this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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I was thinking about investing in a vinyl player recently and was really sad to learn Vinyl is actually worse for audio quality. The standard thickness of the disk is a physical limitation for frequencies which means the sound gets "squished."
Not only that, but all the "better sound" arguments are just about all the mistakes in the audio, like scratches and bumps.
Digital has no mistakes, it will always sound the way it is intended.
But of course some times "the way it is intended" is not the preferable way (see my other comment to OP).
There's Audacity & co. for that.
There's nothing stopping you still! I find the ritual of placing the disc and needle and turning it over halfway through is quite satisfying. It really makes me feel as though the music is more valuable and I'll be more likely to actively listen rather than if I just put it on my phone with the tap of a button
STFU shill bot, I came here to shit on Vinyl not listen to you rant.
you seem to be a toxic moron
Sometimes you have to be very direct in order to shut down conversations with lemmings.
Yeah, vinyl is more about the haptic experience of putting that giant black disc onto the player and watching the needle slowly scrape away that 30-40 dollar item. It's not about the sound quality. I think with listening to vinyl listening to music becomes more of an experience, because of all the manual steps involved. And with albums these days artists seem to put more effort into them then at the time the CD came around.
Woah. Weren't they, what, 2$ a piece before CD?
They were definitely cheaper than they are now. But most of them also were produced much cheaper than they are now.
And they were also sold at incredible volume back in the day, for a couple of generations just about every household had a record player or two and shelves of record collections to play on them.
Nowadays vinyl is regaining popularity among people who buy physical music, but that is still a small fraction of the general public who have largely moved on to soft formats.
It is true that vinyl records have a smaller dynamic range than CDs and digital streaming, but it can also be a blessing in disguise on account of the loudness wars. A lot of modern digital music since the 90s have been brickwall mixed so they can be played on devices with inferior speakers or headphones and still sound loud and punchy, but that same music will sound awful and distorted on proper hifi systems.
Because vinyl records have a (slightly) smaller dynamic range they have to be mixed and mastered separately from CDs and streaming, and some times that means the vinyl edition has the only properly mixed sound. And even if the vinyl version gets a brickwalled mix, then it is still slightly better than the brickwalled CD or stream versions simply because the dynamic range capability is lower, so the brickwall is smaller so to speak.
Anyway, even compared to non-brickwalled CDs or streaming, vinyl still holds it own on proper hifi systems, there is nothing wrong with the sound experience under the right circumstances, and it is that combined with the physicality which is the draw for most vinyl collectors I think. It is inconvenient, expensive and often times inferior (especially if you find scratched up used copies), but that is exactly the attraction. It makes listening to the music an event.
Most vinyl record collectors still listens to other formats, because of course in the car or some other place you are forced to, so it is not an either/or situation either.
I expect artists to record the media as they intended it to be heard, idgaf if you think it sounds better after you cut the limbs off of it.
Investing? You want to sell it again?
I measure returns in satisfaction not money. What you put in you should get back out on a relative metric, my baseline is tacos and pizza.