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I'm nearing 50 and I recently bought a record player and a handful of records together with a multi-tier display stand for my home, after not using one since about the advent of CD. I don't use it much, but when I do its a pure nostalgia moment; it takes me back to my teenage years, flipping over records in my room, the "warmer" sound, carefully removing and replacing records from their covers trying not to scratch them, slowing down the whole process of listening to music rather than just picking a music playlist on my phone and over-consuming.

CD's are much less nostalgic for me, even though the quality is good, they feel not only charmless but obsolelete, much in the way that DVD/BluRay do in the age of streaming.

Cassette tape is just a bridge too far; rapidly degrading sound quality, tape de-spooling and getting chewed up and having to yank it out of the player. It was handy in the age of Walkmans if you wanted to listen to music on the go.

I guess the point I am making is that ones level of nostalgia for these older formats is probably highly dependent on your age, memories etc.

I'm in my 30s and I was born in the right generation. CDs used to be cool and futuristic, and they're still a convenient way to handle music in a world where all software sucks and sending a file from one "personal" computer to another requires advanced networking knowledge

Records and tapes don't hit the nostalgia button for me

The things I don't like about CD ... the jewelled cases always coming apart at the hinges, the hinge pieces snapping off and you're left with two loose halves .. I mean cheap enough to keep a bunch of spares around I suppose, but it happens way too much.

Also when they do get scratched, they skip in a really awful "digital sounding" way, unlike vinyl which can be either a mild hiccup or bump, to downright comically burping their way to the end of the track or side. But you're right they were very ergonomic compared to what came before them, there's no doubt like DVD that came a little later they were a complete game changer.

Two things.

(1) Pre-recorded tapes are cheap and abundant. Quality really varies. My son gets any music he likes to play in his car, I collect anything prerecorded on metal or chrome for the audiophile value. (There are some recordings I listen to because I like the recording, like a tape of Tibetan chanting that sounds like instrumental Frank Zappa)

(2) Tape peaked around 1990 as CD encroached on it. The best tapes and tape equipment sound better than most people who lived through the period remember and certainly better than the mediocre mechanisms and terrible tapes (e.g. ‘type zero’) that are made today. Good chrome tapes don’t have particularly offensive hiss even without noise reduction and are somewhat affordable although metals are out of reach for most people today.

I lived through that period, too. Tape was never a long lasting medium. As you listened to your favourite albums over time, the tape would stretch and the must would sound different over time. Especially if you left them inside a vehicle where they overheated. It was inevitable. And there was the horrible warble of the batteries in a walkman when they were getting weak. By the time 1990 came around portable CD players were available, and a few years later when anti-skip CD players they were far better audio quality than portable tape players ever were.

What I really wanted in the late '90s or early '00s was a DVD MP3 player. Then I could've carrier my entire music collection around with me.

But who was listening to 40hrs of Music really? Was it more scrolling and skipping and looking on the display and not push the play button, looking out of the train window and just listening to the song of the artist?

I was traveling a lot at the time. Carrying lots of physical CDs without damaging them was a pain.

Most pre-recorded tapes were as cheap as possible and if you left them in the car player on a hot day, the tape would stretch -- I used to buy the record version and tape it to a TDK SA-90 (chrome) tape which was of much higher quality and thus more resilient and I could usually get 2 records on it (one album per side). If the tape ever got damaged, it could be re-taped from the record (plus the artwork/booklet was always far better on the record than a pre-recorded tape).

Did the same thing with CDs until MP3 players became prevalent.

> 8-track

Oh lord. Inevitably playing Barbara Streisand's greatest hits in my grandpa's light blue Dodge Dart.

While DAT was an expensive and equivalent stepping-tone, CDs were such a vast improvement because they delivered human perceptible Nyquist bandwidth-complete reproduction (PCM 44.1 kHz @ 16-bit 2 CH stereo). And still audiophiles and other sorts of liars insist on making absurd claims without evidence or demonstration that they "can tell the difference" between CDs and higher sample rates because it's simply beyond the laws of physics and limits of human perception. 44.1 kHz @ 65536 levels of sample choices is plenty. If anything, better quality DACs and preamps/amps would be more beneficial.

> I don't understand the hatred of CDs. A truly excellent format. Crystal clear sound, orders of magnitude better resistance to physical decay and damage, longer-playing without intervention. And it is easy to rip them without DRM getting in the way!

Same. 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo is quite something: the CD was released in 1982. I don't know how long it took to develop before that but we're talking 42+ years now. Nearly half a century.

I both pay for a Qobuz subscription (lossless music streaming), which allows to buy lossless songs and I ripped my very own CD collection (I kept the physical CDs though).

There's an entire generation of people raised on lossy MP3s and lossy Bluetooth willing to die on the hill that "lossless CD-quality music is unnecessary". I had mp3 files back in the Napster days. What was a HDD's size back then? 8 GB? Internet connection was some DSL variant.

So, yup, with 8 GB HDD and a slow-as-molasses Internet connection and a computer from 1999, CD-quality lossless files were a bit too heavy (and anyway back then we didn't know yet how to bit-perfectly rip an audio CD).

Don't get me wrong: I've got good memories of Napster and I even still have a few impossible-to-find low quality mp3 files from back then: obscure mix aired one on obscure radio stations etc.

But we're a quarter of a century later: my SSD is not 8 GB anymore but 2 TB. And Internet is fiber to the home.

In other words: no, losslessly streaming and storing files from a format that is nearly half a century old is not a problem.

I'm done arguing with these people who believe it's stupid to listen to lossless music files: they're probably the same people who listen to old cassettes connected to soundbars.

I prefer my lossless music (either streamed over the Internet or from one of my computers) on a pair of Dali Epicon 6 speakers I bought used (video is not mine but speakers are the same):

https://youtu.be/ZQ_A4KOPuJc

YMMV.

Hey old person. Stop it with the complaining.

I like my vinyl records because I think the tech is neat and like them. That’s all you need.

Get off my lawn.

Its about nostalgia. And to learn something. How mechanics have worked to produce the sound. CD sound is way too perfect, to clear. I cant listen to Jimi Hendrix on CD. A short sightend person seeing the world a bit differently, so much bright christmas trees instead of traffic lights....

I feel like the essential property of the resurgence of tapes and records is simple joy and fascination with the technology and its aesthetics. As such, it bypasses any tests of practicality or superiority.

We don't need to talk about audiophiles since they've always been insane.

8 track sucks butt for other reasons. Shit durability and not reliable at all. Cassette tape but worse in every way, there's nothing really to look at, and frankly a brief blip in the story of home media.

But reaching back even further, reel to reel is now prized and expensive. Simple, reliable, and visually stunning.

These things aren't competing with Spotify or whatever at all. They're enjoyed alongside.

I don't know who you're thinking of that hates CDs. They're maybe not catching as much interest, but hate? Not seeing it.