Lavender Bebble offers good insight into the LP buying (and non-buying) crowd. Vinyl is cool, and tangible, and different, and properly archaic, and cool (did I say that?). The rationalizations concerning sound quality etc. come afterwards.
And driving your car degrades the engine and the tires. Using your oven degrades the oven element, and using your microwave degrades the magnetron.
Degradation was a significant problem back in the days of cheap ceramic cartridges, which were generally found on so-called “record players”, those boxes with a built-in amp and speakers. But modern turntables using good dynamic (magnetic) cartridges use very low tracking forces and properly adjusted anti-skating prevents uneven pressure on either side of the groove. There is still theoretical wear but it can be minimized. I did transcribe my favourite records to reel-to-reel tape back in the old days, as I mentioned, but only because I was a perfectionist nutter. 
Today, I don’t play vinyl very often, as I consider it a specialty component, so wear is not really an issue there either.
The issue I have with streaming services is that by using them, I would be essentially renting the music, at a running cost. I want to own my music, not access it for a monthly fee for the time being.
With 10 e / month as the basic price for quality streaming, and up to 20 e / month for special perks, I can buy a crapload of music on CD, rip 'em into high-quality music files, while having physical backups for decades to come. CD’s don’t take up much room, either.
I’d also like to contribute to the artist, which I find streaming services are a highly ineffective way of doing so. I do want to own my music (in cd form for permanence and ability to collect and perhaps even resell, but play the digital form on phone or kodi) but I also want to encourage the artist to make more. Streaming just does not achieve that.
Which, I would state is a minority opinion these days. Most people have realized they don’t care about owning their own music (this is similar movement in terms of movies & TV) - streaming also allows for better music discovery as well.
Not a “format” per se but I went past the toy section at Target the other day and what did I see but original reissues of the Transformers Ghostbusters and He-Man toy lines, as well as some new GI Joes!
For sure, it’s a minority opinion these days. I tend to see these kinds of things as cyclical, though, just like the 21st Century vinyl phenomenon attests. Owning your music may well make a comeback. Streaming services aren’t forever, their fees are subject to increase etc. etc.
Buying music in no way precludes anyone from excellent music discovery, as streaming happens alongside buying music. I find new stuff to potentially buy on Youtube all the time.
My car has both an analog speedometer and digital readout in the center. I actually find myself using the digital readout more than its analog counterpart. I really don’t understand the arguments saying it’s easier to read the analog output. I guess it varies by person, but I find reading the number at least as fast, but I’d say faster. A digital tach, though, that I like analog (not even sure if there’s such a thing as a digital tach.)
With pens, I’m very particular about them. Or, rather, I should say I have my thought-out preferences, but I’ll use what’s available. I used to do a lot of fountain pen writing but, these days, a blue ink 1.0 mm Pilot G-2 just feels like I’m ice skating across the page when I write. Those gel pens can feel quite buttery. The Sharpie S-Gel 1.0mm is similarly nice. I don’t like the fine or extra fine points — has to be 1.0, which is “bold” with most brands but “medium” with Bic. Those old school cheap hexagonal plastic Bics (Cristal, I think their called) in medium point were my favorite in high school.
It’s interesting to see the fountains resurgence in popularity.
This is my daughter and her friends (early 30s). They’ve said many times they want to own as little as possible. They rent as much as possible. They don’t have cars, they use Uber etc (but when on vacation, they’ll rent something quirky… it’s part of the celebration).
And they’re now almost 100% music streaming. I really miss the days when my kids would buy a new CD and share it with me. Then it was mp3s/AACs, then streaming, then Spotify/Pandora playlists… now I ask “What are you listening to?” and I get “sküllTwizlr665 does remixes of shoegazer with ambient noises on Soundcloud”.
There is! At least in the aftermarket.
Like, for example, I have no idea what number is at the West or North positions of my speedometer (I’ve had this car for 5 years, and an older model of the same one – Mazda 3 – for ten years before that.) I’m sure many of you do. I don’t. I’m guessing somewhere around 30 and 70, but I’m not sure. And I have no idea if my wife’s car is the same. I’m assuming speedometers on various cars differ in the way they’re scaled. It’s just easier and quicker for me to glance at the number and know exactly where I’m at when I’m approaching the speed camera or entering a school zone rather than look at my analog dial.
walks out to cars
Huh. It’s 20 to the west and 80 to the north on both. Is it standardized on cars? Have I been driving nearly 30 years and just only now noticed this?
The “Digital Done Wrong” guy went beyond merely ridiculing it a bit: he essentially said he listened to some Bob Dylan via Tidal MQA and it sounded like shit, and went on to question the engineers’ grasp of even the rudiments of digital sound.
This makes sense if few people go faster than 140…
That’s about the same as all of my cars. I couldn’t say exactly.
