Vinyl fetishism is such a cliché it was actually a popular movie in 2000:
Stranger
Agreed. Lowering the sampling rate is a form of compression in that it results in less information being stored. Reducing the dynamic range also fits the same description. These are different problems than data compression which can be lossy or lossless. I was simply emphasizing the idea that all digital recordings are inherently sampled and therefore “compressed” in the sense that information is discarded.
Well that’s just nuts. I am the archetypal baby-booming vinyl-nostalgionado, and I don’t believe I have ever in my life bought a pre-recorded cassette. And I’m someone who, back in the day, actually bought pre-recorded reel-to-reel tapes in addition to vinyl. But cassettes were strictly home-brew things, mainly for use in the car, and for a time, in the boat.
I’d love to have been running a record store back in the day, so that when someone came up with a pre-recorded cassette they wanted to buy, I could hand them a business card from an audiologist specializing in hearing impairments.
Last CD I bought was Billie Eilish’s Where Do We Go When We All Fall Asleep?; how’s that for clashing paradigms?
Dunno why, but I just can’t get used to streaming services (although I do listen to a lot of music on YouTube). Plus, it’s easy to slip a disc into the player in the car.
I was very happy to say farewell to my vinyl LPs, though.
Kimmel was staggered by it and Ringo himself was basically shaking his head at the weirdness of 2021.
But the point about cassettes back in the day was that you could listen to them in your car. I’m sure millions of mix tapes were made but if like most of us you didn’t have the money to buy an album in two formats, getting the one you could take with you was a brick on the scales.
I don’t pretend to understand the math behind the Nyquist theorem. I’m just making a point about a digital representation of an analog reality. Analogy: draw a curved line across a piece of graph paper. Describe that curve using only the points on the graph paper at intersections in the grid. Any such description will always be an approximation, regardless of how high your grid resolution is, because a curving 2-dimensional line with no width will pass between the intersection points even if they’re infinitesimally close together. That doesn’t mean that the approximation isn’t high enough in fidelity for any conceivable application, just that it’s still an approximation.
I know this is accepted fact but my brain has never been able to grok how this is possible. It involves Fourier Transforms so it’s probably just my brain going into some form of shock to prevent itself from experiencing Diff Eq 285 again.
You’re using ‘compression’ in a different way from everyone else in this thread. You’re not wrong that lower sampling rates and lower bit-depths result in less information being stored, but that’s not what anyone else is talking about when they talk about compression, be it dynamic range compression or data compression. You’re talking about any digital format having a finite resolution, which is absolutely true. But if, for example, I produced a photo taken with an early digital camera with 640x480 max resolution, and we marveled the digital ugliness of it, we wouldn’t say the ugliness was due to the image being compressed (even though it probably would be, if the camera produced jpegs) but because of the image being low resolution.
Not all music hipsters are young, after all. 
A good friend of mine is a big music fan, and he’s 54. He has a massive collection of digital music – years ago, he ripped all of his CDs into digital files, and got rid of the CDs. However, about four years ago, he invested in a good turntable and amplifier set-up for his living room, and started building a new collection of vinyl (his old collection having been sold off or thrown away years ago by his mother. He has bought a bunch of vinyl albums since then, a mix of old stuff and new artists.
For him, I think it’s as much about the ritual and the tactile experience as it is anything else, and there is definitely a nostalgia aspect of it for him.
I think you might be projecting a little. Seemed like a few of the folks upthread were using the term as a catchall for quality degradation. I was refuting some of the blanket statements made. In either case it’s all semantics.
This is not true mathematically - this is literally a case where you have to define what “equal” means mathematically on a continuous (hence with infinitely many points to compare) function.
Mathematical ‘equality’ of two signals (or rather continuous functions) is a more slippery concept you might think, which is what Fourier himself had to deal with.
In a mathematical sense a “perfect” reconstruction of sampled data points to the original analog signal is absolutely possible, if they are sampled at a minimum at the Nyquist (Harry Nyquist - Bell Labs had a lot of good applied mathematicians back in the day) rate. Reconstruction to a level indistinguishable to the human ear (or any biological ear) is a much easier condition.
Discrete-time sampling lets you reconstruct a signal with a limited range of frequencies. So 96 kHz sampling is OK for playing music but not to reconstruct a 100 kHz tone. NB that is only one of many considerations in digital audio, as you know.
Thanks for the very interesting discussion, folks.
My point of reference is this: The first time I ever heard a CD, it was around 1985. I heard piano music coming from next door. I assumed they had a piano. When I found out it was a CD I was astounded. I had never heard recorded music sounding so realistic.
