So you think most people replaced their vinyl so that they could play cds in their car? How common were in-car CD players in the early nineties? At the beginning of the big vinyl/cd swap i can’t recall knowing a single person who had one. And why you so butt-hurt about this?
I think it was the snarky way you phrased your astonishment when it was so clearly obvious why people replaced their vinyl as soon as it as convenient.
Honestly, when you say something like “What amazes me is that people sold or tossed their vinyl and went out and purchased the same releases on CD. Never made any sense to me.”, you’re not really amazed and it isn’t that it doesn’t make sense you to you – you’re just being a hipster, or possibly a Luddite.
And you didn’t limit your astonishment to the early 90’s – as far as we can tell, you’re amazed that people are listening to mp3s rather than listening to those songs on vinyl.
Which remains a dumb way to calculate monetary cost, unless you could have actually been paid for that time.
And do remember that said time is the time to get the record going and to turn it over or replace it. No other time is lost. You want to use the weird system and claim something ridiculous like $60 an hour, you’d still have paid around $2 a record.
I have been a lurker on this site for a few years and never posted. I will use my 1st post to say “Lighten up Finagle!”. Sheesh…
Yes. The genres and music labels I most frequently consume have always been heavy on vinyl from singles to special packages. My kids (8 and 12 now) have had record players and vinyl albums for 4-5 years now (long enough to outgrow their initial musical tastes), too.
Also, I used to make a significant amount of money flipping offline auction hauls via online sales, and I can’t count how many times I got huge lots of vinyl for $1 or had fellow bidders/sellers invite me to their homes to haul away their record collections for free.
I listen mostly to MP3s now. I have not purchased a CD in a couple years. If at all possible now I will buy vinyl with a free download and then burn that onto CD to listen to in my car. But back in the day before every car had CD players it never made sense to me to spend the money and buy a CD when you already had a good sounding copy on vinyl.
That really doesn’t follow. I do a lot of crap with my spare time. I jerk off to porn, I play stupid puzzle solitaire games, I read comic books, I go for long walks on hiking trails, etc. My time is not worth what I get paid in working hours.
And, too, look at the numbers. I’ve got an old LP. It takes me ten minutes of real work to convert it. At my crappy pay scale, that’s around $2.50 of wages. Buying a new CD of the same album – around $10.00
(Finally, I have the “advantage” – so to speak – of a tin ear. An LP > mp3 conversion is, for me, very close to a brand new mp3 or CD in overall sound quality. I really can’t hear much difference.)
So, converting is sound (pun intended) fiscal policy and appropriate aesthetics too.
(Doesn’t apply to everyone, I grant you.)
Not sure about you guys, but I remember that back in the day if we wanted to preserve our vinyl and/or have something to listen to in the car we made cassette tape recordings.
Yep. And I used TDK Super Avilyn metal bias tapes with dbx (not that inferior Dolby crap) noise reduction, and the car player could handle all that. The sound quality on my cassette exceeded that of some of the actual vinyl. When I would record from vinyl, I could hear on the tape when the record stopped - it got quieter! The cassette had a lower ambient noise level than vinyl.
But digitized music has all that, plus instant accessibility for any song. Want to whip up a playlist? Done! And I don’t mp3 anything, except for car mp3 discs (because of the sheer number of song you can get on there. Good for road trips.). Full aiff imports for me. No crappy compression! I’d rather deal with the hassle of vinyl than compress the music.
I can’t count on any digital format being readable in 40 years. But they sent grooved records into space! I buy vinyl for two reasons: To support the musicians I love and get a permanent memento out of it. Lucky for me, almost all new vinyl records come with a digital download, so conversion isn’t necessary.
There’s also the fun of buying old out-of-print albums at Goodwill or yard sales and actually being able to play them. But the playing of vinyl today isn’t why I buy it (I mostly listen to music in the car, or at work, and I need mp3s on my phone for that). I buy it for the ability to listen to it in 40 years, and pass it onto my grandchildren. A vinyl record feels like ownership in a way digital files never will.
Well, a word of warning on that one – my first attack of sciatica was brought on by stupidly lifting boxes of records by myself while helping a friend move. So make your grand kids move those boxes for you.
Don’t kid yourself - the version you’ll be playing for your grandkids won’t be the same as the version you are hearing now. As Trinopus noted, every time you play vinyl it deteriorates a little. In 40 years, in whatever digital format it ends up, my music will sound exactly the same as it does now.
And the space record was a copper disc with gold plating. A vinyl record attached to V’ger would already have fallen apart.
Right. But I rarely listen to my vinyl records. My day-to-day listening is all digital. So in 40 years my records will have been used far less than a 40 year old record has today. And if not, well, I have digital files too and hopefully the 15th hard drive I transfer them to will still function in 40 years, along with the codecs, players and DRM required to make them work.
And anyway, we can listen to Alexander Graham Bell’s voice from a wax disc recorded in 1885. There’s no reason this technology for optically reading old record grooves will stay expensive. It’s just lights and software.
My big fear with digital music is that it is all encoded in ways that may be lost in decades’ time. Many are encrypted. There’s a long chain of technology (and technology companies) that have to stay in place for these files to stay listenable. Sure, I’ll probably convert my files early enough and frequently enough to keep them, at least for the music that is easy to get to and that I like well enough.
But with a good enough microscope you can actually look at the sound waves on a grooved record. The information is right there, for all to see. You don’t need to decode it or decrypt it. That’s why I think vinyl has staying power. I know digital works far better than analog for fidelity and eliminating noise and distortion.
And anyway, like I said, my big reasons for vinyl are paying the artists I love to keep releasing music, and to have a tangible memento with nice artwork to collect at the end of the transaction. The “listening to out of print albums” and “future proofing my music collection” are just bonuses, in my opinion.
Not wholly irrational, but the trend of the art is to preserve backwards compatibility.
For instance, Word will open my old Word Perfect files. (And thank goodness for this!) I’m pretty sure that customer demands will persuade vendors to make their next generation of music players mp3 compatible.
(If not, someone else will compete by selling compatible player apps. The market will provide!)