(in a few years, when everyone who's been collecting vinyl realises it sounds like rubbish [1][2] and they don't use it anymore - but still want the physical medium experience)
During lockdown I "got into" vinyl and then this year back into CDs and.. I'm really enjoying the experience and think you might be right. I managed to get used audiophile gear for pennies on the dollar and through the same gear, CDs sound streets ahead of Spotify on the same tracks (vinyl less so, it's more about the "ceremony").
The thing about CDs is so many were poorly mastered, and while you can pick up CDs super cheap, finding ones that genuinely sound amazing is quite tricky. Rare ones can still go for a lot of money. I have started to collect things that simply aren't on streaming services (common with older original albums of less mainstream artists) and it's harder but more rewarding than I expected (for example, try to get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazemachi_Roman for less than $30..)
>The thing about CDs is so many were poorly mastered, and while you can pick up CDs super cheap, finding ones that genuinely sound amazing is quite tricky.
That's the thing. The mastering (and this can definitely affect more recent vinyl releases too) and the compression and loudness wars really ruined a lot of CDs.
I for one, wish SACD had taken off. I never really got that into it (too young to afford stuff but old enough to lust after it at Tower Records and the Virgin Megastore), but the few SACD discs I have are just awesome. The competitor, DVD-A was supposed to be good too, but it didn't really take (I have a few DVD-A discs and I think one way to play them at this point).
That said, while I have bee predicting a CD comeback for several years (b/c nostalgia), I think that CDs lack the thing that makes vinyl (and to a much lesser degree, the cassette resurgence (which is often a pure retro/nostalgia play, which as an aging hipster I respect, but as a wannabe-audiophile, I cringe at)) and vinyl collecting special.
A record takes work to get to play right. You need to care for the vinyl. You need to store it correctly. Configuring and setting up your turntable is a process -- especially if you want to do it well. And then there is the rarity factor. Because only so many plants exist, there are are both artificial and genuine limits on how many copies of an album exist. And then you get the custom colorways (the number of albums I've purchased multiple times on vinyl for the various colorways is too long to mention), the fact that liner notes and album colors are huge. It's just special.
Obviously, they could do this with CDs -- and in the late 90s, we did see some record labels/bands play around with different colors and designs for CD labels, but it still isn't quite the same.
There's also something to be said about the statement piece you have by having a really beautiful record player in your house, that you don't get with a CD player.
I was a really big MiniDisc person (mostly used it as a pre-iPod MP3 player) and I wish that would have a comeback. That format was so dope and so underrated. And the collectibility factor there would be off the charts, similar to cassette tapes, but with good sound quality and a durable product.
Having said all this, I fully expect to see Gen Z carrying around DiscMan players within 18 months.
Can you notice the difference with SACDs for classical tracks on good speakers? I've never had the good fortune of seeing a SACD player.
> It's just special.
Agreed, the process and the album art definitely can't be replicated.
> Obviously, they could do this with CDs -- and in the late 90s, we did see some record labels/bands play around with different colors and designs for CD labels, but it still isn't quite the same.
I'm starting to see this with recent CDs - some have a lot of thought into the digipak (cardboard fold out) packaging and liner notes. There seems to be a recent trend from jewel cases to liner notes but I'm not sure if this is real or not!
> There's also something to be said about the statement piece you have by having a really beautiful record player in your house, that you don't get with a CD player.
This I've got to disagree with :D Vintage CD players from the 80s/90s in all black are stunning [1], especially when paired with a similarly designed amplifier and preamp.
I love the idea of a MiniDic comeback - another vintage tech I've never had the chance to see!
Well, the recent resurgence of vinyl has had a lot people buying substandard all-in-one-decks from online stores. For vinyl to sound good you need to invest a significant amount of money in equipment.
Yes for some, but also brands like Rega, Pro-ject et al are selling loads of tables. Hell, Panasonic has revived an entire Technics product line! It's definitely not just Crossley shit.
Vinyl does not sound like rubbish - when the pressing was down correctly. There are some absolutely horrendous pressings being sold and it sucks, but a lot of the time it also has to do with terrible mixing and mastering and that carries over to the CD version as well.
