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Comment by aerotwelve | Hacker News Reader

This is why I still maintain a digital music library -- backed by a physical media collection that sits in my real live analog house -- that I sync to an SD card in my phone.

In 2018, Bandcamp seems to have solved the digital music sales problem that the iTunes music store never could (DRM-free album downloads in lossless formats for less than the retail price of the CD or LP). Everything that isn't there can usually be found on Amazon music in a lossy format for a decent price w/ no DRM (sometimes free if you have Prime). If I have to rent music, I'm doing it from Spotify.

Another half-baked Google service that they'll give up on in six months plus an obnoxious marketing campaign fronted by an old Warner executive? They might want to consider paying people to use it.

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I only buy music on bandcamp these days. Usually 200-300 Euros a month, because I know the artists get most of the share. I really really really must be needy for some song that I go to beatport or some other service. I find it unbearable to pay extra for flac - seriously, bandwidth and storage is so cheap these days, 1.5 Euro extra for flac - absurd.

Secondly, I'm a DJ and even if I would not be able to hear the difference, there are people with certain hear impairments in which the psychoanalytic model does not fit. It's my job to bring the best possible sound quality.

But I hardly buy physical media anymore, it's just using up space of something I don't use and with the saved buck I just buy more music :)

My backup is done through git annex and my library is duplicated over many PCs and harddrives - it works quite well and I'm able to carry only a part of the library but still see everything. A simple "git annex get ..." will get the requested files. My girlfriend has my library as well and when I add new files, a quick "git annex sync [...]" will update her copy as well.

Frankly, I'm moving back to vinyl. I'm aware that most albums have finally been properly remastered to be in a digital format, eliminating the disparity in sound quality, but I feel like something purely analog with zero possibility of any DRM is more permanent, crazy as that may sound.

Plus, Bandcamp is nice. Artists I've discovered through there frequently have a vinyl pressing available, which entitles me to download the lossless digital version as well.

> I feel like something purely analog with zero possibility of any DRM is more permanent, crazy as that may sound.

Yeah that's crazy. CD (when appropriately mastered) is as good as it gets (unless you're looking to make remixes or something): perfect sound reproduction as far as human ears are concerned, and losslessly copyable. Vinyl you wear away slightly every time you play it.

Wrong. Many good Lables release 24 bit mastering quality flac releases, better as CD. But, to hear a difference, you really need highest quality equipment and even then, depends on the sound.

I hear the different of flac vs mp3 on my Shure SRH 940 and some other high quality headphones. On medium quality speakers I don't.

> Many good Lables release 24 bit mastering quality flac releases, better as CD. But, to hear a difference, you really need highest quality equipment and even then, depends on the sound.

A properly mastered CD can represent the whole audible range; to properly represent the very quietest sounds (mosquito-in-an-empty-room level) requires doing dithering as part of the mastering process, but any competent masterer should be able to do that. AFAIK no properly blinded (ABX) listening test has ever shown a human-detectable difference between 24-bit and correctly mastered 16-bit.

> I hear the different of flac vs mp3 on my Shure SRH 940 and some other high quality headphones. On medium quality speakers I don't.

mp3 is a long long way below CD quality.

Unfortunately my A&H Xone:K2 does not have a 24 bit DAC so I can't really test with equipment and songs I know.

I think people who like vinyl more the CD just like the noise floor on top of the music and not that vinyl actually has higher quality. Everything before the pressing is digital anyway these days, just with higher resolution. And that's what I meant, your sound can't get better then the 24 bit releases used for mastering. You may like the sound more, but the quality is necessarily worse then the digital original.

> your sound can't get better then the 24 bit releases used for mastering. You may like the sound more, but the quality is necessarily worse then the digital original.

My point is that a correctly mastered CD will be perceptually indistinguishable from that digital original.

Have you ever found vinyl sounding different from its CD equivalent due to the equipment you play it on?

The few vinyl rips I have seem to have issues like a high noise floor (hearing the amplified sound of the needle pushing the vinyl during supposed silence, as well as random pops).

I am curious to know if that's seen as a feature and not a bug.

"Have you ever found vinyl sounding different from its CD equivalent due to the equipment you play it on?"

