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Comment by Aaronmacaron | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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