If I was doing it as a way to acquire music to listen to, CDs, it's easier and more convenient to rip them to a computer, they take up less storage space, and are more tolerant of a bit of neglect.
If I'm just looking to collect something for the sake of collecting something, probably vinyl.
I was in the record business from the 70s through the early 2000s, and oversaw the transition from LPs to CDs. I had a huge LP collection (50% classical), which I transitioned to a huge CD collection, and got rid of most of the LPs. I still have the entire collection.
CDs were the better format by a long ways, but I totally understand why people love vinyl. For one thing, the large format cover. I remember working for a classical record label, and we were looking at the final cover proof of the last LP we were releasing before going all CD, a particularly beautiful photo of the Alps, and my boss saying "Aren't you going to miss the big cover art?" And all of us nodded solemnly. It really felt like a funeral, like I was saying goodbye.
I also remember wondering how people were going to clean their weed, and roll proper joints without an LP with a gatefold cover.
Properly keeping a vinyl collection is a chore. First of all, if you are doing it right, ALL of your LPs are in a poly sleeve for protection, so the process for playing an LP is this:
Remove the album from the shelf, where it is properly stored upright and tight.
Remove the LP from the poly sleeve
Remove the inner sleeve/ dust cover from the cover.
Remove the LP from the inner sleeve/ dust cover, carefully using fingertips on the edges and label only.
Hold the LP, and look at it from the edge, to see if there are any obvious warps or kinks. Of course there aren't, you store it properly, but you look anyway.
You blow off any obvious hairs or dust.
Set it carefully on the turntable, trying to put the spindle through hole on the first try, without rubbing it around, making nearly invisible, but bothersome, marks around the hole, that will irk you every time you see them.
Carefully clean the surface with a Discwasher or some other cleaning device.
Use a stylus brush on the needle to remove any schmutz.
Carefully place the needle on the surface, and relax for the next 20 minutes as you listen to your music. Or dance. Or my personal favorite: Air Guitar (I play for real, I'm allowed).
Flip the record, repeat the entire cleaning process, and drop the needle.
Reverse the process, put the LP back into the inner sleeve, put that in the cover, put the album back in the poly sleeve, and slip it back into its proper place on the shelf.
That's a lot more complicated than simply dropping a CD into a drawer and pushing a button.
The psychological result of all those steps, EVERY time you want to play music, is that it starts to feel like a ritual, and takes on a feeling of importance. The music you listen to, the LPs that that you fuss over, that you preserve, and collect, take on a personal and cultural significance, that you feel a need to protect.
As new formats came along, CDs, then Digital Downloads, the ritual was removed, and music stopped feeling important. In the 60s and 70s, music was a significant factor in ending the Vietnam War, but it is hard to imagine today's music industry mobilizing against the government. Most people don't take their music as seriously as they did back then.
Yet some have rediscovered the satisfaction in having such a strong, PHYSICAL relationship with their music collection, and are collecting LPs again.
I get it. Music has ALWAYS been important to me, so I don't need the ritual to remind me anymore anymore, or maybe doing the ritual 100,000 when I was young wove it into my DNA. Either way, CDs have the durability, combined with the punchier sound quality, ease of use, and longer duration, and I was hooked the first time I saw one. I'll take the advantages of the CD over The Ritual any day.
I am so grateful to see someone write it out like this in ritual sense so that someone who didn’t have any records would understand. It’s downright reverent of the music. Thank you for that.
Very true. Many hobbies have rituals. Cyclists assemble their gear, clean their chain, and choose their wardrobe before their ride. Card collectors and collectors of all kinds of things often have detailed ritualistic organization of their collection. Potheads might pack and burn their bowl the exact same super optimized way every time. Gardeners might walk meditative paths and talk to their plants. Those descriptions are outside observations of people and their hobby rituals that anyone can make. OP has given us an inside look into their hobby, which is pretty damn cool and insightful!
Andres Segovia playing Bach's Partita #3 for Solo Violin. I heard it first when I was a teen, and now I'm trying to learn it on electric guitar, as an oldster.
My Discwasher came with a little stylus cleaning brush that fit over the top of the little bottle of cleaning solution.
You probably didn't have to clean it every time, but it wasn't a bad idea to give it a quick swipe and remove any grit that accumulated from the last playing.
I have and use vinyls, but I use them differently.
I don't keep a collection and they're not rare or expensive. They cost next to nothing in second hand stores when I buy the odd "greatest hits" and mixed artist records that have no collectible value.
I use them with no regard to their longevity - I consume them. I play them on a cheap record player with a less than ideal needle or speakers, well aware that they will wear down and become useless over time. I don't care. I don't believe in the need to preserve everything that is old only due to it being old. I'll leave that for the museums. I don't run a museum.
I do it because I like the part of the ritual where you actually just listen to records and hear all the songs that are on there without having to make a choice or change tracks all the time.
A lot of records only have one or two hit songs. The rest is stuff I'd never choose to search for, and is never played on the radio. These are the tracks I like to hear, because I would not be exposed to them otherwise.
You can rip CDs to digital easily. You can get them cheap at resale shops and garage sales.
I buy and listen to vinyls, but also I moatly only buy them for my top 5 artists, partly for display. I do buy some if Infind them cheap or they are special, but I don't really collect vinyls. They are impractical.
CDs have caught on again, and it's getting harder to find them. I used to go out on a Saturday, and hit 2 or 3 Goodwills, and come home with 20-30 great CDs, at only $.50-$1 each.
These days all they have are bad religious albums, vanity projects, old software, etc. Garbage.
All things being equal sure, but vinyl is a severely outdated audio format that is both a lot more environmentally taxing as well as being a poor medium for music. Both in production and for shipping around the world.
Vinyl doesn't appeal to me personally compared to CDs, and it's generally less technically capable, but...I mean, people like what they like. As long as they aren't being misled as to the characteristics of what they're buying...shrugs
Some of it is opinion. It's like saying "which is better, chocolate or vanilla"?
