But why buy vinyl instead of buying CDs?
I understand your point about listening to a whole album being preferable to singles, I feel the same way but I'd still much rather listen to a CD than an LP.
I understand your point about listening to a whole album being preferable to singles, I feel the same way but I'd still much rather listen to a CD than an LP.
Analog is neat. To me, at least. There's a microscopic groove cut into some plastic in which a tiny chunk of diamond connected to a cantilever is pulled through, and the motion it has gets converted to a tiny electrical signal which gets amplified. To hear this at home on speakers or headphones is cool enough; to hear it in a venue with excellent sound is really something else for me. Something so powerful coming from something so minuscule.
Maybe it's 40, 50, 60 years old, too. It's something that has a history, a past. I can listen to a record made in Brazil in 1968, that somehow found its way to Europe in my hands, or I can buy some sterile, boring CD copy of it. I can listen to my parents' very own records that they had in the 70s, that I also listened to growing up. I can even listen to classical records from before they were born. I can listen to a record from a country that doesn't exist anymore.
Not everything got released on CD (or streaming).
Plenty of reasons one might prefer vinyl over a CD.
Either it's something newer that I just really love and want the big cover art and physical "object" for collecting and appreciation. Often times I'll be at a show and buy the band's new album instead of a T-shirt as a way to support the band I like. Those often come with download codes so I can still get a high quality digital version for portability.
If it's something older I find at a Goodwill or a yard sale, I tend to buy it because it looks interesting enough to be worth the $0.50-$2.00 asking price. It's almost like buying some small novelty or other impulse purchase. It may be great. It may be awful. It may just be fun to have a bunch of old comedy records on my shelf. And if they are uninteresting, the cost is low so the risk is as well.
And occasionally I've purchased the vinyl versions of albums I copied from friends' tapes in high school or downloaded illegally years ago. As with buying the record instead of the Tshirt at a concert, it's a way to support the band I discovered for free but has since earned my payment.
We thought vinyl was going the way of the dinosaur when the CD came, but now that they are back it feels like they are here to stay. Both vinyl and cds were bought to get the music the first time around. CD had no trouble displacing vinyl for the quality of the sound.
But this time, when it's more about the cover art and the ritual of listening, than it is about the sound, I don't see how something could display the LP. I know a lot of vinyl buyers now that buy the albums but then listen to the streamed music. Just to hold the album but have the convenience of digital.
I've been DJing various Techno genres with Vinyl for ~15 years and I've watched the scene shift towards CD and MP3 devices, yet turntables (Technics SL-1200 or thereabouts) are still almost always guaranteed to be at most dance venues (often with CD-DJs hooked up nearby). I also somehow prefer carrying my music around with me, it forces me to pick out ~50 pieces and then lug them behind me to the event, arriving all sweaty and out of breath because that shit's heavy. But it somehow gives me a sense of accomplishment even before I lay down the first record. And I know that my records will play, as long as the mixer isn't totally destroyed.
And my point was mostly that if you're DJing with them, it's hard to keep them in pristine condition.
I download most of the music I consume from torrent communities in FLAC. For those times I am inclined to buy the physical artifact, it is far better to buy the vinyl version as it has full-sized artwork and is more suitable as decoration in my home (google "Hang Up Your Old Vinyl Records!").
Like an enormous number of vinyl purchasers, I don't even own a turntable. I'd never play the vinyl, instead I play FLACs off a Raspberry Pi media center. I imagine most young people buying vinyl these days just listen off YouTube.
It's a distribution issue. You can't even get some of these songs as torrents ha. You have to find the physical record or find a high bitrate download.
- CD's scratch and then skip easily
- CD's come in horrible plastic covers that break if you look at them wrong.
- Skipping to a certain part of a song is much more difficult with CD's.
- The benefits vinyl provides (large artwork and liner notes/ lyrics, posters etc.) don't all apply to CD's and at that point there's not much/any benefit CD's have over digital.
Are you serious?
NB: I'm thinking about actual CD players here, not your CD through iTunes or something where you can click to skip on a progress bar.
Nowadays, a good professional CD player (or DJ equipment) will have something like an infinite-turn knob, which you can use to seek.
Nope; many CD players, like the first one I got in 1986, had only a two-digit led display for the track number -- there was no time display at all.
EDIT: It was a Fisher Studio Standard that looked like this, so I guess it did show an "index number" while scanning through a track.
I imagine they are not!
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 and artwork in pristine condition. On vinyl records, there's no plastic, only paper/cardboard, so the more you handle it, the more worn-down and beat-up it gets. There's no way to keep it mint-looking without simply never opening or handling it. With CDs, as long as you're careful handling them, they'll stay mint-looking indefinitely (as long as they aren't those stupid "recyclable" ones that are mostly cardboard without the jewel boxes).
The only advantage LPs have is that there's physically more space for artwork/notes. 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.
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?
By the same reasoning, I suppose I should throw out my tablet and replace it with an iPhone and a magnifying glass.
You can back up a CD's audio tracks digitally to PCM files, with no loss. You still have the music even if the CD is completely destroyed, and your backup survives.
Vinyl records are also sensitive. They can skip even with slight vibration, because the arm which holds the needle is delicately balanced to exert only a small force to keep the needle in the groove.
Vinyl records easily warp from heat. They still play, but the warps make it easier for skipping to occur.
Fun personal fact: my grandma hard a way to make records flat again. She sandwiched them between cotton cloths, and gave them an ironing!
> Skipping to a certain part of a song is much more difficult with CD's.
Skipping to a certain part of a song is very difficult with a vinyl record. The song consists of a strip of grooves that are only a couple of centimeters wide. The resolution for navigating is not very good. Even if you could pick a specific cycle of the groove, which you won't, your precision is still limited by the rotating latency. At 33 rpm (let's round off to 30 rpm), you have one revolution every two seconds. (Sure, you could stop the rotation, and fiddle with it for five minutes to get the exact spot in a four minute song.)
With a CD-ROM drive and PC/laptop, you can script up some software to seek to a position with sub-second precision.
A decent media player lets you mark off two points, A and B, with sub-second precision, and loop them.
A bookmarking feature is plausible; there is no reason why a CD playing application wouldn't let you make bookmarks associated with CD's. Pop in a CD, and see a list of bookmarks; pick one and there you are at your favorite part of a favorite song. (If this doesn't exist, propose it ... say for VLC, or hack it yourself.)
Why would you even play the CD? Just rip it once to your media center in a lossless format, and then put it back on the shelf and never touch it again unless you suffer a hard drive failure with no backup. On a media center, it is easy to skip to whatever part of the song you want. Plus, if you don't open the CD's jewel case again after that initial rip, then you won't have to worry about the jewel case breaking through mishandling.
They can also be regenerated for cheap as long as the scratches don't reach the data layer and only affect the plastic protection layer. Vinyl discs, on the other hand...
Making Vinyl sometimes better than CDs