When did vinyl stop making sense?

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i suppose if you live in a tiny flat the physical medium stops making sense pretty quick.

when you can put what it takes me half a room to fill on to a pocket sized hard drive, then you're probably going that route in a bedsit :shrug:

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cross post there jan, but yup, space can be a limiting factor 8)

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Yeah. My son has a room in his flat dedicated to housing his vinyl collection. He has thousands of records and never buys CDs. Its gonna be a nightmare if he moves house.

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yeah totally not looking forward to any future moves, the music collection was bad enough, now add the lego and other collectables :o
i should probably just make my landlord an offer he cant refuse and buy this place :lol:

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TL;DR
Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

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Aloysius wrote: Sat Sep 28, 2019 5:21 pmTL;DR
the lord
doth rock :band:

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:hihi:
Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

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cron wrote: Sat Sep 28, 2019 4:22 pm
Roman Empire wrote: Sat Sep 28, 2019 12:21 pm
Forgotten wrote: Sat Sep 28, 2019 12:01 pm
Roman Empire wrote: Sat Sep 28, 2019 10:55 am 1. A recording where one or more tracks were recorded solely using analog equipment from source to master, is more "pure"
That’s complete nonsense. A limitation of vinyl is that the more energy in the low end, the more space the grooves take up.

This led to producers mixing in preparation for mastering i.e. having to manipulate the sound because of a limitation of the format.
Agreed, but we´re not talking about artifacts here, that´s a topic already touched millions of times. The purity I´m talking about is the - almost - endless resolution of analog recordings compared to the x khz / x no. of bits present in the digital domain.
I think it's perhaps a mistake to think about this in terms of fidelity. The endless resolve power of analog recordings is purely theoretical. While digital can't ever have infinite resolve power, it can be arbitrarily high. You could have a 10¹⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰ yottahertz sampling rate or much, much, much higher. Such sampling rates don't really make any less sense than thinking about analog as resolving to infinity. In terms of both pure and practical fidelity, vinyl became entirely obsolete the moment the first CD was pressed.

For me, the question of when vinyl stops making sense is all about how easy it is to produce and whether people will buy it. It's always made sense for club records (although that's been changing) but it's becoming more and more difficult for independent labels to make due to vinyl's mainstream resurgence. Even in 2009-2010 the label I was affiliated with was experiencing 3+ month lead times to get a test pressing. Record Store Day alone means vinyl makes more sense to independent labels in Summer than it does in Winter thanks to majors booking up the facilities in advance, even back then. I can't even imagine what the situation is like now.

So yeah, I don't really think it's ever been about fidelity. There are a galaxy of things like cost, accessibility, type of record, time of year, personal preferences etc that matter way, way more. It's not even all about fidelity in the digital world. Some people will prefer 192 kHz as a delivery format despite ultrasonics being either filtered out or a straight-up liability on all but the very best gear.

As a consumer today, your choice of format is mostly down to either how convenient it is or how it makes you feel, not how it sounds. Whether that's people listening to 192 kHz recordings on shitty gear or people buying vinyl because they love the feeling, then never playing it and just making use of the download code for the convenience.
Well, I do agree that there´s probably nobody who can really hear if a recording is limited by digital equipment or not, but it´d be that last resort to justify buying vinyls from a fidelity-purity point of view, and I´m just curious about when it all became digital. From that perspective it makes more sense to buy a Rupert Holmes album than one by Duran Duran for instance, pressed on vinyl. I´d prefer Rupert over Le Bon at any time anyway :)

I do use spotify most of the time myself, although I have a decent collection of vinyls. I recently got "and then there were 3" by Genesis on vinyl, because I really like this album and wanted to have a vinyl copy. I think it´s been on once ever since, but still I´ll play it on Spotify now and then. Having gotten used to the convenience of media-less music is difficult to undo.. Vinyls are great for drinking with your buddies, but not on a normal day in the 2010´s...
Best Regards

Roman Empire

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thecontrolcentre wrote: Sat Sep 28, 2019 4:50 pm Yeah. My son has a room in his flat dedicated to housing his vinyl collection. He has thousands of records and never buys CDs. Its gonna be a nightmare if he moves house.
Man, moving with a vinyl collection gave me PTSD.
And my last move was into a place with another person with a vinyl collection that is even slightly bigger than mine. And his is still growing. :scared:
I think we are actually doing damage to the building with it at this point. The next move will be some kind of Iron Man endurance run.

Maybe @ topic,
A thing that surprised me was when I ripped a ton of my most favorite, most hard to find, most rinsed DJ jams to ultra high quality wav. I did this with a lot of tracks I know really well, some of which have digital releases. A/Bing the rip vs the digital release is easy. A/B the digital release vs the vinyl is easy. But A/Bing the rip vs the vinyl is verrrry difficult.
I think most of what we hear that is the 'vinyl sound' is just a layer on top of the music that is from the medium. Its a layer on top, sure, but its the last layer, and one that imo can be captured with ultra hi-fi recordings on good equipment.
Imo, the analog/digital/whatever nature of the source material is not really that important in this 'translation' or whatever. What we are hearing with vinyl is the medium, imo.

Another sad side effect of the process and the results; Post PTSD, and post DJ career, I have found it a lot easier to accept the hi-fi wav in place of the formerly cherished piece of vinyl...
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jancivil wrote: Sat Sep 28, 2019 4:43 pm It wouldn't have made real sense for me because of the type of involved mastering before you have anything to print copies of, the bass issue for a first example. As a consumer, well, there were things which came out abysmally on CD when it was new, a problem I only half understand and which is apparently solvable. I don't buy hard copies of music any more, don't really care. I don't like things taking up space when it's always at a premium.
True. A lot of early CD releases were pretty poor. That’s not really an issue any more. I think the engineers at the time just didn’t realize the traits of the new format.
Zerocrossing Media

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Oh gods, moving a huge vinyl collection... my in-laws are old hippies who never gave up on vinyl and had shelf after shelf of it; I helped them move it this spring on short notice.
Wait... loot _then_ burn? D'oh!

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Roman Empire wrote: I´m just curious about when it all became digital.
What you're looking for is the first CD with a DDD Spars code. Well, that was from the beginning already
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARS_code

But it's moot. Every step in the process is not 100% transparent. But the 99.9,% transparency available in both analog & digital is good enough for Rock'nRoll. You cannot tell, so why worry.
We are the KVR collective. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. Image
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Because we love to worry? I mean if we didn't worry what would we do all day? They say sports are a national pastime but didn't we just invent sports so we could have more to worry about? Us musical types have lots more to worry about too, our mixes, our instruments and of course neighbors. We have kids and they are like the number one big thing to worry about and eats up a lot of our worry resources. We worry about what's for dinner, what's on TV, if our shoes match our clothes, if it's too hot, too cold, some even worry when things are good the hammer is about to fall. Should we be worried about worrying? :shrug:

Sorry you asked :clown: :hihi:
The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another's world. It requires profound, purpose‐larger‐than‐the‐self kind of understanding.

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I only worry about everyone else.
Im fine. :P
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I bought one record on vinyl this century, Frank Zappa's I Don't Want to Get Drafted, an extended play single (quite different than the album cut); because the B side is Ancient Armaments, which has no other release. I never actually played the record. Now it's on Youtube, so no worries.

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