If what you want is big album art, a neat mechanical gizmo to watch, and a playing experience that triggers nostalgia, then, hey, who am I to say "no, longevity, compactness, and audio fidelity are more important characteristics"?
I mean, some people like live audio. Some people like retro boom boxes.
End of the day, what you're doing is picking the thing that makes you personally happy.
CDs for sure but then again I never stopped collecting them. They can be played as is with no loss of audio quality. They are easy to store, and serves as a backup after you have ripped them to a harddrive. So should your hardware fail you can always start over.
There is also a lot of music I might have forgotten about if I only had streamed it, but finding it on my shelf years later gives the music new life again.
My wife is totally into vinyl but I keep telling her, the best it will ever sound is the first time you play it and it degrades just a little bit every time the needle hits it.
CDs are consistent. The same data every play, and it's easier to rip them to digital.
I knew guys who were so weird about their LPs, that they wouldn't play something because they didn't want to wear it out, which is stupid.
I also had customers (I worked at n record stores back in the day) that would play certain records EVERY day, and would buy a new copy once a year. Dark Side of the Moon, Rumors, Led Zeppelin 4, and Lynyrd Skynyrd were common ones.
I personally dislike vinyl for how damaging they are for the environment during production, but from the testing I've seen, they don't really degrade in any meaningful way just from playing them.
Same as I do now, vinyl. If you're listening to CDs, which are digital, you may as well buy your music digitally from Bandcamp or wherever and you have no need for physical media.
CDs also suffer from bit rot so they won't last forever, best way to keep them forever is to rip them, but at that point, again, just buy the music digitally.
Vinyl doesn't give you the best sound quality, it can be annoying to have to flip the record over or change records, but there's something about it being tangible, it's a real thing, you can see the grooves, you don't even need power to play a record. And with care, they'll last a lot longer than a CD.
Vinyl isn't a perfect medium, but that's kinda what makes it so fun and special
Your point is true until you find a lot of music that is mostly accessible via CD only. I'm with you, getting stuff at bandcamp is great. But I have so much music that does not exist any other way that I got a CD player for the PC to rip the cds and find CDs at second hand market (and also, the CDs are so bloody cheap for a lot of good old music)
This is exactly how I feel too. When I want to listen to a record, it’s because I want to interact with the music. I have a whole process with my record equipment, stuff to mess with etc. Turntable, preamp, EQ, amp, speakers. Each is something I can play with. Records are very physical, I can see them and feel them to understand them. It’s a very interactive medium. I actually enjoy flipping the record. And I don’t care if it doesn’t sound as good, I usually buy cheap used records anyway that have a bit of surface noise. It actually feels warm and nostalgic, I enjoy that. It’s like listening to a live recording from the 30s or something. If I want amazing audio quality I’ll just get it digitally. When I listen to records that’s not what I’m going for, I’m going for the experience. It feels more human, where a CD feels clinical and sterile. That’s not how I want to describe an album, personally.
CDs. They take up less space. Especially if you throw the casing away and just have the actual CD. I don't have any device that can read either so keeping them usable is not a priority.
I'm aware of the correct interpretation of the question but I found this more amusing.
The first time I handled a Jewel Box I was in awe. Then they told me it was called a Jewel Box, and I fell in love. I could never surrender my Jewel Boxes.
CD's are lossless 16-bit/44.1 kHz PCM digital audio. You can already get that in file form. Why would you want digital audio that's stored on media that degrades? It doesn't sound any different than the digital file...it's quite literally (not figuratively literally but literally literally) the exact same data.
There's actually quite a bit of music published on CDs that is not available on any digital platform. If it's not somewhat popular no one buys a license to distribute it. There's recordings you can only find browsing the CD racks at physical stores.
With most digital media these days you don't buy the actual media. You buy a lifetime license. For your life or the life of the host platform. Whichever is shorter.
Technically when you bought any music wether it be 8-track, LP, cassette, or CD, you were purchasing a single-user license for the music and the media was just how the record companies delivered it to you. That's why Napster and all the piracy that followed it was/is illegal, because you don't own a license when you copy the digital file.
HOWEVER... Over the many decades I've been alive I've scratched, twisted, demagnetized, or just plain old lost hundreds of LPs, cassettes, and CDs. Do you think if I requested a new copy of the music that the record companies would send me a replacement?
No, they would not. So I obtained digital replacements by...other means.
Neither. CDs are only useful as a digital copy and 700MB is a quick download, and many discs can fit as FLAC on a microSD the size of my pinky nail. It might even be cheaper nowadays for them to mass produce 512 MB micro SD cards to put FLAC albums on them. If anybody wanted physical albums. It would be hilarious to just have a QR code on a tiny cardboard envelope.
If we want analog music, which is a cool idea, we should replace vinyl with something better. We can still use an optical laser disc but encoding stereo audio tracks as analog laser etches rather than zeros and ones. That way we could reduce the cost, and increase the quality at the same time. Might even be able to print them on glass for longevity. Then you might have an audiophile quality LP that doesn’t need to be flipped. Also in terms of longevity - an analog laser recording could be reverse engineered and listened to after the apocalypse, while binary CD format is a bit more opaque.
If you want the highest quality, lowest cost, and most convenient listening experience (especially portable) then get CDs. If you enjoy the ritual of using the turntable and you also want something that looks good on the wall, get vinyl.
It's a tough one because vinyl records are objectivity inferior in every way. However, for some weird reason high quality dynamic masters are used for vinyl records but not CD's. There's no reason they couldn't use dynamic masters for CD's and digital but they don't. Read about the loudness wars if you feel like learning about the subject. If anyone needs tips on CD ripping or anything of that nature feel free to PM me.
large format cover art, lyrics on back. It was part of the experience, plus cost. You did a lot more research into an album when it was that expensive. Today, people just collect a lot of digital crap.
