> The album that exploded punk rock 30 years ago, re-exploded onto obscure, obsolete, and inconvenient formats. It's really strange. I probably don't get it.

> The album that exploded punk rock 30 years ago, re-exploded onto obscure, obsolete, and inconvenient formats. It's really strange. I probably don't get it. I was there listening to punk rock and "grunge" rock in 1994. Back then nobody listened to music on his computer (the .mp3 format didn't even exist yet: at least not with that name) except if it was using the PC's CD drive, to play an audio CD. 1994 was kind "peak" quality: the loudness war on CDs just hadn't started yet and listening to music was often amazing for it was often played directly from CDs on actual stereos. Crappy sound only arrived a few years when the first, lame, mp3 encoders arrived and became ubiquitous and everybody made lossy rip of CDs (because we didn't know how to rip losslessly yet from CDs) and then encoded them with poor encoders at shitty bitrates (like 128 kbps mp3 were really a thing in the late 90s, for Napster sharing). So it's really strange to take music from 1994, which is precisely a year were nobody listened to "shitty format" music yet on his PC. FWIW I had my first CD player in 1988 or so. It's only in the late 90s that music quality for listening experience went seriously downhill, with people listening to shitty 128 kbps mp3 on their shitty, tiny, Logitech speakers. Nowadays all is good and fine again: Tidal, Spotify, Qobuz... It's all good sounding again. And many acceptable soundbars and systems came out (like Sonos and whatnots). So yup I don't get it: to me it's "fake retro" because 1994 music was enjoyed from CDs, on speakers hooked to a stereo (which were never as shitty as those tiny Logitech speakers and similar hooked to PCs). I just don't understand what this is: I must be getting old... But then as I'm getting old, it means I was there in 1994 and it's definitely not the 1994 I remember. It's kinda fake retro for something that never existed.