iirc all forms of physical media are regaining traction. From CDs to casettes and vinyl.
No one wants to be shackled to a subscription service that makes their jams vanish the moment the internet is out.
True also right now you can really collect CDs from thrift shops, there’s a ton of decent stuff
People like to collect physical media, and it’s one of the better formats for music.
paying an artist you appreciate
I’m a huge huge fan of music, a big ol’ nerd about it and I’ve been collecting records for like 13 years. My reasons are similar to others mentioned already. I usually listen to super underground DIY stuff and I love to support artists who come to my town, and my local record store. I like the intentionality of listening to a record; I can put it on as background music but even then I need to look over each album, pick it out and put it on instead of just quickly choosing a random playlist and not even looking at the artists. The physical ritual is really comforting.
My record collection also kinda functions similarly to a photo album for me. Each record reminds me of when I bought it, when I was super into the artist or which show I was at when I got it. Super nostalgic. I’m also just a very tactile person so the tactile aspect just changes the quality of listening to music, idk.
Also, once rapidshare/music blogs kinda died out and streaming services really took over, it’s been almost impossible for me to remember new artists that discover that I like. When I used to peruse the blogspots, I’d actually read reviews, download like 2 dozen albums and listen to them and they’d end up in my normal rotation. With streaming services I have sooooo much access to so much music which I love, but it all kinda blends together and I forget to really spend intentional time listening to them
Another reason that no one has really mentioned here is that mastering tracks for vinyl is different from mastering for digital/CD/streaming in such a way that the tracks basically have to have some amount of dynamic range due to the physical limitations of a needle riding in a groove. Since the late 2000s, the major labels have been stuck in sort of a “loudness war” where they brickwall the shit out of every mix and/or master so that it is as loud as possible for the duration of the song, thus forcing anyone within earshot of a radio or muzak system to listen to whatever is playing. With vinyl, mastering engineers tend to be a little more careful, since brickwalled tracks can cause the needle to skip/bounce.
Unfortunately, sometimes it’s still not enough to fix a final mix engineers’ fuckups, e.g., with Metallica’s Death Magnetic. The original mix/master of that thing is a brickwalled clusterfuck – you can hear the mix pumping, clipping, and farting out on snare hits, and the vinyl sounds just as bad, because mastering engineers can only polish a turd so much.
I like old music. Particularly rock from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. Jazz from the 1950s, 1960s. A lot of music over the last 30 years or so drive me crazy and I hate it. I use an equalizer when I watch movies because the TOO LOUD / TOO QUIET problem is even more annoying. Usually equalizing does the trick. But some damn tv series figured out an extra-annoying way of making songs TOO LOUD so I either turn down the volume or skip the scene.
I’ll leave this here.
The loudness war (or loudness race) is a trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music, which reduces audio fidelity and—according to many critics—listener enjoyment. Increasing loudness was first reported as early as the 1940s, with respect to mastering practices for 7-inch singles. The maximum peak level of analog recordings such as these is limited by varying specifications of electronic equipment along the chain from source to listener, including vinyl and Compact Cassette players. The issue garnered renewed attention starting in the 1990s with the introduction of digital signal processing capable of producing further loudness increases.
I have not located a CD that sounds exactly as good as a canadian issue Dreamboat Annie LP.
Yeah; I’ve noticed over the years that a lot of those mid-80s CD reissues of albums released in the 70s and early 80s just sound like sterile ass because they more or less printed the studio’s archival masters to CD format. The assumption was that if you had a CD player, you must be some kind of mega-rich audiophile, and therefore you also must have an outboard equalizer, and it would be untoward for the mastering engineer to make assumptions about how much bass you want coming out of your bespoke quadrophonic setup. The mentality shifted drastically by around 1991-92 which, incidentally, was around the same time everyone realized that they could cram a pair of boxed subwoofers and a Rockford Fosgate amp into their rusted out Pontiac Grand Ams.
But yeah, growing up listening to the first two Dio albums on cassette (so many times that I had to transplant the tape at least twice) and then hearing the same albums on CD for the first time was pretty underwhelming because of the aforementioned “just print the DAT masters to CD” approach. I guess my shitty Emerson shelf system wasn’t bespoke enough.
Edit: It’s also really difficult for those earlier masters because if the studio doesn’t have the original tracks from prior to the mastering stage, their options are really limited as far as what they can do on a remaster, and even then, a lot of drum recordings tended to be just two room mics aimed down at the kit, so you can’t really go back and isolate kick/snare/cymbals/toms and apply different volume, panning, EQ, and compression to each track to give the other instruments more “space.” Track extraction tooling has gotten pretty damned fancy in the past 3-5 years, though, so it might be possible now, if the digital artifacting isn’t too obvious.
nocw cringe
Best sounding CDs I have are easily the 80s ““sterile ass”” issues, stuff like the Killing Joke selftitled, 1986 release. 1987 press of Little Queen. 1991 press of Big Generator, 1984 press of Who’s Next. “Sterile ass” thought is what brought us to the loudness wars and compression death, because people’s systems and gear weren’t good enough and they whined that the CDs sounded bad. Funny enough, the 91-92 shift you describe is right before albums started being ruined comprehensively, examples like the George Marino masters of Yes and Led Zeppelin albums spring to mind, and then Oasis’ second album and the reissues of Abba Gold were crushed within an inch of their lives. The Dreamboat Annie CD I refer to is from 2007, a US Capitol issue.
