i miss records: why they were better than cds
 

listen up kids, many years ago, we had things called "records." i miss them.

yes, the music quality is better on cd, and yes, cd's don't scratch and get all "popcorny," HOWEVER....

records came with record album covers. and they were cool and fun, and they were art, and they were puzzles.

the rolling stones "sticky fingers" had a real zipper on the cover.

alice cooper's "billion dollor babies" was a giant billfold, and when you opened it, there was a huge billion dollor bill inside that you could take out.

the led zepplin record with stairway to heaven on it, when you opened it up, there was a picture with an old guy standing on a rocky cliff watching a woman climb up. if you held the rocks up to a mirror, there was a horned skull right there. oooooh, spooky...

the pink floyed "wish you were here" album...the inside jacket cover had this wierd picture of a close up shot of a hankerchief floating in a field of green grass. if you looked "through" the hankerchief, there was a topless woman standing there. no one ever sees it, but once you see it, you can't help not seeing it. optical illusion, and cool topless chick which is awesome when you are 13.

cheech and chong's "big bamboo" came with a giant rolling paper.

queen live killers had all those cool photographs, as did the rolling stones "hot rocks" albums had cool liner notes, some album covers were sheer art, like elton john's "mr fantastic."

cd's are great technologically, but i miss the fun and art and whimsy of album covers. too bad they can't make cd's with huge cool album covers, and we could have the best of both worlds....

does anyone have a record album cover they really liked, or that was different or cool? do any cd's come with anything cool like that?

It's just a matter of laziness now. They can do that, most just don't. Check out the work on Tool's "10,000 Days" for an example of what creative things can be done with cd's. Occasionally, some cds do include some liner notes, but again, it's just laziness.

the sound is much better on vinyl--cd sound is highly compressed--you hear it in the relative one-dimensional character of the low end and the lack of warmth overall. you can still indulge a vinyl fetish pretty easily too, especially if your predelections run toward audiophile systems and heavy vinyl releases.

as for packaging, well yes. record covers were bigger canvasses.
but there is lots of cool cd packaging--you wont find much of it in regular stores, however, because they like those nasty plastic jewel cases. go underground---the most interesting music and most interesting graphics live there.

I don't think I've ever held a record in my hands, or have been close enough to touch one.

A lot of the problem with CDs is because of the Loudness War.

That's just sad....I still have most of my vinyls.

Back about 3/5 of my life ago, I shared an apartment with my best friend. We'd drink a lot and I had a penchant for spending a portion of my unemployment checks on vinyl. One purchase was 'Best of the Guess Who', which came with a huge poster of the group in pink and black....
After a couple of tequila sunrises or screwdrivers(memory is hazy about that detail), my roomie and I said "Let's hang the poster over the stairs!" (Our upstairs apartment had its own private entrance, thus its own staircase). I grabbed some thumbtacks and, being the taller of us two, stretched out over the stairs and hung our newest wall art. Cooool......







The following morning, we noticed I'd hung it upside down.....

I think you are confusing cd's with mp3's.


I respectfully disagree.

this was certainly true in the infancy of digital music, when analog recordings were first being digitized. the initial digital mastering of many great records suffered in that respect (a prime example being the Led Zeppelin catalog,which was dreadful upon first cd release, but was later remastered by Jimmy Page himself and suffers no loss of fidelity in comparison with vinyl.) and in today's recording industry, most (all?) music is digitally recorded by highly skilled professionals. the initial short-comings of digital music have long since been overcome.

and, in fact, there are many great records that sound better now, on CD, than they ever did on vinyl...with detail heretofore unheard able to be brought out, due to the precision that digital mastering can bring.

let's face it, other than rap DJ's who use vinyl for scratching, vinyl is nearly as dead as 8 tracks.

My employer has a significant vinyl collection--it takes up one half of his garage. Pretty impressive, if you ask me. I love it because then I get to listen to all of my favorites as they were originally meant to be heard. He even has Sade's Diamond Life, of all things.

But I prefer my iPod because it goes with me everywhere.