Mini discs! They never really took hold in the US but I had one and LOVED it. Rewritible media, but better quality than cassette. Sony made a killer player that only somehow sipped a single AAA battery, which was a big deal for a kid.
Vinyl: bigger collectors value (old releases), nice album art, pleases multiple senses at once.
CD: convenient to use, better audio quality (vinyl can come near only if you are willing to spend thousands of dollars on equipment), easy to rip or copy, compact (as the name says)
This is pretty much right on, especially the part about spending so much on audio gear to get vinyl's best sound out of it.
I'm frugal audiophile...okay, I'm a cheapskate. Right now, I'm rocking a cheap SONY CD player, a $45 tripath amp, and a set of Boston Acoustic speakers that I bought nearly brand new from Goodwill for $10. The entire set-up was well under $100, and it sounds way better than the system I put together in my youth, which was more like $1000.
To put together a vinyl system that sounds as good as this cheap crappy system I cobbled together, would cost me thousands.
If you get a reader, I'd suggest Blu-Ray 4k/UHD rather than standard Blu-Ray. You can still read standard Blu-Ray. My guess is that Blu-Ray UHD will be the final significant physical video format.
4k blurays are usually more expensive though, as are the players, and aren't really that noticeable of an improvement unless you have a particularly large TV. It's much more affordable to stick with standard 1080p blurays.
I collect both but have begun focusing more on CDs for their portability, price, and their ease of digitization. I'm actually in the middle of extracting CDs I recently picked up at the thrift store as I type this. I have an MP3 player and I load them on there, keep them on my hard-drive AND a separate back up. I still have CDs from the 90s and have had no issues with them playing or being digitized.
I like both. Vinyl is fun because you have to more actively deal with it, which keeps me engaged with listening.
CDs are good because they are cheap and I grew up in the 90s, so I like the selection. There are some things you just can't get on vinyl. They are also nice because you don't have to flip them.
I had an old receiver so I just picked up a cheap dvd player with OSD to handle playing CDs and it has worked really well. I just switch inputs depending on my mood for maximum nostalgia.
If I was starting today probably CDs because the price difference is significant. Ive collected vinyl since the 80s though and acquired the bulk of my collection when former vinyl enthusiasts foolishly unloaded their collections for pennies on the dollar to get cds instead. I dont buy many new LPs nowadays and stick to thrift stores and discogs bargain deals.
Disk rot is a real issue, but I can make ISOs from them and back them up with my current hardware. Records are all fun and a better decor item, but if data preservation is the goal, I need to be able to make my own copies.
Vinyl is cool and cozy but I couldn't be bothered. It's a bad tech / product overall.
Too much space, too clunky of a tech to not lose interest in a few months and I don't believe there's an audio difference a human ear can notice. So you're just having a bunch of square posters that you sometimes look at - might as well just do posters then.
I still buy music CDs, and rip them to digital media. CDs are a lot easier to rip to digital media, but vinyl is cooler, but I listen to local music mainly through strawberry media player (or USB stick in a car)
Depends on what you use it for. I love buying records and listen to them only in a specific way. I listen to records only in the living room with a chill vibe. I enjoy the intentionally of picking a record and turning it over. I lose that for CDs but do enjoy them in the car when I get sick of the radio
CD"s. I'm old enough to have had a vinyl collection before CDs came out. The first CD I bought was Brothers in Arms, the sound was revelatory, ditched my dozen or so LPs
I've got both and prefer vinyl. If I was starting from zero now I would focus on CDs. Not everything is available in every format but I think CDs have the most coverage.
No, Physical media is out, at least as means of distribution.
Archiving however is a different story. I burn all my collections to archival grade blurays. As a history nerd, I'm painfully aware how much was lost, and I'm doing my part to give future historians something to work with.
Vinyls don't corrode over time. We have vinyl from 80 years ago. Still good. We have CDs from 90s that no longer play. And itunes that have completely disappeared unless than 20years.
No, I could never I would NEVER. I just see physical media like CDs as a waste of money/space and generally an inefficient way to consume/store media. I would/do horde books though I love books and I luv me bookshelf.
Don't horde, but do hang on to books that you will pick up and read on a whim, but wouldn't if you had to go and check it out, or those that are unlikely to be stocked at your local llibrary. A small collection is good.
Nah i like to keep my favourite books around so I can reread them or lend them to a friend of theyre interested. Most of my reading is from the Library because I'm reading random unknown books and they're very hit/miss. If you want a popular book you have to wait months. When i hear about a book I know I'll like I buy it from a 2nd hand store usually.
My wife and I have already started collecting vinyl. My FIL gave us a really nice setup he was using and a few records, and we’ve gone from there.
At first, I didn’t really get it, but then I was reminded of how nice it was to listen to a whole album. I wound up rediscovering songs I loved as a kid that I haven’t heard because you can now just make a playlist of your favorites. It’s also really nice to actually own my copies. Empire is probably long gone, eaten by another company, but my player still works just fine. I can also repair it myself in the unlikely event that it breaks.
I also like going to music stores and browsing again. People in the stores are typically nice and love talking about music and, honestly, anything else you want to chat about. You get to share the experience with strangers face-to-face and be a small part of a moment in their lives.
Like any kind of collecting or niche interest, it’s hard for a lot of people to understand why others do it. Hopefully, this helps.
Also, CDs are typically waaay cheaper, so we will be supplementing with those.
When I was a kid, and my friends worked in fast food joints or bussed tables at restaurants, I worked in record stores. The pay sucked, but we got lots of free records, and it was the greatest job in the world.
We loved talking to enthusiastic music lovers, and we had lots of regulars that we looked forward to seeing. We knew their preferences, and when new stuff came in, I'd often set stuff aside for them.
They'd come in, greetings exchanged, and they'd say "What's new?" and you'd pull something out from under the counter, and say "This came in so I put aside for you." Even if they didn't take it, they appreciated that you thought of them.
