Vinyl and Cassette Sales Continued To Grow Last Year (fortune.com) 272
Albums sold on vinyl and cassette both saw a growth in sales according to BuzzAngle Music's End-Year Report profiling U.S. music industry consumption for 2018. From a report: Vinyl sales grew by just shy of 12% from 8.6 to 9.7 million sales, while cassette sales grew by almost 19% from 99,400 to 118,200 copies sold in the US, The Verge reported. Sixty-six percent of those vinyl sales were of albums that are more than three years old and feature classic bands like The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, and Pink Floyd, reported BuzzAngle. Cassettes saw popularity in newer releases. CDs on the other hand have declined by 18.5% in popularity leading to a total decline in physical album sales of over 15%, reported The Verge. Meanwhile, audio streaming saw an increase of 41.8%, the largest of all music consumption.
Hiss and crackle (Score:5, Funny)
Some people get their hiss and crackle that way. I choose fire and snakes to accompany my digital music.
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Your tapes and records are in shitty shape if you hear hiss and crackle. The best part about analog music? No DRM and no bit rot.
Re:Hiss and crackle (Score:5, Insightful)
its worse than bit rot. bit rot implies you had once a perfect copy; and in that case, you could have copied it to HD and others for backup.
vinyl and analog cassette NEVER let you get a perfect copy. each and every time you play it, it gets worse and different (both). can't avoid it unless you optically scan the LP; and no way to avoid degrading tapes (they stretch, have drop-outs, no redundancy, bleed-thru, HF loss, etc).
I have no idea what you are talking about. I grew up with that stuff, glad its gone, I do audio for a hobby and digital is the only way to go.
analog is for hipsters OR for those who have exceptional analog systems, and that's really rare, today.
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I have no idea what you are talking about. I grew up with that stuff, glad its gone, I do audio for a hobby and digital is the only way to go.
analog is for hipsters OR for those who have exceptional analog systems, and that's really rare, today.
I listen to vinyl songs on youtube. They sound much better than the HQ CD version on youtube. The bass is clear on vinyl, and other instruments are also clear and separated better. Vinyl is an audiophile medium, whereas CDs are for people don't appreciate the finer details.
Re:Hiss and crackle (Score:5, Informative)
It's nothing to do with the medium, it's entirely to do with the mastering.
Re:Hiss and crackle (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. This. CDs can sound incredibly good if they're mastered right, but that's something record producers no longer have any interest in. Basically any rock or pop CD from about 2000 onward is going to sound crummy. Also, any recording from earlier than that if it has been remastered. When I see REMASTERED on a CD label, I mentally translate that as SPECIAL EBOLA EDITION.
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I listen to vinyl songs on youtube.
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Given that youtube is a digital medium, you're saying that an analog medium converted to digital is better than a directly digital medium? This can only occur if the original digital version was extremely poorly done in the first place. You could take a digital rip from youtube and burn it to cd and it would sound identical to how it did on youtube, so the cd itself isnt the problem - it's how the audio was processed prior to being put onto cd.
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Taking their cue, I made a cassette of a Youtube recording of an album and it was even betterer.
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I always buy new rock music on vinyl, because new CD releases are always afflicted with crushing dynamic range compression. Yes, CD beats vinyl handily if both are mastered properly, but where are you going to get a properly mastered CD these days? A CD that's sonically crushed will sound like crap when new, and it will sound like crap forever. I find that any rock CD pressed after 1999 (more or less) is probably bad.
New LP releases are typically mastered "okay", not with as much dynamic range as they of
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That's why a lot of people buying vinyl rip immediately to their computer. Then apply some noise reduction and click/pop removal. They want the better mastering on the vinyl edition but the convenience of digital, with the best possible sound quality.
It's a shame laser turntables didn't catch on. I know at least one piracy group uses one, and there is one manufacturer in Japan that still makes them. They are the only way to listen that doesn't degrade the record every time.
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analog is for hipsters OR for those who have exceptional analog systems
And those who find that some of the only decent masters were exclusive to vinyl and tape while the mass produced CD got trashed in the name of loudness.
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Although, If not cared for.. Actual rot is a possibility
I remember grabbing a bunch of casettes out of what I thought was good storage. The tape looked like week old white-bread sandwiches
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no bit rot
Yeah, the shit just wears out, which is much better...