Many CD are remastered if not remixed, so they aren't perfect equivalents of the original vinyl; they usually also add compression to raise the perceived average volume (sometimes beyond clipping!), which kills the original dynamics and quality of the media. Some early CDs may have been direct conversion of the master into digital form, but if we take an old record and the equivalent CD issued recently, they're not the same thing anymore.

"The few vinyl rips I have seem to have issues like a high noise floor"

That's because of the needle friction and other interference by motor and other mechanical parts etc. all noise which is getting amplified. They've made miracles with pickups, RIAA preamps and other stuff, but we can't make a mechanical device that doesn't generate friction otherwise we would have invented perpetual motion. So yes, records are more noisy and have a much smaller dynamic range, although most modern overcompressed music would falsely suggest the opposite. A search for "loudness war" can bring some interesting information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

You know that vinyls get a mixdown from a tape (open-reel) or DAT master also, right?

Vinyl, like CD, has format limitations that need to be overcome. Most notably with vinyl, bass has to be converted to mono and high frequency content needs to be heavily EQ'd.

Vinyl isn't the "original" sound, and you should never mixdown a CD from a vinyl source (since in most cases you have the original master or a tape copy of it) unless you have absolutely no other choice.

Of course I know about limitations, I stopped using vinyl over 20 years ago. The OP was wondering why vinyl and CD sound different and besides the obvious media limitations I added that even a perfectly new record that doesn't crackle will produce noise because of friction. I also pointed out that today CDs don't come from the same master (1) used for vinyl. Sometimes they're also remixed (2) then compressed and limited (sigh). This may suggest that modern CD sound worse than vinyl while it should be the other way around, but greedy producers force their engineers to ruin the sound to make music louder. FWIW, I am one of hose Rush fans who stopped buying their CDs when Vapor Trails came out. I don't even have the mp3s of that awful sounding crap:(

1. stereo master tape, not the record press 2. from the same multitrack tape (often transferred onto digital) and sometimes with other audio added.

Well you have to master differently for a vinyl. At least you have to take it into consideration when mastering for digital and vinyl.

So it is possible to sound differently to the digital signal. The phono amplifier has to do some filtering, so this influences the sound too.

All in all records are a pretty bad medium for conserving music nowadays.. but for many people the experience is the most important thing.

That sounds like vinyl crackle. It's such a sought after thing that people make entire sample libraries of it.

>purely analog with zero possibility of any DRM is more permanent,

I wonder could a make an needle that only works with specific records now..

I do this too. Not only do you save money by not subscribing to streaming services each month; chances are that you can downgrade your data plan as well. The money I save I spend on CDs.

Yeah, I use about a gig of data a month. All of my music is stored on my car.

After several months of Apple Music and disappearing tracks this is what I’m doing now.

I’m not renting anything any more.

Ugh this was also what got me to stop my Apple Music and then Spotify subscriptions. Songs or entire albums can disappear simply because the licencing changed.

May I ask, why not both? I‘m pretty sure you will not buy 20mio songs, rather a couple thousand. With Match you get your own collection online and available everywhere, and augment it with the Music subscription. I’ve done it like this but only rarely need the Match fallback now, because most of my library is available on Music or Spotify.

Two reasons: cost and that I like things in one place and format.

Doing a search on Bandcamp for songs that I like.. I was able to find none of them. I'd argue if they only solved the problem, then they solved the subset of the problem which excludes the songs that I would be after.

There's nothing to solve. Bandcamp is for finding music you'd probably never hear on radio or streaming.

Here's what you can do:

1: Find one album you like.

2: Click through the profiles of people who bought it (those icons under the album cover).

3: See what else they like.

You can also check out Bandcamp's blog and click through the tags on posts for genres you like: https://daily.bandcamp.com/

Yeah, they've solved the problem brilliantly for people who either don't want record company involvement (and I don't blame them) or would never get a record deal (me). But it will only ever be a supplier of niche(ish) content.

> In 2018, Bandcamp seems to have solved the digital music sales problem that the iTunes music store never could (DRM-free album downloads in lossless formats for less than the retail price of the CD or LP).

Until it’s inevitably integrated into YouTube Red (they bought Bandcamp)

You're thinking of BandPAGE - Bandcamp is still privately owned.

Whoops, you are correct!

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