Re:Sony plans to make vinyl records again
by Declanomous on Friday June 30, 2017 @11:35AM
(#14671378)
I don't care at all for the act of playing vinyl, but I really love the artwork. I occasionally buy records just for the art. I wish they sold the art separately because it's kind of ludicrous to spend all that money for something that is kind of incidental to the actual product.
Nine Inch Nails did something kind of like that for their latest EP. They sold the art plus a flac download. It wasn’t large 12” art but it was bigger than a cd and… “interactive” (which really just meant “messy”). I would be totally down with more artists doing that.
Analog is neat. To me, at least. There's a microscopic groove cut into some plastic in which a tiny chunk of diamond connected to a cantilever is pulled through, and the motion it has gets converted to a tiny electrical signal which gets amplified. To hear this at home on speakers or headphones is cool enough; to hear it in a venue with excellent sound is really something else for me. Something so powerful coming from something so minuscule.
Maybe it's 40, 50, 60 years old, too. It's something that has a history, a past. I can listen to a record made in Brazil in 1968, that somehow found its way to Europe in my hands, or I can buy some sterile, boring CD copy of it. I can listen to my parents' very own records that they had in the 70s, that I also listened to growing up. I can even listen to classical records from before they were born. I can listen to a record from a country that doesn't exist anymore.
Not everything got released on CD (or streaming).
Plenty of reasons one might prefer vinyl over a CD.