Vinyl and film I can understand, but magnetic medium just doesn't hold up. I don't understand why anybody would want a cassette tape. When are we going to bring back floppy disks? Or zip disks, there ya go... or better yet, punch cards and ladies in long skirts and high heels changing the reels of tape
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d pawn shops for years, hunting for every r
elated item I could find. And when the 8 t
rack comes back, I'm going to make a killing!
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The narrowness is strong in this one...
Re: Hiss and crackle (Score:2)
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I can't play a record in my car, even if there were record players that did not skip on a slightly bumpy road, they would probably wear out the records pretty fast.
And if I connect my phone to the car, then instead of just driving and listening I am tempted to play with the phone trying to select the next song at every opportunity (red light, stopping for a pedestrian etc).
With a tape, I just put it in and listen until the end of side B.
Tapes suck (Score:2)
I can't play a record in my car, even if there were record players that did not skip on a slightly bumpy road, they would probably wear out the records pretty fast.
I can't play a tape in my car either. Hasn't been a car made with a tape player as standard equipment in quite a while. Last car made with a tape player as standard equipment was sold back in 2010.
And if I connect my phone to the car, then instead of just driving and listening I am tempted to play with the phone trying to select the next song at every opportunity (red light, stopping for a pedestrian etc).
If this is your argument in favor of tapes, it's a terrible argument. If you think people didn't play with their tape decks (fast forwarding) to skip to their favorite bits you haven't driven in a car with a tape deck. People played with their tape decks while driving ALL THE TIME.
With a tape, I just put it in and listen until the end of side B.
And then put a gun in your mo
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My car is older and it has a slot for a tape deck or radio.
If this is your argument in favor of tapes, it's a terrible argument. If you think people didn't play with their tape decks (fast forwarding) to skip to their favorite bits you haven't driven in a car with a tape deck. People played with their tape decks while driving ALL THE TIME.
Well, maybe other did, but I do not. I very rarely rewind a tape to listen to a song a second time, that's it. When I can select a song to play from a list (be it on a phone or PC), I tend to spend too much time thinking what should I play next. When I play a tape, I listen to it from start of side A to the end of side B.
Plus you have to keep a library of tapes in your car unless you are a psycho who likes listening to the same thing endlessly.
What I do is decide what tape I want to listen to and then take it to my car. When I finish listening to that tape, I get another
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Most modern cars have a button on the steering wheel to let you skip to the next track etc, very easy and doesn't distract you from the act of driving.
What i hate are cars where for "safety reasons" they won't let you access certain functions like setting a destination for the navigation system while the car is moving, even if those functions are being used by a passenger.
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I use cassettes to listen to music in my car and on a portable player primarily.
I already have a lot of cassettes - recording them to CDs (though CDs are bigger than cassettes, so it would be less convenient) or other digital formats would take a long time. It is easier to record the new CD I bought to a cassette so I can listen to it in my car.
Also, some music (quite a lot on my country) was only released on a cassette, so if I want it, I have to buy (or copy) that cassette.
I tried connecting my phone to t
An actual tape user? (Score:2)
I use cassettes to listen to music in my car and on a portable player primarily.
I'm sorry. That must be an awful existence.
You are aware that you can connect digital music players via adapters to play through a tape deck without having the awful experience of actually using tapes, right?
I already have a lot of cassettes - recording them to CDs (though CDs are bigger than cassettes, so it would be less convenient) or other digital formats would take a long time. It is easier to record the new CD I bought to a cassette so I can listen to it in my car.
What's even easier is to rip a new CD to your smartphone and then use that to listen to it. FAR less hassle than recording a CD to a fricken cassette tape.
I tried connecting my phone to the tape deck and playing mp3s. The problem was that I was too tempted to skips songs etc that it distracted me (I would select the next song at an intersection, not notice that the light is already green etc). With a tape, I just put it in and I listen to it until the end of side B. Also, connecting the phone, starting the player program is an additional thing to do when I start the car.
Seriously? You be you but if this is your reasoning understand you are many standard deviations away from normal. If you are that easily distract
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I do not need an adapter, I modded my tape deck to have a line input. I sometimes connect my minidisc player to that.
