It depends who you talk to. Some people feel vinyl “sounds more analog” just because of the format. Some people feel it adds natural saturation. In my opinion what matters most is the recording source. That said, bass frequencies respond very different on vinyl. Because of this, it’s pretty common to make a separate master for digital and vinyl.
FWIW, almost all vinyl records produced today will come from a digital source. Even if the music was recorded directly to tape, there’s very likely a step of getting that audio into the digital domain.
I think the compression format is what people point to when they say that digital music isn’t as full or “analog” sounding, and that would be true for vinyls made from a source that uses the same format, but there’s also the potential to use the raw WAV file which wouldn’t have this issue even if it’s digital.
It would be extremely unusual to print a vinyl record from anything less than 44.1 kHz / 16 bit wave or aiff.
Also, for what it’s worth you can find online audio tests (https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...) that let you test if you can hear the difference between CD quality audio vs high bit rate mp3. Basically nobody can determine the difference with accuracy.
> I thought the whole point of vinyl was that it maintains analog from recording to playback
That may be one point for some people, but not mine. I have my music on vinyl and that is how I listen to it. Regardless of the quality or analog vs digital or any of that, if I want to own an album, it needs to be available on vinyl for my to purchase. There are albums I want that I cannot purchase today. This is _my_ walled garden.
You still see cassettes used today because of the ease of home distribution, and bridging the gap between those indie music makers and music consumers like myself is something I am looking forward to.
I don't fully understand the cassette thing either to be honest. I've heard something about it being a mix of analog + digital, but I'm not positive the draw. Artists that I enjoy like Atmosphere and The Midnight both release their albums on cassette, though, so I imagine a good number of people enjoying them.
They usually include the digital download as well so maybe it is just a fun way to get the digital music?
Retro cool, fairly sturdy packaging, doesn’t take up much space.
All things that MiniDisc took inspiration from. It added metadata, near-infinite rerecordability, and on-the-fly track division, combination, and rearrangement.
Never took off in the US, more popular in Europe, very popular in Japan. They were expensive and the first device’s encoding chip gave poor results on a battery that could barely record an hour.
- I prefer to own vs rent music
- I prefer physical to digital (albums often come with digital downloads)
- I enjoy listening to full albums
- I enjoy the album art, liner notes, posters, special releases, etc
Not all the music I want to own is available on vinyl, but at the same time, some of the music I listen to is not on streaming services. And some isn't available on CD. Nothing is perfect. I choose vinyl as it provided the best set of trade-offs for how I enjoy music.
When I was a teenager I recorded vinyl, cassette, cd and even music from the radio on reel to reel tapes just because I liked using the Akai reel to reel tape deck my father was no longer using. Everything in it felt just more satisfyingly sturdy and mechanical to use than my other audio devices made with shitty plastics.
Sometimes the ritual matters more than the outright audio quality.
For starters it will outlast your digital content. Also it won’t get deleted if you forget to pay for cloud storage. And your kids can inherit it without breaking into your cloud accounts.
An excellent argument for physical artifacts. I take an archivist’s point of view and digitize my photos and music for convenience then store the original for long term stable preservation. But I keep everything locally, unlike my kids who seem content to rely on an unchanging world where everything will be around forever.
A few years ago, I realized that the use case for CDs no longer held. Vinyl will persist for experience seekers, lossy audio (MP3 et al) for convenience seekers including streaming, but the audiophiles are now being served by FLAC downloads, which can exceed CD quality. If you poke around bandcamp you’ll find many labels selling vinyl with associated 24bit/96k FLAC downloads tossed in as part of the deal.
There is an argument that the loss of dynamic range and other factors in the compression required in mp3 or CD recordings make the latter inferior to vinyl. This was a prolonged debate forty years ago
CDs have better quality than vinyl in every way. If you want the sound of a vinyl, apply the modulation and record the result on a CD.
In practise, popular music recorded on CDs often had poor mastering (see "loudness wars") where the dynamic range was reduced to make the recording sound louder.
