I've heard and discussed with artists who mentioned that producing vinyl was very expensive compared to cassettes, which are cheap and easy to DIY.
Then I'd add that cassettes have a retro appeal nowadays. Lastly, they are an analog format, opposite to the CD which is the 1:1 copy of the downloaded FLAC album downloaded from Bandcamp.
Analog, sure, but very low quality. 1/8" tape is not enough to reproduce sound accurately and there's a lot of tape hiss. There's a reason why professional analog multitrack studios use 1" tape.
Ehh, all those 1” tape machines are 8-tracks and designed for editing, not playback. Magnetic tape fidelity has a lot more to do with medium, bias and processing than the width of the tape itself.
Hell, plenty of analog shops use four and eight track machines that run 1/4” tape!
Compact cassette also has the potential to sound very good. If you would like a demonstration, look up the vwestlife yt channel or listen to a good tape on a good tape deck.
I think there was a 99% invisible podcast episode about that, it's prison inmates. For some never-changed rule they are only allowed music on cassettes, so they are probably the target audience mainly.
Just a few years ago I had an old car with a cassette player/radio, and from time to time I enjoyed the cassette player with some leftover stuff, but in most cases I just used an FM transmitter
The prison system sucks in so many ways. Legal slavery with archaic rules that would be considered hate crimes or human rights violations if they happened to people in the U.S. who aren't incarcerated.
As far as old cars with cassette players. Like you said, you can use an FM transmitter, but I also remember having a fake cassette with an aux cable so you could plug it into a CD player headphone jack. I would bet they have a bluetooth version these days, so you don't have to listen to cassettes even in those cars.
That reminds me of something though. When I was a kid, we had a Toyota Corona station wagon with an 8-track player. My father had this converter device that you plugged into the 8-track and it had a little tray that you laid a cassette into so you could play it. I don't remember if the sound quality was worse than playing a cassette in a player designed for it.
I had a friend with the cassette adapter for his 8 track player. I just brought my boombox with me in high school. It sounded better than the shitty stereo that came with my dad's 1972 Mercury Capri.
Sure, there are transmitters without Bluetooth. I somehow preferred the SD card, as it would hold a few Gb of music and needed no internet connection. The only downside was if I was driving short trips only for a while, and it stuck with a 20-min long Deep Purple concert track every time :)
Someone else told me that. What bullshit. "You can't have audio technology that was developed in the 1980s" is a fucking stupid punishment. Why not just make them listen to Edison cylinders?
Legit didn't know people still bought music. CDs though? How does anyone still have cd players, and why. Vinyl is a hipster fad now so I guess that explains records.
Audiophiles is why. Why CDs? Because the music in a CD is raw uncompressed. So if you got a good amp and speakers, earphones or IEMs you can hear the musicians scratch their beards while playing jazz, or maybe you can hear the sound of dacer's boobies rubbing against the spandex or clapping harmoniously. LOL 😂, the rest of us will tin can and string headphones, we make due with mp3s.
Hey now you know how the Spanish do their cevillana clapping trick!... You can imagine how their guys do it. Yes it's painful at first but it gets them ready for war once them clapping things go numb.
My car has a CD player. It sounds a lot better than the radio or any streaming service's compressed audio. I used to have a SiriusXM subscription and their audio quality was absolute garbage. I don't pay for any streaming music services now, and have no plans to ever do so.
I buy CDs of every band I like, because I know that music will last in its perfect quality form for decades and nobody but burglars can take it from me. I use my blu-ray burner to rip them to high-bitrate MP3s for phone and Plex library usage.
I also have a pile of records that I don't listen to because I don't have room to set up my record player right now.
I have an external CD/DVD player that is used solely to rip CDs and add to my media server. I abhor renting music and ripping a CD gives me the format and quality I like (!1000kbps flac) and future proofs me if tech limits change down the road. I used to rip to ogg but a few years ago I reripped about 500 CDs to flac.
yup, sadly many of the bands/artists i listen to don't really offer their music as physicals, but there's also no way i'm gonna spend 20 bucks on an album just to listen to like 3 of the songs ever.
I don't think it's a hipster thing anymore, I understand why: aesthetically vinyl are nicer than cds. You have a large cardboard with artworks. I might buy one from an artist whom art I like, and never actually play it.