What's even easier is to rip a new CD to your smartphone and then use that to listen to it. FAR less hassle than recording a CD to a fricken cassette tape.
Here's the problem. I have maybe 200 cassettes. If I want to get rid of the tape deck in my car and replace it with a digital player, I would have to record all of those cassettes to a digital format. It would take at least 200 hours to do that (then I would need to name the files, maybe split them by song which would take more time).
OTOH, it takes about an hour to record a new CD to a tape.
Plus I've never met anyone who didn't try to fast forward tapes while driving or fiddle distractedly with changing tapes.
I
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Sounds like your phone was poorly integrated into the car, probably through one of those cassette adapters (which themselves introduce a lot of hiss)...
On most modern cars you can skip songs using a button on the steering wheel, and you can fit a lot more songs on a modern phone than you can on a very large stack of tapes so you also avoid the distraction of changing or turning over tapes. Some cars also have a button which invokes voice control on the phone, so you can verbally command it to change song et
Decay and wear (Score:2)
Vinyl and film I can understand, but magnetic medium just doesn't hold up.
Vinyl and film don't last either. Anyone who thinks they last hasn't actually worked with them enough to know that fact. You play vinyl records by putting a very sharp needle on a very soft bit of plastic. Expecting the record to not wear/scratch/deform/etc with repeated playings is delusional. Film degrades over time and has to periodically be transferred to new medium. Otherwise it will eventually decay and be lost. Countless films from years gone by have been lost when the film decayed.
I don't understand why anybody would want a cassette tape.
The answer i
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Lending original media is a bad idea, just make copies on demand.
When i was a kid i was always encouraged to make copies of any tapes or floppy discs i bought, and then play the copies and if the media got damaged just make another copy. Kids destroy things.
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There is extensive "bit rot" every time a needle scrapes through a groove and leaves a cloud of bits streaming behind it.
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Just the deafening squeal of tape rot
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Fake CDs (Score:3)
And the ripped WAV files from CDs don't have DRM unless you choose to add your own
Unless you have a nonconforming disc passed off as a CD [wikipedia.org] instead of a CD.
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I accidentally bought a couple of those at the thrift store. Ripped fine, though they did take a bit longer due to jitter. That might have just been scratches. But then I don't run Windows and if I did, I'd have autoplay turned off. They're just multi-session.
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Your tapes and records are in shitty shape if you hear hiss and crackle. The best part about analog music? No DRM and no bit rot.
Tapes suffer from degradation all the time and records get worn out just by playing them.
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no bit rot.
Tape aging is much, much worse.
DRM isn't just crypto (Score:2)
Your tapes and records are in shitty shape if you hear hiss and crackle.
I have new for you. ALL tapes sooner or later get in shitty shape. I'm old enough to predate the CD so I grew up with this tech. Pretty much all tapes and records end up in bad shape if you play them a meaningful number of times.
The best part about analog music? No DRM and no bit rot.
That hiss and crackle IS a form of bit rot. It's data being lost through the waveform being deformed.
Also your notion that there was no DRM is not quite true. There is no practical way to make a perfect copy of a tape or vinyl record and making copies requires equipment and phy
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Buy into premium quality recordings.
Noise reduction
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Doesn't have to be
https://youtu.be/1qtxPSR8q98?t... [youtu.be]
There is in truth much beauty (Score:3)
Cassette tape, I would have to agree with you there. There is no real redeeming feature to cassette besides nostalgia. But vinyl, well, there is another story.
Take good care of your albums and they will reward you with rich, warm, pop-free sound for a lifetime. Eventually some dust gets on them, either a fine layer of white glue or some good light cleaners, or both will take care of that. I have a 1963 Philips Capella Reverbio B7X43A, one of the last tube radios and one of the only tube radios to have F
Confirmation bias (Score:3)
Take good care of your albums and they will reward you with rich, warm, pop-free sound for a lifetime.
Not if you actually play them they won't. You are putting a sharp metal needle on a soft plastic record. Even with the best possible care you will inevitably damage the vinyl record merely by playing it even if nothing else goes wrong which is seldom the case. If you think you can avoid this you haven't actually lived with vinyl records or played them with any regularity.
