That said, the deliberate experience of sitting in your couch, doing/thinking nothing else but the music you're listening, is for me an invaluable ritual. It's like meditation.
Just imagine if you could do that with a CD or even an album of MP3s! But that's just not possible, it can only be done with vinyl records.
I think it's the physical aspect of the vinyl compared to streaming services. Some people do that with CDs, but I like vinyls more since they feel more "analog" to me. Also I like the warmth of their sound. Also GP has a point about the turntable engaging you more.
> Forcing yourself to flip the record and drop the needle keeps you more engaged I feel.
A vinyl without sleeve and artwork and a carefully curated Spotify playlist sit somewhere inbetween.
There is at least the cover picture left, but yes, I would not recommend Spotify for mindful listening. It is designed for "engagement", I still have not found out, how to tell it to stop, after that one song I want to hear.
It insists on playing something else. Very rarely something interesting shows up, but usually I just get annoyed for it playing radio, when I wanted ONE song, nothing more.
So I love my own digital music collection and player that remains under my control. I have a shuffle there as well, but conscious listening remains possible, even though surely the experience would be more powerful, combined with the ritual of going through the physical records, holding the artwork in my hands and putting the one record in. But for convinience, I stick to my digital collection. (I don't think all my music is on vinyl and I would need extra rooms then)
Its fucking wild to imply that Spotify prevents mindful listening to music, what the hell does it mean that its designed for engagement?
I dont think I've ever listened to a song I didn't want to listen to on Spotify.
And when the sound comes from the boxes? Then yes, I have to hurry back to the laptop to stop the not fitting next song (e.g. something fast, after I choose something chill). This is ridiculous.
The feature "stop after song" is avaiable in every serious music player I used (and also the one I programmed myself). But it is not in Spotify, even though it is trivial.. This is what I call "designed for engagement". I have to click more and find new things etc.
"I dont think I've ever listened to a song I didn't want to listen to on Spotify. "
So how do you achieve that? Do you only use custom playlists, or do just mostly don't care so much?
Because if I have one song in my head, then sometimes I just want this exact song and if I tell spotify to play this song - then afterwards it plays something totally different, even though it tries to fit the same genre, but this works badly. And even if it would be the same genre, some songs are just deep. And you want silence afterwards to process them - if you are consciously listenting in the first place. For some background noise spotify works great, no doubt about that.
Well, the objective sounds quality is always _worse_ than eg CDs. (In the same sense that lower mp3 bitrate is always worse in some objective sense.)
But often the sound engineering and mixing is done more carefully for vinyl; and aesthetically you can prefer whatever you like.
The driving experience, though, is completely different. There's some "grin factor" raw-ness, some analog-ness to the former that makes the latter comparatively feel like a muted couch-on-wheels.
By contrast, one can digitally capture the output of a turntable + phono preamp and then store it, share it, and replay it with all the crackle and warmth of the original in perfect fidelity without ever having to touch the record again.
Pop producers went off the deep end with this trick during the loudness wars, once it became possible through CDs.
It kind of is because you don't have an even frequency response throughout the vinyl. The closer to the center, the less high frequency response you get. Also higher frequencies in general require the cutting needle to to move faster and can introduce unpleasant distortion into the record, so you might attenuate higher frequencies on a vinyl record that you wouldn't need to for the streaming/radio/cd mix.
> It's about the fact that vinyl physically cannot support a super compressed mix.
This is false. Vinyl's physicality limits its dynamic range. If you have too high of an amplitude the cuts in the vinyl will be deeper and depending on the track could lead to the needle literally jumping off the player creating skipping. A super compressed mix doesn't create issues, a heavily limited one does. Clipping and brickwall limiting create problems for vinyls and introduce unpleasant distortion. You can still have a very compressed track on vinyl.
If a vinyl mix ends up with more dynamic range than the CD mix, it's because it was an active choice made by the mixing/mastering engineers, not because vinyl can't handle compressed mixes. In fact due to avoiding limiting as much as possible, you'll encounter plenty of cases where there is less dynamic range due to added compression to bring out the detail in quieter sections.
It also is basically the epitome of DIY ethos so popular in punk and indie music, what with creating your own mix tapes, sometimes imperfectly. The relatively low fidelity of the medium also adds to the charm. "stealing" music by taping it from the radio, another cassette, or from a cd.
