Manufacturing plant fire threatens worldwide vinyl record supply

It's a way to distinguish themselves from other people.

Vinyl editions of albums come with a lot of cool artwork, and are a nice physical token of ownership, they also often are mixed differently and avoid things like the loudness war style mixing. It doesn't matter how high definition your digital audio is if the spectrum analysis looks like a brick.

Vinyl is not for me, but I get it.

The ritual of putting on vinyl versus just sliding a CD into a player.

Owning a large physical object with a art its large cover.

Being part of a sub-culture of enthusiasts.

Each to their own I say.

It’s a hobby like anything else. Why do people prefer stick/manual to automatic? Same thing imo. It’s just a little more “real” and involved with a hobbyist setup. I do enjoy the sound a little bit better but also the mastering is often different between digital and analog.

For me, it's not about the sound. A clean record played with a quality stylus sounds about the same as a digital recording.

However, you get a physical copy with full-size artwork, and it's a chance to support the artist directly.

Playing a record is a ritual. It's just a different way to relate to the music. There's something in the mechanical nature of it.

Does there need to be an objective explanation? Some populations have even embraced the cassette tape medium. The physical medium itself (and not the quality of the recordings, or the fidelity of the audio on its associated players) can be enough to be compelling.

To my knowledge, in small volumes vinyl is cheaper to produce than CDs. So, if you want to get a physical medium, it might be the only choice.

Personally, as soon as people don't claim it sounds "better" I have no issue with it.

(The caveat, of course, is that some recordings only release properly mastered version on vinyl. Nothing stops the recording company to release the same version on digital media, they just don't.)

Others have given good replies and I think they're mostly correct. But...

>I've listened to both, and the description of vinyl or even analog sound as being generally "warmer" never resonated with me.

I feel like this is the sofar unaddressed dimension. I grew up with my grandparents so I've heard a lot of vinyl by virtue of one of them having a love for classical music. When I was younger (29 atm) I felt like the audio quality was better on vinyl. Back then, in the Walkman days, it probably was.

Now...? I think digital gets good enough to fool most would-be audiophiles in a blind test. It fools me well enough for the most part anyway. That said, I think part of the appeal of vinyl is the simplicity of setup. A good home entertainment system is expensive and even more so if you lack the skills to coordinate and install it yourself. A solid sounding record player is far from cheap but it's a lot less intimidating or laborious than a hi-fi system and it contributes to the retro aesthetic as well.

There are some genuine differences, but these are probably only discernible to a relatively small subset of humans, who have genuinely superior hearing to the rest of us - especially as we age. However, to the best of my understanding, the magic of vinyl also has to do with how some individuals consume music. From the appreciation of larger artwork on a physical medium to the act of making time for the process of listening to an album, almost like a little ritual - arguably helping the mind switch to “and now I’ll listen to good music and give it full attention” mode. While I don’t fit that demographic, I can definitely respect it.

For some: the Technics SL-1210

Acquired taste. Like when somebody loves beer/wine and other person thinks it tastes horrible. Also, "when I was young, everything was better" effect.

It makes listening to music an experience. Similar to the focus and immersion holding a heavy hardcover provides over attempting to read a PDF on your phone.

For me it's similar to the reason why I like having a mechanical pendulum clock on my wall. A quartz clock keeps much better time, but there's something cool about being able to see the gears turning. Vinyl isn't quite like that, but it's a lot closer than an MP3 player. There's also something about the imperfections of vinyl, the noise, clicks, and pops, that is a valuable part of the experience for me, probably because I came of age in a pre-digital world.

Don't start looking for the people who think crt monitors are better for gaming then - https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/

Spend us$300 for a vacuum tube and small real loudspeaker, even Bluetooth play is different. Then add a vinyl from time to time, it is music all over again.

Btw may be not all human are the same. As said someone meat is ... it is not about human rights. Just music. Let us be different.

Listen differently.