Unless you really want them, make sure you let your dad know that you don't want it to be your responsibility to deal with them after he dies. My dad had a huge LP and CD collection. Like a wall of LPs and a wall of CDs. It was mostly things I didn't want and I had a lot of trouble selling them off. A lot of them ended up either with friends or, at last resort, Goodwill.
I agreed to take care of getting rid of it all after he died and it was a huge mistake.
I don’t think vinyls are hipster. In the age of music digitalization, it is nice to own a physical piece of media, in addition to being able to support your artist more directly. Also it looks nice.
I always thought it had more to do with the aesthetic of vinyls rather than any sort of ownership dilemma. A good chunk of my friends own multiple vinyl records but no record player. I also wonder what the production rates are like for vinyls vs CDs, are we producing about the same quantity of them?
For some people it’s definitely the aesthetic/collectible nature of vinyl. Anecdotally, for me, it’s for the listening pleasure. I’m no audiophile. I’m listening on potato speakers on a sub par turntable, but I like listening to records like I did when I was younger.
I do also love the much larger album sleeve artwork, but my primary drive in purchasing an album is to listen to it on my turntable.
Many albums, especially comedy albums, relied on you flipping over the record. They would have jokes that talked about things on the other side. There's a Firesign Theater album where one of the characters says, "wait a minute, didn't I say that on the other side of the record?" There's a Monty Python album with a locked groove that says, "oh sorry, squire. I scratched the record." Which is brilliant.
Edit: There's another Monty Python album that has two sets of grooves and what you hear depends on which groove the needle hits first. Again, absolutely brilliant.
More famously, the end of the Beatles' peak album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band contains a locked groove which was snippets of recordings mashed-up in a bit of short multi-track recording experimentation. The CD only repeats it 2 or 3 times. The record was designed to play indefinitely.
So yeah, CDs took that away from recordings, but on the other hand, it's a lot harder to damage a CD and get an unintentional looping segment.
I love that on the CD version of Full Moon Fever they added a bit to the end of Running Down a Dream telling CD listeners they're going to take a break so that people on vinyl and cassette can switch to the other side.
Poeple jerking off CDs here dont understand down sampling and the average quality of CDS. they think that just because it is digitally mastered that it therefore must be the master that is put on CDS, its not.
I can't hear anything above 20 kHz, and neither can most people. CD audio is passed through a 20 kHz lowpass filter. It is then sampled at 44 kHz. Due to the Nyquist Shannon Spamling Theorum, when sound is digitally sampled at just above twice the rate of the source audio, converting it back to analog perfectly reproduces the original waveform. And I do mean perfectly. The exact same waveform. (The extra 4 kHz is to prevent artifacts in frequencies very close to 20 kHz.)
Therefore CD audio is perfect unless you think you can hear above 20 kHz. (Spoiler: you can't) There are a few good YouTube videos on this topic, and the best ones are very mathy.
Is there something I'm missing? Do I need to educate myself some more?
I don't know shit about fuck, but you explanation seems correct.
I do remember hearing that precisely because of the limitations of vinyl compared to CD, music is mastered differently for each medium. So the CD master of a certain song might be more compressed (dynamic compression, not digital compression) to make it sound "louder", while the vinyl release has a wider dynamic range. So some people might prefer the vinyl version because it actually does sound different to the CD version.
Keep in mind tho, I might be spreading misinformation here.
The loudness wars were definitely a thing; you are correct. But that was a choice and not a limitation of the medium. Plenty of CDs were not produced that way. But that's not what the OC was talking about. They were talking about down sampling, not dynamic range compression.
You are correct, CDs can reproduce the human audio spectrum perfectly, IF AND ONLY IF certain rules are followed, and I think that's why earlier CDs sounded weird. For example: how good were low pass filters when digital sound first arrived?
Keep kidding yourself that you can hear the difference.
Vinyls have their appeal but they get dusty, scratched, they skip etc. Only snobs truly think that they sound better.
Digital music can be taken as easily as it can be given.
CDs are the best compromise. They have sound quality as good as digital but you also get the lyrics and artwork that come with a vinyl, they're also much easier to store. The best thing though, is that if I get bored of a CD, I can sell it or even just give it away for free, you can't do that with digital music.
Digital music can be taken as easily as it can be given.