Everything is "optimized" for "decent" sound out of medium quality streaming services on terrible speakers where dynamic range is nearly non-existent and everything is compressed to matchbox quality.
The music streaming industry has ruined the experience of listening to and discovery new music. Nothing like going to the record store and getting something out of the vintage bin for a few bucks and bringing that home, sitting there and actually taking the time to listen to the music. Instant streaming optimizes for popcorn listening and not listening to the intricacies of the soundscapes of some music.
I wonder if old CD will be looked after. CD are subject to rot (especially the ones before the nineties), so it will be a big risk for people buying them (people often talk about it in the video games community).
I'm not sure how it'll be in decades to come, but so far I've had a lot of luck even with "soiled" CDs from the 90s and error correction seems to make up for a lot. They are far more robust than DVDs, at least, which can generally go in the garbage beyond a certain state.
I bought a SACD player for classical - the dynamic range on Vinyl is just not enough to really do justice to a good orchestral recording, and I say this as a Vinyl DJ. It's great!
I got a Sony SACD player for about €140 off ebay. New classic SACD's are about £13 off Presto, secondhand cds can be dirt cheap - £2 or £3 for good labels (Philips, Decca, DG etc). Wonderful way to build a small library.
Vinyl still great for anything modern though. The compression is a feature. That video you linked is wrong about how RIAA equalization works...
Don't think a single on of these are sold as vinyl. They all come as cassette (so much for what I wrote lol), and a bunch on CDs. Narrow electronic music with an 'internet' vibe I guess you could call it.
As someone who had a collecting habit at one point and has hundreds of records and cds, I can’t see this happening at all. Vinyl records last indefinitely with proper care, whereas my carefully kept cds develop glitches after a while that makes the cd unplayable.
Having a box set as a tiny relic of what you consumed is pretty cool. Not only are they attractive shelf pieces, there was something cathartic about ritualistically putting the Sopranos in the DVD player during a binge. So many things we consume now are ephemeral. Do you remember that movie you watched last week, or that article you read two days ago on HN? Probably not... But, we consume so much now that a physical relic for all our media would be impractical.
I still buy shows and movies I really like on Blu-Ray (though usually after a first watch on streaming services).
For one, I’m betting that bit rot on the disk will take longer to happen than shenanigans with the streaming rights.
For two, the video quality of most streaming services is god awful. The resolution is there but the bit rate absolutely isn’t. I watched Mr Robot on Prime Video recently and dark scenes (of which there are a lot) looked like a blocky watercolour mess.
Not only is the video quality awful, unless you're watching on a controlled device like and ipad or a TV with netflix included, the video and audio are also slightly out of sync.
Another reason to own media is that companies like netflix can't change the playback experience. There's already annoying "skip intro" buttons, ads on the end credits and age and strobe warnings whenever you touch the pause button.
These annoyances have the tendency to creep in and I would not be surprised if at some point they include unskippable ads and a permanent Netflix logo in one of the corners. Disney, who are the worst offernders here, already displays a Disney+ logo for the first and last 15 seoonds. Once the bluray and DVD market has died, streaming companies may get a lot braver with this kind of stuff. (Remember when you could watch TV without a channel logo and banners advertising other shows?)
Oh and then there's the SJW patrol that gets streaming services to alter or cancel episodes of shows.
So there's really a good argument for buying the stuff you really like and owning a copy.
This is part of why vinyl is so appealing - storing them is tough but being able to pore over the artwork or using it as a display is the only advantage they have over CDs.
The box sets of CDs make up for that display-ability and the booklets can be fantastic little history lessons.
Tying into this: I really liked the concert DVD - especially around the gift-giving time of the year. I could get a DVD of my parents' favourite musicians for Christmas and I knew it would be a hit with them.
I love having the context from a good set of liner notes. Session dates, musicians, back story. It anchors the music as work done by real people, and not just content to consume.