Lots of cute girls, too. Working alongside of you, their cute friends dropping by, cute customers, and I was the perfect age for it.
What a great job. I'd still be doing it today, if y'know, every record store didn't go out of business, and if they ever paid more than minimum wage. Free records is nice, but you can't eat them, and I never found a landlord who would exchange records for rent.
Local marketplace had a really nice turntable for an unreasonable price for a bit and I argued with myself for a while about it. (The same person had sold me a nice set of speakers, just upgrades a lot it seems).
Final product, vinyl wears out, the needle wears out, and it’s finicky. It needs to be level and vibration isolated. The voltage produced is so low it’s highly subject to electrical interference. You need a preamp, which vary widely in quality as well as style - it may be high end but is it to your taste? It’s all a rabbit hole I wasn’t willing to go down for what, ultimately, is a lower quality experience than a CD. You have to dust records and have a microgram scale to balance the tonearm. If it’s not an automatic player it’ll wear a groove at the end of playback if you don’t get up to deal with it. If the power supply is slightly off kilter, it plays too fast or slow, or you need to adjust it.
Now, CDs don’t last forever (as audio storage) and have their faults and loudness war outcome, but they do store high fidelity and provide a mindful listening experience in that you need to get up and open a box and place the CD in the player; they have album art; and they have liner notes sometimes.
So I ended up convincing myself to save the money and frustration.
Playing a CD doesn't require degrading it in that sense, though I'd expect ordinary wear and tear, occasionally dropping a disc and scratching and such to be a factor in the real world.
To backup a vinyl can you just.. take a mould of it and recast it? Or some sort of machinable gcode for a CNC? Never come across any vinyl preservation info
People preserve vinyl mostly by just digitizing it. If they want more copies they normally try to find the original master recording and make new presses from it.
Trying to take a mould of the existing disk would make a really low quality copy, and only make the imperfections even worse.
The main advantage of collecting vinyl for me would be to archive rare releases that never got onto another format.
For example, this vinyl rip i found on yt, has the description:
Vinyl rip of my original 1971 vinyl copy of this classic album. It has the paper-style (B.I.E.M.) label and the matrix numbers are 6397020 1+380 A10 and 6397020 2+380 A13, which are the earliest I have ever seen.
Although not worn, it has not always been treated very well during its forty-one years of existence. I have removed as many pops and clicks as I could without audibly degrading the sound quality and destroying the vinyl sound. To my ears, the final result is pretty close to what a near-mint vinyl copy would sound like. Without the noise reduction and compression (applied to all CD and recent vinyl issues of this album), the album sounds more spacious and livelier.
I'd very much like to make a custom format. I miss the tactile nature and robust quality of cartridge games for Nintendo and the aesthetic feel of 8-track radio in cars. We have the tech to make it happen, I'd like to encode all of my media into 2.5in sata SSD or something like that. Sure it's bulkier than most options but the satisfaction of popping in a cart and the ability to drop it and not immediately destroy it would be nice.
Buy digitally and store, yes agreed. But then I wonder, how long will that last until the major platforms remove the option to download? Then what'll I do?
These days I try to buy either DRM free flax files. If I really like the art or the artist in addition to wanting to regularly actually listen to as an album, then I may try to buy vinyl + flac files. If it's at a show I'll buy whatever is available that I can play because at that point it's more about the merch than music. I'm probably going to pass on the wax cylinders and I may think long and hard before buying a cassette.
I don't have any now and don't plan to start now. Physical media just seems so dumb for distributing small amounts of data, I can store so much more on an SD card which takes a fraction of the space of vinyl or CD.
1 CD is what, 700MB? A CDs size worth of SD cards is tens of TBs.
Neither. Give me files. I have no use for all that plastic. I have 8 TB of music and growing. Mostly freely traded and doesn't have or need a plastic container anyways.
Vinyl is an environmental mess. PVC with plasticizers and lead as a stabilizer. Heavy to transport, bulky to store. Extremely energy inefficient in making. They degrade the minute you play one.
I used to have a record collection (several hundred at some point, maybe nearly a thousand), I am glad to be done with it. Records are way too short.
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Easily, with how much people's digital download or streaming libraries are being stolen from them at will by any given storefront.
If I was doing it as a way to acquire music to listen to, CDs, it's easier and more convenient to rip them to a computer, they take up less storage space, and are more tolerant of a bit of neglect.
If I'm just looking to collect something for the sake of collecting something, probably vinyl.
I was in the record business from the 70s through the early 2000s, and oversaw the transition from LPs to CDs. I had a huge LP collection (50% classical), which I transitioned to a huge CD collection, and got rid of most of the LPs. I still have the entire collection.
CDs were the better format by a long ways, but I totally understand why people love vinyl. For one thing, the large format cover. I remember working for a classical record label, and we were looking at the final cover proof of the last LP we were releasing before going all CD, a particularly beautiful photo of the Alps, and my boss saying "Aren't you going to miss the big cover art?" And all of us nodded solemnly. It really felt like a funeral, like I was saying goodbye.
I also remember wondering how people were going to clean their weed, and roll proper joints without an LP with a gatefold cover.
Properly keeping a vinyl collection is a chore. First of all, if you are doing it right, ALL of your LPs are in a poly sleeve for protection, so the process for playing an LP is this:
Remove the album from the shelf, where it is properly stored upright and tight.
Remove the LP from the poly sleeve
Remove the inner sleeve/ dust cover from the cover.
Remove the LP from the inner sleeve/ dust cover, carefully using fingertips on the edges and label only.
Hold the LP, and look at it from the edge, to see if there are any obvious warps or kinks. Of course there aren't, you store it properly, but you look anyway.
You blow off any obvious hairs or dust.
Set it carefully on the turntable, trying to put the spindle through hole on the first try, without rubbing it around, making nearly invisible, but bothersome, marks around the hole, that will irk you every time you see them.
