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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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