3d ago

What's something you don't get the hype about?

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Vinyl records.
If you're rejecting online music streaming and wanting music in physical form, CDs look a lot more practical. CDs are smaller, less delicate, and don't physically degrade every time you play them. CD playback hardware needs essentially zero maintenance and is crazy cheap still.
Could it be for nostalgia? But I've seen people younger than peak vinyl get into music on records. They wouldn't have any nostalgia for vinyl.
Is it for the sound quality? But I've seen chiptune albums available on records! It would be truer to the music to load it onto a real Game Boy or something.
- The reason I like vinyl is how slow and deliberate it is compared to other mediums. If I want to play a record I have a limited curated selection which I purchased with a specific use case. These are all played in my living room and are generally slower and relaxing type music. If I want to play a record I will need to start at the beginning and typically commit to hearing the entire thing in its entirety. Each side I have to choose to continue which slows down the process. I can't skip ahead to the songs I like and it doesn't automatically play anything once its done. Its slow and has a large physical object which I enjoy.
  If I used CDs I could skip to whatever song I like or have it automatically play the next CD. With a multi-disc changer I wouldn't have to choose what I want to hear each time. I have CDs which I use in my car for a different use case which is to listen to when the radio is being annoying.
  
  This exactly.
  It’s the ceremonial steps that precedes the listening experience that adds flavour to the enjoyment.
  If I want to just listen music and do other things I just use Apple Music + AirPods/Soundbar, but if I want to listen a certain album and make the experience more active, I use the record player.
  My music collection on vinyl is curated since each album involves a higher cost.
  There is also my fascination on analog things, I have an automatic turntable and love the orchestra of mechanical sounds from all the internal components.
  Edit: Forgot to mention that on streaming platforms sometimes the only version available is a remastered version that was rereleased on CD that fucked the dynamic range during the loudness war or is an edit of the original one.
  
  It’s the ceremonial steps that precedes the listening experience that adds flavour to the enjoyment.
  Exactly. Its a ritual for the listening experience. If I had to add up the hours of listening to Vinyl vs streaming, streaming would win hands down. But I love the vinyl when I use it which is usually an experience. We do a lot of vinyl around the holidays since we spend a lot of time in my living room relaxing. Which adds to the experience
- The reason the people choose vinyl is because of its limitations. CD has a larger dynamic range, but because it's fully digital, producers can abuse that fact and make an extremely loud and dynamically compressed record and the CD will play just fine.
  If you tried doing that on vinyl, the needle would fly off the record. So thanks to this physical limitation, people who produce for vinyl are forced to make a quieter, more dynamic record. It's less fatiguing on the ears, and if you want a louder record, you can simply turn up the volume.
- I like vinyl for it being big enough to be somewhat like a poster. I'm hoping to eventually gave a vinyl wall when I have my own place
  I'm 30 so CDs were well and truly widespread during my formative years so it's not nostalgia for me
- Vinyl gives you better dynamic and frequency range than CDs. Like if you play Genesis' "The Firth of Fifth" on CD there's a segment that sounds like the bass is being run through some extreme distortion effect. It isn't. It's just being played at an extremely low frequency that the CD can't properly catch, so you're getting distortion artifacts from it. Playing the same passage on vinyl, however, assuming you have equipment that isn't low-end trash, and assuming you have decent amplifiers (note the plural) in the loop, and are playing them out of good speakers, will give you an undistorted bass note so low that you can barely make it out ... if you're young. (People my age can't hear it at all.) But whether you hear it or not you will feel it echoing through your chest cavity.
  But that right there is the problem. Count the costs. You'll need an upper-middle-end turntable to start with. Then you'll need an equivalent grade pre-amp. Then you'll want a power amp that's even better (because the switching noise of a lesser power amp will be very audible with a sustained, loud bass note that low). And you'll want speakers that can actually reproduce that frequency at all. (Most can't.) So you're talking low thousands of dollars of kit minimum. To hear about 15 seconds of a single song in all its glory.
  That's a bit stupid.
  And that's over and above the problems you've already state: that note will play gloriously perfectly on the second playing (the first playing will be slicing away some of the artifacts of vinyl production first). Then you'll get ... maybe a dozen plays of good quality bass that you will feel more than hear deep inside of you. And then it starts going away.
  Thousands of dollars. To hear 15 seconds of a single song. Maybe a dozen times.
  I mean sure, I guess, if you've got the thousands of dollars to blow, and are willing to constantly buy and buy and buy the same album over and over again, you be you, but I personally have much better stuff to spend my money on. (Like actual musical instruments.)
  Oh, and if you're buying vinyl to play on a turntable that puts the audio out on Bluetooth for Bluetooth-enabled speakers? Just burn your money. It's a better use of it.
  
  This is untrue. CD's have a much larger dynamic range; 96dB compared to ~70dB, depending on how the record was pressed.
  The reason why people say vinyl is more dynamic than CD is because producers are forced to make vinyl records more dynamic, so that the needle doesn't fly off the record. With CDs there's no such limitation, allowing people to make the album as loud and dynamically compressed as they like.
  Edit: I should also mention that the 44.1kHz sampling rate of a CD is enough to produce a perfect analog waveform all the way up to 22.05kHz, which as you know is beyond the limit of human hearing. If produced correctly, a CD will always sound better than vinyl. Problem is that CDs often aren't produced properly.
  Because you don't have to factor in needle skipping, you can produce a loud record that distorts, either because you want to be the loudest song in the listener's music collection, or that you simply don't know/don't care about proper dynamics.
  The distorted bass you're talking about is not because of the limitations of CD, but simply because the CD version was not produced/mastered correctly. Like I said, the sampling rate of CDs are high enough to reproduce a perfect analog waveform every time.
  
  Perhaps the CD is theoretically capable of better. In practice, however, it seems they don't use that capacity (which leads me to suspect that "in theory, theory and praxis are the same; in praxis, …".
  I don't have the technical chops to assess this. What I have are ears. And those ears tell me that actual physical CDs that I have held in my hand and put into a good sound system myself sound … well, sound perfectly fine for most music. It's just some outliers (like the aforementioned "Firth of Fifth") that sound far better on vinyl than any CD pressing I've ever seen.
  I've never seen a CD that can produce bass that you feel rather than hear. I have seen vinyl that pulls it off. I suspect there's something intrinsic to the formats that causes this.
  
  Thank you for being the voice of reason.
- I don't have room for any sort of physical media. Yeah, I have some legacy tech I occasionally fuck with, and my sound system parts are from the 70s, 80s, 90s and up, but those parts do their job.

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