7 ms·

Personally i enjoy listening to vinyls becaule of the whole "ceremony" browse the albums, pull one, take it out of the sleeve, clean it, put it on the turntable

Personally i enjoy listening to vinyls becaule of the whole "ceremony" browse the albums, pull one, take it out of the sleeve, clean it, put it on the turntable, lower the tonearm and listen to the small imperfections until the music starts. Its like cooking vs ordering food.

spectramax 7y ago
I enjoy the same things but with CDs. CDs are gonna come back big time as they offer all the conveniences of quality and the ritualistic aspects of vinyl records.
- jonathonf 7y ago
  Also advert- and DRM-free.
  - dymk 7y ago
    Can't say I've ever heard an advert on my $10/month Spotify or Apple Music plans. I've also never noticed the DRM.
    - kgwxd 7y ago
      But monthly fee for the service plus an internet subscription and active connection, plus interest if you pay with a cc a dont pay it off that month. Its a never ending cost.
      - dymk 7y ago
        If I was to purchase the albums of music I listen to every month, I'd be spending literally hundreds of dollars on music per month. Compared to $10 that might increase $1 or $2 every few years. I'm going to ignore the monthly internet/mobile bill, because music streaming is a fraction of what it's used for. Cassettes records, and the equipment used to listen to them eventually wear out, so you'll have to rebuy them at some point (or limit how often you listen to them).
        kgwxd 7y ago
        Im not saying streaming is a bad deal, just that the requirements to use it make it far less portable, more temporary and removes any sense of ownership.
        dymk 7y ago
        I don’t care about the concept of ownership, I care about being able to listen to my music. My phone is much more portable than a cassette, record, or CD player.
        mehrdadn 7y ago
        > I don’t care about the concept of ownership, I care about being able to listen to my music. Well, they're kind of related. You won't be able to if Spotify terminates your account for whatever reason (which happened to me once, due to claims on their end the payment ran into some issue, which I could never verify) or if it goes out of business.
        freehunter 7y ago
        So then you switch to Google Music or Apple Music and keep listening. Meanwhile if your CD collection is stolen or destroyed, you have to go buy all of them again.
        totem1 7y ago
        Assuming any of these services actually have all of the music you listen to at any given time. Entire albums, songs, artists could be lost to you not because they were so forgettable but because they became lost in the sea of abundant music streaming. Your favorited artists went from something like a count of 237 to 230. What was lost? And when were you supposed to notice? This is what you lose by not owning your music. Not to mention music that simply does not exist on streaming services, which a very large amount of worthwhile music. At the end of the day, why are you giving so much control to others about what music you would have shared and preserved? You can also rip your CDs so that the music is no longer tied to the physical media.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Digital music you buy has been DRM free since 2008. When the iTunes music store came out in 2003, it came with the ability to burn regular CDs.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
avip 7y ago
Amen. One underinvestigated aspect of streaming is "people" (and I'm talking about my kids here) don't know what they are listening to, it's super easy for them to skip/change, and lots of what was "relation to artist/album" is lost. On the upside, streaming is sup for discovering new music.
- tzs 7y ago
  It might be easier to discover new music with streaming, but I'm not sure one discovers music of as high a quality. Back in the album days, an artist needed a song or two or three on the album that would would have wide appeal and be easy to quickly like, so that they might become hits. These would get played on mainstream radio, and based on them people would buy the album. They would listen to that album for those songs, but because it was a pain to skip around on an album they would listen to the whole album. Artists could put deeper, more complex songs on the album. Songs that people might not instantly like. Songs that people only come to appreciate after hearing many times. Songs that eventually become people's favorite songs on those albums. With streaming, a lot of people will just jump to the newest hit from another artist instead of listening to the less immediately accessible songs from the previous artist whose hit they just checked out.
  - freehunter 7y ago
    On the other hand, it encourages artists to make songs worth listening to. I've purchased way too many albums because I liked one or two songs only to discover every other song on the album was complete trash. But at that point it was too late, they already had my money. People who jump from hit to hit will always do that. Don't worry about them. People who seek new and interesting music are immensely helped by risk-free streaming.