Eventually some dust gets on them, either a fine layer of white glue or some good light cleaners, or both will take care of that.
Eventually? Try almost immediately. Dust is everywhere. And dust will be the least of your problems in the long run. Any time you h
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With a sufficiently high sampling rate and a sufficient number of bits per sample, you'd might be right. Though there are still ways to tell the difference, especially on tracks that have any waveform that are close to a fundamental harmonic of the sampling rate. You can actually hear the sampling beat frequencies injected into the music and distortion. At those harmonics, sine waves of certain frequencies can be sampled into square waves. Square waves are a mix of a large number of harmonics, so overal
Re: There is in truth much beauty (Score:5, Insightful)
there are still ways to tell the difference, especially on tracks that have any waveform that are close to a fundamental harmonic of the sampling rate. You can actually hear the sampling beat frequencies injected into the music and distortion
So you have not heard of Nyquist frequency or sinc filtering. If you can actually hear beat frequencies than your hardware (software?) is misdesigned. It can be mathematically proven that you can't hear such beat frequencies in a properly engineered system. Of course I realize I am telling this to someone who *believes* in vinyl, so it probably fell on deaf ears.
Anyway, I can guarantee that you are wrong about the other guy being wrong. This is science.
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Anyway, I can guarantee that you are wrong about the other guy being wrong. This is science.
Perhaps, but audiophiles arguing over meaningless specifications long predates the digital era. Science and facts never stopped a good measurebation session.
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That's not how digital sampling works. Not at all. Those "square waves" you see are not square waves, they are a defect in the way your computer software displays the waveform on screen.
This video explains it in detail: https://youtu.be/cIQ9IXSUzuM [youtu.be]
TL;DW is that a "square wave" at 2 samples per wavelength comes out as a perfect sine wave at half the sampling frequency, also known as he Nyquist frequency.
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This is and other things.
I can some what understand the love for vinyl. It has some redeeming value. The covers are big enough to put art on and the sound does appeal to some members of society.
Cassette tapes? They are the worse medium for music devised by man. All the worse of vinyl without any of the art work. Tape stretches and breaks for almost no reason. Sounds like crap after a few plays too.
Re:Hiss and crackle (Score:4, Interesting)
Cassette tapes? They are the worse medium for music devised by man.
Well no that's unfair. They were better than what went before. They were compact, the tape was pretty well protected, recordable and you could fit 120 minutes into a single tape. This allowed you to actually carry quite a lot of music with you. 1 or two tapes would see you through two bus journeys and whichever lessons you could listen to music in without getting caught...
At the time they were about the best choice.
Though I only bought a few albums on tape, mostly I copied them from CDs or friends to my own tapes.
Tape stretches and breaks for almost no reason.
Yeah but it wasn't that bad. Even the rather failure prone D120s would last a fair while. The somewhat thicker tape that music was sold on generally lasted better than that. I basically listened to everything on D120.
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Yeah but it wasn't that bad. Even the rather failure prone D120s would last a fair while. The somewhat thicker tape that music was sold on generally lasted better than that. I basically listened to everything on D120.
Part of the problem is people don't realise there were a whole bunch of different types of cassette tapes because they all looked the same and went in the same players, of which there were also different types. Most people had bad tapes on bad players so the experience was bad.
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And for all the poor sound quality of cassette tapes, is it really worse than spotify?
Well this statement pretty much invalidates the rest of your argument, but I'll bite anyway.
No, it's not a large part of people wanting physical things. Most people understand the difference between buying something digital and buying vinyl/CD's. Just as most of them understand the issue with buying something with DRM or no DRM. An no, they are not giving up on streaming or even buying mp3 online. Sales of independant artist mp3 from thier own websites are going up and, like it or not, streaming is t
Did you know (Score:4, Funny)
“Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continues... AAY!"
I remember the old days (Score:2)
Audio reproduction started out shitty and steadily improved
Each advance was a real technological advancement that made music sound better
Then, everything changed
People started to value convenience over quality. MP3s on shitty earbuds became the standard
Others were seduced by nostalgia for old, crappy sounding media
Hopefully, people of the future will continue the quest for audio quality
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You forgot how crappy sound systems were in the old days. Today even cheap digital systems can often outperform the best equipment in an old time studio. Now when you get to analog components you might have a point, although there have been huge advances there too.
