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I think playing from CD or LP definitely puts you in a more intentional space for listening than dialing something up from your local server or a streaming serv

I think playing from CD or LP definitely puts you in a more intentional space for listening than dialing something up from your local server or a streaming service, but holy hell the convenience factor is enormous. Also, it's super unpopular to say so, but fidelity and dynamic range from an LP, even on a relatively fancy turntable, lags what you can get from CD or high-bitrate digital by a measurable margin. But hauling out the record is more fun. When we entertain -- or, when we WOULD do so, pre-COVID -- having guests pull out albums to play was a fun way to keep the music rolling. Excellent call on Bitches Brew, btw. -- I also wonder a bit as to your age. I'm 50, and when I grew up in the 80s the kids my age probably only had vinyl if they had music-fan parents or cool older siblings. Cassettes ruled the day for my cohort, and then pretty quickly CD was on the horizon so I remember consciously not buying my own copy of some things -- "Substance" by New Order comes to mind -- because I wanted to wait and have it on CD, and buying something twice is ridiculous. I didn't start enjoying vinyl until after the dot-com crash. An ex-roommate had left behind a turntable, and my girlfriend and I would sift through used record bins at thrift shops on weekends since you could get a stack of records for like $5 or $10. Super cheap entertainment!

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
I disagree with the premise that an experience is inherently more intentional because it's more laborious. When the last Tool album came out, there was an mp3 redemption code within the box of the physical album that I had preordered. I ended up using the mp3s to listen to the album for the first time (primarily because I have a nicer setup for my computer's audio than any CD player I have lying around), but it was still an "intentional" experience: I poured myself a drink, fired up ProjectM alongside the music player to give myself some graphical visualizations to look at while the album played (to keep myself from getting distracted), and routed the audio through a USB-DAC into my ATH-M50's. So that was 90 minutes of focused, uninterrupted listening, and it was done digitally. Intentional space is a result of, well...intention. The potential of a medium to allow for less-focused listening does not inherently cheapen that medium, much in the same way that the added labor of having to go open up my vinyl player and drop the needle onto a record does not inherently mean that I'm going to pay more attention to it once it starts going than if I had just clicked a button on an app somewhere.
- drchopchop 6y ago
  Great point. I do think physical product (especially vinyl) adds a three-dimensional, tangible, aspect to intentional listening. Vinyl has the act of placing the record on the turntable, flipping it over, looking through the artwork (which may be involved), etc. It enhances the experience even more than just staring at an MP3 playback would.
- ubermonkey 6y ago
  I think you miss me a little here. You can BE intentional with whatever approach you want. Most of my critical listening today is via Apple Music, my phone, an outboard DAC, and some fancy Sennheisers. But when I use that setup, I'm being just as intentional as I would be with vinyl. However, a physical playback medium demands a certain degree of intentionality that isn't required if you're just Hey-Siri-ing some Tool (which I also do).
scrooched_moose 6y ago
> Also, it's super unpopular to say so, but fidelity and dynamic range from an LP, even on a relatively fancy turntable, lags what you can get from CD or high-bitrate digital by a measurable margin. While true, that doesn't necessarily mean it sounds better. Vinyl has a certain sound (commonly known as "warmth" that's different than digital. It may be quantitatively worse in things like bitrate butthe human ear may prefer it after going through all of the the messy, analogue, and physical steps that create "sound". We've done (anecdotal, non-scientific tests) of playing the same song from Spotify and Vinyl through our stereo. About 90% of the time we could pick out which was which[1], and generally preferred the vinyl version. 1) We did mute the intro for several seconds to hide the needle drop. Some may have been given away by cracks and pops on older albums, but most were clean and in good condition.
- ubermonkey 6y ago
  I don't mean to say vinyl can't sound good. It totally can. But if you have a nice enough stereo system, it's not that hard to get to a place where you hit vinyl's ceiling vs. CD source on a couple of fronts. The big one, at least for some genres of music, is dynamic range. There's a physical problem with vinyl that keeps it from even really approaching what's possible with CD, and this matters a LOT in classical music. But the other issue is more universal. Absurdly good audio quality is really, really easy to get from digital media now -- either streamed or local digital or CD source. It'd mind boggling how good that can sound on a nice setup. Vinyl can sound good, but it typically requires more dollars (or $local_currency) per unit of quality (so to speak) than the more modern approaches. There's so much that can go wrong with vinyl -- needle or cartridge issues, tonearm tracking, quality of the record itself, turntable motor interference, issues in the signal chain, etc -- that you can go nuts and spend a LOT chasing gremlins. I threw some money at my setup -- nice Rega turntable, a few hundred at the phono stage, fancy receiver, etc -- and so really well engineered records sound ALMOST as good as well-engineered CDs. But if you're stuck with a Crosley or whatever vs. playing a local CD over the same setup, there's gonna be a very appreciable gap. At least in my experience. (As an aside, I think the obsessive hunt for audio hacks to improve vinyl playback in the 70s is the direct reason so many in high-end audio are taking in by absurd claims of snake oil sales men. 40 years ago, you actually needed to know what you were doing to get good sound in your living room. Just having some money wasn't enough. People heard rumors about things that sound crazy, and tried them, and some of them worked and some of them didn't. Trouble is, most of those folks don't have any grounding in engineering or science, and so you ended up with shit like Tice clocks and $5,000 interconnects and whatever else. Now, in 2020, anybody with a few hundred bucks can have really amazing sound (by 1970s standards) in their home this afternoon. But the (mostly boomer) 70s/80s audiophiles are still there, on the margins, hawking $250 power cables.)
sasaf5 6y ago
The keyword here is "sift". Sifting physical records curated by someone else is (still) much better for discovery than app recommendations.
bsder 6y ago
> fidelity and dynamic range from an LP, even on a relatively fancy turntable, lags what you can get from CD or high-bitrate digital by a measurable margin. Only if the mastering doesn't suck sh*t. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war And, to be fair, vinyl had its own loudness war. It's just that material considerations eventually place a limit on what you can do.

