this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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Vinyl records.
If you're rejecting online music streaming and wanting music in physical form, CDs look a lot more practical. CDs are smaller, less delicate, and don't physically degrade every time you play them. CD playback hardware needs essentially zero maintenance and is crazy cheap still.
Could it be for nostalgia? But I've seen people younger than peak vinyl get into music on records. They wouldn't have any nostalgia for vinyl.
Is it for the sound quality? But I've seen chiptune albums available on records! It would be truer to the music to load it onto a real Game Boy or something.
The reason I like vinyl is how slow and deliberate it is compared to other mediums. If I want to play a record I have a limited curated selection which I purchased with a specific use case. These are all played in my living room and are generally slower and relaxing type music. If I want to play a record I will need to start at the beginning and typically commit to hearing the entire thing in its entirety. Each side I have to choose to continue which slows down the process. I can't skip ahead to the songs I like and it doesn't automatically play anything once its done. Its slow and has a large physical object which I enjoy.
If I used CDs I could skip to whatever song I like or have it automatically play the next CD. With a multi-disc changer I wouldn't have to choose what I want to hear each time. I have CDs which I use in my car for a different use case which is to listen to when the radio is being annoying.
This exactly.
It’s the ceremonial steps that precedes the listening experience that adds flavour to the enjoyment.
If I want to just listen music and do other things I just use Apple Music + AirPods/Soundbar, but if I want to listen a certain album and make the experience more active, I use the record player.
My music collection on vinyl is curated since each album involves a higher cost.
There is also my fascination on analog things, I have an automatic turntable and love the orchestra of mechanical sounds from all the internal components.
Edit: Forgot to mention that on streaming platforms sometimes the only version available is a remastered version that was rereleased on CD that fucked the dynamic range during the loudness war or is an edit of the original one.
Exactly. Its a ritual for the listening experience. If I had to add up the hours of listening to Vinyl vs streaming, streaming would win hands down. But I love the vinyl when I use it which is usually an experience. We do a lot of vinyl around the holidays since we spend a lot of time in my living room relaxing. Which adds to the experience
The reason the people choose vinyl is because of its limitations. CD has a larger dynamic range, but because it's fully digital, producers can abuse that fact and make an extremely loud and dynamically compressed record and the CD will play just fine.
If you tried doing that on vinyl, the needle would fly off the record. So thanks to this physical limitation, people who produce for vinyl are forced to make a quieter, more dynamic record. It's less fatiguing on the ears, and if you want a louder record, you can simply turn up the volume.
I like vinyl for it being big enough to be somewhat like a poster. I'm hoping to eventually gave a vinyl wall when I have my own place
I'm 30 so CDs were well and truly widespread during my formative years so it's not nostalgia for me
I don't have room for any sort of physical media. Yeah, I have some legacy tech I occasionally fuck with, and my sound system parts are from the 70s, 80s, 90s and up, but those parts do their job.
This is untrue. CD's have a much larger dynamic range; 96dB compared to ~70dB, depending on how the record was pressed.
The reason why people say vinyl is more dynamic than CD is because producers are forced to make vinyl records more dynamic, so that the needle doesn't fly off the record. With CDs there's no such limitation, allowing people to make the album as loud and dynamically compressed as they like.
Edit: I should also mention that the 44.1kHz sampling rate of a CD is enough to produce a perfect analog waveform all the way up to 22.05kHz, which as you know is beyond the limit of human hearing. If produced correctly, a CD will always sound better than vinyl. Problem is that CDs often aren't produced properly.
Because you don't have to factor in needle skipping, you can produce a loud record that distorts, either because you want to be the loudest song in the listener's music collection, or that you simply don't know/don't care about proper dynamics.
The distorted bass you're talking about is not because of the limitations of CD, but simply because the CD version was not produced/mastered correctly. Like I said, the sampling rate of CDs are high enough to reproduce a perfect analog waveform every time.
Thank you for being the voice of reason.