My theory is, in returning to the formats of yesteryear, the hope is that somehow the music will be as good as it was back then.
I think that probably captures it pretty well, with an emphasis on different (not necessarily better) sound quality. The gradual distortions that come with use. I have a similar taste when it comes to folk songs, “old times” music, and marches. I mean, I actually prefer some imperfections. I hate polished, technically perfect performances in music that should (in my mind) possess a raw emotional core.
Call it… wabi-sabi.
So I think formats that are not wholly impractical and yet allow for a certain uniqueness through suboptimization or imperfection are most liable to make comebacks.
Not sure it counts as a format but iPods are making a bit of a mini-comeback - lots of people are upgrading their old iPods with new solid state drives and better batteries.
wax cylinder or nothing! 
Brian
I’ve got mine hooked up. nice recording deck. Love those analog VU meters!
Plus no music newer than 1980.
I thought those at least were fundamentally flawed, and stretched over time of usage. I heard that waaaay back in the day from someone who replaced their car stereo 8 track (only one I knew with one back in Scotland) with a normal cassette. Possibly a lack of titles over our way didn’t help either. So it might not be true.
Thumb drives are banned where I work. And the process for getting a hard drive approved by IT is a pain in the butt. So when we need to transfer files between two computers that are not networked together, we use CD ROMs.
There was a point from the late 90’s to a few years ago where until most cars got bluetooth compatibility unless your car still had a tape player it was a huge mess getting stuff from your ipod/smart phone to play on your car’s stereo, as by then most cars only had CD players but nothing for you to play off songs from a hard drive. So I remember a few friends actually getting tape decks installed in their cars because with those you could use those fake tapes that inserted into a tape deck but also connected to your ipod and play music that way.
Speaking of iPods and old stuff, I had one of the early ones – not first generation, but early enough that they still used ultra-miniature hard drives. It was very, very disappointing, and really ironic that it was a major stepping stone to turning Apple into the behemoth that it is today. The hard drive failed no less than three times, replaced under warranty the first two times, and I gave up after the third. But the most surprising thing was how poor the electronics was. The same source file played back on a computer, using the exact same high-end headphones, sounded fantastically better. We’re not talking subtlety here – you’d have to be practically deaf not to hear the difference. The iPod seemed to have a highly constricted frequency response that attenuated both the low and the high end, sounding quite flat compared to a good playback source. I notice no such issues in modern devices, like my current tablet or smartphone. It amazes me that the damn things were so popular.
That’s because iPods played MP3 files, which are pretty highly compressed (in a computer science sense), and that compression is what’s called “lossy” compression, meaning (vastly simplified) that part of the algorithm is to determine what data is and isn’t relevant, and toss the irrelevant stuff. Of course, this isn’t perfect by any means, and causes quality loss relative to something like CD audio.
And on top of that, you had little ear buds which aren’t always known for high quality sound reproduction either.
The reason they were popular is because they held something like 250 songs without having to actually swap anything in or out. They were like the ultimate Walkman in a lot of ways- tiny, held a ton of music, and easy to use.
Some VHS apparently are valuable…this article is from a year ago but Mrs. L said she’d heard something recently about it as well.
You seem to have missed major points in my post about the iPod. I’m talking about the same audio file played back on a computer (or, in fact, another decent media player) and listened to with the same high-end headphones. It was a direct A-B comparison. And the iPod sucked.
Also, a nitpick: iPods certainly did play MP3 files, but those who bought their music from the iTunes Apple store got it in AAC format, which was theoretically superior to MP3 at any given sampling rate (but still lossy, and in those days it was typically AAC @ 128 kbps). And another nitpick: while MP3s are indeed lossy, the significance of the loss depends on sampling rate; at 320 kbps, an MP3 is essentially equivalent to a CD, and most people couldn’t tell the difference at 256 kbps or even less.
The 5th gen ipods use Wolfson DAC chips which supposedly have the best sound quality and these ipods are generally the most expensive to buy because of that. Also if you mod an ipod you can install Rockbox which has a proper equaliser rather than the set of terrible presets that come with IOS. I modded a 7g and put Rockbox in it and it sounds great to my ears although having over 350gb of storage gives me license to save music at very high quality!
Anyway, sorry for the hijack. Taking of formats, one of the most interesting failed formats is RCAs CED. Basically video on vinyl! Company politics kept this format from being released in the mid 70s when it would probably have changed video formats forever. By the time it was released VHS was established. But RCA had spent 20 years working on this format and it proved to be the final nail in the company’s coffin.
But that’s not nostalgia. That’s because gauges are actually easier to read than numbers, in most real world settings. A digital display that shows a gauge is in many ways the best of both worlds.
(I mean, if you want to know whether you are going exactly 55 mph, or 54, the numbers are better. But if you want to know at a glance about how fast you are going, the gauge wins.)
I have a couple old MP3 players that I haven’t used in years, because smartphones, but they do have one advantage over a smartphone: they have physical buttons, so you can operate them without looking at them (e.g. while driving).
Beyond that, gauges show rate of change better than numeric gauges.
Absolutely. Analog gauges convey more critical information at a glance and require less cognitive processing than numerical readouts. Speedometers with only numeric digital displays were used only briefly in a small number of cars, based on the ridiculous rationalization “because we can”. Yeah, but “because you can” is not always the best justification for a radical change in a critically important human interface.
We don’t have weather here in Melbourne, and the roads are, by design, built for a vehicle speed greater than the speed limit, which is also far below the capability of any modern car in good condition. So there is almost never a situation where I care about my speed other than in relation to the other cars or to the speed limit.
I liked having the digital speedometer.
I work part-time at a record store for funsies, and I think this is a big part of it. I’ve been at this store since around 2008, and the clientele has vastly changed. We still have the usual record collectors, and the lifer music scene kids, but what used to be mustachioed hipsters is now overwhelmingly college students that skew more Greek than hip. It honestly took me adjusting some of my ingrained prejudices.
Young people still love music, and they love talking about music, and I think the weirdness of streaming is pushing them toward wanting something more physical. I hate streaming because even though I have access to the whole world’s sounds, there’s something about it that doesn’t stick in my head. I can stream an album and not remember a thing about it. Vinyl (and CDs and cassettes) are more intentional.
We also have a lot more cassettes these days, but it’s overwhelmingly indie bands, electro, and hip hop and other weirdos, and they keep making them but they don’t sell as well as these bands want them to…
Me, too!
Our car instrument pod isn 't designed the best, so it is hard to read the analog gauge under a lot of lighting conditions, but the numerals are always very visible.