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

I disagree with the premise that an experience is inherently more intentional because it's more laborious. When the last Tool album came out, there was an mp3 redemption code within the box of the physical album that I had preordered. I ended up using the mp3s to listen to the album for the first time (primarily because I have a nicer setup for my computer's audio than any CD player I have lying around), but it was still an "intentional" experience: I poured myself a drink, fired up ProjectM alongside the music player to give myself some graphical visualizations to look at while the album played (to keep myself from getting distracted), and routed the audio through a USB-DAC into my ATH-M50's. So that was 90 minutes of focused, uninterrupted listening, and it was done digitally. Intentional space is a result of, well...intention. The potential of a medium to allow for less-focused listening does not inherently cheapen that medium, much in the same way that the added labor of having to go open up my vinyl player and drop the needle onto a record does not inherently mean that I'm going to pay more attention to it once it starts going than if I had just clicked a button on an app somewhere.

drchopchop 6y ago
Great point. I do think physical product (especially vinyl) adds a three-dimensional, tangible, aspect to intentional listening. Vinyl has the act of placing the record on the turntable, flipping it over, looking through the artwork (which may be involved), etc. It enhances the experience even more than just staring at an MP3 playback would.
ubermonkey 6y ago
I think you miss me a little here. You can BE intentional with whatever approach you want. Most of my critical listening today is via Apple Music, my phone, an outboard DAC, and some fancy Sennheisers. But when I use that setup, I'm being just as intentional as I would be with vinyl. However, a physical playback medium demands a certain degree of intentionality that isn't required if you're just Hey-Siri-ing some Tool (which I also do).

scrooched_moose 6y ago

> Also, it's super unpopular to say so, but fidelity and dynamic range from an LP, even on a relatively fancy turntable, lags what you can get from CD or high-bitrate digital by a measurable margin. While true, that doesn't necessarily mean it sounds better. Vinyl has a certain sound (commonly known as "warmth" that's different than digital. It may be quantitatively worse in things like bitrate butthe human ear may prefer it after going through all of the the messy, analogue, and physical steps that create "sound". We've done (anecdotal, non-scientific tests) of playing the same song from Spotify and Vinyl through our stereo. About 90% of the time we could pick out which was which[1], and generally preferred the vinyl version. 1) We did mute the intro for several seconds to hide the needle drop. Some may have been given away by cracks and pops on older albums, but most were clean and in good condition.

ubermonkey 6y ago
I don't mean to say vinyl can't sound good. It totally can. But if you have a nice enough stereo system, it's not that hard to get to a place where you hit vinyl's ceiling vs. CD source on a couple of fronts. The big one, at least for some genres of music, is dynamic range. There's a physical problem with vinyl that keeps it from even really approaching what's possible with CD, and this matters a LOT in classical music. But the other issue is more universal. Absurdly good audio quality is really, really easy to get from digital media now -- either streamed or local digital or CD source. It'd mind boggling how good that can sound on a nice setup. Vinyl can sound good, but it typically requires more dollars (or $local_currency) per unit of quality (so to speak) than the more modern approaches. There's so much that can go wrong with vinyl -- needle or cartridge issues, tonearm tracking, quality of the record itself, turntable motor interference, issues in the signal chain, etc -- that you can go nuts and spend a LOT chasing gremlins. I threw some money at my setup -- nice Rega turntable, a few hundred at the phono stage, fancy receiver, etc -- and so really well engineered records sound ALMOST as good as well-engineered CDs. But if you're stuck with a Crosley or whatever vs. playing a local CD over the same setup, there's gonna be a very appreciable gap. At least in my experience. (As an aside, I think the obsessive hunt for audio hacks to improve vinyl playback in the 70s is the direct reason so many in high-end audio are taking in by absurd claims of snake oil sales men. 40 years ago, you actually needed to know what you were doing to get good sound in your living room. Just having some money wasn't enough. People heard rumors about things that sound crazy, and tried them, and some of them worked and some of them didn't. Trouble is, most of those folks don't have any grounding in engineering or science, and so you ended up with shit like Tice clocks and $5,000 interconnects and whatever else. Now, in 2020, anybody with a few hundred bucks can have really amazing sound (by 1970s standards) in their home this afternoon. But the (mostly boomer) 70s/80s audiophiles are still there, on the margins, hawking $250 power cables.)

sasaf5 6y ago

The keyword here is "sift". Sifting physical records curated by someone else is (still) much better for discovery than app recommendations.

bsder 6y ago

> fidelity and dynamic range from an LP, even on a relatively fancy turntable, lags what you can get from CD or high-bitrate digital by a measurable margin. Only if the mastering doesn't suck sh*t. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war And, to be fair, vinyl had its own loudness war. It's just that material considerations eventually place a limit on what you can do.