8 ms·

This is like saying “Candles are superior to lightbulbs because they burn out quicker and thats an advantage in some situations”. I’m not sure how, its an aest

by dijit 7mo ago

This is like saying “Candles are superior to lightbulbs because they burn out quicker and thats an advantage in some situations”. I’m not sure how, its an aesthetic choice but an inferior technology by every metric that counts. Candles still have a place, we still buy them, but we can’t reasonably call them superior either- even if, candles actually would have a real advantage of not requiring power. Vinyl doesn’t even have that.

bob1029 7mo ago
You have to look beyond the audio engineering on this one. Using constrained mediums on purpose is often how the best artistic expression is achieved. For example, if the artist knows their channel is noisy and band-limited they can get a lot more liberal with the kinds of samples they use throughout. CD/SACD is kind of like 4K for television. The medium becomes so transparent that it causes upstream shocks in every other part of the process. You can no longer rely on the camera or audio chain to cover it up (unless you hobble yourself intentionally).
- ratmeadow 7mo ago
  With this logic you can argue the best audio medium is dirt because if you made good music with dirt, the music must have been so incredible to have counteracted the flaws of dirt as a medium. Ignore the fact that dirt cannot be used as a music medium. (Vacuous truth)
  - atoav 7mo ago
    Yes, but your "IF" is doing the heavy lifting here and it would be your burden to proof how dirt would be a means of artistic expression before anybody could take your argument seriously. As a musician myself I can assure you that the high stakes releases for any musician are vinyl releases. They also happen to be the ones with which most musicians earn the most money. Now technologically vinyl isn't superior (and anybody who claims it is is an idiot in the sense of the word), but technology isn't everything. A noisy casette tape can evoke the same (and sometimes more) feelings than the digital recording. A vinyl record with a big cover, an inlay with band info, that you specifically chose to put on the record player while reading the liner notes and examining the design is in a ritualistic sense a thousand times more gratifying than having spotify select a song for you without knowing why, in the background of the daily life. That is like the difference between a candle light bath and getting wet in a rainshower. Now that doesn't mean people will be binary either 100% vinyl or 100% digital. Vinyl is for the special occasion or for DJ sets, digital is for everything else.
    - ratmeadow 7mo ago
      Yes that's my point with the "if"! And in general I largely agree with you. The parent comment basically argued vinyl is superior because when artists used vinyl the resulting music was creatively better (because of whatever process). Sure, but then you can't selectively ignore the great music that has been made with other recording technologies. I can point to a lot of good music recorded on tape or digital. Unless we are arguing that music back in the vinyl days was broadly better than now? (Different argument then...) As for artistic choices, I totally agree that vinyl can be a valid choice! Then it's silly to say one thing is "better" than another. But in terms of raw technology, I say it's just copium to claim vinyl is in any way superior to digital. Digital's recording capabilities are a superset of vinyl's. There is no magic sauce killer feature unique to vinyl.
      - atoav 7mo ago
        Adressing your points: Music may have been a bigger culturual force during the heights of vinyl record sales. Whether that translated to better music or whether it is some form of survivorship bias: I don't know. In fact I doubt it. But there is something to the music that happened when it was new, e.g. Punk music was better when everybody was still trying to figure out what is punk and what isn't, while today it feels like most bands just copy was has been made in the past. You can extrapolate the same idea to many other genres that developed. So was the music better on average? Probably not. Was it more exiting and had more impact on society, fashion, culture? For sure. As for vinyl: I agree that digital is superior in terms of sound quality. Nearly every vinyl record is pressed from a digital master nowadays