Carefully clean the surface with a Discwasher or some other cleaning device.
Use a stylus brush on the needle to remove any schmutz.
Carefully place the needle on the surface, and relax for the next 20 minutes as you listen to your music. Or dance. Or my personal favorite: Air Guitar (I play for real, I'm allowed).
Flip the record, repeat the entire cleaning process, and drop the needle.
Reverse the process, put the LP back into the inner sleeve, put that in the cover, put the album back in the poly sleeve, and slip it back into its proper place on the shelf.
That's a lot more complicated than simply dropping a CD into a drawer and pushing a button.
The psychological result of all those steps, EVERY time you want to play music, is that it starts to feel like a ritual, and takes on a feeling of importance. The music you listen to, the LPs that that you fuss over, that you preserve, and collect, take on a personal and cultural significance, that you feel a need to protect.
As new formats came along, CDs, then Digital Downloads, the ritual was removed, and music stopped feeling important. In the 60s and 70s, music was a significant factor in ending the Vietnam War, but it is hard to imagine today's music industry mobilizing against the government. Most people don't take their music as seriously as they did back then.
Yet some have rediscovered the satisfaction in having such a strong, PHYSICAL relationship with their music collection, and are collecting LPs again.
I get it. Music has ALWAYS been important to me, so I don't need the ritual to remind me anymore anymore, or maybe doing the ritual 100,000 when I was young wove it into my DNA. Either way, CDs have the durability, combined with the punchier sound quality, ease of use, and longer duration, and I was hooked the first time I saw one. I'll take the advantages of the CD over The Ritual any day.
I am so grateful to see someone write it out like this in ritual sense so that someone who didn’t have any records would understand. It’s downright reverent of the music. Thank you for that.
Very true. Many hobbies have rituals. Cyclists assemble their gear, clean their chain, and choose their wardrobe before their ride. Card collectors and collectors of all kinds of things often have detailed ritualistic organization of their collection. Potheads might pack and burn their bowl the exact same super optimized way every time. Gardeners might walk meditative paths and talk to their plants. Those descriptions are outside observations of people and their hobby rituals that anyone can make. OP has given us an inside look into their hobby, which is pretty damn cool and insightful!
Reverence is the perfect word for how performing the ritual makes you feel about the music.
What's your favorite purely classical LP to air guitar to
Andres Segovia playing Bach's Partita #3 for Solo Violin. I heard it first when I was a teen, and now I'm trying to learn it on electric guitar, as an oldster.
My family had discwasher but not needle cleaner. You are supposed to use it EVERY time???
My Discwasher came with a little stylus cleaning brush that fit over the top of the little bottle of cleaning solution.
You probably didn't have to clean it every time, but it wasn't a bad idea to give it a quick swipe and remove any grit that accumulated from the last playing.
I have and use vinyls, but I use them differently.
I don't keep a collection and they're not rare or expensive. They cost next to nothing in second hand stores when I buy the odd "greatest hits" and mixed artist records that have no collectible value.
I use them with no regard to their longevity - I consume them. I play them on a cheap record player with a less than ideal needle or speakers, well aware that they will wear down and become useless over time. I don't care. I don't believe in the need to preserve everything that is old only due to it being old. I'll leave that for the museums. I don't run a museum.
I do it because I like the part of the ritual where you actually just listen to records and hear all the songs that are on there without having to make a choice or change tracks all the time.
A lot of records only have one or two hit songs. The rest is stuff I'd never choose to search for, and is never played on the radio. These are the tracks I like to hear, because I would not be exposed to them otherwise.
Same as I do now.
CDs.
You can rip CDs to digital easily. You can get them cheap at resale shops and garage sales.
I buy and listen to vinyls, but also I moatly only buy them for my top 5 artists, partly for display. I do buy some if Infind them cheap or they are special, but I don't really collect vinyls. They are impractical.
CDs have caught on again, and it's getting harder to find them. I used to go out on a Saturday, and hit 2 or 3 Goodwills, and come home with 20-30 great CDs, at only $.50-$1 each.
These days all they have are bad religious albums, vanity projects, old software, etc. Garbage.
Oh god the religious albums everywhere.
You are awakening some PTSD here...
Man, what a way to find out so many people hate Bad Religion and Garbage. D:
Vinyl is trash coming back to sell to collectors.
If you want to put covers up in a room or something go for it. But for listening to music they are the dumbest shit imaginable.
Preach. I am so fed up with vinyl. I hope more artist will continue releasing their music on CD instead.
Por que no los dos?
Some people like collecting vinyl records, others like collecting music on CDs.
To each their own, live and let live.
All things being equal sure, but vinyl is a severely outdated audio format that is both a lot more environmentally taxing as well as being a poor medium for music. Both in production and for shipping around the world.
I'll take CDs over vinyl any day.
Vinyl doesn't appeal to me personally compared to CDs, and it's generally less technically capable, but...I mean, people like what they like. As long as they aren't being misled as to the characteristics of what they're buying...shrugs
Some of it is opinion. It's like saying "which is better, chocolate or vanilla"?
If what you want is big album art, a neat mechanical gizmo to watch, and a playing experience that triggers nostalgia, then, hey, who am I to say "no, longevity, compactness, and audio fidelity are more important characteristics"?
I mean, some people like live audio. Some people like retro boom boxes.
End of the day, what you're doing is picking the thing that makes you personally happy.
So exactly what I said?
If I weren't allowed to stream or pirate, then CDs.
If I am, then Vinyl.
CDs for sure but then again I never stopped collecting them. They can be played as is with no loss of audio quality. They are easy to store, and serves as a backup after you have ripped them to a harddrive. So should your hardware fail you can always start over.
There is also a lot of music I might have forgotten about if I only had streamed it, but finding it on my shelf years later gives the music new life again.
My wife is totally into vinyl but I keep telling her, the best it will ever sound is the first time you play it and it degrades just a little bit every time the needle hits it.
