Unpopular Opinion

It is a textural element. Vinyl doesn't play music at well as digital, but it plays it differently which may contribute a different feeling when listening to music.

I get the argument, especially in today's single heavy streaming nature. I also completely understand the digital to analog complaint. Cds are superior, but there is something about being present for those 4 or 5 tracks and flipping it over to hear the rest, I just stay more plugged in to it. I have always been an album listener. I appreciate the layout of tracks, the thought behind an overarching story, the flow of music from one track to another. A single is great, but in context to the rest of an album, it can be elevated even more. Physical ownership is awesome too, and if the apocalypse actually happens, vinyl can still be played without electricity.

Yeah, I think you're right when it comes to quality alone. Especially with that last text.

To me, vinyl has the following qualities that I like:

• I own it physically, no streaming service can revoke my records against my will
• It just works
• No funky formats, DRM or special technical requirements
• The ritual of putting on a record
• Listening becomes more intentional (putting on a good album vs your random 1000+ track "everything"-playlist)

I can probably come up with more reasons. These are not all unique to vinyl.

There are lots of downsides as well, like price, conveniance, dust, no streaming on the go and so on.

I still like my records though.

Not sure if I agree with you or not. I think technically you are right. But there is a lot more to it than pure quality and conveniance.

Wait til you hear about 4k blurays based on 2k digital masters

Vinyl also has a lot of difficulty with low frequency range, as too much intensity in the low frequency range will cause the needle to skip (momentum of it going up and down on the big sine waves), so it needs to be properly mixed to attenuate the low end. I wonder how many are actually mixed properly for vinyl...and a lot of modern music is intended to have that nice deep low end.

96kHz+ digital is really the way to go nowadays.

Edit: I also just realized if they're doing an analog workflow to create the vinyl, the EQ won't be linear phase and will massively distort the sound (particularly the low end) and now you've lost what the artist was intending to present.

any extant quantisation error is mathematically corrected for utterly and completely thanks to the sampling theorem. 44.1kHz is theoretically enough to reconstruct a 20kHz waveform exactly, and we typically oversample by a factor of 5. of course you could use a shitty ADC to get the data in but with a normal 24-bit one you get 16 million possible positions of a waveform in one time slice. considering that the average JND in humans is around 1dB, giving you roughly 140 000 imperceptible steps between every perceptible one from "vacuum of space" to "head inside a jet engine", this is a pretty big margin.

as for digital filtering, it works on a mathematically perfect version of the waveform rather than one distorted further for every step. it's like being able to filter in parallel rather than in series, meaning the integrity of the wave is preserved until tapeout.

of course you can do analog filtering, both before and after. the noise and artifacts it introduces can make music a lot more dynamic and interesting. but the idea that digital workflows are somehow worse is completely false. if they were, the biggest producers in the world would have stopped using digital filters as soon as they were introduced in the late 70's.

all that said, i completely agree that vinyl doesn't make sense. who would want their music on a format that degrades with every use and is unable to represent the full range of volume humans can perceive?

Edit: flubbed a unit

One thing that I can say that it is useful for is finding music that you will never find on streaming sites.

I love going to the thrift store and finding an album with interesting artwork or something that looks kooky or weird and then bringing it home and playing it.

Like, did you know that the original Dumbledore, Richard Harris, was also a musician and released a couple of albums? Now, I bought the album, not knowing who he was, realizing that his face looked familiar, looking him up and going, oh shit, this is Dumbledore music!

And after listening to it, it was pretty terrible, which explains why he went into acting, but it was still an event that never would have happened had I only relied on streaming services.

Lots of stuff doesnt make sense. If motorcycles were invented today they would never be allowed on public roads.

Just like shooting your photos on film, running your amp on tubes, or traipsing through the woods in the dark with an incandescent bulb flashlight, music on vinyl in this age is just hipsterism. There's nothing wrong with that per se, if that's what you're into, and this is coming from someone who nearly exclusively writes with a fountain pen because of hipsterism (an opinion that did not make me popular on the fountain pen community recently). But at minimum people who do it ought to be honest about it.

Retro is cool and people want to feel cool by being retro and/or bucking the mainstream. Being "better" somehow doesn't enter into it, and claiming otherwise is inherently disingenuous.

History is littered with formats that were contemporary to LP records that people don't go all starry eyed over, other than occasionally for historical interest. Compact cassettes and eight tracks leap to mind.

I don't have your answer, but what you said mirrors what happened when music on cd came out. The discs would be marked DDD or AAD to designate whether they had used an all digital pathway (DDD) which was the holy grail, but opposite of what you seek. Recorded digital, Mixed digital, Mastered digitally or analog. Spars codes. Wild. Now my cds are in a box in the attic.

Amen.

People who had formative experiences of listening to music on vinyl associated the crackle/distortion (“warmth”) and the ritual of putting a record on with positive feelings. Eventually, this evolved into the idea that vinyl is inherently authentic in itself (even for music that wasn’t released on vinyl the first time around, like 90s grunge), an idea close to that of vinyl records having souls which CDs and digital files lack.

The recording companies did their best to help this along: other than the margins being higher now that it has gone from being an outdated technology to a luxury format, you can’t pirate vinyl (well, you can, but you just get the lower quality without the magic of the whole package, as anyone who listened to tapes recorded off vinyl records knows). Given how they tried and failed to make copy-protected CDs that play in CD players but cannot be ripped (there’s no provision for DRM in the Red Book CD standard, so any attempts depend on breaking the standard and hoping that it affects the pirates and only them), the death of CDs, and their replacement by collectible vinyl and DRM-encrypted streaming services couldn’t come a day too soon.

I mean, you’re right.

It’s why I respect Adrienne Lenker so much for using an all-analogue workflow.