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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

> whereas vinyl is more popular than ever. (Okay, maybe not ever, but it’s actually growing gain.)

let's not confuse "the only format available at the time" with popular by choice. each time a new format was created, it was adopted to the point of vinyl nearly becoming obsolete. what is old is new again is part of vinyl's resurrection. it's doubtful most hipsters buying vinyl today even have sound systems other than bookshelf speakers to hear a difference in any format.

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I’m not confusing those; by popular I simply meant… well, popular. It was what everyone used because it’s what there was.

My point was that vinyl, as well as being (1) pleasingly retro and (2) physical rather than existing in the cloud somewhere, also has (3) fundamentally desirable traits as an audio format — ‘analogue warmth’, etc. Bad lossy digital compression has (1) but not (2) or (3).

You’re right about vinyl’s current popularity not having much to do with that though: it’s mainly (1) and (2) I think.

I always thought an interesting format would have been the plastic disc with a physical track similar to vinyl, but read optically so that it could be a disc that was compact like that other digital format. The loss in fidelity would naturally cause the format to have a charm of its own. Sort of like those old films with an optical audio track that have a distinctive sound.

Optical turntables exist.

not compact as a disc. that's just someone retrofitting an optical reader for existing vinyl. that's not even close to what i'm suggesting

Laserdisc is analog optical, but not so compact.

Analog audio was first, and video was always analog, but most of the time laserdisc audio playback is literally CD Audio (not merely 16bit/44.1khz but the same intermediate data/error correction/scrambling... even CD-G was recycled into LD-G)

That said, assuming a pilot signal was added one could probably put two to three hours of PAL-frequency analog audio (which completely went away with digital sound) onto a CD.

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