CDs are consistent. The same data every play, and it's easier to rip them to digital.
I knew guys who were so weird about their LPs, that they wouldn't play something because they didn't want to wear it out, which is stupid.
I also had customers (I worked at n record stores back in the day) that would play certain records EVERY day, and would buy a new copy once a year. Dark Side of the Moon, Rumors, Led Zeppelin 4, and Lynyrd Skynyrd were common ones.
People back in the days would copy their vinyls on cassettes in order to not wear them out to quickly.
Then the cassettes would wear out, but cheaper to replace...
I personally dislike vinyl for how damaging they are for the environment during production, but from the testing I've seen, they don't really degrade in any meaningful way just from playing them.
Same as I do now, vinyl. If you're listening to CDs, which are digital, you may as well buy your music digitally from Bandcamp or wherever and you have no need for physical media.
CDs also suffer from bit rot so they won't last forever, best way to keep them forever is to rip them, but at that point, again, just buy the music digitally.
Vinyl doesn't give you the best sound quality, it can be annoying to have to flip the record over or change records, but there's something about it being tangible, it's a real thing, you can see the grooves, you don't even need power to play a record. And with care, they'll last a lot longer than a CD.
Vinyl isn't a perfect medium, but that's kinda what makes it so fun and special
Your point is true until you find a lot of music that is mostly accessible via CD only. I'm with you, getting stuff at bandcamp is great. But I have so much music that does not exist any other way that I got a CD player for the PC to rip the cds and find CDs at second hand market (and also, the CDs are so bloody cheap for a lot of good old music)
This is exactly how I feel too. When I want to listen to a record, it’s because I want to interact with the music. I have a whole process with my record equipment, stuff to mess with etc. Turntable, preamp, EQ, amp, speakers. Each is something I can play with. Records are very physical, I can see them and feel them to understand them. It’s a very interactive medium. I actually enjoy flipping the record. And I don’t care if it doesn’t sound as good, I usually buy cheap used records anyway that have a bit of surface noise. It actually feels warm and nostalgic, I enjoy that. It’s like listening to a live recording from the 30s or something. If I want amazing audio quality I’ll just get it digitally. When I listen to records that’s not what I’m going for, I’m going for the experience. It feels more human, where a CD feels clinical and sterile. That’s not how I want to describe an album, personally.
CDs, hands down. Never liked vinyls for a myriad of reasons.
CDs. They take up less space. Especially if you throw the casing away and just have the actual CD. I don't have any device that can read either so keeping them usable is not a priority.
I'm aware of the correct interpretation of the question but I found this more amusing.
The first time I handled a Jewel Box I was in awe. Then they told me it was called a Jewel Box, and I fell in love. I could never surrender my Jewel Boxes.
Hard no. Hauling this shit around and finding a spots for it is not something I would've chosen if I didn't already have the nostalgic attachment.
That being said! Can't lie I do still love it.
If I ever need to move....I might just donate most of my things. I love things and I have too much.
Vinyl, without a doubt. Because it's analog.
CD's are lossless 16-bit/44.1 kHz PCM digital audio. You can already get that in file form. Why would you want digital audio that's stored on media that degrades? It doesn't sound any different than the digital file...it's quite literally (not figuratively literally but literally literally) the exact same data.
There's actually quite a bit of music published on CDs that is not available on any digital platform. If it's not somewhat popular no one buys a license to distribute it. There's recordings you can only find browsing the CD racks at physical stores.
It's easy to buy and sell CDs second hand.
With most digital media these days you don't buy the actual media. You buy a lifetime license. For your life or the life of the host platform. Whichever is shorter.
That was always my argument back in the day.
Technically when you bought any music wether it be 8-track, LP, cassette, or CD, you were purchasing a single-user license for the music and the media was just how the record companies delivered it to you. That's why Napster and all the piracy that followed it was/is illegal, because you don't own a license when you copy the digital file.
HOWEVER... Over the many decades I've been alive I've scratched, twisted, demagnetized, or just plain old lost hundreds of LPs, cassettes, and CDs. Do you think if I requested a new copy of the music that the record companies would send me a replacement?
No, they would not. So I obtained digital replacements by...other means.
CDs so I can rip it and store it on my raid array.
I will buy digital if I can find it ofc.
Neither. CDs are only useful as a digital copy and 700MB is a quick download, and many discs can fit as FLAC on a microSD the size of my pinky nail. It might even be cheaper nowadays for them to mass produce 512 MB micro SD cards to put FLAC albums on them. If anybody wanted physical albums. It would be hilarious to just have a QR code on a tiny cardboard envelope.
If we want analog music, which is a cool idea, we should replace vinyl with something better. We can still use an optical laser disc but encoding stereo audio tracks as analog laser etches rather than zeros and ones. That way we could reduce the cost, and increase the quality at the same time. Might even be able to print them on glass for longevity. Then you might have an audiophile quality LP that doesn’t need to be flipped. Also in terms of longevity - an analog laser recording could be reverse engineered and listened to after the apocalypse, while binary CD format is a bit more opaque.
I find people with huge music collections in fact have no taste in music.
It just adds up from getting whole albums when you like a specific song
If you want the highest quality, lowest cost, and most convenient listening experience (especially portable) then get CDs. If you enjoy the ritual of using the turntable and you also want something that looks good on the wall, get vinyl.
Or do like me and get some of both!
It's a tough one because vinyl records are objectivity inferior in every way. However, for some weird reason high quality dynamic masters are used for vinyl records but not CD's. There's no reason they couldn't use dynamic masters for CD's and digital but they don't. Read about the loudness wars if you feel like learning about the subject. If anyone needs tips on CD ripping or anything of that nature feel free to PM me.
CD's. Already have a sizeable collection in storage and honestly never got the fascination with vinyl.
large format cover art, lyrics on back. It was part of the experience, plus cost. You did a lot more research into an album when it was that expensive. Today, people just collect a lot of digital crap.