  - elevenbits 7y ago
    I use streaming radio to find songs that are similar to a song I like, then look up the artists for some of the new songs that caught my attention. This allows me to find both new songs (immediate win), but artists whose other songs may influence my musical tastes (longer term win).
kd5bjo 7y ago
It used to be that when you visited someone’s place, you’d see their collection of books, or music, or movies, or games sitting on a shelf and it was a low-friction way to find something in common to talk about. Now that everyone’s collections are digital, it’s all “out of sight, out of mind” and nothing has really replaced that function.
- avip 7y ago
  Open their fridge.
  - marci 7y ago
    Especially if you're close to one another, and they happen to say something like "There's nothing to eat".
  - hueving 7y ago
    That's very invasive. I keep all of my underwear in there in the summer.
    - avip 7y ago
      There you go - something interesting to talk about.
- Wistar 7y ago
  Maybe there's a market for a bookshelf populated with (OLED? E-Paper?) digital label displays that mimic real book spines and upon which are displayed the titles from your digital book library. It can also have shelves with displays mimicking CD spines with the titles taken from your music library. It would serve no purpose beyond being a skeumorphic conversation starter and visual reminder of your media. Of course, it'd have an app that allowed the user to vary the logic used to choose the titles to be displayed by genre, chron, or some social purpose, i.e., I want to look smart or I want to impress a date, I don't want a political fight on Thanksgiving, etc.
  - 7y ago
lisper 7y ago
> Its like cooking vs ordering food. Or pulling a cork out of a wine bottle vs opening one with a screw top. The screw top is superior in every way in terms of its ability to protect the wine from spoiling, but people still prefer corks because of the romance of the de-corking ceremony.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  I never got into the corking thing, but I enjoy my auld skool clutch and gearshift.
tzs 7y ago
I found vinyl a bit annoying in college--but that was probably because as the only person at my end of the hallway who didn't smoke marijuana I kept getting asked by people to handle operate their turntables when they wanted to listen to music while high. Cassettes can be operated by even the most baked person with little risk of damage to the cassette or the tape deck.
- weedsmoker69xXx 7y ago
  Seems like fellow hacker weedsters have downvoted your completely fine post. Well, that's why I personally use throwaway accounts for anything even remotely controversial. Kids (and the great Chinese Winnie the Pooh together with his admirers at Google) today can't handle real opinions posts.
- whenchamenia 7y ago
  As a former rave dj, you are talking out of your ass. A record player, even a manual one, is plenty easy to use even while quite intoxicated. Marijuana specifically should not impair your record playing ability at all.
bonestamp2 7y ago
Ya, it's a ritual. The other thing I like about Vinyl is that you have to actually listen to the music. Well, you don't have to, but if you're going to all that trouble it's likely because you want to actually listen to the music -- I mean, listening to the music is the activity that you're doing. With spotify, I usually flip it on to fill the background while I do something else. That's not true for vinyl (for me). Spotify is for hearing music, vinyl is for listening to music.
pacomerh 7y ago
Yes, couldn't agree more, the whole experience of manually browsing and playing records physically is something else. I also find that visiting record stores is great for discovery, at least in my case. One reason probably is that when browsing online I get lost in a sea of options and waste more time. Not saying its better but its a fresh change.
mauvehaus 7y ago
Agreed so many times over. Music on the radio, or from the computer/ipod and most of my CD listening is background music. Putting on a record is a ritual, a conscious choice to sit in front of the stereo and listen intentionally. CDs do sort of straddle the boundary between background and intentional listening. I own music that I treasure on CDs that I don't own on vinyl. While it's more convenient than records, I sometimes put it on with the intention of focusing on the music. What's interesting is that a few recordings work better on CD than LP for me. I came to love the Allman Brothers Band in University[0], and Mountain Jam spans two sides of a Eat a Peach on LP[1], requiring an interruption to change the record and hear the whole thing. On CD, it flows seamlessly. [0] I got into them backwards from most people. Blues Part II by Blood Sweat and Tears got me into longer-form rock, and I found Mountain Jam by searching for mp3 files over 10 or 15MB on the school's network. I have since bought perhaps half a dozen albums I'd have never discovered otherwise. [1] The Eat a Peach version is the definitive version. The July 5th version from Live at the Altlanta International Pop Festival remains my favorite, but I digress.