Dynamic range compression is not "required", it's a choice of the mastering engineer. You can produce MP3 or CD recordings with higher dynamic range than vinyl if you want to.
Dynamic range compression is often used on most mainstream music because said music is rarely listened in perfect conditions in one's living room. They need to sound decent enough in the street, in a car, on a metro/train during rush hours, in the kitchen while cooking, on the beach, from allkinf of devices from crappy smartphone headphones, phones and computers integrated speakers or cheap bluetooth speakers.
Ideally one would own 2 different recording of the songs they like. One for good listening environments and high quality equipment, one for more hostile environments. Or have devices that apply dynamic range compression on the fly when needed.
Chemical degradation of CDs can occur over time even in a relatively stable environment. Flash memory is also known to be volatile and most people aren't storing data on flash memory in a redundant storage system.
>If you're that worried, use ZFS or something similar.
I'm not personally storing stuff on vinyl, nor am I "worried", although I have bought a few vinyl that are over 50 years old that play perfectly.
For me, I choose vinyl because I had to pick one of those and I really enjoy 1.) listening to full albums 2.) Album art and 3.) That act of collecting something physical.
tl;dr version - because i prefer it. doesn’t make it right. doesn’t make it wrong. makes it what it is.
* i prefer the weightiness of vinyl (although it make moving flat a pain in the arse)
* most of the stuff i buy is limited run stuff that wont exist again, each release i buy is its own thing that wont exist again — even later pressing runs can come out different
* a lot of the time, someone putting out a small limited release is a good signal to me they give a shit about what they’re doing, so i pay attention more to what they’ve done, and i enjoy it more as a result
* i like having a wall shelves filled with vinyl in my flat, i like collecting stuff
* i like putting records on and sitting and listening to them and watching them go round and round on my decks, i like interacting with them, i like the feel of them, they feel more intimate than just plugging a USB in and going through a menu
* i’m forced to listen as the artist intended - ain’t no skip or shuffle button!
* beat matching with vinyl is far more of an art form - there ain’t no magic “sync” button when you’re mixing with vinyl
Ideally you can maintain the analog chain from recording to the listener’s ear, but that really isn’t feasible for a lot of artists today and could also suffer from generational loss through the process. With cutting a record from a digital source you can control the digital to analog conversion rather than relying on the listener’s DAC (usually not high end) and it only costs you one generation of loss. I don’t think it’s a huge deal, but maybe a benefit.
> It is therefore ironic, that most vinyl records that were cut after the late 70s went through at least one round trip of analogue to digital and digital to analogue conversion. This is because a digital delay is almost always used in the cutting process in order to get better cuts.
For me part of the appeal is to have something physical that I truly own and can enjoy without being tracked by algorithm. Blue Note Tone Poets (which are analogue all the way) got me into the hobby but I also buy new records, especially when they are available in a signed version.
I like to think that different things have a ‘substance’ to them, not unlike the nebulous concept of quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
In this sense, the appeal is not just in the tangible record but also in the ritual of listening to it on a turntable. That process of choosing a record to play and then listen to it is quite a deliberate one, and you probably wouldn’t do it if you didn’t intend to appreciate it. It’s a hobby or an enthusiasm you have and there’s an effort involved in curating your record collection.
I compare that to the process of opening up Spotify of Apple Music where most of that intentionality is stripped away. It serves a totally different purpose as a passive activity, not unlike leaving the radio on in the background, rather than an occasion you’d take time to enjoy.
In my imagination I just picture those scenes in the Bosch TV show where he puts on a classic jazz record, with the view of LA sprawling into the distance in the background. And it wouldn’t be a vibe if he just said ‘Alexa play smooth jazz.’
I might be totally wrong, but I won't be surprised if even commercial vinyls by modern artists come from digital masters. Surely mosts big studios have moved on from tape based systems by now?
I thought the whole point of vinyl was that it maintains analog from recording to playback