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Comment by RileyJames | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been buying vinyl for the sake of collecting it, with limited intention to ever play it.

And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD? (And I own more cassette players than the zero vinyl players)

I recently found out that some of my favourite vinyls, that I’ve been collecting, ONLY include the art/lyrics booklet in the CD version. These are from the early 2000’s (peak cd?).

I reckon I’d buy an art / lyrics booklet over a physical medium of the music itself. Particularly if it included flac download of the music.

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> And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD?

I have no interest in cassette or vinyl. I love CDs because they provide the highest music quality, uncompressed audio that’s trivial to rip to lossless FLAC files, complete with metadata.

Sure, but on the whole I’d take getting FLAC directly over CDs. Not that I don’t have CDs, even deluxe editions with picture books and stuff, but I pretty much never get them out.

I can understand people preferring vinyls as physical artefacts, the full frame jackets of my father’s albums are gorgeous in a way that’s distinct from and superior to CD album art, even if the music bit is markedly inferior technically (although that technical inferiority has led to better musical end results in some cases, you can’t compress the shit out of a vinyl, then again hopefully that time is long on the past).

I'd take getting FLAC files directly, but they're not available most of the time.

Yeah. But my point is mostly that the CD remains nothing but a transmission vessel for the audio, I don't know anyone and have seldom heard of people who value CDs for their physicality as a CD. Unlike vinyls which they very much do.

So you go to work, earn money, then you buy yourself some object to put it in a shelf?

And thats basically it?

You are not even playing it?

To do what with it? Letting your kids/family sell your collection with a loss?

Is it background decoration for you? Couldn't you just buy bulk of Vinyl no one wants to use it for your decoration purposes?

That feels like consumerism at the peak.

Is it consumerism to walk around the beach collecting pretty rocks to go home and put them on a shelf?

A rock is not a consumer good, so no.

And a rock is unique, nice to look at, did not cost you anything and kind of an appreciation of nature.

Enjoy your rock! (i'm sincere)

Naturally since people are buying things, technically they are consuming.

I mean that collecting a relatively small number of durable and visually pleasing objects isn't really the worst flavor of consumerism, even if it seems pointless to some people.

I agree we have a massive problem with over-consumption (most glaringly with things like fast fashion), but I'm not sure record collectors are a big problem.

>And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD?

Many people I know buy the CD because they prefer owning a physical medium, and the CDs they actually play and have a collection of them.

As for cassette, I don't know about buying regular releases on it, but there's a small but very passionate music community around cassette releases for experimental and indie music (same as a demoscene using old computers or people making new 8bit games).

I buy cassettes. Mostly old, period-correct ones, but some new. I also have a fairly high end tape deck, that these days can be had for rather good price. Our perception of cassettes are mostly warped by the experience of badly recorded tapes played on horrible, unmaintained players, but inherently the tape is much less of a limiting factor to quality than most of the things people use to play music nowadays. In fact, when comparing my vinyl and cassette purchases, I have higher change of getting a bad sounding vinyl than a bad sounding cassette.

Notably, tape decks with separate play and record heads let you listen to the recorded signal, while it's being recorded and quickly switch between the tape and source signal. Even on a good pair of headphones, when correctly dialled in, vast majority wouldn't be able to recognise which signal is the tape.

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