Yes I made a particular issue of the point because I’ve heard vinyl idealists suggest that problems with things like dust are mere “operator error” as if - by cleaning perfectly - one could make vinyl perfect.
Music has always been a cultural touchstone and hype has long been a big part of that (but who cares what pricey cables connect your machines?). My father had a small collection of Beatles, jazz and comedy records and they sounded good enough on his middling record player. The Beatles “red” and “blue” albums had all the words to all the songs printed in the liner and other albums had inserts or pictures that were sometimes interesting or artistic.
I grew up mixing cassettes and graduating from the Sony Walkman to the Sony Discman (mandatory comedy routine - it had a shuffle feature. Who knew which of the ten available songs it would play next?).
When discs came out they seemed much more convenient than anything proceeding them. Despite Spotify I still like compact discs, showing my age, but wish more art and creativity had been used rather than the more common goal of seemingly producing them as cheaply as possible, since they were not that cheap outside of Columbia House. Now the thrift shops sell very decent discs for a dollar or two from people who gave away their collections because progress. Vinyl was about the same price.
On pleasant days, vendors now have a dozen tables worth of vinyl records in boxes for sale outside the university student centre. Anything half decent goes for twenty dollars. What the students see in them now, I cannot say. Probably what students always thought about music - this is different so this is cooler, this is limited so I am part of a select group which can appreciate this, this is music history (or a reimagined version of such). Maybe it is cool. But I do not miss making popcorn in a metal pot or with an electric gadget with a butter melter either.
I feel it’s the opposite. I’m old enough that I grew up listening to vinyl. And when digital came along, I was glad to make the switch because the quality was so much better.
I think the current fans of vinyl are young people who don’t remember how inferior vinyl was.
After decades of LPs with their pops and clicks and surface noise, I happily ditched them for CDs.
But my millennial kids have “rediscovered” vinyl. In their case, I think it’s a reaction to the ease of clicking on Soundcloud, or a random Spotify playlist, and barely listening to it as background music.
They yearn for a more thoughtful experiencing of an album. Instead of having “Crossroads” show up between random songs, they’ll shop around for Cream’s Wheels Of Fire LP, get it home and open it up to get two square feet of day-glo artwork and liner notes, then carefully pull out the disk, cleaning it and cuing it up (after the tubes have warmed up:)… And listen to an entire side of the album in order like Cream intended. It’s all part of “being in the moment” for them.
I’m inspired, and I’m rehabbing my old AR turntable and HK 330c receiver. I’ll be damned if those whippersnappers will have a more thoughtful experience than I am.
Analog (specifically, vinyl) is also an approximation. Getting the needle to stay in the groove for deep bass is a real test of the system. If the needle can’t follow the groove, it can’t reproduce the music completely.
Analog cassette tapes are way worse. The medium can’t handle the S/N ratio, frequency response, wow and flutter, or dynamic range (unless you have a really really good deck) required to be true high fidelity. And prerecorded cassettes were incredibly bad, even for the day.
He’s also on record assaying he hates Harvest, he hates the success of Harvest, and he hates his fans. There’s not much he actually likes. 
This makes perfect sense if you know the wave is a sine.
This however is new information. It seems unintuitive that you could transform a infinitely complex function into a finite set of sine waves.
I think the word to describe today’s vinyl consumption is fetishism. What the CD suggested and what streaming has confirmed is that, at the end of the day, recorded music is just another kind of information. The vinyl LP was the last time — arguably the only time — when music could be appreciated as a physical artifact, with its own aesthetics and rituals. I would never go back to analog formats and replicating my music library on vinyl would require at least an extra room in my house, if not an entire wing. But I get why people miss holding LP covers in their hands, or enjoy the ritual of playing records on a turntable. I just wish that so many of them wouldn’t try to make spurious arguments about the aural quality and just admit it’s not about the sound — it’s about the object.