And some artists put a lot of effort into their liner notes--even if they are with CDs. Look at Muse's last two releases. I used their last release, "Black Holes and Revelations" in an English class I was teaching to illustrate symbolism to the kids in a way they could literally see--and then let them listen to the music to draw their own conclusions. It was probably one of the best classes I've ever taught. The point is--it's out there if you look for it, and if you listen to artists that care about it.

VERY interesting article...I may have to restate my previous post after I've finished reading and processing the article.

in any case, thanks SM

Maybe you have a point. I have no endearing stories about CDs, and in fact I wouldn’t complain if tomorrow there were no CDs in the world, just as long as they were replaced by something of equal or greater convenience. Shoot, I can’t wait for the day when you might be able to just download the music to your brain. No physical copy to speak of, and I could just turn the music up in my head and tune people out.

This has been repeatedly and consistently disproven. Modern pressed CDs present no audible difference in sound quality, even in audiophiles. In double-blind tests with so called "audiophiles" who claimed to hear the entire spectrum and beyond (15 - 20,000 Hz) were unable to determine what was CD and what was a record.

This also assumes a perfectly preserved vinyl record, of which there are very few. CD quality music can be reproduced thousands and thousands of times without a loss of quality (as there always is in analog reproduction).

To the OP:

I think that CDs will start doing more of what you describe; as RIAA lawsuits continual to fail and the prices of songs go down, marketing such as that will become more and more important.

I recently bought the "Year Zero" CD by Nine Inch Nails, and it had a cool packaging/marketing.

"On February 12, 2007, fans found that a new Nine Inch Nails tour T-shirt contained highlighted letters that spell out the words "I am trying to believe."[9] It was discovered that iamtryingtobelieve.com was registered as a website, and soon several related websites were found in the IP range, all describing a dystopian vision of the world fifteen years in the future.[10] Many events reported on these websites take place in the year "0000." Digit Online later reported that 42 Entertainment had created these websites to promote Year Zero."

Even better, the CD itself was black, but after you played it once in a CD player the black wore off, revealing a white background with black lettering to the same website. Neat stuff.

JinnKai...that reminds me of the debate about the merits of high-end (read high $$) audio cables...the ones with the gold-plated jacks and/or gold braided in the cabling itself.

I've seen data from an electrical engineer that says that the whole thing is a load of bullocks....unless your cables are over 50 feet in length (which few are) then plain old copper speaker cables are just as effective and way cheaper.

Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick actually opened out into a full-size newspaper. Beatles Magical Mystery Tour came with an album-sized booklet of photo stills from the movie.

The sound quality of analog (vinyl) sound is more "three dimensional" to the ear whereas the discrete point sampling technique of digital audio is always flat and two dimensional sounding to me. For example, if I listen to "Twist and Shout" on vinyl, I can "hear" Ringo's drums as actually behind John's vocals. However, digitally-recorded audio seems to have all the instruments and voices side-by-side in a line without anyone being "behind" anyone to give the three-dimensional effect.

Easier to hear than it is to explain.

I only have the vinyl, but Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is 'split' in stereo, in that you can hear some of the music in one speaker, some in the other-does the CD do that? It's also a cool thing to hear The Mama's and the Papa's California Dreaming that way. Turn one speaker off and all you'll hear are vocals, no intrumentals at all. I know that it's that way with almost any recording made before the 80's...

I actually remember riding my crappy 10 speed 8 miles one way to pick up the released-that-day album "Powerslave" by Iron Maiden. Still have it with the shrink wrap. I spent hours looking through all the hieroglyphics in the artwork to find all the oddball whimsical stuff that they tossed in. You don't see that with the CDs, although I admit that stuff is getting more and more creative.

Still have all my child/teenhood records, including some 45's. Just wish I had a record player still.....

I must have the PG version....she has a top on

Heh.. CD what nows? I never grew up in the record age.. i played a few when i was real young, but really i started out with a bloody tape deck. Cant say i miss those one bit. My old 69 merc half ton i had when i was 16 had a 8 track in it.. it was kinda neat to have something super old but still have the good old g'n'r, ccr, alice, ect on 8 tracks, but that got old quick too. cant say i miss it either..