The relative neutral response and high dynamic range of 1980s CDs is the benchmark. You don’t need an EQ or expensive gear to make these sound good, my setup involves a JVC R-X81 and a pair of Sound Dynamics R-515 speakers. The R-X81 was TOTL but the more modest Akai AA-1150D or Kenwood KR-3600 I have sound great too, and to be real a SMSL SU-1 combined with a Douk U3 and say, some Sennheiser HD650 or even Sony MDR-7506 will sound great too. This meme is atrocious, your Emerson system (literal Kmart junk) was in fact not good enough.
also the first two Dio albums would have likely been recorded to 1/2" PCM tape or analog sozIt is true that lots of studios lose the multitrack recordings that make up their albums, look at The Who or Yes’ back catalog lol. But also those sort of remixes don’t get done often anyway, and when they do it’s usually for an album that didn’t need it–see Close to the Edge. Only time I can think when it was done to an album that needed it was In The Court of the Crimson King, where the 40th and 50th anniv. Steve Wilson remixes use successively better-quality multitracks for the drums, which sounded awful in the original mix.
(Sorry I know it must be super thrilling to get lectured about Steve-Hoffman-Forum-tier loser shit by some fucking bazingabrained critter on the bear website
yw & apologies) (getting banned from the bearzone for posting cringe)
I think a large part, as others have said, is to collect physical media, but another large reason could be because people want to support the artists they listen to by actually buying their music. Streaming services are the most popular way to listen to music now and they are so fucking awful when it comes to compensating artists that most of them cannot even come close to relying on them for a stable income, even when you take in to consideration streaming on multiple platforms. So doing things like buying a record or a CD or even just buying an album digitally on a site like bandcamp does a lot more for the artists that you enjoy because they receive a much larger fraction of that money. Also, doing things like buying merch and going to shows are other good ways of supporting the artists you love!
Own nothing and enjoy it >:(
Missing the forest for the trees imo
Younger people are increasingly looking to past decades for cultural inspiration. From fashion to music mediums like vinyls and cassettes. I think it’s because they’re by far the most hopeless generation so far, and they can’t really envision any happy future or really, any future at all with global warming, decreasing living standards, technological control, etc
So they look back at the good old days before any of this was a concern to Westerners. Even their online aesthetics only come as far as the early early internet days before everything was so hypercommodified by companies and it was mostly just people fucking around making things they enjoyed with no profit incentive in mind
Fashion and music have been looking backwards since the 90’s, in the US at least.
I need something large and fragile to take up space in my luxurious spare room I don’t have.
I don’t want to start a struggle session but as nice as physical media is - I don’t miss records. They get warped or they get scratched. In some alternate universe if a record was somehow the same high fidelity but the size and weight of a cassette -
I might actually buy some.I would have some. But I don’t know how the windows would work on the cover of Physical Graffitti. Holograms I guess. Or then again - something better.It’s the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over there that they got here. But it’s just - it’s just their physics is a little different. And you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese? A Royale with Cheese.
I only buy vinyl records of albums that I really love or are otherwise Meaningful to me in some way. Otherwise, I shoot for cassette tapes, and CDs when I wanna but physical media. I just really like the physicality of it.
The ceremony of deciding what to listen to. Taking the media out of the case, putting it on the turntable, and having to be intentional about flipping to the next side. It’s all a nice break from the ethereal, instant gratification machine that is my phone
Plastic spin, go beep boop. Dopamine.
it’s nice having something to display in your living space. if you have company over having a record collection can give them something cool to look at and can be a good conversation starter. much like a book shelf
I’ve bought records even though I don’t own a record player because I like album art. you can frame them too
Plus, they’re nice to hold, put on the turntable and play. The little tactile and visual feedback is part of the fun.
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Shits usually cheap (I only buy old records)
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No loudness war bs (I only buy old records)
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Big sleeves are cool
I’m equally into taping Bandcamp albums though, I have brainrot for physical music. However most of my listening is on a 512gb sd card in a Fiio M7.
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Personally, there’s something more ritual to listening to music on a record compared to any digital medium. I’m not gonna jerk off about analog better or whatever, but to listen to a record you need a record player and possibly a speaker, you need to physically place that record in the player, and you listen to the record in the order the music was put down on it. It’s a different form of consumption than putting on a Spotify playlist on the bus.
I don’t buy vinyl because I don’t have a record player, nor do I want to dedicate space to it. My apartment is large by NYC standards, but not that large.
However, I do buy music (usually via bandcamp) directly from musicians I like. I don’t really use spotify or other streaming services, and I certainly won’t pay a monthly rental fee for music.
I like having a collection. I like being able to keep it forever. I like that I can have a brief, personal connection with the musician (via the message box in bandcamp, or at the merch table at a show).
But it’s not for everyone. People have different ways of relating to music. Some people just don’t care that much about the individual album or musician.