It’s a community activity, at least for me. I love going to record stores, discovering gems etc.

I hate everything about CDs. The flimsy jewel cases that break all the time, the tiny artwork, how easily CDs scratch, how choosing a song requires clicking stupid buttons, the delay after inserting CDs, the high pitched whine of the motor, the sound of the stepper motor as it moves the laser...

When I listen to music, I want to slow down and relax, and taking a record out of the sleeve is just so much nicer than fidgeting with CDs. I like that everything about playing records is analog. I like the crackle between songs when playing an old record, it's so much nicer than the random skipping when playing a scratched CD. When something breaks in my analog audio system, I can usually fix it myself with a soldering iron.

As for the sound, I think it's mostly because of a different style of mixing than the media itself.

Something that hasn't been mentioned so far: Some forms of DJ'ing kinda rely on vinyl. You can speed up or slow down the vinyl on the player by hand.

There are devices that try to simulate this experience, I think they've gotten better over time. I think vinyl DJ'ing has been in decline in the past decade, however it's definitely still one factor that's been keeping vinyl alive.

I never really had vinyls but tapes before CDs. Something was very different, even more with the shift to MP3. I stipped to listen the full album, started to skip the "bad" songs. So the experience is different. So I did play the "good" tracks much more and many times, which was cool. But at the same time, I felt they lost some of there magic. On tape you had to "earn" the good songs a bit more. Of course you could fast forward also on tape, but with the CD, MP3s some magic got lost for me.

Everything sounds great to me. A lot of my older records have cracks and pops and minor scratches and I’ve heard them so much during the opening and gaps between songs that I actually recognise the patterns and it becomes part of the anticipation. Albums that are continuous pieces of music despite the tracks (e.g. Lovesexy, Parade) sound terrible on digital because there’s always a gap between the tracks and that doesn’t happen on CD or record. Also, it’s a lot less friction to pull out a record and play it than finding the phone, opening Spotify, searching for the album, switching to play through the remote Spotify connect, adjusting the volume in two places.

I do both. Digital music is way more convenient to initiate, continue, store and take with you -- so I use that the most. But, it's almost too convenient in some cases to the point where I often don't appreciate what is really happening and the music just becomes background noise. Although it's obviously possible, I rarely use digital music to sit and listen to an entire album anymore.

On the other hand, when I listen to a record, I sit down and I listen to the record. I mean, you kind of have to do that anyway because you only get a few songs before you have to flip it. I find it makes me more mindful of the music; I feel more in-the-moment; and it reminds me of my youth. That was a time when we couldn't just tell our phone to start playing an AI curated playlist while everyone talks over it anyway. I'm not convinced we would we have wanted to do that either...

People rarely talk about music anymore, compared to what it used to be like. We used to line up when a new album was coming out from a favorite artist. We'd take the tape or cd from our car, into our bedroom, over to our friend's houses, and blast it on our parent's floor speakers before they came home from work. We used to talk about that album for days, sometimes months as we got deeper into it after many replays. I can't remember the last time I had a good conversation about a new album... few seem to care anymore. A lot of people will blame the music, but there is still some great music being made today.

Maybe it's the medium.

usually vinyls are not impacted by the loudness war[0] they are mastered for people who care about audio quality, have good audio equipment and listen to music in a silent environment. music mastered for radio/streaming is for people with earbuds who listen to music in a noisy environment and as a second activity (listening while driving, exercising, working, dancing)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

The microphones faithfully follow the soundwaves..

the A class amplifiers faithfully follow the sound waves..

the cutting needle faithfully follows the sound waves...

the grooves in the record faithfully follow the soundwaves..

the needle on the record faithfully follow the soundwaves..

the speakers faithfully follow the sound waves...

the soundwaves faithfully follow the soundwaves...

Even with a crackle and pop, you are hearing the real thing...you hear betweeen the noise..

You are there...