Hold on there, CD’s are not compressed. The CD Red Book standard for the WAV files is a 44,100 HZ sampling rate and 16 bits per sample per channel. This is completely different from a format like MP3 which uses lossy compression that results in components of the original signal being removed.
Are you arguing that the 16 bit A/D conversion process is somehow compressing the dynamic range of the original analogue signal?
I haven’t had a working turntable for decades, but bought an album the other day just for the cover art.
so much this these days … last cd I bought was E costello and the attractions “all this useless beauty”
Well, an actually infinitely complex function does require an infinite set of sine waves. But, realistically, ears are not infinitely sensitive, so the transform of frequencies humans can actually hear is quite manageable.
Also, I have yet to hear an infinitely long or complex song.
Or perhaps I’ve been hearing it all my life and it will continue well after my death.
a lot of people have always thought that vinyl and to a lesser extent tape sounds more “warmer” and human due to the imperfections of the medium and digital recording just sucks the life and joy out of any recording by making it clinically “perfect” sounding
You can’t do every function exactly with a finite set of waves. The Nyquist theorem is also only relevant if the function doesn’t have any component sine waves outside the 2x sampling rate.
You can throw a record farther, and they shatter much more spactacularly.
I don’t know - you ever watch those ultra high speed videos of CDs being spun to 30K rpm? Those shatters are pretty impressive.
And I don’t understand this obsession with streaming. It’s much easier to make a playlist on iTunes than Amazon. I have nearly 15K songs in uncompressed format on my computer, and they are all good songs (otherwise DELETE), and they play through the good stereo system
And I just bought a CD today.
For new vinyl at least, most albums come with a download code for the album.
And if I’m gonna buy an album in this day and age where pretty much every song that has ever been recorded can be listened to online for free, I’d like to have something tangible to go with it.
Yes, this. To me, the act of collecting is a big part of experiencing music, just sort of encountering it and acquiring it and indexing it and storing it and caring for it, experiencing the physical object and the large-size cover art, queuing it up and listening to it, sharing it and showing it off. All of that physical stimuli makes it a bit more real, makes me look into it a little more deeply, makes me appreciate it more.
I appreciate the ability to find new music on a streaming service by just punching it up and playing it, or to have it in my portable device when I go jogging. But that’s not the collector experience, it’s just not the same.
FWIW I don’t collect vinyl at all, but I collect a few things including CD’s. Even saved the cardboard CD boxes from the handful of early years when that was a thing. As collectors we need to own our stuff, otherwise it’s not really a collection.
Vinyl doesn’t have to be superior, it just has to sound good. The best sounding system I ever heard used vinyl and vacuum tubes, and I’ve heard a lot of fancy systems. Vinyl sounds just fine, there’s nothing inherently broken about the format. Though it is technically inferior to CD, some folks find it a superior experience, which doesn’t have a specification to put on a chart.
True, it seems odd to build waveforms out of only sine waves, but that is indeed what it comes down to. In electronics you can demonstrate this by analysing the frequencies that a given waveform is composed of. Mathematically it can be shown, for example, that a square wave is simply an infinite set of sine waves i.e. frequencies ([Square wave - Wikipedia]).
In practice there are of course no infinitely high frequencies, and on an oscilloscope you can see that when you try to create a square wave you actually have rounded corners, due to the missing high frequencies.
You may be confused by looking at explanations of D/A converters where a sine is built from square steps. Even if that is how the electronics tries to recreate the sine, mathematically speaking the blocky wave is simply a collection of sine waves of varying frequencies. The thing is that the ‘square’ corners are actually due to the highest frequencies. So if you simply filter out the highest frequencies your blocky wave will magically become sine-like. (of course this is simplyfing matters). That is in effect what (as Sam Stone explained) filters do, and the Nyquist frequency is simply the cut off point. I agree with Sam in that I feel that it is better to have a cut-off frequency significantly above the limit of human hearing instead of Nyquist which cuts it rather close.