And now cd's.. i havnt played a cd in about a year and a half now.. not with the satalite radio and mp3 players around. And i definatly do not miss them either.

Vinyl > CD's any day.

Of course being a DJ I'm a bit of a purist. I can't stand these fucking dj's who spin using iPods and I'm even pretty biased against those who use cd spinners (no offense king)

I'm a product of the vinyl era. There was something about those records that had...I dunno..."depth". Life. A soul. I don't get that with CDs. 8-tracks, on the other hand, sucked. I don't miss them at all. Cassettes? Although better than 8-track, by far, I still don't miss 'em. Cds do have excellent sound quality. But they don't "breathe".

Oh, and I still have the Zenith stereo that I bought with my $2.90 an hour McJob, back in '79. Turntable...intact. 8-track...intact. Cassette deck...intact. Tuner...intact. Along with those giant assed Allegro speakers. I'll still go down to the basement, from time to time, and listen to My Pink Floyd, my Meatloaf, my Billy Joel, and my Boston LPs.

cool, i didn't know that about thick as a brick...as for the audio...

both the rolling stones let it bleed and david bowie's ziggy stardust came with the disclaimer "to be played at maximum volume" and, they were right, if you did, you heard "more" stuff, like you were saying with the layering....

that's what i'm talking about...i would spend hours looking at the covers, seeking little inside jokes and such....

wierd....honestly, on mine she is topless....

That was due to limitations in multi-tracking back in the 60's. Pretty much all Beatles stuff recorded in 66-67 are done that way - Yellow Submarine, All You Need Is Love, Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite, Strawberry Fields, etc. All the vocals are smashed into one stereo channel and if you turn off that channel you lose the vocals completely.

Sidenote #1) For an unexpected treat-mistake, put the headphones on and listen to Mamas & Papas Creeque Alley. All the vocals are in one channel (left, I think) and all the instruments are in the other. But the best part is near the end because you can tell that they completely re-recorded all the vocals directly onto the same track where they had recorded them previously but they stopped the recording before the end and a slight bit of the earlier vocal recording suddenly jumps in during the fadeout. If you listen all the way to the end you'll see what I'm talking about.

Sidenote #2) I usually have to go into a big explanation to my music classes about what stereo actually means and what it is. To be as simple as possible, "stereo" is an audio illusion. In order to have stereo, you must have two speakers (one speaker would be mono, which is what all the old transistor radios and record players used to be). In order to achieve the stereo effect, the listener should sit equi-distant between two speakers at least six-feet back. Then, if you close your eyes while listening to music recorded in stereo, you will be able to "hear" sounds coming from places directly in front of you where there is no actual speaker. I used to have students "map out" exactly where they heard each voice and instrument coming from in relation to the two speakers on each extreme left and right.

Fun stuff.

Sidenote #3) Give me Sgt Pepper, Abbey Road, Magical Mystery Tour and one hour and I'll have you totally convinced that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by an imposter. Hey, all the clues are right there on the album covers. Try that with a CD......

Sidenote #4) Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy album and Blind Faith's only album are impossible to find anymore because they both have naked children on them. The Houses of the Holy CD has fake stickers placed carefully around the cover art and the Blind Faith album is probably worth 5 years in prison if you're caught with it (just kidding, but it is rather unusual in today's times).

Haha, records. You wanna talk about vitage? I grew up in the family that owned a reel-to-reel player as well as a record player. In my childhood, my favorite children's stories were vinyls. In fact, we haven't owned a CD player of any kind until 1998, when I was 12.

I was just about to mention that album. It's all about whether the record company thinks it's worth the money to get creative like that.

On the inside cover of TLC's last album Fan Mail they printed the the names of everybody that was a member of their official fan club. Not much, but that should count for some measure of creativity.

I'll be the new-tech junkie and express my love for CD's. Scratch a record, it's' ruined. Scratch a CD, you can fix it. An old CD player has never eaten up a disc like a tape deck ate my Eric B. & Rakim album. Old hi-fi's look cool, but i think CD's sound better.