If you don't hear the difference, I am afraid I don't quite know how to answer your question. From a hobbyist-producing viewpoint, I tried both: digital and analog producing. While digital is very convenient, it tends to sound hollow and empty without a lot of tr5icks or professionally-written plugins. If you power on your favourite analog synth, it basically instantly sounds like something. However, if you don't hear that difference yourself, I am at a loss how to explain it to you. As a listener, I have the same feeling. Digital productions can be very sophisticated these days, but if I listen closely, I almost hear the bits.

Maybe this is pretentious, but to say vinyl sounds "better" or "warmer" is missing the point for me. IMO one thing that records have is "personality". Those clicks and cracks of the old records I found for £2 in a jumble sale, and their stained jackets that have been passed around since the 1950s become part of the listening experience. You're connecting with the history of the music in some way.

The pure sound of those crackles are important to more modern music too. Think about how many modern records add record noise to add atmosphere. Burial's Untrue or Portishead's Dummy wouldn't sound the same without them.

Beats me. I still have a collection of LPs I bought in the 1970s and early 80s, and while many of them are pretty good pressings and I don't mind listening to them, some are pretty bad. I have a lot more CDs, and they almost all sound very good to excellent (any defects being in the master, not the medium, of course).

What I do get nostalgic for is music without compression. So many recent recordings I find unlistenable, even when I like the music, because they're compressed to within a dB of their lives. This is a much bigger deal to me than digital vs. analog.

-For me, two main reasons, none of which relate to the perceived superiority of the vinyl format -

a) In recent years, it has been a trend that the vinyl masters suffer from less compression than their digital counterparts. Hence, they may sound better, despite the inherent limitations of the physical format.

b) I note that the mere act of putting a record on the turntable makes me eager to listen more carefully than if I just find the same music on Spotify; this is just a lack of self discipline, but after all - if going through the ritual of readying a record for play is what it takes to listen attentively, then so be it.

On top of what everyone else has said: reliability.

My record player + amp have never had any problems I couldn't fix on the spot. Only things I've had to repair/replace were needle cartridges and the belt, both of which take under five minutes to fix. My vinyl setup has outlived my smartphones and will likely continue to do so.

Streaming music can have problems I can't easily fix. It's like the difference between an old car which still uses carbs compared to a new BMW: you can tear the former apart in your garage and rebuild it, but you have to pay someone to help you for the latter.

That isn't the primary reason I use vinyl, but all of the better reasons have been covered already.

I understand that, there's a certain ritual to playing a vinyl that will appeal to some. Objectively from a sound quality perspective it's the same thing as plopping a CD or playing a (correctly compressed) file from your computer but the ritual and potentially the nostalgia make it significant.

I feel the same way with videogames: plopping a disc in my old PlayStation feels "better" than playing on an emulator. You get the sound of the system, the composite noise on the TV. It's not rational, it's actually generally a worse experience than using an emulator, but it feels like home.

I'm perfectly fine with that, most of what's fun in life is effectively pointless. What annoys me is when people make up pseudo-science to justify their tastes. Analog sound being warmer is nonsense, you can master a CD to be as warm as you want. CDs effectively have the range to reproduce anything we can hear[1], you could record a vinyl playback, master it on a CD and it'll sound exactly the same.

[1] Okay, technically the human ear has a higher dynamic range than a CD can reproduce, but that doesn't really matter in practice because in practice you never want to master a track where some parts are as loud as an airplane taking off and others are as quiet as somebody whispering at the other side of a stadium. And it's not like vinyl would fare better anyway, that's mostly an argument for the audiophile nuts who claim that 16bits per sample is not enough.

There’s a lot of music that is hard to find on popular digital distribution networks like Spotify. They have gotten better to be honest but I still have vinyl records where there’s either not a digital version or more likely there is somewhere but it’s taken from a record. Or even taken from the original mastering and not remastered for digital which does make it sound awful compared to the original mastering. This was a huge problem in the early 90’s with CD’s and why so many CD’s from that era sound awful. Most of the more popular albums and quite a few niche ones have since been remastered for digital. But there’s a lot of obscure music that hasn’t been remastered for financial reasons or the masters don’t exist.