after all. Even those who want "vinyl warmth" could have that easily emulated in digital nowadays. Digital is endlessly flexible, you could theoretically envision (and some have done) a vinyl experience that is purely digital under the hood – or you could do whatever netflix is doing. But in practise vinyl comes with the experience, forces you to do the ritual, to listen to the whole album, is immensly direct (just the waveform pressed into the material) etc. This is a limitation if vinyl is all you have, but in times where you could listen to 10 nameless streams of sounds at once for the whole day that limitation has become a popular feature. I have friends with pressing plants and all of them have more job offers than they could realistically fulfill for years now. I'd advice against too easily dismissing the value of the ritual a technological dispositif forces onto the people interacting with said technology. Listening to a vinyl record in a time where people rarely ever sit down and just listen to music in a concentrated way is a thing people look for. Those who say it is because vinyl is technically superior are wrong, but the limitations and the listening habits a technology enforces are unseparably a part of the technology itself. And if you are looking for what vinyl gives you, vinyl is the thing that gives it to you best.
  - cluckindan 7mo ago
    Early Motown records were tracked in a room which had a dirt floor.
  - mort96 7mo ago
    No, you can't argue that the best medium is dirt. Just like you can't argue that the best medium is vinyl. But you could maybe argue that there are advantages to dirt (at least a hypothetical dirt which can be used as a musical medium somehow) which you lose by going to CD or vinyl. If this hypothetical dirt managed to be constraining in such a way that it produces kinds of musical works which would not have been produced for CD, is that not an advantage?
- alpaca128 7mo ago
  > Using constrained mediums on purpose is often how the best artistic expression is achieved Artistic expression is not technology. Vinyl is strictly inferior as technology. That doesn't imply that it cannot have any advantages at all, but that wasn't the point being made.
  - jszymborski 7mo ago
    > Artistic expression is not technology. Technology is sometimes used by artists to express themselves. Sometimes that means lo-fi recordings of your music on a shit tape recorder when better tools ate around. Sometimes it means pressing vinyls.
- Qwertious 7mo ago
  A CD is 100% technologically capable of having the duration and physical size of a vinyl.
  - NBJack 7mo ago
    A return to laserdiscs (with CD or BluRay technology and information density) would be wild.
- Lio 7mo ago
  Reminds me of the Autechre album Tri Repetae which was labelled as “Complete with surface noise” on vinyl and “Incomplete without surface noise” on CD.
  - dsr_ 7mo ago
    If they really wanted to do so, they could take the vinyl, play it with all the surface noise they wanted, and record that to CD so they could have the surface noise there, too. It would be the same surface noise each time, not getting worse.
    - Lio 7mo ago
      We need a new consumer audio format with the ability to contain playback algorithms! :P > It would be the same surface noise each time, not getting worse. Interestingly, not always getting "worse". A large portion of vinyl surface noise comes from static rather than groove wear. So you can zap it with a little petzo-electric gun and it goes away again. At least for a little while.
- steve1977 7mo ago
  > CD/SACD is kind of like 4K for television. In theory. In practice most stuff is distorted and compressed to death and might as well be 12-bit ;)
cj 7mo ago
Instead of "Candles are a superior way to light a room" you can say "Candles are a superior way to create a romantic vibe in a room". Candles/Vinyl can be superior if you clarify the metric you're optimizing for.
- lb1lf 7mo ago
