Comment by aibara | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aibara | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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