Digital does not always mean DRM. You can pry my bandcamp FLACs from my cold dead hands. Physical media nowadays is more about the experience than functionality. Maybe there are snobs who claim that vinyls are somehow functionally superior, but generally the people who use vinyls or CDs or tapes instead of digital are really just looking for that physical experience in a highly digitalized world.
They have sound quality as good as digital
CD quality is actually superior to streaming services like spotify (I personally can't tell the difference tho).
I'm a (former) audio engineer and I can't tell the difference. My professors used to laugh at audiophiles who spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars for stereo equipment because we were taught to mix things so that they sound good in a car as well as a perfectly quiet room. In fact, we were told that after we finished a master, we should test it by putting it in our car and driving around to make sure the mix was audible in the ways you and the band wanted.
I still really like vinyl because I like the ritual of the whole thing, but I don't spend money on it because it's way too expensive and everything you hear is almost certainly mastered digitally and likely recorded and mixed digitally, negating the whole "warmth" factor.
It's why I use a dedicated music tracker for my music. I own it. I get the exact quality and version I want, and no one can take it from me.
I've had a lot of physical media stolen from me, and I would never try replacing it with more purchased media, because of the he cost and potential for damage and chance it might get stolen again.
Not me, I don't miss rewinding them shits. CDs are still good though, I still buy those because you can't go wrong by having it on the most highly-detailed and durable medium.
My first CD I bought in the mid 80's still plays fine. The selection of CDs was paltry and the only thing I could find at my parent's town that I was remotely interested in was ZZ Top's Eliminator.
I never purchased a single cassette the entire time they were popular. I would buy records and tape them ( I was a Maxell person but did have some TDK) so that I could listen in the car or in my giant boombox that had APLD which was skip to next song.
I'm fairly certain most people who likes vinyl is because of the collection aspect. The leaflets and photos are nice to look at while you're listening.
That's something with vinyl records is that they come in big sleeves with nice big prints of the album art and such. That's great stuff for a music buff to enjoy.
When my dad died, I told my brother, who is very difficult to deal with, to just take whatever he wanted from my dad's vast collection of things and I'd deal with the rest. One of the things he took was an original Edison cylinder phonograph with a bunch of cylinders. I was okay with him taking it since I gave him permission, but what annoys me is that the phonograph was missing the stylus and he has never replaced it. It's inside a wooden case with a lid, which he keeps closed, and the cylinders and the horn just sit next to it.
Why the fuck did he take it?
I don't even have room for it, but if he's not going to even display it properly, let alone get a single part that is needed for it to work, what's the point? Just sell it if you're not going to do anything with it.
Can’t beat analog audio. A lot of newer releases are mastered digitally anyways so sometimes it’s not worth buying those on vinyl. I prefer to get some older albums on vinyl because there’s some shit you can’t hear in the streaming versions of certain tracks. CDs are a pass for me, they are basically just flat USB drives.
Anyone who says vinyl is better is really just enjoying the experience. And you know what? That's fine. The problem is, some of them do a terrible job of explaining that it's not actually about the audio quality. When it is actually about the audio quality, vinyl is worse, but some people enjoy that aspect too.
I picked up a little bit on the "audiophile" hobby in the last few years because I was bored and was tired of listening to crappy sound systems with tinny speakers and wanted something a little more premium.
In the "audiophile" community there is all kinds of stuff being marketed mostly to those with more money than brains trying to eek more quality out of their vinyl setups using $10,000 "cartridges" and "record cleaning machines" and the like. I have no idea what these people are thinking because a much easier path to getting quality music to your speakers is to use a digital source.
However, I don't know who at this point would use CDs either. CDs are obviously better quality than vinyl, 8-track, or cassette, but these days you can get CD quality (or even better, master quality from the mixing boards) digitally and losslessly via the Internet and save yourself the collecting of disks.
So I think CDs are kinda stuck in no man's land. Vinyl enthusiasts are in a few groups: loony tunes buying $10k cartridges for their record players, people who like the "aesthetic" of vinyl and don't really care about the quality, people who sample / mix / DJ from vinyl...and the overlap between those groups....CD enthusiasts are people who....like the quality of a digital format but want to still....collect things? Dislike convenience? I'm not sure.
long tangent
I am probably at the exact right age and demographic to be a CD enthusiast (it was my primary listening method in my early to late teens so that should trigger nostalgia, I'm a big music fan, and I was one of the few people dorky / techy enough to make "mix CDs") and I cannot imagine ever wanting to go back to CDs...digital files overtook all other source types for me less than a decade after I started having a substantial CD collection. I ripped all of my CDs to digital files at one point and tried to go get some money for a large CD collection I had and watched as the music store guy went over every single (working) CD with a fine tooth comb and explained why I could get $0 for basically all of them at the farmer's market. I wound up dropping the entire box of CDs in a visible place in the store parking lot so someone else could get them for free and then I drove off.
