Let’s make a bit of a bold stand here, and crack down on the old black crack called vinyl which still seems to be appreciated so much by the so-called music connaisseur.
Wired posted this article about why vinyl may be the final nail in the CD’s coffin which is so full of crap I found it hard to believe it got through their editorial process. In fact, I’m starting to think they are taking the whole Wired-wiki thing to far and allow just about anything to be posted nowadays.
Without going into too much depth however, here’s a list of reasons why vinyl sucks compared to a good quality mp3 file (320kbps baby, no less plzkthx!). (Thx Gabber!)
- Vinyl dies on you. It bends due to heat, it scratches, it needs maintenance. Mp3s only need a backup.
- Vinyl is clunky. It takes up a lot of space to store.
- Vinyl isn’t portable. It sucks to drag around in crates if you’re a DJ going to a gig, and you can’t play them in the car or while commuting.
- Porting vinyl to any other format will make you loose quality. It’s the advantage of analogue technology baby.
- Dust may reduce your listening experience. Crackle. Pop.
- Vinyl can’t take extremely high frequencies. Nor can it deal with panning on lower frequencies. How’s that for the myth of audio quality?
- Badly maintained turntables will cause your DJ gigs to sound crappy. Playing the same tunes off a laptop might not look as cool, but it will make it sound good at least.
Since you can rip any CD into a perfect 320kbps mp3 file without any real effort, unless you find popping the disk into your CD-ROM drive hard, I’ll take CDs over vinyl any day.
Oh, and yeah, I know there’s quality loss when converting to mp3. Not that I ever noticed at 320kbps, but yeah, I know it’s there.
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FLAC = MP3 portability + Vinyls/CD quality = WE HAVE A WINNER!!
I think FLAC will be the lossless format of choice to replace the MP3 I guess. The problem is that mp3 is right now the most supported format which plays on basically any mp3-player/iPod/whatever. For audiophiles this isn’t good since digital downloads are in some cases only offered in mp3 format. Even though at 320kbps the quality loss is practically inaudible the fact that you know it’s there gives you this annoyed feeling. It does with me anyway.
Charging more for a FLAC or WAV download sucks as well, but I think that’ll be something that’ll drop in a number of years as competition between various online services selling music is going to increase.
I grew up listening to vinyl and then switched to CDs in the eighties. I also think vinyl sucks. But I also think MP3s suck. We need a new organic medium or at least hi res downloads. I refuse to go back to an obsolete format. You people have no idea how much of a hassle vinyl is, especially if you own more than a handful of albums. I remember buying albums and having to return them 3 or 4 times to get a copy that wasn’t warped or just flawed from a bad pressing. I have a feeling a lot of vinyl listeners aren’t really listeners at all. It’s this whole “history repeating itself” that young people seem to think is the best way to live your life. If you missed it you missed, so create something new. It reminds me of the Onion article where they say German youths are annexing Poland as part of the next retro craze.
Even though the article mainly puts the CD (digital) vs vinyl (analogue) it also talks about so called sound-quality of vinyl being superior and therefore the weapon of choice for DJ’s.
That’s what I’m responding too. Digital vs analogue, as in mp3 vs vinyl.
The reason you’re wrong is because you’re responding to points that the article never made. While the article does mention some of the subjective reasons why someone might prefer vinyl over other formats, it’s ultimately about why vinyl will most likely outlast the CD. And frankly, Wired made a lot of valid points to suggest why it most likely will which you neither acknowledged or addressed.
The media step will be skipped completely in the near future I think. Straight from the studio’s in high quality format onto the internet for distribution. No more CD’s, vinyl or whatever. The future is digital. :)
Agreed! Vinyl sucks donkey balls. I for one want to hear my music the way it sounded in the studio…all of the highs and lows, and you just can’t get that with vinyl. You barely can hear the damn song over all of those hisses and pops.
Care to back that up with some facts and figures? Or at least some sort of explanation as to why I have no idea what I’m talking about here.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.