I do miss album art. But I have to disagree with the notion that it's laziness that prevents artists from creating album art for CDs. The cost of printing has increased (just price the difference between a single sided CD cover vs. a booklet) and the benefit of album art is diminished by the size of the CD insert. Plus, most artists couple a CD release with a complete website redesign anyway -- if they were really smart they'd allow people to download the equivalent of album art. I'm sure some bands do that now anyway.

As for the sound quality debate: Yes, some things sound better on vinyl and some things sound better on CD. The process of recording music for the two mediums is very different.

CDs do allow for a much, much higher dynamic range. You can get really loud booming bass and screeching highs. In the old days those loud passages could cause the needle to skip on a record. But it's not just the loudness that you get with CDs, you can have a very soft passage in music that doesn't get buried under the sound of scratches and dust.

The problem with CDs is the same problem with any digital medium: bits. Digital recordings aren't "smooth"; they have edges which you can actually hear in very soft passages (such as during a fade out). It's sort of like a low-res JPG where you can see "blocks" in the images. This can also show up in the louder passages as a shrill feel (a lot of people call it "cold").

The loudness war is another problem ... just because you CAN make a CD very loud, doesn't mean you should. When Roachboy was talking about compression he wasn't talking about MP3 compression (which is file size compression). He was talking about compressing the music so that the soft parts are just as loud as the loud parts. It's a little hard to explain.

I also grew up when an "album" to me meant the vinyl LP format, so I have a pretty large vinyl record collection, including mostly 33-1/3 rpm 12" LP's but also a lot of 45rpm discs of the typical 7" variety, these are mostly the small singles, but some large 12" discs were also cut at 45rpm for increased fidelity; and I also have some older 78rpm LP's. As it became obvious that records were becoming obsolete, I wanted to hear them as well as possible and also play them in a manner that would preserve them as long as possible, so I "tooled up" and got as good of a turntable/tonearm/cartridge system as I could afford which complemented my already decent above average sound system ...so I was a mild audiophile I guess.

I also still have my original Motorola 8 track player as well as one of the best Akai cassette tape players they ever made. Prior to CD's I used the Akai to record vinyl discs for listening as background music or at parties where the improved sound from the vinyl disc was a moot point.

The early CD's lacked most of the nice graphic and printed materials already mentioned above that were part of what you got with records, but more recently we're finding additional information on the discs that can be viewed on a computer monitor/other screen and which is a nice enhancement that I think compares favorably with the old records.

Also, I agree that the first many years of CD production mostly sounded like crap compared to records. But there have been vast improvements in CD production so now they are quite good. I probably don't have the latest and greatest CD's and digital playback hardware from a sound quality point-of-view, so the best aural experience in my home is still playback of the best produced records I have. Some of these are the "direct to disc" cuts where the analog feed from properly placed microphones was fed directly into very special amplifiers that drove the actual master disc cutting heads, and then a limited number of discs were pressed from those direct cut masters. In any case, my best vinyl discs that can demonstrate their capability for realism often ellicit comments along the lines of "...it sounds so real it gives you chills and makes your hair stand up...". But the "problem" with any advanced audio vinyl record format (or other more modern technical demonstrations) is always the limited selection of music made in that format, so if music is your primary interest and not sound quality, you have to find most of your pleasure in more conventional formats.

Alright, vinyl is cool, I'll admit. I listen to my parents collection, and there can be a lot fuller sound. But the comment that "Thats how they were meant to be heard" is pretty absurd. If they had good digital technology back then, that's what they would have used.

No disrespect to vinyl lovers, but vinyl was simply the best technology they had. It was the best sound quality that could be achieved then. Thats why they used it.

That said, I agree with the album art. A larger canvas definitly offers more options, but as someone mentioned the latest tool album... Cool stuff can still be done.

Kiss Lovegun had a real gun that when drawn quickly would make a loud bang sound!

album art and inserts really suffered from the diminutive CD jewel case. The long box was tried but failed since it was a waste of materials for the most part. I recently was in a store and saw some brand new CDs in long boxes. It was surreal.

personally though for the music itself, don't care about the format.