I don't really care about the physical discs, but it seems like there's not a lot of options (at least in bluegrass): a lot of this content is just not available digitally. (And when it is, the liner notes are usually lost in the process.)
> And when it is, the liner notes are usually lost in the process.
And sometimes the tracks themselves are inexplicably mangled: The digital versions (both streaming and for download) of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series inexplicably leave out the between-tracks material on the live albums even though those bits are definitively part of the charme and appeal of that material.
Plus when ripping myself I get to choose how to handle that kind of gap material: Standard procedure seems to be to stick it onto the end of the preceeding track, whereas personally I've found that for live albums I tend to prefer having it combined with the following track.
My college boyfriend worked at a radio station and I ripped so many box sets during that time. Seeing the stax one reminded me of being a bit younger than I am these days
I don’t even have the ability to play it anymore, and I’ve no doubt the CDs are scratched and unlistenable. But I still consider it a beautiful object, and one that got me through various long dark teatimes of the soul.
I have the BBC tv series on laserdisc, perhaps not as good as the radio show but a great artifact anyway. You've reminded me to track down the radio serial.
I suppose it depends on the genre of music that you listen to, but I tend to avoid box sets or collections for the same reason that I avoid streaming, shuffle, and playlists. Often times, the artist put tremendous thought into the album as a whole and how the songs transition and fit together to create the desired atmosphere. Breaking that up feels like taking random chapters of an author's books and recompiling them.
I was going to say I hate those brittle hard plastic jewel cases but there are many better form factors out there and this blog post shows box sets made from better materials.
At higher bitrates mp3 (and AAC) is OK, but through good headphones the difference between common 128kbps mp3 files and CD audio is night and day.
Every store I know that sells MP3s gives you either 320k CBR, or a high quality VBR encoding. Neither is perceptively different (by humans) from a CD, even with the best equipment.
And most stores are now offering lossless downloads anyway.
If you're making your own MP3s, don't make 128k MP3s.
Later codecs (AAC, Vorbis, Opus, etc.) all allow you to use fewer bits for the same quality.
I still have a NAS full of nasty 128kbps MP3 files I really should just delete. All that time ripping CDs 20 years ago wasn't a complete waste of time, the MP3 player I had only had a tiny amount of memory and the fledgling NAS I had didn't have a lot of disk space as it was.
Time to delete them has come though, funnily it's much quicker to <arrgh me hearties> CDs I already own than rip them myself.
> Neither is perceptively different (by humans) from a CD, even with the best equipment
I think there is way more individual differences here than what some people assume. I have a few friends that often perceive way more details in images and image quality than me, to the point that some compressions that are fine for me will bother them. I think the same is true with sound: some people will benefit from CD quality, and some others won't.
That may also depend on the music that people listen to. If the tests are not made with the music you listen to, is the result the same? Is there a way to say "there's no difference for song X, so there is also no difference for song Y"?
I have yet to find the encoder that encodes The Downward Spiral good enough where I can't AB test it from the CD. The album is neigh unlistenable on Youtube.
That particular disc seems to have been made at the cross roads time during which seamless natural-sounding digital effects were possible in music, but were still blocky enough in implementation to cause some type of Moire effect with digital encoders.
The box sets above mostly house the jewel cases in a plastic moulding (which helps them not get damaged). The "Tougher than tough" set unfortunately uses the digipak style of packaging, so when the little plastic fingers in the CD centre start failing, the disks fall out every time you open it up and it can't be repaired. Not sure how they managed to come up with packaging that was worse than jewel cases, but digipaks succeeded remarkably well at just that.
More plastic garbage in your life, eventually to fill a landfill until the end of the Earth. Stop buying music on physical media. It hasn’t needed to be this way for decades.
As someone who bought his first CD in 1985, no. CDs never had charm. Nerd allure at first? Sure. But
they were a means to an end. Lossless streaming solves that problem better and less wastefully.
(in a few years, when everyone who's been collecting vinyl realises it sounds like rubbish [1][2] and they don't use it anymore - but still want the physical medium experience)
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bMI2JB-vY [2]: https://www.discogs.com/forum/thread/761231