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Comment by voldacar | Hacker News Reader

Vinyl isn't about crackle or warmth. Good vinyl rigs are usually not warm. It's about the fact that vinyl physically cannot support a super compressed mix.

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Unpopular opinion: Vinyl is not really about the sound. The sound is different, Yes, but that's not it. Vinyl is about displaying the cover, pulling the disc out of it, feeling the weight of the object as you align it on the turntable, pushing the button and watch it spin up, then delicately drop the needle at the right place. Vinyl involves a _ritualistic_ consensual experience which modern medium entirely lack. You can share your appreciation of the cover art and printed lyrics with other people in the room while the music plays. There's no distraction or suggestion coming from a computer screen. When the music stops, what happens is entirely up to you. Vinyl lets you feel the void and puts you entirely in control of the listening session.

I'd hope that that's not the "unpopular" opinion.

Cassette tapes have made a similar niche comeback for a very similar reason. There's the tactility in the experience of fast forwarding, rewinding, pressing play. If you're using a walkman, you can even feel the tape turning as it plays in your hand or in your pocket. The rituals involved with using a tape are so intentional in a way that it just isn't when listening to music on a streaming service.

It also is basically the epitome of DIY ethos so popular in punk and indie music, what with creating your own mix tapes, sometimes imperfectly. The relatively low fidelity of the medium also adds to the charm. "stealing" music by taping it from the radio, another cassette, or from a cd.

It just plays heavily towards nostalgia in a way that I don't think CD will ever be able to. Though I do have fond memories of burning mixed CDs, it just doesn't have the same charm as sitting at a tape deck and carefully pressing record and stop.

I got rid of all my vinyl (much of it with some water damage) years ago, but I do sort of understand the tactile appeal, the retro-ness, and the listening intentionality. In these days of lossless digital formats, CDs are mostly just a medium to buy/transfer a bunch of bits. I can't say I really understand interest in cassettes at all. Obviously it was the only way you could copy someone's album or make a mix tape at one point but that doesn't apply today.

I guess the intensity of cassette nostalgia depends strongly on exactly when you were a teenager?

I certainly had cassettes as a teenager and college student and made plenty of mix/party tapes using them (and copied albums my friends owned). I guess I just look back at them as a utilitarian tool to accomplish something I had no other means to accomplish.

Same, except that I think it's worth spelling out the purpose of the tool:

1. win friends (and influence people)

2. convince the target of my affection that I am truly super-awesome, and they should fall in love with me because of incredible mix tapes.

Cassette tapes FTW!

I don't get it. You understand the tactile appeal, retro-ness, and listening intentionality of vinyl, but you don't understand interest in cassettes?

You don't have the large format artwork and liner notes, you have objectively inferior sound quality, you don't have random access, it's just an object that you stick in a player. So, no I don't, beyond a nostalgic I used to make mix/party tapes in this format.

The difference between cigarettes and pipe smoking? I agree, anything having rituals are going to be personally moving... or... spiritual.

I grew up DJing with vinyl, it is as much about the wicky-wicky as it is the ritual of carefully and delicately placing a needle before going off to smoke your cigar.

Though for me its more about blending and beatmatching... the feeling of a perfectly timed double-drop or blend or whatever simply isn't the same with digital. And most new DJs can't even beatmatch by ear any more!

If you go to a party and the DJ is spinning wax and he's got two tracks going perfectly in-sync... due to vinyl's inherent instabilities, that takes some serious skill. On a modern setup you just drag the pitch fader til the BPMs are the same and hit play at the start of the phrase, and the worst you have to worry about is the bass knocking your cheaply-made faders around

> Vinyl isn't about crackle or warmth.

It kind of is because you don't have an even frequency response throughout the vinyl. The closer to the center, the less high frequency response you get. Also higher frequencies in general require the cutting needle to to move faster and can introduce unpleasant distortion into the record, so you might attenuate higher frequencies on a vinyl record that you wouldn't need to for the streaming/radio/cd mix.

> It's about the fact that vinyl physically cannot support a super compressed mix.

This is false. Vinyl's physicality limits its dynamic range. If you have too high of an amplitude the cuts in the vinyl will be deeper and depending on the track could lead to the needle literally jumping off the player creating skipping. A super compressed mix doesn't create issues, a heavily limited one does. Clipping and brickwall limiting create problems for vinyls and introduce unpleasant distortion. You can still have a very compressed track on vinyl.

If a vinyl mix ends up with more dynamic range than the CD mix, it's because it was an active choice made by the mixing/mastering engineers, not because vinyl can't handle compressed mixes. In fact due to avoiding limiting as much as possible, you'll encounter plenty of cases where there is less dynamic range due to added compression to bring out the detail in quieter sections.

Forgive my ignorance: I thought it was the other way around, and you needed some relatively high amount of compression on a vinyl master, since otherwise the grooves would swing too wildly, and the needle would have a higher chance of "skipping". Is this an incorrect understanding of mine?

Digital medium has a higher dynamic range and can be used for playback of completely uncompressed orchestral performances, but in practice it also can reliably play audio that is so compressed (maximising perceived volume) that vinyl playback of the recording would be impossible.

Pop producers went off the deep end with this trick during the loudness wars, once it became possible through CDs.

I think this is mainly dealt with by the RIAA curve which is standard across all recordings. The compression being referred to is likely the per-track compression as part of the production/mastering process.

And that's exactly what I said originally:

> [...] often the sound engineering and mixing is done more carefully for vinyl; [...]

Vinyl also has no low end to speak of. Hence the RIAA curves which define how the low end is stripped out before cutting, and "restored" during playback. If you ever get a chance, listen to some vinyl on gear that can have the RIAA curves defeated/disengaged.

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