For new music recorded digital a vinyl record will probably sound worse really.

I'm curious why one would care in the first place.

But to answer your question- in my family we find vinyl a fun way of discovering artists and songs we would never be served by either a DJ on the radio or some algorithm used by a service.

For me there are two aspects. First is directly related to your question, which is that vinyl has stricter limitations on the mastering[1] compared to digital. Some might prefer the sound that results from these limitations, at least when well done.

But for me it's mostly about the ceremony around playing a record. You have to actively participate, preparing the player, and you sit down and listen to the record in linear order. No fast skipping. So when I listen to vinyl it's about relaxing and enjoying the music for what it is.

[1]: https://www.gottagrooverecords.com/vinyl-mastering/

I'll try. I'm a recent convert.

1. I spend so much time with computers and virtual things, that there's something about the physicality of the thing that's incredibly refreshing.

This is the same reason people like fountain pens and watches. Do you need a watch when you always have your phone on you? Not really, but watches are cool.

2. Sound, which is tricky because it doesn't sound better. Vinyl has different strengths than digital music. When its done well, the artists will master the music to play to those strengths. There are albums I have both mp3 and vinyl versions of that are distinctly different versions of the same idea.

I buy both. For the most part, it's nostalgia, not sound quality. In fact, if sound quality is the goal, CDs or losslessly compressed audio files are preferable. Virtually everything is mixed and mastered in digital now, so any notion of the "warmth of analog" is mostly horseshit.

But some of us have a soft spot for physical collections of things. I have around 500 CDs and 200 records (and 1000-ish books). Vinyl is prettier than a CD. They're big, there's a bit of a ritual to putting one one. They're nice to throw on when friends are over. I didn't even grow up with records: I was from the cassette and CD generation. I didn't start acquiring records until I inherited my dad's and started buying techno records.

Some people will spout some post hoc rationalizations about the sound of vinyl, but objectively, they're wrong. It's mostly just that we like collecting the things and that more often than not these days when you buy the vinyl you get a download code for the digital version, so you get the best of both worlds.

I listen to both and one stuff i actually enjoy is the one purpose object. When listening to a record, as the record player can only do one thing, I don't get side-tracked like on a phone or on a tv where you find yourself randomly looking stuff online.

I did realise while browsing in recors shops that, even if i never had access to that much music in my life as nowdays, i never known less about new bands. I haven't found the equivalent in streaming services. In the end, what comes closest online is music blogs.

In term of sounds, i guess it's a question of taste. I do enjoy music both ways so, in the end, that's not what's make a difference for me. I'm not sure i could tell the difference between a vynil and a digital version if it was not from the sound of dust.

It's OK to like the things you like. It has nothing to do with objective explanations.

Have you ever tried to watch a live event on a streaming service like YouTube, and found yourself a few milliseconds behind the action? Have you ever tried watching digital TV have frames dropped completely because the signal got weak?

If you were going analog, you would be watching real live action, and if the signal got weak you'd still be watching but there might be some "screen fizz".

Vinyl is like that :D what you see is what you get, the sound is right there in front of you, all you need is a needle -- much like all you needed was an aerial in olden times.

If you only care about sound quality then digital music is a superior format. I prefer CDs over sound files since it is more fun to pick from a catalog of CDs on the shelf then a list of artists on a display.

That said, if you care about the album or the art vinyl records are superior. A CD has very limited visuals and seeing it disappear into the machine feels disengaging (although it is handy not to have to turn a CD over half way through).

