Apropos of nothing, I have a Sears 1976 catalogue where a top of the line HP calculator costs $989. Although this seems like a lot, it has over 150 functions including the ability to do logarithms and trigonometry. Plus it has a two line display.
I had forgotten about the way records smell, but I could recognize it. Kind of like a new car, but more base.
Seriously, make a new playlist. I don’t have any bad songs on rotation, because I’ll delete them.
And there are a LOT of albums that have weak songs. Ritual change every 20 minutes is one thing; getting up to skip a horrible song in the middle of an album is just wasting time you could be doing something else.
Having an album on vinyl doesn’t make the crappy songs better.
“Within You and Without You” is the price you pay for “A Day in the Life”. Technology has made us all cheaters.
That price is too high!
Side 2 has started with When I’m 64 since I learned how to drop a tonearm. 
That’s why I usually set my playlists to random these days so I am never sure what the next song will be.
I’m amazed* that my kid still wants a physical CD or an LP. And he wants to buy the whole album, not just “that one song”, even back when he was very young.
*Amazed, with a smidgen of proud…
.
When I was a kid, that was part of the ‘ritual’ of listening to music. You got the LP out and cleaned it while the tubes warmed up.
(Did I appreciate it at the time? No, I was too young and impatient.)
Am I the only one who loves “Within You Without You”?
No, me too. I’ve always liked it much better as final song of side one than what followed on side two, the old-timey sounding “When I’m Sixty-Four”. I’ve made my peace with “Sixty-Four”, these days I think it’s a charming piece written by a 25 year old, but “Within You Without You” is one of the most interesting pieces of “Sergeant Pepper’s”, an album with a lot of interesting pieces.
ETA: just checked one of two(!) vinyl copies I have of SPLHCB (as well as one on CD, in the Beatles Mono Box), and I see that “Within You Without You” was the first song on side two, with “Sixty-Four” following. I misremembered.
Eastern mysticism vs. Granny music. You make the call.
Which is another thing you could do with a vinyl record. I I had an acquaintance way back when who would buy a new album, listen to it once and then if he decided he didn’t like a particular song, would use a pin to score a fast track lane across that part of the album so the needle would shoot across (with a horrible burst of static) to the next song. I refused to loan him any of my records…
Re: old games
Sure, there are a lot of old games that are bad (see the Angry Video Game Nerd), but there are also many games that are either good or at least better than some stuff today.
I don’t know a single person who plays older games for the ritual. They like them and enjoy playing them.
Where you get into ritual is in actually owning the original hardware and games, especially when you get into collection. But, even then, there are ways that playing on the original hardware can be better. For example, when combined with a CRT television, older consoles often have less input lag. Hence speedrunners and others who play at high skill levels tend to play using that setup.
There are some games I’d love to play again with a friend on an Atari 2600.
In some ways their complete simplicity by today’s standards were a joy to play. Good memories.
I’m much more of a live music guy (tonight I will be going to my 50th concert of 2021). I have a Sonos system throughout my house which isn’t the best overall but is arguably among the best WiFi systems. I mostly stream live concert bootlegs and sometimes stuff from YouTube music. So, the way that I enjoy listening to music at home isn’t conducive for hard media and I don’t own any CDs or vinyl. Even if I did, when I am chilling on the couch listening to tunes, I do not want to be getting up and down and swapping discs.
Heh, I’m a person with more than 1000 records, 500 CDs and at least 5 tube (guitar) amps that I can think of. I don’t know how many digital music files I have in my possession, strung across various devices. They all sound different for various reasons, but that’s not always the reason I own them.
Tubes really do usually sound different when you drive them into distortion than their solid state bretheren. Most tube amps technically get into distortion faster than solid state amps do, but it’s pretty pleasant to the human ear, even when they start to break up earlier than the solid state equivalent. This wasn’t the goal of the engineer that designed those tube amps of the golden era, it was just an accident. We got used to hearing it, and we liked it. It became the “classic” style of distortion. We heard it everywhere.
You can arrange an all transistor circuit so that it breaks up in a way far more similar to a tube circuit, and creates the same type of harmonics. In the era before integrated circuits became common, it was expensive to do this, and most engineers thought you would be insane for wanting distortion in the first place. They were generally trying to design that out of the old tube circuits, anyway. Dissipating power into distortion (or heat) was not their goal. I’ve seen and heard transistor home stereo and guitar amp circuits that did this imitation of a tube circuit very well. Both sound nice, but if you’re a person who actually wants complete fidelity, you’d by a simpler transistor circuit and keep it below its distortion levels. I can’t say which side is wrong, that is a matter of taste, but they absolutely sound different unless the transistor circuit is carefully designed with the intention of imitating a tube circuit’s breakup.
