much about vinyl but if it's the record players, perhaps your father can buy them a good one which could help them solve the issue they are facing.
This! If you just care sound quality it becomes "product", no more an experience where you feel it. You tell me your story with your dad, all started by he buying his children "shittiest briefcase record players". An elderly woman gifted me a Brockhaus encyclopedia, making me see the stark contrast between Google's billion-dollar presence and the noiseless authority of the printed word.
“There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.”
Sometimes I wonder how much INTENTIONAL engineering people's discontent for good or ill happens across the spectrum of human activity. One thing is for sure, people don't talk about it much.
Liquid Death, CocaCola branded water, and household water filtration are unbelievable luxuries. Manufactured status for the masses. And my examines are truly luxuries: they are unnecessary for drinking water in developed countries.
Pools and green lawns have higher status when water is more expensive/scarcer.
I don't hang out with extremely high-status people, or the extremely wealthy, but I'm sure both of those groups have some surprisingly luxury water.
Luxury is a human concept that is completely disconnected from the underlying product.
Provenance, Branding, Myth, Environmental, Science all matter for status.
There are overwhelming examples of people who continue to work when all of their basic needs are met. Some work because they love to, some work because they have to; we, collectively, should be trying as hard as possible to make work optional (automation, etc), because the point of life is to live, not to work. Some combination of Abundance [1], Solarpunk [2], etc. The entire planet will eventually be in population decline [3] (with most of the world already below fertility replacement rate), so optimizing for endless growth is unnecessary. So keep spinning up flywheels towards these ends if we want to optimize for the human experience, art, creativity, and innovation (to distribute opportunity to parity with talent).
Nay, work is one of the pillars of a fulfilling life. Though for most of humanity relative freedom to choose what work one does is more of a modern achievement, the original commandment (“be fruitful”) was so general it might suggest God knew what he was talking about.
I'd love to learn how you came to this definitive conclusion. At no point in human history have humans not worked (I'm sure there are some limited exceptions, none of which have been sustainable).
Perhaps you meant to say the point of life is to survive, but you have to work to make that happen.
"Art is to console those who are broken by life." -- Vincent van Gogh
Broadly speaking, creation is the meaning of life, not work, although some creation could be considered work. Survival is table stakes to achieve self actualization and a chance at finding meaning and contributing to the commons during a lifetime.
> At no point in human history have humans not worked
This is a non sequitur. The discussion is about the point of life. At no point in history have humans not pooped, but I would imagine that few consider pooping the point of life.
> people who continue to work when all of their basic needs are met
There are no such things as "basic needs". If people can easily satisfy their basic needs, they simply expands this concept until it ceases to be easily satisfied
In other words, abundance is a myth promoted by mentally ill cultists, and meeting the basic needs of all people is unattainable.
>> If people can easily satisfy their basic needs, they simply expands this concept until it ceases to be easily satisfied.
> Decent living standards for 8.5B people would require 30% of current resource use
That claims seems to be based on your first link.
1. They define decent living standards as including things like 1 cooking appliance, a mobile phone, and internet, but not things like a dishwasher/microwave/Netflix account, etc.
2. To achieve this, they specifically say that existing resource uses that are wasteful, such as buying extra clothing, wasteful entertainment, etc, should be “reallocated” to the basic needs of society, as without reallocation they explicitly point to how the basic needs like food and shelter become too expensive.
So in the context of the grandparent commenter’s argument, we would have to take away a lot of the luxuries (which is probably a fair description) that most Americans have like entertainment, buying more clothes than they need, etc and would not include things like any trips/travel, eating out, etc - and you believe people would react the opposite of what the grandparent claimed, that they would not consider those things to be “basic needs”? I guess if we were truly able to eliminate most inequality and all millionaires, etc, then maybe people would accept life without those existing things they have as basic needs? But I am not sure if your argument is meant to be a thing that could happen in real life, or merely a “If I was dictator I'd ensure peace on earth” type idea?
If people were broadly socialized for collaboration and collective good, people could and would achieve as much with many fewer hours of work, and with the many more hours available for personal creative pursuit and play.
There is no innate human nature that prevents this, only a prevailing social order which reinforces individualism and competition at the expense of the many.
This was a 5 year play by my dad. Shout out.