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"Today even cheap digital systems can often outperform the best equipment in an old time studio"
Err, no. You're quite wrong, there.
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You forgot how crappy sound systems were in the old days. Today even cheap digital systems can often outperform the best equipment in an old time studio.
But especially hi-fi systems and speakers. Those things were just not very good.
A modern cheapass class D amp outperforms probably 99% of systems if not more from that era. It's hard to build high power analog with high linearity, low crssover low distortion etc. Like really hard.
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But it's well-established. Look at something basic like a Yamaha A-S301. A class D amp isn't going to get close to that. But that's something recent. What if you go back 20 years? A Yamaha AX-392 from 20 years ago doesn't perform as well as the A-S301, but it's still going to beat a class D amp. Going back further, anything from Pioneer, Yamaha or Sony from the "power wars" in the '80s is going to outperform a class D amp, and a lot of cheaper home theater amps as well (jamming a lot of amps into one b
Good Enough (Score:2)
Each advance was a real technological advancement that made music sound better
That's because we were starting from nothing. Eventually we got to Good Enough and there was no reason to progress further.
People started to value convenience over quality. MP3s on shitty earbuds became the standard
It's adorable you think people used cassette tapes or vinyl records because of their quality. They used them because they were the ONLY realistic options at the time. The moment CDs came out people dumped vinyl records and cassettes like they had the plague. Vinyl records and cassettes are huge pains in the ass. The moment MP3s were available they did the same to CDs. Why? The ne
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People started to value convenience over quality. MP3s on shitty earbuds became the standard
Sorry but by the time this started happening music was compress, manufactured and generally devoid of any quality or dynamic range. People moved to convenience because they found it didn't make shit sound any worse than it already did.
But let's face it, we all know the only real way to get good sound it to play Guitar Hero: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
My investment portfolio (Score:2)
I should have invested in mustache wax, fair-trade coffee, and LPs.
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Having music digitally on a computer is at the whim of a computer brand, DRM and politics.
Cassette, vinyl, CD, DVD decades later is still good news for fans.
Even fans may not be able to buy/find early limited music DVD's decades later.
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Marshall stack tube amps and speakers never sucked, even a 2x12 setup.
They defined the sound of guitars from the 70s through the 90s.
Ah the memories, of my hearing...
We were playing with an early 90s Boss distortion pedal this weekend, it was fun to hook up the electric/acoustic to (and the bass).
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You can also buy "raw water" for $20 a gallon, but that doesn't mean it's better.
Better than what? "better" is a comparative term. You need to compare it to something else. RAW water isn't good for you to drink, but as someone who has just recovered from a gut infection from a trip to a 3rd world country I would have greatly appreciated having RAW water instead of whatever was used to wash or clean the things I ate that got me sick.
Records suck compared to CD. Technically they do in every way. However we have a lot of evidence that vinyl goes through a different mastering process than a
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A good tube amplifier should probably sound the same as a good amplifier using field-effect transistors.
You know that the electrodes in tubes get contaminated and evaporate, right? And no two tubes respond exactly the same. It is possible that the nonlinearities sound good to your ears, or you have a whole lot of unintended low pass filtering built into your tube amp, plus some unintended resonances, and you kind of like the modified product. I on the other hand, prefer to hear sound reproduced exactly as it was recorded.
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You know that the electrodes in tubes get contaminated and evaporate, right? And no two tubes respond exactly the same.
No two FETs respond the same, either. The closest you get is the matched pair discretes you get on the input stages of high end measurement equipment. The good amplifiers all used a high gain configuration with negative feedback so the response is as linear as you can get.
It is possible that the nonlinearities sound good to your ears, or you have a whole lot of unintended low pass filterin
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You have no idea what you're talking about. Can you elaborate on "electrodes" being "contaminated"? Are you referring to cathode poisoning? That only happens in circuits where the tube is in cutoff for extended periods (like in digital circuits). Also extending your logic, no two opamps respond exactly the same either. How low in ppm do you want to get here?
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A good tube amplifier should probably sound the same as a good amplifier using field-effect transistors. Honestly any amplifier of any kind that doesn't sound the same as the others is probably not a good amplifier.