Nothing can beat a wall of a CD/Cassette/Vinyl collection.
Nothing can beat making a mix tape/CD.
Mix MDs have a bit of a coolness factor to them, though. Even if they're lossy audio.
Mini discs! They never really took hold in the US but I had one and LOVED it. Rewritible media, but better quality than cassette. Sony made a killer player that only somehow sipped a single AAA battery, which was a big deal for a kid.
All hail MD.
It's up to you.
Vinyl: bigger collectors value (old releases), nice album art, pleases multiple senses at once.
CD: convenient to use, better audio quality (vinyl can come near only if you are willing to spend thousands of dollars on equipment), easy to rip or copy, compact (as the name says)
This is pretty much right on, especially the part about spending so much on audio gear to get vinyl's best sound out of it.
I'm frugal audiophile...okay, I'm a cheapskate. Right now, I'm rocking a cheap SONY CD player, a $45 tripath amp, and a set of Boston Acoustic speakers that I bought nearly brand new from Goodwill for $10. The entire set-up was well under $100, and it sounds way better than the system I put together in my youth, which was more like $1000.
To put together a vinyl system that sounds as good as this cheap crappy system I cobbled together, would cost me thousands.
I think I'd go for CDs, I could get a blu ray reader to also collect movies
If you get a reader, I'd suggest Blu-Ray 4k/UHD rather than standard Blu-Ray. You can still read standard Blu-Ray. My guess is that Blu-Ray UHD will be the final significant physical video format.
4k blurays are usually more expensive though, as are the players, and aren't really that noticeable of an improvement unless you have a particularly large TV. It's much more affordable to stick with standard 1080p blurays.
I collect both but have begun focusing more on CDs for their portability, price, and their ease of digitization. I'm actually in the middle of extracting CDs I recently picked up at the thrift store as I type this. I have an MP3 player and I load them on there, keep them on my hard-drive AND a separate back up. I still have CDs from the 90s and have had no issues with them playing or being digitized.
If I had no other option to get music, I'd take the CDs to rip them.
I like both. Vinyl is fun because you have to more actively deal with it, which keeps me engaged with listening.
CDs are good because they are cheap and I grew up in the 90s, so I like the selection. There are some things you just can't get on vinyl. They are also nice because you don't have to flip them.
I had an old receiver so I just picked up a cheap dvd player with OSD to handle playing CDs and it has worked really well. I just switch inputs depending on my mood for maximum nostalgia.
Vinyl. If shit hits the fan and there are no music players left I think I might possibly get vinyl to play manually/mechanically somehow.
100% percent possible, Ive used ones that are over 100 years old that use literal needles on the play head
The only thing that really breaks on them is the old elastic wound up with a hand crack to power them (which is relatively replaceable)
With global warming being an issue, I would worry about keeping vinyl records safe.
Yeah, I've seen people play them with £5 notes
I like the ritual of playing a vinyl, they require intention.
Second hand CDs are very cheap and much easier to rip.
I don't collect either but when I buy something I buy vinyl, they feel more like a physical object.
If I was starting today probably CDs because the price difference is significant. Ive collected vinyl since the 80s though and acquired the bulk of my collection when former vinyl enthusiasts foolishly unloaded their collections for pennies on the dollar to get cds instead. I dont buy many new LPs nowadays and stick to thrift stores and discogs bargain deals.
CDs
Disk rot is a real issue, but I can make ISOs from them and back them up with my current hardware. Records are all fun and a better decor item, but if data preservation is the goal, I need to be able to make my own copies.
Vinyl is cool and cozy but I couldn't be bothered. It's a bad tech / product overall.
Too much space, too clunky of a tech to not lose interest in a few months and I don't believe there's an audio difference a human ear can notice. So you're just having a bunch of square posters that you sometimes look at - might as well just do posters then.
crack...pop...pop...skip...crack ...pop....pop. Pretentious media.
I still buy music CDs, and rip them to digital media. CDs are a lot easier to rip to digital media, but vinyl is cooler, but I listen to local music mainly through strawberry media player (or USB stick in a car)
Depends on what you use it for. I love buying records and listen to them only in a specific way. I listen to records only in the living room with a chill vibe. I enjoy the intentionally of picking a record and turning it over. I lose that for CDs but do enjoy them in the car when I get sick of the radio
CD"s. I'm old enough to have had a vinyl collection before CDs came out. The first CD I bought was Brothers in Arms, the sound was revelatory, ditched my dozen or so LPs
Cassettes.
(My car only has a casette deck.)
I would collect drm free files. Format mostly doesn‘t matter
I've got both and prefer vinyl. If I was starting from zero now I would focus on CDs. Not everything is available in every format but I think CDs have the most coverage.
No, Physical media is out, at least as means of distribution.
Archiving however is a different story. I burn all my collections to archival grade blurays. As a history nerd, I'm painfully aware how much was lost, and I'm doing my part to give future historians something to work with.
CDs.
Cassette tapes with a special pencil for each one.
How about a new format: large optical media. That way, we get the cover art, lyrics on back, without degradation or wearing out.
Audio laser discs.
Vinyl, since I'm buying something that can't get replicated via other digital means.
Vinyls don't corrode over time. We have vinyl from 80 years ago. Still good. We have CDs from 90s that no longer play. And itunes that have completely disappeared unless than 20years.
No, I could never I would NEVER. I just see physical media like CDs as a waste of money/space and generally an inefficient way to consume/store media. I would/do horde books though I love books and I luv me bookshelf.
Don't hoard books, use a library
Don't horde, but do hang on to books that you will pick up and read on a whim, but wouldn't if you had to go and check it out, or those that are unlikely to be stocked at your local llibrary. A small collection is good.
