The best possible quality of sound isn’t everyone’s top priority. The process of playing vinyl records is fun for some people who didn’t grow up with it.
Why cook your own food? Why sew your own clothes? Why make your own furniture? Why restore muscle cars? Why climb Mt Everest? Why sing? Why dance?
I’ve heard that with vinyl specifically, records are more immune from the “loudness war” because the technology doesn’t allow you to crunch everything down as much as digital does. I don’t know how true this is and I also don’t know if there are better solutions for people who are more discerning in their sound quality than I am and actually care about this stuff.
Over-compression is a real issue in the digital world right now, but the solution isn’t vinyl (and I like vinyl), it’s to stop over-compressing music.
That was literally my point. The world has only been fully digital for a very short time. Just look at your example.
CDs didn’t overtake cassettes until the early 90s and didn’t completely replace them until the late 90s. A massive amount of millennials grew to adulthood in that span.
And CDs are basically the oldest digital technology. Millennials were present for the analog-to-digital switchover for everything else.
But listening to records on vinyl is fundamentally different, in that listening to music is passive, while everything else you mention is some sort of creative/restorative or at the least, active endeavor.
And it’s not the same as having a classic car either; this isn’t some 1967 Mustang or 1935 Ford, it’s like getting an old POS 1983 Olds Cutlass and driving it around because it doesn’t have engine computers or fuel injection. It’s not classic, it doesn’t require any more skill, it’s just worse.
Is it? Only if it’s background muzak, or something like that.
If we listen attentively to music for enjoyment, it’s not passive. Not for anyone who takes music seriously.
“Alexa, play Justin Bieber” is passive.
Is less passive.
The forced involvement in the process is part of the reason why vinyl is currently outselling CDs. It’s not because they sound better, are cheaper or more convenient, it’s because vinyl is interactive, and CDs aren’t.
In fhe meantime, I’m actually listening to quality audio through my itunes, through my component audio system.
I was going to post a picture of a wind-up alarm clock, but Google found this.
I’m not sure what to do with that, mentally. It looks like a wind-up, but it’s battery-operated quartz. And it’s $525, plus tax and shipping, I assume.
The sterling silver tape measure is also mind boggling. Welcome to Tiffany Everyday Objects.
If you’re looking a really fancy mechanical clock there’s the Chronophage (time-eater).
It’s 100% mechanical, except for a bank of fixed LEDs, powered by a wind-up mechanism.
It does all kinds of interesting things – slows down, speeds up and sometimes even stops, but is accurate to one hundredth of a second on every fifth minute.
The grasshopper on top ‘eats’ a minute every 60 seconds, and blinks it’s eyes at irregular intervals.
It’s designed to run for centuries.
Oh, WOW! I will soon be watching all of his videos. Probably more than once.
Thank you so much.
Ooh, bit harsh of the CD there - I can appreciate wanting to see the thinking behind the executions, but everyone works differently. I’d never force a creative to work in a way that doesn’t suit them.
How do you feel about live music? Ambient noise, musicians who make the occasional error, little chance of putting yourself in the sweet spot for the speaker setup. Adds up to “objectively worse”, or not?
Yes, this point isn’t in dispute.
Indeed, I tried streaming to my system once, and the turntable jumped off the rack to knock my phone to the ground. Weirdest thing, one would think that owning vinyl doesn’t actually prevent you from listening to music in other ways, should the mood strike, but clearly that’s not the case.
Well, that’s the thing, innit?
Should the mood strike that I want to peform an ancient involved ritual just to listen to music, I agree there’s no harm. But you’re really not “listening to music”, you’re recreating the procedure that used to be needed to listen to music. The actual listening would be secondary to the totality of the “experience”,
Really depends on the performance. I’ve been to some, and seen a few on TV where the band really didn’t sound too good live, and I was disappointed.
Exactly. I’m kind of looking at all the procedure as basically set-up for the experience itself- i.e. listening to the actual music, not as part of the experience itself. And through that lens, all that business mentioned upthread with zerostats and discwashers is just “overhead” that you have to do in order to not have less-than-optimal sound out of a record. Which is why I’m perplexed- why go through all the hoopla just to have an arguably worse listening experience?
It’s like the difference between having a car with a manual choke and a hand cranked starter vs. a car with a manual transmission. The first is just a bunch of BS you have to go through just to get the car started, while the second is something that’s integral to the actual experience of driving the car.
That’s because you keep ignoring that a listening experience is an experience, and thus subjective. There’s no real reason to explain why people enjoy a different experience. I wouldn’t record a high def version of a record played on a turntable and play that in my car, but I still enjoy those artifacts and the noise when it’s part of playing a record on the turntable. Of course if the record is too scratched the enjoyment goes away, but a record with just a little hiss has more than enough fidelity for me to enjoy the song, and the awareness that it’s being played through a record player more than compensates for any reduction in appreciation that would hypothetically be there.
And I’m not a millennial. I’d been listening to records for a few years when the first millennials were born. Admittedly almost entirely kids music and kids audio plays, but still. I’ve only bought one record myself in my life, back when the millennials were still all in diapers, and never set out to get a record collection, but I’ve ended up with one, and the equipment to play it, and I enjoy that, even though I basically never bothered much with playing music, except for sticking a tape in the car stereo on long drives.
If a person enjoys the totality of the experience, what part of this concept are you having difficulty understanding?
Seriously, the OP asks “why do people buy records” and when told “this is why people buy records” we’re getting a bunch of clap back as if we are fools or liars for answering the question.
People who are listening to records are not interested in your definition of “really” “listening to music”. They want something else. They have the luxury of taking on these extra steps because they find it soothing or engaging or nostalgic, or whatever, and continue to have the option of iTuning it if they just want music to come out of their speakers.