  Just so. The advantages of vinyl are basically making up for lack of self-discipline in humans. (I much prefer vinyl for that precise reason!) a) Since putting it on becomes more of a ritual - handling the album carefully, brushing off lint, placing the needle &c - I find I make more of an effort to actually _listen_ to the music I put on. I could listen as intently to Spotify or Tidal, too - but, alas, I most often don't. b) Seeing as you'll get some 20-odd minutes of music before having to make another choice - be it playing the other side or another album entirely - it enforces having to decide on what you'd like to listen to, rather than just letting your streaming service of choice play things it thinks you may like. (That being said, streaming services are a great way to explore new music!) c) Given the economics of streaming, buying physical media helps both the record stores - a good one is like an excellent library, in which the librarians give you all sorts of curated recommendations for things you may like, in addition to being great social meeting places with like-minded folk - and performing artists alive; I've no idea how many hours I would have to listen to an artist on Spotify before the payout is equal to their takeout from a single vinyl sale... d) Besides, it is cosy. That being said, you could easily DSP CDs or streaming to sound like vinyl if that's your idea of fun - just about any playback format is superior sonically to vinyl. However, to many, it is the whole ritual of putting on a record which basically makes it worth the sonic tradeoffs... (Call me a luddite if you like!)
  - saalweachter 7mo ago
    In a similar vein, vinyl records make the unit of music an album, and I like it in situations where the artist has created "an album" rather than "a collection of ten-ish tracks". I listen to most of my music on phones or computers and when I do, I like to pick out a track at a time or put together a playlist or just shuffle the whole damn thing. When I purchase or put on a record, it's because I think the album is a cohesive work and I want to listen to it as a piece; the constrained format created the concept of an album, and using it enforces listening to the music as an album.
stef25 7mo ago
Really good analogy!
emacdona 7mo ago
I think we can agree that vinyl sounds different than CD, right? Is it so hard to believe that some people actually prefer the sound of music on vinyl? For such a person, that might be the only metric that matters. But, another example: when I was growing up (dating myself here), cassette tapes were superior to CDs in the only way that mattered (to me): they didn't skip in my portable music player (walkman) when I took them running.
- scns 7mo ago
  Really deep bassnotes can't be reproced by vinyl. The grooves would get too wide IIRC, it's a physical limitation.
- mrob 7mo ago
  The sound of vinyl is a subset of the sound of CD. If you take a high quality recording of a vinyl record playback and write it to CD, it will sound identical.
  - emacdona 7mo ago
    Okay, sure. But if I prefer the subset of CD sound that is the same as vinyl, and my favorite band comes out with a new album... I just buy vinyl, right? Or are you suggesting that I buy the record, a blank CD, and all of the high quality recording playback equipment I need to write it to that CD?
mikkupikku 7mo ago
Candles are better than lightbulbs at melting the ends of frayed nylon strings and ropes. :)
- steve1977 7mo ago
  And at PM2.5 and VOC output.
Aldipower 7mo ago
Vinyl isn't about technology it is about musicality, art and taste. If you try to explain and reduce vinyl to something technically, you are leaving out the most important part, the artful content that will be enjoyed from it.
soopypoos 7mo ago
> advantage of not requiring power. Vinyl doesn’t even have that. well actually...
RiverCrochet 7mo ago
RAM shortages will never make vinyl more expensive. Anything digital requires a CPU to work.
- dijit 7mo ago
  AMPs: am I a joke to you? RAM prices are such an infinitesimally small component cost of digital audio equipment that I can’t take you seriously here.
  - RiverCrochet 7mo ago
    It was a stretch, so you're right to not take me seriously. I imagine any large about of RAM in audio equipment would strictly be for devices/functions that buffer large amounts of data as opposed to just decoding it. An old Akai S1000 sampler I had a long time ago had slots for memory modules (some weird proprietary slot IIRC), but that was a musical instrument, not really a player of any kind.
rout39574 7mo ago
Candles are pleasant light, in a way difficult to acquire with other lighting types. That means there's a niche in which that facet is more valuable than the other technologies. I had candles at my dinner table last Thursday, and am likely to do so date night tonight... but the bulbs I turn off to give the candles reign are LED...

