this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Anyone who says vinyl is better is really just enjoying the experience. And you know what? That's fine. The problem is, some of them do a terrible job of explaining that it's not actually about the audio quality. When it is actually about the audio quality, vinyl is worse, but some people enjoy that aspect too.
I picked up a little bit on the "audiophile" hobby in the last few years because I was bored and was tired of listening to crappy sound systems with tinny speakers and wanted something a little more premium.
In the "audiophile" community there is all kinds of stuff being marketed mostly to those with more money than brains trying to eek more quality out of their vinyl setups using $10,000 "cartridges" and "record cleaning machines" and the like. I have no idea what these people are thinking because a much easier path to getting quality music to your speakers is to use a digital source.
However, I don't know who at this point would use CDs either. CDs are obviously better quality than vinyl, 8-track, or cassette, but these days you can get CD quality (or even better, master quality from the mixing boards) digitally and losslessly via the Internet and save yourself the collecting of disks.
So I think CDs are kinda stuck in no man's land. Vinyl enthusiasts are in a few groups: loony tunes buying $10k cartridges for their record players, people who like the "aesthetic" of vinyl and don't really care about the quality, people who sample / mix / DJ from vinyl...and the overlap between those groups....CD enthusiasts are people who....like the quality of a digital format but want to still....collect things? Dislike convenience? I'm not sure.
long tangent
I am probably at the exact right age and demographic to be a CD enthusiast (it was my primary listening method in my early to late teens so that should trigger nostalgia, I'm a big music fan, and I was one of the few people dorky / techy enough to make "mix CDs") and I cannot imagine ever wanting to go back to CDs...digital files overtook all other source types for me less than a decade after I started having a substantial CD collection. I ripped all of my CDs to digital files at one point and tried to go get some money for a large CD collection I had and watched as the music store guy went over every single (working) CD with a fine tooth comb and explained why I could get $0 for basically all of them at the farmer's market. I wound up dropping the entire box of CDs in a visible place in the store parking lot so someone else could get them for free and then I drove off.Then there's everyone else...if you are OK with digital formats (like most people) you're probably already on a streaming service. CDs provide quality but little else. They're fussy, they require a physical collection, they're easily damaged, they skip, etc. etc.
I would not be surprised if at some point cassette tape sales rebound and overtake CD sales because I think cassettes sit in similar nostalgic / aesthetic territory to vinyl.
As it is, I don't even know what device I would use to play a CD if I bought one. Maybe my PS5?
The funny thing here is that vinyls have everything you're complaining about CDs, but worse.
I can see CDs going the vinyl route in terms of enthusiasm in a couple of decades.
True enough, but vinyl has its own kind of aesthetic because they were original form of distributed recordings. There is also a good reason they are used for DJing and sampling, you can run turntables off of them and do the sampling live in something approaching an "analog" way. There's a huge amount of rap and hip-hop culture around working turntables this way, and prior to the creation of rap, party DJs would do this exclusively live.
We're both just trend forecasting here, and either one of us (or neither one of us) could be right.
But as far as unique advantages and tactile feel go, cassettes seem much more likely to eventually be re-introduced. There is something awesome about being able to record on the fly with them, even if they aren't the best quality...and I, looking back as a person with a large CD collection that only used tapes in my very early youth for listening, genuinely like the cassette format better.
CDs uniquely suck as a portable digital format for listening. I could see some audiophiles continuing to buy expensive "CD transports" or whatever, but it seems much more niche, and much less retro-cool than vinyl or even cassettes do to me.