We have our Pioneer tuner, JVC tape deck andTechnics turntable, but I don't know where to get a stylus for that so I can play my LP's. Way back in the 70's and 80's, compilation LP's were pretty popular and I have a LOT of those-it'd be great if I could have a setup to put some of that obscure music onto CDs.
When CDs first came out, a friend of ours got a CD player for Christmas and, at his New Year's party, played a Dire Straits CD and LP almost simultaneously to point out the differences in sound. He did it as well with Bruce Springsteen. Problem was that at that point in time, the music was just basically a transfer of the master recording to CD format, more than likely with little or no remixing, so the changes in sound were slight-the biggest difference was that damages, like scratches and wear, weren't an issue with the CD, so no distortion.
Also, in the first few years of CD production, everything released was new-LP's previously released weren't remixed to CDs right off and it made it very difficult to get older music in the newer format. I'd venture to guess that some of the compilation LPs I've acquired have music that would only be found in peertopeer sites now.

anybody remember cleaning the sticks and seeds out of your stash in an open "on the threshold of a dream" album cover? can't do that in a CD package...

There are a lot of misunderstandings about the technical merits of each format. In terms of accurate sound reproduction, digital is clearly superior. The fact that it's sampled doesn't imply any meaningful loss of quality. Sampling only limits the maximum frequency that can be reproduced, which in the CD's case is 22 kHz, well above the limit of probably 99.9% of human hearing. Few people past their teens can hear over 18 kHz and it gets worse with age and noise-induced damage.

Furthermore vinyl can't generally reproduce frequencies over 20 kHz either. Even if anyone could hear them, or if the vast majority of amplifiers and speakers could reproduce them, even a brand new vinyl on a good system probably won't be that good, and it gets worse with age and wear. After a few plays you probably won't be getting much over 16 kHz. Just because it's an analog format doesn't mean it can reproduce any analog soundwave; analog systems have limitations just the same as digital and usually worse since high-quality analog components are hard to design and expensive. The 'warm' sound of vinyl is caused by distortion plain and simple. But I'm not going to tell you that music sounds worse with analog distortion because it's purely a subjective opinion whether it does or not and I see the merits of both arguments.

Anyway I own plenty of music on both formats. There is definitely something appealing about having a physical representation of your music in vinyl, and in fact, vinyl will probably outlive the CD just as it outlived the cassette because CDs are highly disadvantaged against internet distribution, flash memory, and hard drives while vinyl has those certain benefits that can't be replaced. In the future, if you want the artwork, you'll buy the vinyl, and it will come with a code to allow you to download the album in digital format and you'll have the best of both worlds.

If you can remember that, you probably didn't do it :D

Without knowing the turntable model and the cartridge brand/type and/or the stylus type, I can't say if it's still available or not. But it probably is. Try some of these more obvious places first and PM me if they can't help you, then we may have to look at more esoteric, and expensive, sources. Of course in many major cities, like NYC or here in Philadelphia, you can still find stores where you can buy this stuff in person.

http://www.needledoctor.com/Online-S...acement-Stylus and also look in the Phono Cartridges section

http://www.needlefinder.net/

http://www.elexatelier.com/ateliercart1.htm

http://www.everythingradio.com/turntable_needles.htm

..

