Good point, albeit I think a different one than mine.
As for me, I think the answer is mostly that older tech doesn’t just involve slapping a computer on it. It’s not some black box, but something you can actually see how it works in the real world, rather than software. It’s why I watch a lot of videos about this tech that likes to take the machines apart.
That was also something I did as a kid–I’d take things apart to learn how they worked, or I’d watch videos of how they were made. That’s less of a thing with modern technology, where that sort of thing tells you nothing.
This is, BTW, why I don’t find cassettes to be something to care much about, since they’re just playing back a magnetic tape. The idea that sound can be encoded with just bumps is far more interesting to me than needing something electronic to read it.
I liken it to why kids would still make those tin can sttring phones even though walky talkies existed by then.
Older tech is mechanical; newer tech is magical. Which is why this thread keeps making me think of Arthur Weasley (from Harry Potter)'s fascination with muggle technology.
It doesn’t have to sound better. A cared for vinyl record contains enough encoded information to faithfully reproduce a musical recording with excellent fidelity. Or, put another way, the vinyl is not the bottleneck in your music system.
The rest of it is convenience. Cassettes and 8 tracks were more portable, but sounded pretty lousy, and were less convenient in terms of changing songs. CD’s fixed that, were very portable, could change songs easily, sounded great and didn’t have sides/tracks to deal with. They’ve been supplanted by even more convenient digital music.
What vinyl lacks in convenience it makes up for in ceremony. The act of raising the lid, placing the record on the platter, moving the needle over, closing the lid, is like making an offering to the music gods. And you still get a pleasing sound.
Nicely put!
Yes. The whole ceremony:
Open turntable cover
Take record jacket out of protective sleeve
Take vinyl protective sleeve out of jacket
Take vinyl out of protective sleeve, handling ONLY by edges
Place vinyl on turntable
Take red cleaner brush and fluid bottle out of discwasher
Use red brush to clean discwasher
Apply cleaner to discwasher
start turntable
check stobe for correct speed
clean vinyl using discwasher in the proscribed manner
Replace fluid and brush in discwasher
Use zerostat in the proscribed manner to remove static charge
Use mini mirror and small brush to make sure stylus is clean and intact
Light a candle and say prayer to Gods of Vinyl (this step optional)
Move tonearm over and used viscous damped cueing to lower stylus to vinyl
Do not close cover
Enjoy
In 20 minutes, do the exact same procedure to the other side of the vinyl
And if you are not pure of heart and show the proper humility, the Gods of Vinyl will smite thee with a pop, crackle, hair, skip, or rumble.
CD listening procedure
Open drawer
place CD in player
Close drawer
enjoy!
With the exceptions of, perhaps, the oldest of old millenials (~40yo), they don’t have any memories of a fully analog world either, which is not the case for most Gen-Xers. You’ll be hard pressed to find any millennial that remembers CDs not existing, for example.
I’m not sure that uniformly cruddy is “better”. It’s like saying that if your bad food is served cold in a shoddy restaurant by a surly waiter, that’s more consistent and somehow better than having it served hot, in a nice place by a competent waiter.
Yeah, the first one is uniformly awful, and the general experience might distract from the quality of the food, but it’s not “better” in any meaningful sense.
And those games weren’t designed to be blurrier; they were just low-resolution.
But it’s not. Not at all. It’s just TINY. You could in theory build a computer out of diodes and components from Radio Shack, it just would be enormous, hot and not very capable.
Which means you can’t see how it works. Hence, magic.
But it’s not. I can go in and open up my AM/FM clock-radio from 1993, and it’s just some integrated circuits on a circuit board connected to a digital display and some knobs/dials. Or I can go look at the 1930-ish vintage Atwater-Kent AM radio that my father-in-law gave us, and see all the tubes and rectifiers and stuff like that. It’s very clear how that one works, and not so much on the 1993 vintage radio. But both are just AM receivers- one’s just much tinier than the other.
It most definitely is, even in a mediocre system. Take any objective measurement you like and it is always so.
And it gets more so each time you play the disc.
Boomers are just as driven by fashion. The Mustang looked better, which is why it was prized.
In 1984, you could buy this car for around $60-70K:
Today, that car will cost you almost $300K in great condition.
As for other factors, it had a 0-60 time comparable to this car (which is far cheaper and definitely more practical) from today:
So, we boomers are just as guilty of following fashion trends, even if we didn’t revert to 8-tracks (which really sucked when it came to finding tracks).
No, it’s like saying having a picnic is better than eating at home. Personally I disagree with that, but I understand that it’s a different experience and accept that to some people there are aspects of having a picnic that make that experience better, overall, to them, despite the food being objectively worse. I’m also fine with them saying “the picnic food is better”, even though I know they are objectively wrong and wouldn’t appreciate that food as much if it was served in a blind test without the trappings of the picnic alongside food that had been prepared to perfection without the constraints of picnicking.
You’re not appreciating what I mean by bottleneck. Play a record in a mediocre system, it will sound mediocre. Play a record in an exceptional system, it will sound exceptional. The record is not the thing that limits the quality of your sound. It may always be a step below a CD by certain objective measures, it may always be more expensive to play, but high quality music is encoded on that record.
Play a record in a mediocre system, it will sound mediocre. Play a record in an exceptional system, it will sound exceptional. The record is not the thing that limits the quality of your sound.
This is just not true. Once the music has been jammed through the vinyl quality bottleneck, no system, no matter how wonderful, can undo the damage done. How would you go about undoing wow & flutter?
high quality music is encoded on that record.
No, it really isn’t. Think of the compromises in , say, tracking angle, between the record lathe and the replay turntable.
Sure, but by that logic someone could watch old VHS tapes on their 50" flat screen, take their glasses off and claim it looks “better” that way. Which it doesn’t, it’s just that any defects are obscured by not having the glasses on.
Well, it’s an eye-opener when design students start and are told “You’re not getting on a computer 'til you pass these analog classes. Now grab a pencil and paper.” (Yeah, I had to be the bad guy there…)
We actually had a student get kicked out of a job interview, because the Creative Director had asked him to bring his sketchbook. The student ignored that and just showed his portfolio: “I know you said sketchbook, bu-bu-but, this was done in Photoshop and InDesign for a real client, then printed, see?”
Creative Director: “You need to show that you solve your problems with a pencil before you ever get near a computer. So let’s postpone this interview until you can bring your sketchbook…”
And this was at a leading Computer Games Company (I guess every Call of Duty starts with Pencil Duty:)
By the way, my favorite thing to do is to sit in a coffee joint or bar and draw, and I’ve got a small bag full of sketchbooks, real books, and analog tools (Blackwing pencils, Sakura markers, a compass, even french curves).
And just to get this more on topic…
Last week my millennial kid said “I really miss sitting in a coffee place, sketching with a good pen.” And he carries around a 35mm camera with “real” film, too.
That’s kind of my point; WHY is that attractive to anyone? It seems like a few steps backward in technology, quality and everything else for… some kind of reasons?
I mean, I get the idea that there’s a sort of Zen-like thing to doing something like sharpening a knife with old-style whetstones instead of using a modern whiz-bang knife sharpening machine. But the meditative part is in the actual action of sharpening that way- it’s sort of time consuming and repetitive while requiring a certain degree of concentration.
Merely listening to music on old-style equipment doesn’t do that for me; it just sounds worse.