I miss vinyl records for only one thing: big sleeves and their art.
Yeah, there’s probably a compromise in quality, but for me the experience is just better.
I miss my vinyl collection a lot. Really wish it was easier to ship it to the other side of the world but I’ve struggled to find a way.
I think society has lost a bit of that with digital stuff.
You bet I wouldn't mind paying full price for that.
Recently a bar I frequent had some issues with their Internet connection for a few days: low speed, drops and a total black out. Usually they are playing music from some internet services, which wasn't an option at this time, of course. But they do have a vinyl setup and enough records to go by while waiting for the connection to be repaired.
The claim (not directly made by the article, but generally made to support the difference) is that vinyl’s physical characteristics limit how “loud” a recording can be. Specifically, that a vinyl pressing of a “brick walled” recording becomes unplayable—or at least unreliably playable—because its physical tracks are insufficient to keep a stylus in place for playback.
I don’t know how true that claim is, but the analysis seems cromulent, and analysis of comparable media seems to support it well enough.
It isn’t a claim that pressing vinyl attracts or requires better production etc, but that the medium has inherent physical constraints that benefit, at least as a side effect, from greater dynamic range.
There are a few general tricks here: https://www.sageaudio.com/articles/how-to-master-for-vinyl but in practice there are so many variables that vinyl mastering engineers are worth their weight in gold, and there's some significant investment made in trying to automate most of all of it algorithmically or via ML/AI.
The recording can be so realistic it captures the actual earth moving along with the heavier-than-normal sound waves hitting the microphones.
The bigger speakers and higher power amplifiers were always favored to reproduce the shock waves, and that's what happened.
It was the speakers' high volume not the smallness of the micro-groove that pushed the needle off the record and it emphasized the need for far better isolation of the turntable during the reproduction process than was needed for the microphone during the recording process.
A well calibrated turntable pickup/arm will not jump until you turn it up past a certain point, but that point is much lower when it's the 1812 Overture, and you don't really need an audiophile setup to shake things when the source material captures that to begin with.
OTOH with radio-friendly pop music a dancer or two in an upstairs room could make the needle jump to the next song on the disc :(
The physical limitations of vinyl don't allow it to be pushed as hard as a digital medium, or even tape, can be.
It's kind of like making a road that only allows air-cooled VWs and noting that speeding drops to almost zero.
I had a copy of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk". Double-album in a hinged sleeve, with each album having an inner sleeve. That gave eight big surfaces for art, and they certainly used it. Lovely.
The kind of do. With vinyl if you master like this you're making the grooves (the paths where the needle runs in) more pronounced, meaning less space for music (which is a premium in CDs compared to streaming, and even more so to vinyl compared to CDs: many vinyl "double albums" could have beeen a single CD). And it can make the needle jump around or have issues too.
So vinyl kind of forces you to master with actual dynamics, as opposed to squashing everything.
Right now, sound engineers, not incompetent at all, optimize CDs for the CD audience (and for the most part, they preferentially buy "louder," even if they'd deny it if you ask) and vinyl for those freaks who maintain their diamond needle.
So vinyl sounds better _because_ it's a hipster medium.
CDs haven't been on anyone's radar for a long time.