there is a lovely audiophile store in philly located in a norton motocycle repair shop around 5th and arch (if i remember correctly, but i could be shifting it south a bit) that you can go to and dream about tube amps, electrostatic speakers, optimized turntable configurations while listening to playback that etches itself into your skull. the kind of sound that spoils you. the kind of sound that prompts you to think that digital, with all its advantages of total reproducibility and almost creepy absolute silence between sound-events, really just doesn't do it in terms of complexity and depth. i am sure that as you sit there, you could also read various studies from consumer magazines that would persuade you that what you are experiencing is an illusion, but it hardly matters as the illusion is consistent internally and so is no different than any other aspect of being=alive. but then again, this perception of superior sound quality might be triggered by the visual aspects: sitting in a chair looking at a wall of tube amps constructed by design fetishist producers and huge flat speakers does have an effect on what you hear and how you hear it, not to mention on the quality and orientation of listening, which is a disposition toward hearing. and hearing is a socially and historically contingent mode of organizing sonic information. if you can measure frequency responses and align them with purely physical responses in the workings of the ear, you are measuring a physical relationship, not hearing and certainly not listening, so perhaps these studies that show your experience in that chair isnt really happening serve mostly as comic fodder, something to make you laugh. and the idea that hearing can be treated as a discrete sense is also kinda silly, given that your everyday experience--like moving up a street on foot, say--demonstrates that what you hear and how you hear it is totally tied to what you see and how you see it. if you want to hear 360 around your head, you have to close your eyes. same logic obtains for the relation of graphic information and music when you encounter a cd or record: what you hear and how you hear it is shaped by what you see, what you read, how you understand it and whether that visual material can function for you to organize projections into the soundspace because projection is central to hearing and listening just as it is central to the experience of space, whcih only exists because of our way of percieving sequence or multiplicity.

The Led Zeppelin Remasters set sounds awful, everything is clipped and muffled. I've never heard a decent quality Zeppelin CD.
The only problems that can be caused by cables are corrosion on connectors, bad connections, signal loss over long distances, and electromagnetic interference. I work in A/V, and as long as your cable is designed for the load you're putting on it (no, a $5 Radio Shack cable will not power your 800W speakers without melting,) there's no difference unless there's a lot of interference.

If you live under high tension power lines or next to an obnoxiously powerful radio station, you might have to shell out extra for well-shielded cables, otherwise you're better off buying whatever is on the shelf, or better, making you own so you get exactly what you need and don't have extra cable lying around to absorb interference, attenuate your signal, or electrocute your cat when he chews through it.

I'm too young to have been around when they were still actually releasing vinyl, but luckily my parents have a huge collection. I've listened to my dad rant many, many times about the superior quality of vinyl versus CD. And now after years of comparing, I definitely have to agree. The depth in sound on vinyl is just gorgeous... you can't seem to get the same kind of power from a CD.

As for the album art... I wouldn't say it's necessarily worse on CDs, it's just less versatile. Has anyone mentioned Led Zeppelin III? With the spinning layer? I just love that. They couldn't reproduce that on the CD.

A radio guy and old rocky-rolly DJ I have listened to, Steve King, had maintained that the best quality music and sound came not from a digital CD but from a well maintained phonograph....

He backed that opinion with that of "The Absolute Sound" magazine

I choose to believe that...

/misses pops and hisses and cue burn

I havent heard the Remasters set, so far as I know. What I have is the box set that was released in 1990, though I got mine a few years later. These compare favorably to the original vinyl records. In some cases, there is vast improvement. Specifically, anything from Led Zeppelin II, which was dreadfully recorded in the first place (the entire album was recorded while they were on tour, using any equipment that was available...also it was rushed into pressing so that very little post-production was done).



There is something that I think many of us have been overlooking in this discussion and that is the role of the playback equipment. Just as records always sounded better when played on good quality equpiment, so do cds. And most people balk at the price of a really good cd player and speakers. I have to wonder how much this plays into the formation of all these opinions we are expressing.

actually, the album cover art was the original intention of this topic, cool album covers, but the audio quality discussions are pretty great.

i totally forgot about led zepplin III, thanks for bringing that one up. that's what i'm looking for, cool album covers that did stuff....

like led zepplin's in through the out door which came in 4 different covers that supposedly made a story when you put them together. i've only seen one cover...damn, zepplin had lots of cool album covers...

Amen squeeb.

I buy vinyls for two reasons:
1) sounds better
2) it gives me the right to have all this downloaded music on my hd. if the riaa ever comes and knocks on my door, i can just say I ripped the music from the vinyl.

This website--turnmeup.org--has a GREAT short video that explains the problem with the Loudness War.

nice find vanblah...very interesting. thanks.

Let's see:

spectre wrote: Some cd's include liner notes?