This reminds me of a marketing tip for…cake mixes.
The story goes that when Betty Crocker first sold the easy-to-make cake mixes,(“just add water”)-- sales were slow. the process was too impersonal.
Then the company changed the formula so that you had to add eggs, too. The process of cracking the eggs, whisking them , and then adding to the mix made you more involved.
And I feel some of that with my nostagic memories of vinyl. Back then, there was a ritual to playing music…search across the bookshelf, physically pick up the album, slide it out of the sleeve,etc…It kept you feeling involved in the whole experience., and you felt like you were part of the music.
Ahh…the good ol’ days.
Nostalgia is nice, and I can see why some of us old folks want to go back to vinyl.
But for the younger generations…nah, I don’t get it.
Posers.
And now, 8-track tape collectors:
So, if you take a complex audio wave and break it down using a Fourier transform, you’ll see that it’s made up of multiple fundamental frequencies. Some of those frequencies may be above the audible range, and outside of the 2X Nyquist sampling range even though the bulk of the energy of the sound is in an audible frequency. If you sample that wave, then display the output against the original they may look different. Maybe they even sound different in a very tiny way. Aliasing artifacts, perhaps.
But if you first run the signal through a high quality filter like a Chebyshev filter, you’ll remove any frequencies above the Nyquist limit. It should be inaudible, since those frequencies are outside your range of hearing, If you run a Fourier against the filtered waveform, you shouldn’t see any contributions above the Nyquist limit any more. So now you can sample and replay without any distortion or errors.
In theory. In reality, crappy filters can induce distortion, and if the filter rolloff isn’t tight enough it might leave some energy in frequencies outside the Nyquist limit. I believe this is why 4X oversampling is common now - to raise the Nyquist limit high enough to compensate for imperfect filtering.
Early CD players were often pretty bad in this context. They often had crap filtering, no oversampling, and lousy preamps and such. Manufacturers were able to leverage the higher intrinsic quality of CD by saving money on hardware while still producing decent sound. But add in the fact that recording engineers were still climbing the learning curve for proper mastering of digital material, and the result was music that could sound worse than the original vinyl.
Some of the early digital releases of previous vinyl versions were notoriously bad, which probably helped set the belief that Vinyl was still superior to CD.
So it’s true that there are CDs and CD players that sound worse than their vinyl counterparts, but that’s not the fault of digital media - it’s the fault of the music industry.
If you ever get a chance, listen to a good SACD or other uncompressed audio version of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ or some other album known for its sonic excellence in a good listening room. You’ll be blown away.
I have a pretty good audio setup. I built a dedicated home theater a long time ago, treated it with 1" thick acoustic panels (“TheaterShield”), treated the reflection points, etc. I even designed the room dimensions to avoid standing waves. I’ve got excellent Paradigm speakers, etc. I have a good turntable (which I never use), a good quality CD player, etc. I have never heard music as good as uncompressed digital from a good master. Nothing else comes close. Dark Side of the Moon, for example, was remasterd for multi-track digital without dynamic range compression or other modern tricks. DSotM in that room, in multi-channel uncompressed digital, is just amazing.
Unfortunately, the biggest limitation for most of us over 50 is going to be our ears. I think it’s hilarious to see old guys arguing over 18khz vs 20khz frequency range ratings, when their own ears probably can’t hear anything over 12-15k if they are lucky.
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I wonder if his efforts to build that collection were partly motivated by a desire to right this wrong. 
I think there’s a paradox of choice thing going on, too, which is distinct from nostalgia.
When the movies I had were a few dozen VHS or DVDs on the wall, it was easy to pick something to watch. With the infinite scroll of streaming, sometimes I’ll spend more time picking something to watch than watching, and then I’ll watch a little bit and decide to try something else…
I don’t have nostalgia for the crappy quality of VHS, but in some ways it’s easier to be satisfied with a choice when there are fewer options.
Similar for music. I listened to a lot more music when I had 100 cds to my name (or the handful of tapes that were in my car) than I do with every song ever recorded at my fingertips. Some of that is where I am in life and my diminished free time, but some of it is some weird human psychology that is poorly attuned to a world of infinite plenty.
This resonates with me, as does the comment about the “craft” or “hobbyist” take on vinyl
I grew up listening to vinyl. I don’t miss the pops and crackles. I don’t miss cleaning my records with a discwasher and still finding fingerprints later that night. I really don’t miss discovering my favorite album has warped.
I believe the current generation finds the old tech interesting and exotic because they have other options. Vinyl is something they can dabble with and Spotify is what they use daily.