spectramax 7y ago

I enjoy the same things but with CDs. CDs are gonna come back big time as they offer all the conveniences of quality and the ritualistic aspects of vinyl records.

jonathonf 7y ago
Also advert- and DRM-free.
- dymk 7y ago
  Can't say I've ever heard an advert on my $10/month Spotify or Apple Music plans. I've also never noticed the DRM.
  - kgwxd 7y ago
    But monthly fee for the service plus an internet subscription and active connection, plus interest if you pay with a cc a dont pay it off that month. Its a never ending cost.
    - dymk 7y ago
      If I was to purchase the albums of music I listen to every month, I'd be spending literally hundreds of dollars on music per month. Compared to $10 that might increase $1 or $2 every few years. I'm going to ignore the monthly internet/mobile bill, because music streaming is a fraction of what it's used for. Cassettes records, and the equipment used to listen to them eventually wear out, so you'll have to rebuy them at some point (or limit how often you listen to them).
      - kgwxd 7y ago
        Im not saying streaming is a bad deal, just that the requirements to use it make it far less portable, more temporary and removes any sense of ownership.
        dymk 7y ago
        I don’t care about the concept of ownership, I care about being able to listen to my music. My phone is much more portable than a cassette, record, or CD player.
        mehrdadn 7y ago
        > I don’t care about the concept of ownership, I care about being able to listen to my music. Well, they're kind of related. You won't be able to if Spotify terminates your account for whatever reason (which happened to me once, due to claims on their end the payment ran into some issue, which I could never verify) or if it goes out of business.
        freehunter 7y ago
        So then you switch to Google Music or Apple Music and keep listening. Meanwhile if your CD collection is stolen or destroyed, you have to go buy all of them again.
        totem1 7y ago
        Assuming any of these services actually have all of the music you listen to at any given time. Entire albums, songs, artists could be lost to you not because they were so forgettable but because they became lost in the sea of abundant music streaming. Your favorited artists went from something like a count of 237 to 230. What was lost? And when were you supposed to notice? This is what you lose by not owning your music. Not to mention music that simply does not exist on streaming services, which a very large amount of worthwhile music. At the end of the day, why are you giving so much control to others about what music you would have shared and preserved? You can also rip your CDs so that the music is no longer tied to the physical media.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Digital music you buy has been DRM free since 2008. When the iTunes music store came out in 2003, it came with the ability to burn regular CDs.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

avip 7y ago

Amen. One underinvestigated aspect of streaming is "people" (and I'm talking about my kids here) don't know what they are listening to, it's super easy for them to skip/change, and lots of what was "relation to artist/album" is lost. On the upside, streaming is sup for discovering new music.

tzs 7y ago
It might be easier to discover new music with streaming, but I'm not sure one discovers music of as high a quality. Back in the album days, an artist needed a song or two or three on the album that would would have wide appeal and be easy to quickly like, so that they might become hits. These would get played on mainstream radio, and based on them people would buy the album. They would listen to that album for those songs, but because it was a pain to skip around on an album they would listen to the whole album. Artists could put deeper, more complex songs on the album. Songs that people might not instantly like. Songs that people only come to appreciate after hearing many times. Songs that eventually become people's favorite songs on those albums. With streaming, a lot of people will just jump to the newest hit from another artist instead of listening to the less immediately accessible songs from the previous artist whose hit they just checked out.
- freehunter 7y ago
  On the other hand, it encourages artists to make songs worth listening to. I've purchased way too many albums because I liked one or two songs only to discover every other song on the album was complete trash. But at that point it was too late, they already had my money. People who jump from hit to hit will always do that. Don't worry about them. People who seek new and interesting music are immensely helped by risk-free streaming.
- elevenbits 7y ago
  I use streaming radio to find songs that are similar to a song I like, then look up the artists for some of the new songs that caught my attention. This allows me to find both new songs (immediate win), but artists whose other songs may influence my musical tastes (longer term win).