It just plays heavily towards nostalgia in a way that I don't think CD will ever be able to. Though I do have fond memories of burning mixed CDs, it just doesn't have the same charm as sitting at a tape deck and carefully pressing record and stop.
1. win friends (and influence people)
2. convince the target of my affection that I am truly super-awesome, and they should fall in love with me because of incredible mix tapes.
Cassette tapes FTW!
Though for me its more about blending and beatmatching... the feeling of a perfectly timed double-drop or blend or whatever simply isn't the same with digital. And most new DJs can't even beatmatch by ear any more!
If you go to a party and the DJ is spinning wax and he's got two tracks going perfectly in-sync... due to vinyl's inherent instabilities, that takes some serious skill. On a modern setup you just drag the pitch fader til the BPMs are the same and hit play at the start of the phrase, and the worst you have to worry about is the bass knocking your cheaply-made faders around
> [...] often the sound engineering and mixing is done more carefully for vinyl; [...]
A CD version of the vinyl mix would sound great, but you'd be surprised how silent it is if you leave your amp at the usual setting.
From what I heard, a lot of vinyls are just recorded from CD. No source, just a YouTube video a long time ago so take it with a grain of salt.
> Because all digital distortion is major distortion and avoided at all costs.
Not a signal processing expert but from what I read, all the quantization noise is pushed into the >20kHz frequencies where it can't be heard via dithering/noise shaping.
Loudness/compression is a deliberate choice and has nothing to do with noise.
Agree. Personally I find the amount of compression used in many of today's releases highly objectionable. I'm a big Duran Duran fan, and was really looking forward to listening to "Future Past" in 2021 after pre-ordering it. But within a minute into it I thought there was something wrong with my headphones. Turns out they compressed the hell out of it - the album is unlistenable, even in a car going down the road.
The large amount of compression is commonly known as the Loudness War:
The clipping you'd get in the digital realm however isn't gentle or subtle at all and the levels beyond the good range simply don't exist. That's a hard no-go.
Quantization noise is an entirely different non-beast. Loudness/compression has everything to do with it. Yes, sometimes ccompression is also employed as an intentional creative element, but that's not even the tip of the ice berg.
I do agree with the suspicion that many vinyl pressings these days are just pressings of the CD mix. But this has everything to do with business and nothing with technology. It's a shame that back when the industry went through that phase of experimenting with formats beyond [email protected], they did not do a multichannel format with one stereo pair holding the loudness-optimized mix for radio, driving and the like, and another pair shifted 48dB lower to add more headroom. (or 24dB, to allow half of the additional bits of a 16 -> 24 expansion to go to where people usually expect it)
Clipping is just bad mastering, no?
I also find it hard to believe that vinyl will have less distortion as it’s analog where physical imperfections in the medium will affect the sound far more than in the case of digital mediums like CDs - with the latter it’s either a 1 or a 0; as long as wear and tear / damage doesn’t flip a 1 to a 0 or vice versa, you are good (and even if you do get a flip, ECC will normally fix it).
Vinyl also has it own set of restrictions with the frequencies it can reproduce and dynamic range since it’s all encode physically as tiny groves with bumps on the vinyl.
Levels on vinyl don't have a clear maximum beyond which the levels are cleanly clipped: they keep going, just not as good. It's more like the red zone on an engine's rpm, you wouldn't want to operate up there for prolonged periods, but a race driverwho never ever dipped the needle in there for even the shortest time wouldn't be good at their job. A good CD mix will achieve target loudness exclusively by dynamics compression, a good vinyl mix can achieve the same with a mix of noticeably less compression and the occasional flirt with the red zone.
Properly mastered CD audio is the near the best audio you can get as a consumer - you have 24 bit 96kHz audio but that's really overkill as the noise floor with 16 bits is already very very low even without noise shaping dither.
Vinyl as an audio storage medium I honestly don't see the appeal. Noisy, lower dynamic range than CD, low durability and longevity, ... etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
The problem in the 1980s was they were starting with master tapes that already had the RIAA equalization whereas today the masters are digital and don't. So for a modern title the RIAA curve would be added for a tape to be sent to the lathe, and probably would be done when the signal is analog.
(I'm in the middle of releasing an album, and we don't have different masters for these, but I could imagine that the situation is different for more professional groups)
(I initially tried uploading 24bit and they rejected it.)