by dijit 7mo ago

bob1029 7mo ago

You have to look beyond the audio engineering on this one. Using constrained mediums on purpose is often how the best artistic expression is achieved. For example, if the artist knows their channel is noisy and band-limited they can get a lot more liberal with the kinds of samples they use throughout. CD/SACD is kind of like 4K for television. The medium becomes so transparent that it causes upstream shocks in every other part of the process. You can no longer rely on the camera or audio chain to cover it up (unless you hobble yourself intentionally).

ratmeadow 7mo ago
With this logic you can argue the best audio medium is dirt because if you made good music with dirt, the music must have been so incredible to have counteracted the flaws of dirt as a medium. Ignore the fact that dirt cannot be used as a music medium. (Vacuous truth)
- atoav 7mo ago
  Yes, but your "IF" is doing the heavy lifting here and it would be your burden to proof how dirt would be a means of artistic expression before anybody could take your argument seriously. As a musician myself I can assure you that the high stakes releases for any musician are vinyl releases. They also happen to be the ones with which most musicians earn the most money. Now technologically vinyl isn't superior (and anybody who claims it is is an idiot in the sense of the word), but technology isn't everything. A noisy casette tape can evoke the same (and sometimes more) feelings than the digital recording. A vinyl record with a big cover, an inlay with band info, that you specifically chose to put on the record player while reading the liner notes and examining the design is in a ritualistic sense a thousand times more gratifying than having spotify select a song for you without knowing why, in the background of the daily life. That is like the difference between a candle light bath and getting wet in a rainshower. Now that doesn't mean people will be binary either 100% vinyl or 100% digital. Vinyl is for the special occasion or for DJ sets, digital is for everything else.
  - ratmeadow 7mo ago
    Yes that's my point with the "if"! And in general I largely agree with you. The parent comment basically argued vinyl is superior because when artists used vinyl the resulting music was creatively better (because of whatever process). Sure, but then you can't selectively ignore the great music that has been made with other recording technologies. I can point to a lot of good music recorded on tape or digital. Unless we are arguing that music back in the vinyl days was broadly better than now? (Different argument then...) As for artistic choices, I totally agree that vinyl can be a valid choice! Then it's silly to say one thing is "better" than another. But in terms of raw technology, I say it's just copium to claim vinyl is in any way superior to digital. Digital's recording capabilities are a superset of vinyl's. There is no magic sauce killer feature unique to vinyl.
    - atoav 7mo ago
      Adressing your points: Music may have been a bigger culturual force during the heights of vinyl record sales. Whether that translated to better music or whether it is some form of survivorship bias: I don't know. In fact I doubt it. But there is something to the music that happened when it was new, e.g. Punk music was better when everybody was still trying to figure out what is punk and what isn't, while today it feels like most bands just copy was has been made in the past. You can extrapolate the same idea to many other genres that developed. So was the music better on average? Probably not. Was it more exiting and had more impact on society, fashion, culture? For sure. As for vinyl: I agree that digital is superior in terms of sound quality. Nearly every vinyl record is pressed from a digital master nowadays after all. Even those who want "vinyl warmth" could have that easily emulated in digital nowadays. Digital is endlessly flexible, you could theoretically envision (and some have done) a vinyl experience that is purely digital under the hood – or you could do whatever netflix is doing. But in practise vinyl comes with the experience, forces you to do the ritual, to listen to the whole album, is immensly direct (just the waveform pressed into the material) etc. This is a limitation if vinyl is all you have, but in times where you could listen to 10 nameless streams of sounds at once for the whole day that limitation has become a popular feature. I have friends with pressing plants and all of them have more job offers than they could realistically fulfill for years now. I'd advice against too easily dismissing the value of the ritual a technological dispositif forces onto the people interacting with said technology. Listening to a vinyl record in a time where people rarely ever sit down and just listen to music in a concentrated way is a thing people look for. Those who say it is because vinyl is technically superior are wrong, but the limitations and the listening habits a technology enforces are unseparably a part of the technology itself. And if you are looking for what vinyl gives you, vinyl is the thing that gives it to you best.
- cluckindan 7mo ago
  Early Motown records were tracked in a room which had a dirt floor.
- mort96 7mo ago
  No, you can't argue that the best medium is dirt. Just like you can't argue that the best medium is vinyl. But you could maybe argue that there are advantages to dirt (at least a hypothetical dirt which can be used as a musical medium somehow) which you lose by going to CD or vinyl. If this hypothetical dirt managed to be constraining in such a way that it produces kinds of musical works which would not have been produced for CD, is that not an advantage?
alpaca128 7mo ago
> Using constrained mediums on purpose is often how the best artistic expression is achieved Artistic expression is not technology. Vinyl is strictly inferior as technology. That doesn't imply that it cannot have any advantages at all, but that wasn't the point being made.
- jszymborski 7mo ago
  > Artistic expression is not technology. Technology is sometimes used by artists to express themselves. Sometimes that means lo-fi recordings of your music on a shit tape recorder when better tools ate around. Sometimes it means pressing vinyls.
Qwertious 7mo ago
A CD is 100% technologically capable of having the duration and physical size of a vinyl.
- NBJack 7mo ago
  A return to laserdiscs (with CD or BluRay technology and information density) would be wild.
Lio 7mo ago
Reminds me of the Autechre album Tri Repetae which was labelled as “Complete with surface noise” on vinyl and “Incomplete without surface noise” on CD.
- dsr_ 7mo ago
  If they really wanted to do so, they could take the vinyl, play it with all the surface noise they wanted, and record that to CD so they could have the surface noise there, too. It would be the same surface noise each time, not getting worse.
  - Lio 7mo ago
    We need a new consumer audio format with the ability to contain playback algorithms! :P > It would be the same surface noise each time, not getting worse. Interestingly, not always getting "worse". A large portion of vinyl surface noise comes from static rather than groove wear. So you can zap it with a little petzo-electric gun and it goes away again. At least for a little while.
steve1977 7mo ago
> CD/SACD is kind of like 4K for television. In theory. In practice most stuff is distorted and compressed to death and might as well be 12-bit ;)

cj 7mo ago

Instead of "Candles are a superior way to light a room" you can say "Candles are a superior way to create a romantic vibe in a room". Candles/Vinyl can be superior if you clarify the metric you're optimizing for.

