Vinyl Bargain or Rip off?

dannnielll

They are not deluded for liking something. They are deluded if they believe it is better. As a quibble it was shellac and clay which was the first audio recorded medium in mass circulation. Vinyl was a later substrate.
CDs still vastly outnumber Vinyl by sales, and plays. DAT and Minidisc have disappeared because semiconductor memory in sd cards is superior for robustness . Digital storage on magnetic   hard drives and now including recordable optical  CD and DVD for capacity and longitivity.
The world has moved on. Vinyl by its inherent limitations cannot

shotokan101

Anyone else remember having to tape pennies/half-pennies etc. To the headshell area of the arm on the old stacking/auto-return record players to get them to play problem/warped records?

Jim

dannnielll

Cheat... They did not have Bailey's Irish Cream back in the day!.

shotokan101

You are completely and utterly wrong

"Better" is an entirely subjective assessment unless there is an agreed definition and means of objectively measuring that criteria - some will simply feel that vinyl sounds "better" than Digital media and as duch who is anyone to say that they are "wrong"?

Am I "wrong" because I thing that Strawberry ice-cream tastes "better" than chocolate ice-cream?

or Volbeat's music is "better" than Bach's?  

Jim

gibbsy

You can't knock anyone for wanting a particular form of music, unless they listen to the Spice Girls, but that's another debate. Vinyl lovers will always press their case (pun intended). Is it nostalgia or are they right. It's their choice. I prefer SACD, sadly I simply cannot get, or indeed afford, all the titles I want. CD comes a strong second provided the mix itself has not been subjected to the dreadful loudness war.

Which is best? Does it really matter. As for kit then no doubt buying a £1800 SACD player would have vinyl lovers looking at me with some wide eyes and some amusement. I can sit back and enjoy both sides of an album, replay my favourite tracks and not worry about a build up of dust and debris on any stylus. Having to leave the comfort of my armchair to turn the disc over, take another ten minutes cleaning the other side and do it all over again. Left that behind in the early 1990s.

Or is that just me being a lazy b******.

andy1249

Ive been buying music across multiple formats for decades and it has always been this way.
Certain big names always command a premium and never show up as “ nice price” editions or in bundle promotions.
I remember paying 30 quid for The wall back when it first came out on
CD, and this was when 30 quid was a lot of money.

Stupid61

Yeah. Buggered several records that way! I don't miss the past
Still got all my vinyl though.

dannnielll

Sorry better does imply objective criteria.The word you were searching for was prefers or preferences

Stupid61

Should also have said I agree with Gibbsy about SACD. The few I have are noticeably better to listen to than the standard CD version. Shame my SACD player went bang and I couldn't afford a replacement at the time. I must rectify that.

Derek S-H

I had a feeling you would reply at some point.

First of all, I stand corrected on the origins of Vinyl in the home - apologies.

Secondly, I'm not sure what sales have to do with anything; being popular doesn't always equate to being good. CD is far more convenient than Vinyl I'll grant you that; to use, to store.

Thirdly, we keep hearing about the world "moving on". That's fine, but some of us (many of us, it seems) are happy to embrace new or current technologies without abandoning everything that came before it. I don't know how this Vinyl versus CD "war" came about, but we don't see something similar in DVD versus Blu-Ray (or 4K) so I'm not sure why this is being perpetuated?

The simple fact is, in the same way that a lot of stuff is only ever released on DVD and not Blu-Ray, a lot of stuff is/was released on Vinyl that has never seen the light of day on CD. So what are you supposed to do?

I don't really get the hatred for Vinyl. I love having a turntable AND CD player (and tape deck too!). It's all about the music, after all, and if it's only available on a particular format, then it makes perfect sense to have the means to reproduce it.