I have over 1100 of the damn things and I can count on one hand the number that don't have liner notes of some kind. In fact the ones that don't have any liner notes are from older albums that have been re-released on CD. Unless you're talking some ultra-low budget DIY "punk/emo/indie band that is self releasing the album, every album these days has liner notes.

roachboy wrote: If you like analog tape hiss and pops and scratches from the dust on the record, then sure it sounds better then CD's.

And we seem to have yet another believer in the bullshit myth about records being "warmer" then CD's.

That isn't due to the album being pressed on vinyl, it's due to the recording being done using analog instead of digital.

And the sound on CD's isn't compressed all that much, not enough for the average music listener to hear. In fact, there is a much greater chance of having a high end record player play an album too slow or too fast then for a CD to have an awful sound balance.

As for not being able to hear the low end on CD, but being bale to do so on vinyl, please. It is the exact other way around. try listening to the last 1:30 of The Beatles A Day In The Life on vinyl and then on CD, or better yet listen to Strawberry Fields Forever first on vinyl, then on CD. The difference in sound quality is astonishing; the vinyl is quite muddied and tons of stuff gets lost in the mix, while on CD all of the individual instruments can be singled out.

And I think that CD booklets these days are pretty damn good, now that people have figured out how they can use the space provided.

This is what roachboy was talking about when he mentioned compression:

http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/...s/dynamics.htm

You are comparing apples to oranges with your analogy. If a record player plays an album too fast or slow you can adjust it. You can't adjust the compression on a CD.

"analog tape hiss and pops and scratches from the dust on the record" = warmth

Also:

They're great for those silly life scenes where you break up with your girlfriend, she's throwing things at you... and runs out of plates.

Or High Fidelity style stuff.

To my mind's ear, those sounds are more like cold, hard, white noises than what I would consider "warmth". Not to say I like too warm either, since that's just another type of distortion that has to be balanced overall as much as possible.

Re: the sound of a record.

Look, most people don't seriously listen to music unless they are at a classical music concert orfor a few years when they're teenagers and think that Motley Crue/Britney Spears/U2 (insert name of act here) is writing songs for them and them alone. The vast majority of people listen to music as background noise. By that imean that they are aware of the music/song and may even sing along, but they aren't putting a conscious effort into listening and trying to separate the instruments in the mix or trying to see if everything stays in the same key.

Most people could give a shit about that kind of stuff.

And while I love music and played in a band for 7 years, I never bought into the whole "records have warmth while CD's don't " argument, simply because, as I stated above, it isn't true.

The sound differences aren't due to the material that the music is etched on vinyl for records and silicon/sand for CD's, the difference is due to whether the actual music was recorded on digital or analog equipment.

ws: so you were/are (?) a musician--but the post above reads like you imagine yourself the only musician on tfp.
that'd be wrong, sir.
just saying.

but it seems that the musician background works to enable you to imagine that what you think about vinyl vs. digital playback (and digital vs analog recording technologies) must therefore be true--not only that, but "objectively" true.

it makes little sense to project for yourself what "most people" key on when they listen to recorded music or even to sound in general. you dont know what "most people" do.

there are self-evidently differences between analog and digital recorded materials in themselves that go beyond the question of the technologies used to make the recordings. but let's keep your terms as you set them up. listen to any of rudy van gelder's engineering jobs for blue note, particularly those he did in the early 1960s. these are beautiful, precise, clean and lovely recordings that demonstrate something of what analog recording technologies, good acoustics and precise mic placement can do. the vinyl versions of these recordings are beautiful things---in the dimension and clarity of the sound image, the range of nuance captured off the instruments, the almost alarming presence of the sound in the space of playback. the digital versions of these bluenote recordings are obviously subject to engineering choices made in the remastering process---and there is considerable loss in the translation.

now you would probably argue that these are analog recordings being transferred to digital so the point is not fair: BUT THIS IS AMONG THE TYPES OF MUSIC THAT I LISTEN TO and given that the thread was about vinyl vs. digital preferences in general, it was and remains not a problem to state my preference.

if you are going to make claims concerning "objectivity" then it pays to actually learn the dataset you are talking about. in the case of this thread, you do not really know what kinds of recorded material folk consume, so your claims are kinda random.

