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My favorite thing about vinyl collecting is that there's no digital obsolescence. You can build a record player out of a motor and a piece of paper. It's like h

by ponker 6y ago

My favorite thing about vinyl collecting is that there's no digital obsolescence. You can build a record player out of a motor and a piece of paper. It's like having a paper book vs. an e-book or photographic slides vs. a terabyte of JPEGs.

ss64 6y ago
This is a good point, I think only a handful of factories are still making CD transports. They are readable in computers but only because of compatibility with the DVD disc and those are already disappearing from most new devices. It seems entirely possible that within our lifetimes it may no longer be possible to buy a CD player.
tialaramex 6y ago
The text in the book whether paper or electronic is digital, like PCM or JPEG. The slides and vinyl decay gradually and irrecoverably even within a lifetime. You can illustrate the principle well enough with your player built "out of a motor and a piece of paper" but the music will be too distorted to want to listen to it. So I don't think this has much practical meaning. The use of digital data means the CD transport is completely independent of the music on a CD, if you aren't interested in spinning plastic discs and laser diodes you can dispense with that part and keep all the audio as it was - and indeed of course in fact we mostly did. The sound of vinyl is wedded to the physical manifestation, the grooves, the stylus, the rotating disc, but PCM data doesn't care how it is stored.
- ponker 6y ago
  True all this. But still there's a joy in holding a record or photographic slide because there's no inscrutable digital device in between the artifact and its sensory experience. If you have a hard drive of photos you need a device that you can't build, can't see (at the transistor level), and probably can't fully understand to see the photos. And a hard drive of photos looks the same as a hard drive of songs -- the specialist media has a form molded to its content. Can't describe the joy. Just like it.

by ponker 6y ago

ss64 6y ago

This is a good point, I think only a handful of factories are still making CD transports. They are readable in computers but only because of compatibility with the DVD disc and those are already disappearing from most new devices. It seems entirely possible that within our lifetimes it may no longer be possible to buy a CD player.

tialaramex 6y ago

The text in the book whether paper or electronic is digital, like PCM or JPEG. The slides and vinyl decay gradually and irrecoverably even within a lifetime. You can illustrate the principle well enough with your player built "out of a motor and a piece of paper" but the music will be too distorted to want to listen to it. So I don't think this has much practical meaning. The use of digital data means the CD transport is completely independent of the music on a CD, if you aren't interested in spinning plastic discs and laser diodes you can dispense with that part and keep all the audio as it was - and indeed of course in fact we mostly did. The sound of vinyl is wedded to the physical manifestation, the grooves, the stylus, the rotating disc, but PCM data doesn't care how it is stored.

ponker 6y ago
True all this. But still there's a joy in holding a record or photographic slide because there's no inscrutable digital device in between the artifact and its sensory experience. If you have a hard drive of photos you need a device that you can't build, can't see (at the transistor level), and probably can't fully understand to see the photos. And a hard drive of photos looks the same as a hard drive of songs -- the specialist media has a form molded to its content. Can't describe the joy. Just like it.