Guitar amps would be the exception.
But I don't really consider them as amplifiers, more like musical instruments.
Come on you lot, do your bit (Score:2)
That was years ago, and the awful rubbish still hasn't gone away yet.
Seriously guys, get your acts together.
Cassettes? Really? (Score:3)
The *only* advantage that cassettes *ever* had over vinyl is that they were more portable... but you took a very discernible loss in quality as a price for that convenience.
Today, you can store countless songs on a portable music player no larger than a single cassette, and at *VASTLY* higher quality than cassettes themselves are capable of. Vinyl, at least, has a redeeming characteristic over digital storage in that it is at least pure analog, and perhaps for some people, it might carry that appeal. Certainly there is no significant lack of quality in vinyl, at least not until the needle has worn the record down through very extensive repeated playing. But cassettes, while also analog, are so far inferior in quality to even today's lossy mp3 sound storage, that there is no reason I can imagine that people today would actually still prefer them.
Re:Cassettes? Really? (Score:5, Funny)
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Absolutely.
The weight of even the lightest (and cheaply made) vinyl records are about 80 to 90 grams, and more typically closer to about 150grams., while an audio cassette is only about 40 grams.
So yes, definitely more portable.
People don't understand what digital music is (Score:5, Informative)
Monty Montgomery demonstrated this in a video [youtube.com] using an analog wave generator, an analog spectrum analyzer, an analog oscilliscope, and A/D and D/A converters. At 20 kHz, the stairstep digital waveform is an awful mess [youtu.be], but after conversion back to analog it's still a perfectly smooth sine wave.
The mistake people make is thinking that the digital signal is a series of stairsteps. It's not stairsteps, it's just the corners of each stairstep. The sound's value is only defined at each corner. In between the corners, it's undefined. And it turns out that there is only one analog waveform which can be drawn through every one of those corners, yet contain no frequencies higher than Nyquist. So the digital sample of the waveform can perfectly recreate the original analog waveform (within the chose frequency limit).
Vinyl is the music equivalent of homeopathy.
Re:People don't understand what digital music is (Score:5, Funny)
Vinyl is the music equivalent of homeopathy.
Well. Not quite... homeopathy would be a track with only the cracks and other noises and then you would imagine that the music is playing.
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Vinyl is the music equivalent of homeopathy.
Or the data processing equivalent of typewriters.
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Great, but the problem with all this is that it assumes that the limit to human hearing is 20kHz.
Now you will say well yes it is, and a standard hearing test will agree. However a standard hearing test uses single frequencies, something no human ear heard till the invention of the tuning fork in 1711.
So given the loss of harmonics to primary frequencies that can be heard, it is entirely possible that 20kHz is not enough.
However given that compact cassettes roll off around 15kHz and vinyl is similar to a CD
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Nyquist's theorem only deals with the sampling rate, and assumes a few idealizations about the other factors. For starters, sampling at 16 bits means you only have 65536 discrete signal levels, so you get quantization noise. It's technically worse than analog noise as it's not random. Also, Nyquist assumes pointlike sampling, whereas real sampling always integrates over some finite time.
Of course, engineers know these things and take them into account. But Nyquist alone doesn't explain why you should rec
Loudness Wars (Score:2)
Vinyl is not the music equivalent of homeopathy. Vinyl is a way to sidestep the loudness wars and get recordings that aren't afflicted with horrible dynamic range compression. Pop and rock CDs from roughly 2000 onward have generally been sonically crushed and sound like garbage. LP releases, for the most part, don't. That's the decision of the record companies and their recording engineers, and you'd have to ask them for the explanation of why it's done that way, because I don't know. I just have to de
Re:People don't understand what digital music is (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, you're up to something but you're barking the wrong tree. It is not magic, but for some a highly sophisticated technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The 'digital' part of the audio systems has nothing to do with quality, and the Solandri's description is rather accurate, if not too technical for slash dot. In fact analog audio systems have rather limited frequency range and dynamic range, much more so than digital ones. Yes overdriven digital system will create nasty artifacts while analog ones would distort like heavy metal amps...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
However, usually in customer digital systems the compression of audio is removing a lot of information from the original and sometimes also introduces audible artifacts.