you and sion seem to think that there is some criterion of purity of reproduction that stands like an a priori over how Everyone evaluates recorded objects. to my mind, that assumption speaks to limitations in your understanding of the conceptual possibilities that one can bring to bear on the manipulation and appropriation of sound. you do not have anything remotely approach a lock on these games.

for example: as vinyl objects, records are subject to deterioration--surface noise, damage, etc.: now you seem committed to a fairly old-school aesthetic in terms of recording as reproduction--i am not: i see recordings as separate from what is recorded, versions of a performance that differ in fundamental ways, objects in themselves that can and to my mind should be marked as a function of their autonomous histories as objects. surface noise then is a marker of that history, of the separate trajectory of that particular recording and also are a way through which particular audio environments can emerge from within a general one. so i see surface noise as compositional elements, part of the soundscape, part of the sound image--and the deterioration of a recording as a kind of organic compositional process. like any such process, not every outcome is equally pleasing or interesting, but often they are. so i fundamentally disagree with what appears to be a structuring assumption behind your aesthetic. i find something kinda creepy about a recording that is exactly the same every time you play it. and while i listen to alot of digital recordings these days, i still find something creepy in the dead silences between pitches--i prefer the grime of the passage of time.

listening is a variegated game and there is no single set of rules that shape it.
because there is no single set of rules, it follows that there is only a very limited value in claims to "objectivity"--unless you prefer to flatten listening into some automatic response in order to subject it to measurement--but why would you want to bother with that? the idea that you can do it simply indicates that you havent thought about listening as a mode of attention or even about hearing as a mode of perception. from your posts, it seems that you think about frequency ranges and physical response limits. so you will find you positions to be "supported by objective data" and i will find those positions to be interesting in some ways and not in others--such information speaks to the physical response level of perception, which is important but which is certainly NOT determinate of the peception itself (e.g. think abotu that famous story re. audiences at the premieres of some of schoenberg's work--apparently they could not hear any structure at all in his work simply because 1. 12-tone rows violate the conventions of phrasing that are typical of european music so 2. the ability to recognize structure is a social-historical variable---the trick is that were you to measure the frequency ranges and so forth for these pieces, you;d have to conclude that these audiences were "objectively wrong"--a claim that i would regard as objectively stupid, were you or anyoneelse to make it. the point is that hearing/listening are not a simple as your approach to them would lead you to think.)

i dont think recordings are accurate--they are the products of genre rules and technical conceits shaped by them. these genre rules determine the nature and character of accuracy. most old-school recording aesthetics prefer to mic instruments so that the illusion is given that they are not being recorded in any particular space--presumably in order to enable the acoustic parameters of the playback space to be the only relevant ones. ambient micing seems to me far more accurate than this old-school close micing. sounds unfold within particular spaces. the space of recording is relevant. the acoustics of that space often generate sounds that from a viewpoint like yours "do not exist" but from my viewpoint these are often among the most fascinating of sounds in a recording---its like the atmosphere begins to sound itself. so the criterion for accuracy has to do with reproducing the sound as it unfolds within the space of recording and not with the sound only as it unfolds for a consumer. so there is not even any agreement as to what counts as interesting in the evaluation of recording as a process. no agreement as to microphone scheme--and this is important because the recording technology itself is only part of the recording process---microphone quality an placement is self-evidently a factor as well--and each microphone scheme presupposes an aesthetic--and there is no agreement about whether that aesthetic is binding outside of the framework of a prticular genre of music.

if you are a bluegrass player, you'd be committed to one approach to micing and to recordings by extension--if you do experimental music, you do not have to accept anything at all about the bluegrass approach.

its like that.

So, given the choice, would you rather hear average music reproduced perfectly, or great music reproduced averagely? I think that's what it all comes down to: audiophiles vs. music lovers*.

I'm in the second category, which is why I don't mind compressing my music onto my iPod, because it means that I can have all of my music available at anytime.


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* I'm looking for a more emotionally-neutral term to replace "music lovers", because it implies that audiophiles do not love music.

maven, perhaps?