3 ms·

My SO collect vinyl. One of the main reasons they do it is because they don't want to lose the music and sounds. Their collection spans 40+ years with records g

My SO collect vinyl. One of the main reasons they do it is because they don't want to lose the music and sounds. Their collection spans 40+ years with records going back further. With other media like cassettes or CDs, the degradation in players or the music itself is large enough that vinyl is the only workable solution for storage. I've seen it on some of my most favorite music from YouTube. One day, poof, the tracks are gone. YT or the creator decided to pull the music to never be heard again. Nothing exists of the music on the internet anymore. I've ripped them and burned them to CDs, but if I could get them in vinyl, I'd be much happier for the long term safety of the music I love.

hotpotamus 4y ago
I wouldn't think a CD would degrade within a few human lifetimes when properly stored. (Though there were issues with early optical media). Vinyl has the advantage of being nearly human-readable though - if all of society and technology vanished, you could still run a needle over it and hear the sounds within. I believe repeated plays do cause some degradation though which should not be a factor for CDs. I believe major movies are still archived onto color separated black and white negatives and stored away in vaults for reasons like the above. Personally, I keep flac audio files on an archive NAS server using ECC RAM and ZFS filesystems plus backups. The open source and lossless nature of flac is appealing as it should not be locked into one proprietary vendor and should never have to undergo any lossy transcoding from one format to another. I'm sure my system is imperfect as all things are, but I'm satisfied. I do also have a very small selection of vinyl records as I can appreciate them for the reasons I mentioned above.