It’s not standardized as far as I know, as this was something I had to adjust to when I got my most recent car. Me previous cars were all compact sedans (a Corolla and before that a Saturn) with speedometers that only went up to maybe 110 or 120. They were similar to yours as far as I can remember, with 0 “southwest”, 20 “west”, probably something like 80 “north” like yours. Actually thinking about it further north was probably something more like 60 on those cars.
Then I got my Miata. Being a sports car, the speedometer goes all the way up to 150 (140 is the highest number that’s labeled, but there are dashes beyond that). And they put the numbers in different places, with 0 all the way at the “south” position, 50 “west”, 100 “north”, and 150 “east” (and the last 90 degrees unused). But the thing that took longer to get used to for me wasn’t that the numbers were in different positions. It was that on my previous cars 60 mph was halfway around the dial or more. On this car 60 isn’t even a third of the way around.
I bake sourdough bread (though I’ve been doing it for a couple years before the pandemic crowd started making it hip). None of that store bought stuff, or even commercial yeast. It seems to me that various artisan cooking crafts have come back in a big way. I also see a lot more people fermenting, pickling and canning vegetables. In fact, the “local food” movement has come a long way. It’s easy for me now to buy beef from a cattle farmer an hour away, or buy flour from the local mill. I don’t have to get whatever mass produced stuff they sell in the grocery store. Hell, I used to buy pork from an endangered breed of pigs that a buddy of mine raised and actually got to go meet the hog before I ate him. This sort of thing used to be common prior to the 19th Century, but it essentially disappeared for several generations.
As for vinyl, I don’t buy much physical music, but what I do is usually vinyl. The reasons why have mostly been explained above, but I’ll go into it here. I stream the vast majority of the music I listen to. I have Spotify Premium and love it. But I know the artists don’t get much from Spotify. So the ones I really love, I make sure I support financially, by going to their shows and buying merch. And vinyl records are my favorite merch to buy. First and foremost they’re a memento of the concert and the love I bore this band at this point in my life. Second, they look great, mostly because of their size. That’s mostly it. I rarely actually listen to vinyl records, but I’ll admit it’s a different, more intentional experience picking out a record, putting it on the turntable, sitting down in my favorite chair and just listening to it. As opposed to most of the music I listen to which is just background soundtrack for other things I’m doing. Listening to vinyl is a more active listening experience, more like attending a concert than just streaming tunes while I work.
Most of that applies to CDs too, and I do buy CDs when vinyl isn’t an option. And of course CDs are technologically and audibly better than vinyl in every way. But they don’t have a century of history behind them either. So I lean towards vinyl. Actually, besides in my car, I don’t even have a CD player anymore.
All (modern) tachs are digital. Speedometers, too. The car’s computer reads the values electronically and tells a little stepper motor behind the display to rotate the needle to point to the right number. A fine distinction, maybe, but this thread is mostly about truly analog formats like vinyl records and paper books (do digital tachs lack the “warmth” of their analog predecessors?).
I’m not some high-falutin’ audiophile. That said, if you play an LP in reasonably good shape ( i.e. the grooves are not worn down from 50 years of heavy use ) of a well-recorded album and then immediately listen to that same album on a CD, you’ll hear the enormous difference. A lot of nuance and dynamic range is lost on an MP-3.
I applaud Neil Young and his Pono Player effort for attempting to bring digital files that are uncompressed to eager ears. It was not to be, sadly.
I can hear the difference. I’m not being overly nostalgic. I can hear it. So can you.
I have zero vinyl and I miss it. I also have zero space and money to build up a vinyl collection again.
At one time there was a respectable collection of fountain pens, good ink and fine fiber paper at my side. I wrote all of my correspondence using those tools. Now? My penmanship is atrocious enough that were I to try, it’d be a failed effort.
In the world of audio metering, analog vu meters were THE way to track audio. Screw cute little bars and dots leaping up from green into yellow to red and back down. My god. Our EARS are analog devices. Let’s use analog metering to produce sounds for them.
I would describe this as a personal preference rather than any sort of established fact. The facts are actually the opposite. I don’t have a cite handy but I do remember reading that analog dials are perceived more quickly and with less mental processing than numerical digital displays. It’s much easier to see at a glance when something is not in its normal range. This fact is enormously magnified when there are multiple indicators that are all being monitored. Imagine, say, if your speedometer, tachometer, fuel level, engine temperature, oil pressure, etc were all just a set of little LCD rectangles displaying numbers. Compare that with analog dials, where you can instantly see that all the needles are in their usual, nominal positions. The analog representation is essentially a graphical display, whereas the numbers are essentially text, and we know that graphical displays show many kinds of information much more clearly.
Here is the latest glass cockpit on the 737 MAX (click to enlarge). Notice that despite all the fancy digital stuff, part of the digital screen near the center is used to render analog-style dials as well as analog-style sliders. It just makes a lot more sense from a human engineering standpoint. The circular dials at the top show important engine parameters, with left and right engine comparisons side by side.