Nah i like to keep my favourite books around so I can reread them or lend them to a friend of theyre interested. Most of my reading is from the Library because I'm reading random unknown books and they're very hit/miss. If you want a popular book you have to wait months. When i hear about a book I know I'll like I buy it from a 2nd hand store usually.
I do digital download for most artists. A lot of my favorite acts sell vinyls with a digital download code included, so I do that sometimes too.
My wife and I have already started collecting vinyl. My FIL gave us a really nice setup he was using and a few records, and we’ve gone from there.
At first, I didn’t really get it, but then I was reminded of how nice it was to listen to a whole album. I wound up rediscovering songs I loved as a kid that I haven’t heard because you can now just make a playlist of your favorites. It’s also really nice to actually own my copies. Empire is probably long gone, eaten by another company, but my player still works just fine. I can also repair it myself in the unlikely event that it breaks.
I also like going to music stores and browsing again. People in the stores are typically nice and love talking about music and, honestly, anything else you want to chat about. You get to share the experience with strangers face-to-face and be a small part of a moment in their lives.
Like any kind of collecting or niche interest, it’s hard for a lot of people to understand why others do it. Hopefully, this helps.
Also, CDs are typically waaay cheaper, so we will be supplementing with those.
When I was a kid, and my friends worked in fast food joints or bussed tables at restaurants, I worked in record stores. The pay sucked, but we got lots of free records, and it was the greatest job in the world.
We loved talking to enthusiastic music lovers, and we had lots of regulars that we looked forward to seeing. We knew their preferences, and when new stuff came in, I'd often set stuff aside for them.
They'd come in, greetings exchanged, and they'd say "What's new?" and you'd pull something out from under the counter, and say "This came in so I put aside for you." Even if they didn't take it, they appreciated that you thought of them.
Lots of cute girls, too. Working alongside of you, their cute friends dropping by, cute customers, and I was the perfect age for it.
What a great job. I'd still be doing it today, if y'know, every record store didn't go out of business, and if they ever paid more than minimum wage. Free records is nice, but you can't eat them, and I never found a landlord who would exchange records for rent.
Local marketplace had a really nice turntable for an unreasonable price for a bit and I argued with myself for a while about it. (The same person had sold me a nice set of speakers, just upgrades a lot it seems).
Final product, vinyl wears out, the needle wears out, and it’s finicky. It needs to be level and vibration isolated. The voltage produced is so low it’s highly subject to electrical interference. You need a preamp, which vary widely in quality as well as style - it may be high end but is it to your taste? It’s all a rabbit hole I wasn’t willing to go down for what, ultimately, is a lower quality experience than a CD. You have to dust records and have a microgram scale to balance the tonearm. If it’s not an automatic player it’ll wear a groove at the end of playback if you don’t get up to deal with it. If the power supply is slightly off kilter, it plays too fast or slow, or you need to adjust it.
Now, CDs don’t last forever (as audio storage) and have their faults and loudness war outcome, but they do store high fidelity and provide a mindful listening experience in that you need to get up and open a box and place the CD in the player; they have album art; and they have liner notes sometimes.
So I ended up convincing myself to save the money and frustration.
Is there a vinyl equivalent of disc rot?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
Vinyl just wears out over time as you use them. CDs aren’t really affected by use.
Playing a CD doesn't require degrading it in that sense, though I'd expect ordinary wear and tear, occasionally dropping a disc and scratching and such to be a factor in the real world.
To backup a vinyl can you just.. take a mould of it and recast it? Or some sort of machinable gcode for a CNC? Never come across any vinyl preservation info
People preserve vinyl mostly by just digitizing it. If they want more copies they normally try to find the original master recording and make new presses from it.
Trying to take a mould of the existing disk would make a really low quality copy, and only make the imperfections even worse.
The main advantage of collecting vinyl for me would be to archive rare releases that never got onto another format.
For example, this vinyl rip i found on yt, has the description:
They're right, it sounds great!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9grRaUpDyNk Serge Gainsbourg, Melody Nelson
I'd very much like to make a custom format. I miss the tactile nature and robust quality of cartridge games for Nintendo and the aesthetic feel of 8-track radio in cars. We have the tech to make it happen, I'd like to encode all of my media into 2.5in sata SSD or something like that. Sure it's bulkier than most options but the satisfaction of popping in a cart and the ability to drop it and not immediately destroy it would be nice.
I don't really see a point to cds when you can just buy the music digitally, and store it on a USB key or similar.
I personally buy vinyls, but they are very expensive compared to cds. I think that they're more of an experience compared to cds.
Buy digitally and store, yes agreed. But then I wonder, how long will that last until the major platforms remove the option to download? Then what'll I do?
Download it before that happens
These days I try to buy either DRM free flax files. If I really like the art or the artist in addition to wanting to regularly actually listen to as an album, then I may try to buy vinyl + flac files. If it's at a show I'll buy whatever is available that I can play because at that point it's more about the merch than music. I'm probably going to pass on the wax cylinders and I may think long and hard before buying a cassette.
I don't have any now and don't plan to start now. Physical media just seems so dumb for distributing small amounts of data, I can store so much more on an SD card which takes a fraction of the space of vinyl or CD.
1 CD is what, 700MB? A CDs size worth of SD cards is tens of TBs.
You shouldn't buy music by the pound.
But that is our currency here
Neither. Give me files. I have no use for all that plastic. I have 8 TB of music and growing. Mostly freely traded and doesn't have or need a plastic container anyways.
Vinyl is an environmental mess. PVC with plasticizers and lead as a stabilizer. Heavy to transport, bulky to store. Extremely energy inefficient in making. They degrade the minute you play one.
I used to have a record collection (several hundred at some point, maybe nearly a thousand), I am glad to be done with it. Records are way too short.
Vinyl. Grew up on the sound
Vinyl, probably. I already have 20 or so. I have a massive retro game collection, so either would be good. I like how vinyl is analog, of course.
That's why they said if you had to start today. Your 20 doesn't count.