The vinyl frontier

I know I am old, because the reason I have a vinyl collection, is because vinyl was the primary method of distributing music when I was a kid. I kept all the music I bought over the years, regardless of physical format. I kept my 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, and minidiscs too. I've had the same turntable for over twenty years to boot. probably time to upgrade again.

So I buy vinyl, because what's the point of getting the cd then?

CDs are more convenient than LPs in many ways for one thing. They generally require less careful handling. They are smaller, making them more portable. They can be easily ripped to digital files (seeing as how not everything is available online yet, this is still a big plus for me). Far more devices can play them (CD players, DVD players, Blu-ray players, many desktop PCs and laptops, some older game consoles, etc.). And they sound better than LPs on all but the highest end equipment (and even that is debatable). LP playback is subject to all the same pitfalls as CD playback, and a host of variables that CDs typically don’t contend with, such as needle wear, improper tracking force, fluctuations in playback speed, dust on the media, record warping and rumble, etc.

And CDs, like vinyl, are lossless. That is to say, there is no space-saving compression used. Yes, CDs do have a sample rate of 44100 Hz Hz, and vinyl purists do say this represents a loss from their continuous wave, but this is not the same thing as compression. This is why there are people devoted to FLAC. For many folks, even a 320kbps rip isn’t good enough for archival purposes.

I have thousands of CDs, and just hundreds of records. These days I buy vinyl and CDs at about the same rate (practically nil), because often times the vinyl comes with enough bonus stuff (even the release on CD sometimes), that it is worth the hassle. There are some albums that I prefer to listen to on vinyl over CD, but not many.

The one thing vinyl has going for it over CDs, is longevity. Given the few examples of disc rot I have already seen in my CD collection, I have no faith that any of my CDs will outlast vinyl records, regardless of how carefully I store them.

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