Certainly sometimes. In fact probably always - you can't just take analogue masters and dump them to digital - you have to do at least some mixing and filtering.
As a single datapoint, Frank Zappa's Hot Rats was remixed for CD; I hated the CD remix, which I thought was too harsh (I'm not the only person who felt that way). Also, there are differences in the actual music: the intro to Gumbo Variations, for example, is a couple of bars longer in the CD remix than the original vinyl.
I've got used to the CD remix now, and I appreciate the extended into to Gumbo Variations.
Not necessarily true. If you have a good pair of speakers, a good amplifier, but a bad DAC[1], a CD can sound worse than vinyl (whose output does not need to go through a DAC). Old CD players (like mine) have dated built-in DACs, so this is not too exceptional a situation.
The above comment holds even if the vinyl was made from a CD source, since the vinyl maker could have used a quality DAC that's better than your CD player's.
For a long time, I didn't understand why my FM radio channel (WQXR) sounded better than my CDs. Turns out my CD player's DAC was poor in comparison to what the radio station was using to play their CDs.
[1]Digital to Analog Converter.
All the flaws will be from, in order:
- the speakers
- the speakers' interactions with the room
- the amplifier
- the source
Nyquist’s sampling theorem tells us that sound sampled at 44kHz will reproduce all frequencies in the range of human hearing. There is no “quantization”.
Further the act of mastering and creating the record, and playback using a needle, will inevitably affect the sound somewhat. In the scenario you describe the music is likely to sound very good, but it will never be identical to a CD.
A signal that exceeds the maximum amplitude allowed by the media will behave dramatically different as digital bits vs an analog groove. There are also very subtle transformations that occur as a byproduct of the needle physically moving around and through the groove, in addition to any properties imparted on the sound by cabling, connectivity, or the preamp's response curve.
Nyquist theorem simply says we can reproduce the original waveform with enough bandwidth. But it does not take into account other properties of the medium.
Subjectively I find the bass on vinyl to be smoother and more buttery given the same recording available digitally. Maybe its the mastering. Maybe its because the music isn't clipping. But for bass music it is definitely a bit of a je ne sais quoi, its definitely there with a good needle, preamp, pressing, and speaker.
Also if the sides of the vinyl are too long, the sound quality will suffer badly.
And if they screw up the cut, it's a lot of $$$ for each laquer master and the diamond needle for cutting doesn't last many records either.
But the result, while a less accurate reproduction, might aesthetically be more pleasing to some.
The only thing we can measure objectively is how accurate the reproduction is, and in that vinyl will always come second.
What you're describing is mindfulness meditation.
This is what we did with cassettes and then CDs. I had dates where we sat on the floor and just thumbed through our CD catalogs and played music for hours. Even today, I still prefer to listen to whole albums.
“Supporting the artist” is a commonly cited reason. In the part, we bought posters, shirts and concert tickets to to accomplish this.
It’s not like meditation. It is meditation. As a meditation teacher, I can definitely say that.
In fact I love everything about vinyl except the sort durarion of each side, but even that makes me focus more closely on the experience. I know I'll have to turn it over shortly...
But most of my vinyl is of old albums that nobody bothered to re-release on CD. It's fun to buy them cheap at the thrift store, wash them, and see what's on them.
----
"I have two basic food groups of music: protein and carbohydrate.
The protein listening is new music, where it’s unfamiliar to me so I’m listening, sometimes taking notes, researching the band while the music is playing. I do quite a bit of this, usually during the week.
On the weekends, I will allow for some carbohydrate listening, which would be records I’m familiar with, that I’ve been playing for years. This music is not exactly background, but more of an environmental asset for elevation of mood."
https://www.discogs.com/digs/music/henry-rollins-food-groups...
Dedicating time to listen to a specific album. My kids may never understand it. An album is an interesting art form, it captures a few pieces of time: when it was made and then then it was consumed. The cover art and liner art. The order of the songs. All assembled with intention. There are albums I’ve heard hundreds of time and I will still hear little new bits I never quite noticed before.
I do love digital music and having it everywhere, but it is special to just listen and take it I’m.
It seems like a fairly universal human quality to want to intentionally listen to music.
All that to say I mostly just like collecting colored vinyl, and supporting small bands and artists you like by buying a product significantly more profitable than millions of Spotify streams is pretty cool.