The CD/Vinyl Debate Part 765

[Scott Dolan]

I stay inside these days mostly because it's colder than fuck outside.

But actually, it's MORE technology-appropriate to get out more than ever! Those portable record players were a bit of a hindrance when hiking and biking.

[porcy62]

Now, try sitting in a hotel room and listening to an LP that you left at home.

Mostly I listen to LPs that I digitally recorded and tranferred to my iPhone.

Edited December 5, 2014 by porcy62

[ArtSalt]

Big fuss being made in the UK about how vinyl sales topped 1 million this year.

However:

Small Data: Is lots of vinyl being sold?

Interesting to note the years of the drastic drop in vinyl sales were when I bought my last LPs (apart from a couple of those daft vinyl only things). The point when almost everything was coming out on CD?

What that chart does reveal, is that vinyl was seriously challenged by the arrival of the humble tape cassette: the ultimate low-fi, low-res sound, but if you get the chance to listen to a tape deck with headphones now, you realize it was impressively direct sound and this explains it's popularity. It wasn't only the CD that cut the legs from under vinyl.

Edited December 25, 2014 by ArtSalt

[psu_13]

re: scratches and such

I had a CD come to me from Mosaic (Artie Shaw, I think) that had a pinhole divot in it. iTunes would not rip the disk, so I took it out of the machine to have a look, and there was essentially a small hole in the surface. It wasn't that large, but it was deep enough to ruin any chance of error recovery.

I've also had a few old CDs delaminate to the point where they would not play. Strangely, one of them was in my old Mosaic Art Blakey box. Luckily I already had a lossless backup of the set at the time.

Unrelated digression:

While I understand why CDs took over the LP at the time, in retrospect they seem like a horrible compromise format. They have a cleaner sound, but you can get that from downloads now. They are a more portable size, but not as good as a phone that holds all your music. And, as a physical object they have little to recommend them (tiny tiny booklets are the worst). They are also of questionable permanence if you just store them.

It's too bad that back in the day we could not have jumped directly to downloads + LP.