Also old vinyl is really cheap and plentiful. You can go to the thrift store and buy and old Beatles album for half a dollar. It is really easy to start a collection from old cheap records. Old CDs only go back so far and it’s hard to find good CDs among all the trash in the thrift store. I usually have to go to the record store and buy a good used CD for $10 a piece (which I do, but not as often as a thrift store record). Meaning that casual lovers of music that don’t like to spend too much money probably have a greater vinyl collection then CD collection (although they probably have an even greater mp3 collection).

People forget that while sure computers are not climate neutral at the same time all the previous media that were used to sell music were straight up petrolium industry products. Like sure Spotify has a big electric bill however we have solar, and wind, both tapes and records require extremely toxic petrolium industry products and processes.

I think it’s a combination of the oft spoken ‘ritualization’ that goes along with listening to the medium, along with the fact that modern digital (ie streaming) renditions are inferior. To my ears, a well mastered CD sounds much better than both vinyl and mass streaming, though.

I think there’s also a collecting otaku aspect to it, and among the most hardcore evangelists, a psychological need to justify the amount of money they’ve spent on $30 180 gram reissues and the gear to play them.

I suspect there’s also something going on that’s a value-based reaction to the availability of ‘everything’ on Spotify, etc. I haven’t quite figured it out, but I bet it’s related to vintage computer/console buffs preferring ‘real hardware’ to emulation. If you have to pay more and work harder for something, it’s worth more, even if the cheaper, more easily accessible version is identical (or even superior) to that thing.

Vinyl records have a mechanical limitation: you cannot put everything as loud as possible on them, else the needle will jump off track.

So mastering for vinyl, even when done digitally, preserves more dynmaic range and finer detail. Ironically, vinyl has a narrower dynamic range than a digital recording, but the "loudness wars" made it use relatively less of that range.

Some people prefer this kind of sound mastering. (Also, the whole ritual and concentration aspect.)

It's not uncommon for the engineers put more effort into the vinyl mix because it's a much harder medium to get right. It's actually vinyl's flaws as a medium that make it sound better in a lot of cases as you can't get away with sloppy mixing as much. Things like the "loudness war" (where the industry demanded engineers increase the overall level at the expense of dynamic range - it's why a lot of recordings from the '90s until about 2005 sound absolutely rubbish) just can't happen to the same extent with vinyl, if they tried that nonsense the needle would literally jump out of the groove. It's also associated with audiophiles these days which is another reason modern vinyl mixes often sound better, the market they're targeting values high quality audio more than the average consumer. If you don't believe me, compare the original CD pressing of Led Zeppelin's Presence with the vinyl. It's honestly night and day.

Obviously this doesn't matter if you're comparing a naff Crosley record player from the supermarket with a naff bluetooth speaker playing 128kbps MP3s. These kind of distinctions don't really matter if your setup isn't great to begin with but it really does make a difference with decent kit. A sound system is only as good as the weakest link in the chain and there's a certain point at which that becomes the storage medium. Overall, a well-mixed lossless file or something like reel-to-reel tape is going to beat vinyl every time in theory but in practice the vinyl mix is often the best.

I think a lot of millennials who formed their music taste in the age of Napster, LimeWire, Torrents and Spotify seem to think the internet has everything (given the illusion of limitless choice).

This is of course not the case and there's so much music that's only realistically available on vinyl.

Vinyl is better than CDs?

CD is way overrated. Terrible, even.

Like, if you compare film to digital photography, but film was represented by ISO160 monochromatic Kodak, and all the digital photographic technology was represented by a 640x480 prototype camera from 2001, instead of a RED or even a yesteryear phone, then it’ll be immediately obvious that analog far outperforms digital full stop.

That’s how vinyl remains “superior”. CD is terrible, not digital quantization playback in general, but because it represents “digital” somehow anyway, analog wins.

They did that in the late 70s. They were called LaserDiscs and held about 60 minutes of video per side in the most common encoding format.

> Vinyl records are perhaps one of the best examples of commodity fetishism

Could you spell this one out because a vinyl record, in and of itself, wouldn't be an example of commodity fetishism because the fetishism depends upon social relations.