kd5bjo 7y ago

It used to be that when you visited someone’s place, you’d see their collection of books, or music, or movies, or games sitting on a shelf and it was a low-friction way to find something in common to talk about. Now that everyone’s collections are digital, it’s all “out of sight, out of mind” and nothing has really replaced that function.

avip 7y ago
Open their fridge.
- marci 7y ago
  Especially if you're close to one another, and they happen to say something like "There's nothing to eat".
- hueving 7y ago
  That's very invasive. I keep all of my underwear in there in the summer.
  - avip 7y ago
    There you go - something interesting to talk about.
Wistar 7y ago
Maybe there's a market for a bookshelf populated with (OLED? E-Paper?) digital label displays that mimic real book spines and upon which are displayed the titles from your digital book library. It can also have shelves with displays mimicking CD spines with the titles taken from your music library. It would serve no purpose beyond being a skeumorphic conversation starter and visual reminder of your media. Of course, it'd have an app that allowed the user to vary the logic used to choose the titles to be displayed by genre, chron, or some social purpose, i.e., I want to look smart or I want to impress a date, I don't want a political fight on Thanksgiving, etc.
- 7y ago

lisper 7y ago

> Its like cooking vs ordering food. Or pulling a cork out of a wine bottle vs opening one with a screw top. The screw top is superior in every way in terms of its ability to protect the wine from spoiling, but people still prefer corks because of the romance of the de-corking ceremony.

WalterBright 7y ago
I never got into the corking thing, but I enjoy my auld skool clutch and gearshift.

tzs 7y ago

I found vinyl a bit annoying in college--but that was probably because as the only person at my end of the hallway who didn't smoke marijuana I kept getting asked by people to handle operate their turntables when they wanted to listen to music while high. Cassettes can be operated by even the most baked person with little risk of damage to the cassette or the tape deck.

weedsmoker69xXx 7y ago
Seems like fellow hacker weedsters have downvoted your completely fine post. Well, that's why I personally use throwaway accounts for anything even remotely controversial. Kids (and the great Chinese Winnie the Pooh together with his admirers at Google) today can't handle real opinions posts.
whenchamenia 7y ago
As a former rave dj, you are talking out of your ass. A record player, even a manual one, is plenty easy to use even while quite intoxicated. Marijuana specifically should not impair your record playing ability at all.

bonestamp2 7y ago

Ya, it's a ritual. The other thing I like about Vinyl is that you have to actually listen to the music. Well, you don't have to, but if you're going to all that trouble it's likely because you want to actually listen to the music -- I mean, listening to the music is the activity that you're doing. With spotify, I usually flip it on to fill the background while I do something else. That's not true for vinyl (for me). Spotify is for hearing music, vinyl is for listening to music.

pacomerh 7y ago

Yes, couldn't agree more, the whole experience of manually browsing and playing records physically is something else. I also find that visiting record stores is great for discovery, at least in my case. One reason probably is that when browsing online I get lost in a sea of options and waste more time. Not saying its better but its a fresh change.

mauvehaus 7y ago

Agreed so many times over. Music on the radio, or from the computer/ipod and most of my CD listening is background music. Putting on a record is a ritual, a conscious choice to sit in front of the stereo and listen intentionally. CDs do sort of straddle the boundary between background and intentional listening. I own music that I treasure on CDs that I don't own on vinyl. While it's more convenient than records, I sometimes put it on with the intention of focusing on the music. What's interesting is that a few recordings work better on CD than LP for me. I came to love the Allman Brothers Band in University[0], and Mountain Jam spans two sides of a Eat a Peach on LP[1], requiring an interruption to change the record and hear the whole thing. On CD, it flows seamlessly. [0] I got into them backwards from most people. Blues Part II by Blood Sweat and Tears got me into longer-form rock, and I found Mountain Jam by searching for mp3 files over 10 or 15MB on the school's network. I have since bought perhaps half a dozen albums I'd have never discovered otherwise. [1] The Eat a Peach version is the definitive version. The July 5th version from Live at the Altlanta International Pop Festival remains my favorite, but I digress.