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Comment by parsimo2010 | Hacker News Reader

parsimo2010

CDs are dying, but they are mostly being killed by streaming services, not by vinyl. Digital music formats are still the king by far. The vast majority of people don't even care that their streamed music is lossy and they lose out on high frequencies that their ears can't hear and their headphones can't reproduce.

Vinyl appeals to hipsters and dumb audiophiles (there are smart audiophiles, but they aren't buying vinyl), both communities that are prone to buying into hype. Hipsters move on as soon as something becomes mainstream, and dumb audiophiles will move on as soon as there is a more expensive option with newer/cooler buzzwords attached to it. Cassette tapes could replace vinyl someday as the hip alternative to digital music- it's retro and analog, plus they are portable and don't skip/lose track during heavy movement (which a record player would do if you could go jogging with one).

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> Vinyl appeals to hipsters and dumb audiophiles (there are smart audiophiles, but they aren't buying vinyl), both communities that are prone to buying into hype.

I think enough people have commented about how obnoxious this statement is, but I'll go ahead and throw another couple of cents into the conversation

I think there is genuine value to artifacts. When you buy a record, you get:

* The record itself

* An 12" x 12" piece of art accosiated with the album

* A booklet of bonus content and anything else the artist wanted to include.

Not only is there added extra value in that (larger than a CD), but it can feel like an occasion to get.

But beyond that, there can be an interesting satisfaction in holding the literal physical interpretation of the sound you enjoy. There's a connection there for some people, and it shouldn't be discounted.

Your conception of vinyl buyers is very negative. I think there's another category of people that buy vinyl. If you really love an album and want to support the artist you can purchase the vinyl version of the album. Apart from supporting the artist you often get additional treats like a nice booklet with the lyrics or additional art/imagery.

I really think there's extra value in buying vinyl apart from it being hip.

If you want to buy a physical medium then CDs are the obvious option because objectively they are superior to vinyls in every aspects and they can also come with nice booklets.

I think that the hip-value of vinyls is extremely important.

I write that as someone who had no choice but use vinyls and tapes until I got a CD player...

My partner and I have our favorite albums in vinyl with the covers framed on the wall. You can't do that with CDs. Or you shouldn't.

Just bought some of these "vinyl frames" for our living room. It's wonderful being able to express your favorite albums in art form.

I disagree with the original comment parent strongly.

Records are much bigger though. In reality you probably aren't buying physical media to actually play the music so the asthetic becomes the most important thing part and records are better in that aspect

CDs are just... awful. Nice booklets? You mean small booklets with tiny pictures and even tinier text. And they come in what I consider one of the most horrible containers of all time: the ugly and easily-broken jewel case.

Like vinyl, CDs can be scratched, but they sure don't degrade gracefully: the nice pops of vinyl becomes jarring skips on a CD up to the point where the CD just becomes unplayable.

Nowadays I have all my music on my computer, as files on the drive or from a stream. But when it comes to wanting something physical, something I can hold and look at (from the cover and extra material that comes with an LP to the wonderful spinning of a record as the sound emerges), vinyl easily wins.

But maybe I'm weird, because even in the mid '90s as a teenager I thought vinyl looked cool and was fun and fascinating to interact with. I hated CDs and their cases so much I even converted all my CDs to minidisc! Happily I kept them around until I ripped them to FLAC files.

Unless you happen to have scratched your CD really deeply to actually damage the data layer (which requires grooves of 1mm in depth), it's fixable though, a scratch in a vinyl is not.

Also, the last few albums that I bought did not come as jewel cases but instead "fancy" cardboard cases.

When I worked as a DJ back in the 1990s I observed that if a 12” or LP skipped you could momentarily turn off the tone arm bias and the extra inward force would usually ride over the scratch as of it wasn’t there. With CDs you were toast.

If a CD skipped then there was nothing you could do except stick another on ASAP.

CDs are a very fragile medium. Especially so if you scratch the top printed surface.

These days you’d do it all off a laptop with no moving parts and no skipping.

Protip number 2: always run your club system in mono. You can’t hear stereo in a club and combining the L+R channels cancels out most feedback coming through the stylus. Happy days.

I was a teenager in the mid 80’s, mostly with tapes, but with some vinyl. The first CD I heard (1987) was far superior sound quality. Vinyl has nice cover art, but that’s it. I’ll stick with CDs. Eventually those will become hip.

CDs are far from objectively superior, considering that there are many CDs which are completely sealed but suffering from disk rot due to poor quality control rendering them completely useless. A lot of older CD-based game systems are going through this problem where they're becoming unplayable despite no wear or tear.

The best of both worlds in my opinion is a vinyl + code for a digital copy, which seems to be the direction most have gone for.

And [literal] tons of vinyl has suffered warping from heat, being stored incorrectly. Or degraded from just being actually played on a record player more than a few times. Despite not being impervious, CDs are far more durable than vinyl records.

You're making a false comparison here.

Vinyl, when stored properly, will be fine. Yes, they suffer from wear and tear when used frequently, but you would have to use it quite a lot for that to happen.