lb1lf 7mo ago
Just so. The advantages of vinyl are basically making up for lack of self-discipline in humans. (I much prefer vinyl for that precise reason!) a) Since putting it on becomes more of a ritual - handling the album carefully, brushing off lint, placing the needle &c - I find I make more of an effort to actually _listen_ to the music I put on. I could listen as intently to Spotify or Tidal, too - but, alas, I most often don't. b) Seeing as you'll get some 20-odd minutes of music before having to make another choice - be it playing the other side or another album entirely - it enforces having to decide on what you'd like to listen to, rather than just letting your streaming service of choice play things it thinks you may like. (That being said, streaming services are a great way to explore new music!) c) Given the economics of streaming, buying physical media helps both the record stores - a good one is like an excellent library, in which the librarians give you all sorts of curated recommendations for things you may like, in addition to being great social meeting places with like-minded folk - and performing artists alive; I've no idea how many hours I would have to listen to an artist on Spotify before the payout is equal to their takeout from a single vinyl sale... d) Besides, it is cosy. That being said, you could easily DSP CDs or streaming to sound like vinyl if that's your idea of fun - just about any playback format is superior sonically to vinyl. However, to many, it is the whole ritual of putting on a record which basically makes it worth the sonic tradeoffs... (Call me a luddite if you like!)
- saalweachter 7mo ago
  In a similar vein, vinyl records make the unit of music an album, and I like it in situations where the artist has created "an album" rather than "a collection of ten-ish tracks". I listen to most of my music on phones or computers and when I do, I like to pick out a track at a time or put together a playlist or just shuffle the whole damn thing. When I purchase or put on a record, it's because I think the album is a cohesive work and I want to listen to it as a piece; the constrained format created the concept of an album, and using it enforces listening to the music as an album.

stef25 7mo ago

Really good analogy!

emacdona 7mo ago

I think we can agree that vinyl sounds different than CD, right? Is it so hard to believe that some people actually prefer the sound of music on vinyl? For such a person, that might be the only metric that matters. But, another example: when I was growing up (dating myself here), cassette tapes were superior to CDs in the only way that mattered (to me): they didn't skip in my portable music player (walkman) when I took them running.

scns 7mo ago
Really deep bassnotes can't be reproced by vinyl. The grooves would get too wide IIRC, it's a physical limitation.
mrob 7mo ago
The sound of vinyl is a subset of the sound of CD. If you take a high quality recording of a vinyl record playback and write it to CD, it will sound identical.
- emacdona 7mo ago
  Okay, sure. But if I prefer the subset of CD sound that is the same as vinyl, and my favorite band comes out with a new album... I just buy vinyl, right? Or are you suggesting that I buy the record, a blank CD, and all of the high quality recording playback equipment I need to write it to that CD?

mikkupikku 7mo ago

Candles are better than lightbulbs at melting the ends of frayed nylon strings and ropes. :)

steve1977 7mo ago
And at PM2.5 and VOC output.

Aldipower 7mo ago

Vinyl isn't about technology it is about musicality, art and taste. If you try to explain and reduce vinyl to something technically, you are leaving out the most important part, the artful content that will be enjoyed from it.

soopypoos 7mo ago

> advantage of not requiring power. Vinyl doesn’t even have that. well actually...

RiverCrochet 7mo ago

RAM shortages will never make vinyl more expensive. Anything digital requires a CPU to work.

dijit 7mo ago
AMPs: am I a joke to you? RAM prices are such an infinitesimally small component cost of digital audio equipment that I can’t take you seriously here.
- RiverCrochet 7mo ago
  It was a stretch, so you're right to not take me seriously. I imagine any large about of RAM in audio equipment would strictly be for devices/functions that buffer large amounts of data as opposed to just decoding it. An old Akai S1000 sampler I had a long time ago had slots for memory modules (some weird proprietary slot IIRC), but that was a musical instrument, not really a player of any kind.

rout39574 7mo ago

Candles are pleasant light, in a way difficult to acquire with other lighting types. That means there's a niche in which that facet is more valuable than the other technologies. I had candles at my dinner table last Thursday, and am likely to do so date night tonight... but the bulbs I turn off to give the candles reign are LED...