So it's not 'digital' that evil but 'mp3'.
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"So it's not 'digital' that evil but 'mp3'."
Hear, hear!
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If you're a heavy metal fan you probably can't hear much of anything anyway, so no worries.
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... At the same time, the digital version causes ear fatigue for long term high volume listening. The cassette can be listened to at a maximum volume before clipping occurs without such ear fatigue....
Nah, pretty sure that's just metallica.
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Your observations are right, but your explanation is wrong. You even named Metallica as an example, which is a dead giveaway, as they were notorious for releasing CDs with all the dynamic range crushed out of them. They don't sound bad because "digital", they sound bad because some recording engineer turned the compression dial to 11.
Renaissance fair (Score:3)
Renaissance fairs are big in Europe. Everybody dresses like The Gap is 400 years in the future and there is no such thing as medical science. I understand they have a lot of fun.
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Renaissance fairs are big in Europe? I think you'll find that they're mostly a US phenomenon.
You'd be wrong. And the wonderful part about renaissance fairs in Europe is that we have actual medieval towns in which to hold them. It's quite a different experience having a renaissance fair in a football field in a US city vs in the Abbey of Echternach in Luxembourg.
For all it's faults..... (Score:2)
A cassette tape will never install a rootkit on your tapedeck.
They will never be able to take your cassette tapes away from you due to some rights-holder asshattery.
A cassette tape doesn't care what region your playing it in.
Cool old cars have tape decks.
Creedence is supposed to have those hiss and pop sounds.
Tapes come with cool album art, lryics, and hidden messages.
Tapes work offline.
Tapes don't report your listening habits, location, duration, sexual preference and political affiliation so some corporat
Kurt Godel, and Archilies (Score:5, Informative)
But, as the Tortoise points out to Archilies, if the play back device is of sufficiently high fidelity then a cassette could be constructed that will produce resonances that will cause it to self destruct. And no matter how hard Archilies tries to fix his machine, the Tortoise can always produce a new machine destroying tape.
Has something to do with Godel. And possibly Bach and Escher.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A cassette tape will never install a rootkit on your tapedeck.
Neither will a standard Red Book audio CD.
They will never be able to take your cassette tapes away from you due to some rights-holder asshattery.
Neither will they with a standard Red Book audio CD.
A cassette tape doesn't care what region your playing it in.
Neither does a standard Red Book audio CD.
Cool old cars have tape decks.
My cool old car has a CD changer.
Creedence is supposed to have those hiss and pop sounds.
If so, they put it on the master
Masochists (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
No. People buy shitty inferior sound formats because record industries have decided to fuck up the releases on technically superior formats rendering the shitty inferior ones as the better product.
I was actually quite happy when the industry ignored vinyl, however recently there's more interest in that, expect the industry to fuck up this format now too. And then there's the recently industry trend of vinyl only special editions with never before released tracks.
Re: (Score:2)
Suckers, Birthrates, Units of time (Score:2)
It's all very easy to explain.
This is just noise (Score:3)
Twelve percent growth sounds impressive, but this is like a penny stock having a 50% change in price. It is just noise. In the heydays of vinyl there were individual albums that could sell 9 million copies in one year. Heck, even Billy Ocean sold 2 million copies of "Suddenly": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Cassette?!! (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Perhaps kids are learning that listening to an album is pretty damned awesome.
No, you remember that in 1973 it was pretty damned awesome to be young and in the arms of your old girlfriend as you listened to that album, baked on whatever pills you had bought in the street that morning.
There is no way your grandkids will ever be able to reproduce that experience. They are visiting you at Retirecrest listening to the album through your carefully coddled and patched McIntosh amp, but all they see is a drooling old guy with a recording that hisses and pops. That 1973 experience was yours
Re: (Score:2)
Older than hipsters, the top hits look like retired baby boomer stuff. But not all of it, some of it looks like grandkids of baby boomers. Who probably get disks and players as presents from their grandparents.
MySpace has millions of artists (Score:3)
MySpace alone has millions of artists.
Apparently 99% of people don't want to look for good music, they want the record companies to find a few decent songs for for them. I guess that's why they only pay attention to the 0.01% of music that is handled by major labels. That and maybe the production quality.