Then there's everyone else...if you are OK with digital formats (like most people) you're probably already on a streaming service. CDs provide quality but little else. They're fussy, they require a physical collection, they're easily damaged, they skip, etc. etc.
I would not be surprised if at some point cassette tape sales rebound and overtake CD sales because I think cassettes sit in similar nostalgic / aesthetic territory to vinyl.
As it is, I don't even know what device I would use to play a CD if I bought one. Maybe my PS5?
The funny thing here is that vinyls have everything you’re complaining about CDs, but worse.
True enough, but vinyl has its own kind of aesthetic because they were original form of distributed recordings. There is also a good reason they are used for DJing and sampling, you can run turntables off of them and do the sampling live in something approaching an "analog" way. There's a huge amount of rap and hip-hop culture around working turntables this way, and prior to the creation of rap, party DJs would do this exclusively live.
I can see CDs going the vinyl route in terms of enthusiasm in a couple of decades.
We're both just trend forecasting here, and either one of us (or neither one of us) could be right.
But as far as unique advantages and tactile feel go, cassettes seem much more likely to eventually be re-introduced. There is something awesome about being able to record on the fly with them, even if they aren't the best quality...and I, looking back as a person with a large CD collection that only used tapes in my very early youth for listening, genuinely like the cassette format better.
CDs uniquely suck as a portable digital format for listening. I could see some audiophiles continuing to buy expensive "CD transports" or whatever, but it seems much more niche, and much less retro-cool than vinyl or even cassettes do to me.
I'm a music collector and saw this coming. "Music" went from a product you buy, into a service you pay to gain access to. You don't pay for music, you pay daddy Spotify for access to HIS music.
Vinyl has turned back into the only form of physical music collection.
I don't buy vinyl, but I do buy CDs for albums I want. I have (what I believe are well-founded) trust issues with services supplying digital copies.
I will say I have bought some nice, normal mp3s in the past from Amazon. Those are fine. But generally I want the discs. I'm going to rip them immediately to mp3, and store the discs away, but I still want them.
I did recently buy a favorite band's entire back catalog on CD, because I want to own a non-revocable copy of their work. Plus it felt pretty good "I give you money, you give me music on CD" felt way less icky than "I watch commercials for fraudulent products and services chosen by a nakedly hostile algorithm, evil megacorporation optionally pays you."
I tried Spotify but it only has about 70% of the albums in my collection. I used to love google play music because you could upload your media and it would be included in your library.
Edit: It needed me to sign up with an email address and I saw it had in app purchases that put me off a bit. But when looking for that app I found Musicolet which looks pretty perfect, just a simple ad free music playing app without all the bollocks!
the in app purchases are mainly if you want to buy PlexPass which unlocks additional features. I bought the lifetime pass years ago when it was on sale for $75 so I can't quite remember which features require plex pass. Its primarily for video but the music section with Plexamp on my phone and laptop is a nice little bonus.
They usually have a higher bitrate than you can get from streaming. There's not one CD I have that I immediately tell the difference in quality of I switch between streaming (or even a standard mp3 actually) and a CD. CD wins every time.
Most of the records I buy come with bandcamp codes. I can play the flac files if I want digital audio, physical media for me is about the thing itself. Often get full sized posters and patches. Shit I'll buy a tape over the cd too
Have you ever listened to records? "Objectively worse audio quality" is not what I'd call the experience. In fact I doubt you'd be able to tell the difference.
Absolutely you would for the reasons I mentioned. Vinyl is typically made from digital and the first step of mastering is altering it to remove sibilance, loudness and other things that either waste space, cause distortion or cause the needle to jump. It's already lossy and then as it is printed and played, more loss and distortion happens. Even playing the record causes it to wear and for dust to accumulate. While it is completely possible for a badly mastered CD to sound worse than a well mastered LP, the reality is if they are from the same master and other biases are eliminated (i.e. A/B testing) then the CD is going to win out since it has a higher dynamic range and frequency.
