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I drove my electric BMW the other day, blasting a simulated V8 noise from speakers. It was a cold grey murky day but no rain. I stopped by the gas station to fuel my stomach by a bag of chips and the Snickers bar, because I went without eating a breakfast that morning. I saw a lonely dog by the roadside. It looked sad. I took my digital retro-styled camera with film simulation function out of my retro Billingham bag and took a photo. A little speaker in the camera has simulated the film advance noise just like in the past. Doggo looked at me with its sad eyes and went away. I took a glimpse of a photo of a dog and pressed "film grain +2" in the menu. Lovely shot. I'll post it to the Insta, probably. Then I entered the store, bought my bag of chips and the Snickers bar and saw a vinyl record corner. Man, I love vinyl. Those digital files pressed onto tangible, tactile surface. An AI-generated woman looked at me from the record artwork. Fonts were crooked. The price was $8.99 with a discount. I knew it's a pop record right away. Though, I'd love to blast an IDM track from speakers in my electric BMW alongside with simulated V8 noise, a pop record with vocoder vocals and autotune is also good. I took a record to place the vinyl on the bookshelf in my room. I know I'll be listening to the music via Spotify anyway. Man, I love vinyl. Just like film photography, it reminds me I'm alive. I'm real.
I really hope no-one ever makes such a monstrosity.
I enjoy the Vinyl & CD vibe of being fully offline.
And it's also interesting how much stuff from 90s/00s era, particularly electronic music and the various remixes never made it on to streaming platforms. I assume some of it is just complexity of licensing some niche pressing of Artist C remixing a song by Artists A&B, etc.
Sometimes I see some of the 2-3 CD live albums make it onto a streaming platform with like 1/3 of the songs greyed out missing due to licensing.
Plus there's the aspect of actually owning your media and not simply leasing it with a monthly subscription.
Helped me to more consciously get into work mode.
CDs just seem so much better. Yes it's technically digital, but can you tell?
With an iPod Shuffle, you needed a screen to load new music. The process of managing your collection happens on screen.
I realize this isn't the world we live in so I guess I'm just yelling at clouds. But come on, Vinyl is just so obviously a bad way to preserve music...
As for myself, I have young kids and this sort of thing doesn’t make the cut these days, so I stream everything. It all feels background-y and I haven’t fallen in love with an album in years and years.
Maybe I just don't get it - I'm much younger than the average HN user, growing up with physical media but not physical media that rapidly degraded on use like how vinyl does. But to me this sentiment is so alien that it seems like some kind of a milder nostalgia Stockholm syndrome.
When we think of other physical media, no one ever romanticizes that type of thing because degradation never really existed there. Would you want a photograph that faded away a significant amount each time you looked at it? A book that had the ink on its pages visibly rub off?
To me it just seems that the hard technical limitations of a long bygone era (that some people would've undoubtedly hated at the time) were given a mystique to them when people come back to them. Is the harsh fact of media degradation really inherently "magical"? Or is it that people ascribe good qualities to it because it's just the way it was?
Yes!
> A book that had the ink on its pages visibly rub off?
Yes, old paperbacks were exactly like that.
I didn't think so, until a couple of weeks ago.
I was in a record store and it had a CD player on sale for $30. One of those cheap blister-pack jobs. Just for a laugh, I bought it, and a couple of CD versions of records I own. (Genesis, New Order, R.E.M.)
I thought "digital is digital" so it shouldn't matter that it was cheap.
It wasn't great.
I sounded very flat. Even with my expensive headphones, it just didn't sound right. I'm not sure if "mechanical" is the right word, but it was noticeably different, and I'm not someone who has perfect hearing. It just sounded... boring.
So I compared the CD sound with the record versions that I rip with a $20 USB dongle and Audacity. The record rips sound much better than the CDs.
Maybe someone with perfect hearing will think otherwise. But I'm not an audiophile. I'm just a guy who likes gadgets.
That $30 CD player… if it’s connected to headphones, how were the headphones driven? Especially if you have nice headphones, it’s very easy for a cheap device to not be able to competently drive them.
Vinyl vs CD mastering is a thing. There could be differences there. Additionally, depending on how you ripped the vinyl (especially with a “cheap dongle”) that may introduce its own color to the record.
There’s a reason why music collectors differentiate between every single source, because often there are differences (sometimes small, sometimes big) between the various sources.
It's not the CD's fault, it's the mastering engineers.
99% of music is made to be played on radio / in car etc., a noisy environment, where you don't want to be adjusting the volume knob all the time. So the dynamics are stripped in mastering phase.
Music that gets pressed on vinyls isn't mastered for car-play, but home stereo equipment, so it makes more sense to have larger dynamic range.
CDs have objectively lower noise floor (less hissing), and more dynamic range (difference between loudest and quietest note), but it's the mastering that usually destroys the sound. And nothing can be done about it on consumer end. Except find a less remastered version of the album in a thrift store that isn't scratched to oblivion.
There's really no reliable way to tell if a CD is going to have high dynamic range, except perhaps niche audiophile studios like https://www.stockfisch-records.de/sf12_start_e.html, but https://dr.loudness-war.info/ has fantastic list of records with their dynamic ranges, so you can check before you buy, and you can also explore and find new stuff to use to listen to your speakers ;)
And even then, it's not digital square waves coming out of your headphones. At some point that digital signal needs to be converted to analog waves. The quality of the DAC matters as well and can give a different quality of output.
yep