On top of that, yeah. Speakers are important. If you have a set of Altec Lansing Voice of the Theatre Cabinets, they’re probably going to be better for most purposes than whatever 6x9s you might have grabbed at Radio Shack the last time they had a sale.
Any argument of Vinyl/Digital’s superiority of sound is similarly in the ear of the beholder, but as was mentioned earlier, it’s complicated by the mastering/mixing process. If you master for digital, you have more headroom, and can basically put the bass frequencies wherever you want. If you master for vinyl, you have a much more restrictive headroom (your loud stuff can’t be too loud and the quiet stuff should probably keep it to a dull roar), and your bass frequencies will have to be centered between the left and right channels. From the mixer’s/masterer’s perspective, it’s almost like the difference between working in charcoal (or limited color) and pastels for a visual artist. You have a different set of tools to work with, and both can be effective if you master the technique. From the listener’s perspective, it’s more of a preference of “I like that pastel” or “I like that charcoal”. Some people like Neopalitan ice cream, and some like plain vanilla. I can’t say either is wrong.
But, where is vinyl the absolute king? It’s already been referenced in this thread. It’s the best artifact a band has come up with to encase their work in. Someone who buys one gets to own one, and it’s got the durability of a physical object, and requires less technology than just about any other sound medium to decode. I’ve got several records that I love that will pop up on things like YouTube only to disappear later when the poster gets their account pulled for posting something that gets them removed. As long as I own it and take care of it, I will not go without. If I hadn’t had the sense to buy them back in the day, I’d be buying them at inflated prices (to me) in order to hear them in the long interims they were not available through other outlets.
The artwork on albums is at least larger than those of other mediums. For a fan that’s really into a band and not just casually listening, that’s another level of engagement. Those fools who just streamed the songs didn’t get any of this extra content. They potentially may not understand it on as many levels. To be fair, there are some CD booklets and tape cases that have been amazing, and video albums that are pretty great too.
But! If you happen to buy weed that surprises you and has seeds in it in this day and age. Well, if you have any gatefold album handy, that will indeed be handy. 45s and even 10" gatefolds? Not so much. I’ve never tried to separate the stems from the seeds on my phone, and I get few opportunities to try these days.
Oh wait. I forgot to include my mini-rant against newly released cassette tapes. I periodically get or get given cassette tapes. I apologize, even though I own a cassette tape deck, I haven’t bothered to get it repaired in a couple of decades. I have one tape I can’t get anywhere, and when I find it, I promise I will get that deck fixed so I can listen to a recording I love.
But they never sounded great, are probably going to die under repeated listenings faster than vinyl, and just ugh. Publish a CD, it’s slightly more expensive and harder to decode than a tape. But since your cassette is just a giant plastic attachment to your download card. I’d rather you’d laser printed your download code on a rock.
And I don’t hate the medium of iron oxide on tape, but new ones just baffle me. And I own a lot of tube amps, CDs and vinyl records.
ETA: Tapes actually don’t baffle me. They’re the artifact your band can get that is just a little more expensive and a little more durable than a bare download card.
It’s an example of nostalgia defeating logic, science, and good sense. Think of it as the musical version of, “Make America Great Again”.
I’m in my mid-40’s, and back in the 80’s, my music collection (c. 100 albums) consisted of pre-recorded cassettes. Everyone I know of around my age has lived in the cassette age, and has potential for nostalgia in it.
I rarely bought prerecorded cassettes, but I had a deck for home recording, It was an awesome deck. Honest 20-20K response, 95db S/N. I used it for copying records and CDs, and, of course, making mix tapes (the playlists of the 70s and 80s. )
Yes, it was awesome, until it crapped out. Started playing tooo slooow, and the transport wouldn’t start half the time. It probably needed the whole drive mechanism replaced, which would likely by then cost as much as the machine did new. By then I could burn CDs. I still have those, they still play as good as when I made them. But you are right - I have nostalgia for that deck. Watching the blue vu meters, the digital counter. Good times!
Viva la mix tape!
This is what I look for when sitting down to enjoy some music.
I do. I want the music, whether it be Beethoven or the Ramones, to sound like the artist intended. I don’t want technical limitations to get between me and the artistic intent.
I mean, if people love the “ritual” of vinyl so much, why isn’t there a craze for 45s? Or even 78s? I mean, now that’s a ritual! Every four minutes you have to run over and change the record. And entire symphony or rock album takes 10 record changes! You can really be a part of the process!