CDs, even when stored properly, never used and still wrapped, will suffer from disc rot due to quality issues. This renders them completely unplayable. Calling CDs objectively more durable ignores that there were A LOT of poorly made CDs which have a considerably shorter lifespan.

CDs for sure sound better then vinyls. It is also nice that you don’t need to turn them over half way through the album. However, when buying new albums, they almost always come with a FLAC download code. So you really have the best of both worlds when you buy the vinyl.

ps. The copy of “Von” by “Sigur Rós” I bought recently even came with extra CD instead of a download code.

You can also support artists by going to concerts and buying merch. If you're buying a lower quality audio option that degrades with usage, then you are buying into the hype at least a little bit.

There’s no evidence that vinyls are of lower quality than CDs. Moreover, vinyl masters are often far superior to thst of CDs. Comparing old classic rock vinyls to the new masters, the olds ones sound so much better because of the loudness war.

It's just a matter of what's available to buy.

People just want to buy mementos to support their favorite artists. It's not that hard to understand.

I'm pretty sure that if someone comes up with an album that's a flash drive + booklet in a vinyl-sized package then a lot of people would buy it. Something like that probably exists already.

> If you're buying a lower quality audio option that degrades with usage, then you are buying into the hype at least a little bit.

I buy them, I don't listen to them. I don't even own a record player, but I have like a dozen of titles I really like to listen to. It's the same with books, I've personally never opened the physical copies of the majority of titles on my bookshelf. I've read them on an e-reader and liked them so much that I wanted a copy that I can actually lend to people.

There's extra value and there's nostalgia and a shared-ness. But the question is, who's still going to buy them when there's a huge carbon tax proportionate to having a quarter-gigabyte of data on ten ounces of plastic shipped across the planet... that's when a lot of people will realize they haven't bought a record in years but still listen to music every day imho.

I'm a smart audiophile. I listen to digital sources. But I like vinyl because I like the aesthetics of it. It doesn't sound better.

I'm also 56 years old so I grew up with vinyl. There's nothing "hip" about me.

There's obviously nothing wrong with that, but I think the parent was more referring to those who buy into "analogue-woo" (if you will). It's bad enough in audio gear, but in synthesizers it's near-universal - "Analogue Warmth" at the expense of price, reliability, noise etc.

Perhaps you should spend a bit more time around music junkies before making such authoritative statements about the market for vinyl :). I am personally close to two communities who still consume vinyl for neither of the reasons you've listed:

1. Underground enthusiasts who enjoy digging for hidden gems that are difficult to find or don't exist on streaming/digital services

2. DJs who prefer vinyl as a medium for mixing

I think vinyl has a lot of understated advantages. Vinyl records are large physical artifacts that contain your music with nice, big covers that provide a great medium for artwork. And you have a cool physical ritual of placing it on the turntable. All of that gets lost with tapes and CD's.

There is plenty to enjoy about vinyl without buying into foolish ideas about fidelity. Nostalgia, the effect, the sense of occasion, the large variety of interesting old recordings, the artwork. Streaming is obviously “better” in any objective way, but that doesn’t mean it’s more fun. Same reason I’d get a Miata to enjoy driving even if my daily is a Tesla. Not for everyone but not wrong either.

True in that there are less die-hard CD fans compared to vinyl, which is always on a perpetual resurgence in some field or another, be that DJ's, wannabe DJ's, hipsters thru to audiophiles. It's always has a strong and following. CD's, not so, as digital, switch to other digital mediums just removed the negative part and that was having to take it out of it's caddy and placing into a player.....An experience less exciting than vinyl on many levels we could all probably agree upon.

So I'd say that this was inevitable and not a swing or sign of things in any way. Though perhaps how some formats, whilst simple, still excell. Which with analogue and digital in many area's, still seeing divides for quantifiable reasons. Photography would be another area in which has its own bastions of the film format camera's.

But vinyl has managed to carry on and not on the back of core users, it's had wave after wave and removing any single group, be them hipsters who move onto something else, won't suddenly kill off vinyl as many fashion born resurgences do.

I only buy vinyl because, funnily enough, it lasts. CDs scratch and become unlistenable. I’ve also had multiple name brand players crap out on me. Record players are much more reliable - and much easier to fix.

Also, in my favorite genre - electronic music - artists no longer put out CDs. So I pretty much don’t have a choice.

On an automatic 'table, maybe. On a manual 'table I find the styli too easy to damage with it is mishandled or falls off the edge of a record.

I just like having a physical copy of my favorite music. It is similar to how there's a greater appeal to rows of hardbound books on shelves compared to a Kindle loaded with epubs, even if the latter is more practical/portable/etc. I'm just going to stream the album anyway. If I'm going to go as far as to directly support the artist by purchasing it, for me it feels more substantial to buy the vinyl.

>Cassette tapes could replace vinyl someday as the hip alternative to digital music

That happened a few years ago

As it happens, I own several freshly printed cassette tapes from the last year or two.

Ditto. I found two of them at a local flea market, indicating that there's at least one more hipster out here on the countryside where I live.

Also, mix tapes are still awesome at parties; it gets rid of the fight about who gets to connect their phone to the stereo.

> Cassette tapes could replace vinyl someday as the hip alternative to digital music

well, there is DAT ...

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