Sensible Erection | Why Vinyl Sounds Better Than CD, Or Not

Sunday, 19 February 2012

quote [ According to Rolling Stone magazine, sales of vinyl albums continue to grow, setting a new record in 2010. Does vinyl reproduce sound better, or is it just a trend? Two audio experts join guest host John Dankosky to talk about the science of audio, and how perceptions can shape the sound experience. ]

Only slightly less fought over than cut vs. uncut. Extras in extended.

VERY NSFW Nude girls, random facts
http://www.nudegirlsrandomfacts.com/i/6d3nf/Due_to_the_speed_of_its_orbit_and_rotation_Mercurys
or in blog form: http://www.nudegirlsrandomfacts.com/

Also NSFW
http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lymzcljpaD1r0egyvo1_1280.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ6IHWSU3BX3X7X3Q&Expires=1329667313&Signature=3NmHLt4Rv5wA4LnMpG38O4y469I=

The Satirical Art of Paul Kuczynski - Stop and Think
http://www.mizozo.com/entertainment/02/2011/28/the-satirical-art-of-paul-kuczynski-stop-and-think.html

Anamorphic Art
http://illusion.scene360.com/art/26432/it-is-not-digital-it-is-anamorphic-art/

Octopus Tats
http://followthecolours.com.br/2012/01/tattoofriday-tattoos-tentacles.html

Realizations from the 90s generation
http://unrealitymag.com/index.php/2010/12/06/for-90s-kids-like-me/

[music] [by bltrocker@1:15amGMT] [+10 Interesting]

Comments

sacrelicious said @ 2:14am GMT on 19th Feb
who cares, it's more fun.

Ebichuman said @ 2:29am GMT on 19th Feb
Wait, which is more fun, CD or vinyl?

I really don't see how you expect us to argue with you properly when you won't choose a side! That's like inviting people to play dodge-ball but keeping the teams a secret.

mechanical contrivance said @ 2:37am GMT on 19th Feb [Score:1 Insightful]
Not a bad idea.

theolypse said @ 2:39am GMT on 19th Feb
Better than that. It sounds like a viable speed-dating alternative.

sacrelicious said @ 3:06am GMT on 19th Feb
vinyl is more fun. CD's are just tedious. I'll go to the extra effort to listen to vinyl because the process of placing and flipping the discs is fun, kind of elegant, and even requires a small amount manual dexterity. CD's are just a cold, joyless experience to operate, so I'd just rather rip them to mp3 and play them on something that's exactly as cold and joyless, but infinitely more efficient.

ckfahrenheit said @ 3:51am GMT on 19th Feb
inspecting 12" x 12" art after stylus drops

mechanical contrivance said @ 5:19am GMT on 19th Feb
and after the acid hits.

sacrelicious said @ 6:14am GMT on 19th Feb [Score:1 Funny]
after the acid hits your LPs you can't play them anymore.

KingPellinore said @ 2:45am GMT on 19th Feb [Score:1 Underrated]
I am a huge fan of the vinyl record. My love for Pink Floyd started with me finding my dad's records and playing them. The Wall hit me like a ton of bricks. Never forget that...

pleaides said @ 7:43am GMT on 19th Feb
The exact same thing happened to me. I remember that afternoon as clear as a bell, it was as though I'd discovered a great secret, oh and that sweet sweet strat sound...

rndmnmbr said @ 8:16am GMT on 19th Feb
1994, my mother buys Dark Side of the Moon on CD. I was enlightened by the time I reached Us and Them

(as for vinyl - a friend sent me a copy of Rush's 2112 on vinyl, in perfect condition. It took a while to find a working turntable, but it was so. worth. it.)

granitewitch said @ 2:32am GMT on 19th Feb [Score:1 Insightful]
The most interesting comparison I've ever seen myself was done by a guy with a small recording studio who taped demos for upcoming bands. As a test he had a local band that I knew record a song which he recorded simultaneously in digital and analog. He then played the two copies for me.

The digital version was crisp, clear and sharp. Every nuance of the music could be heard. The analog version was not as sharp, slightly fuzzier, and had a richer sound to my ear. Analog has a much warmer sound than digital.

Is digital or analog better? I guess that depends on your definition of better. Personally I prefer analog.

mrklipp said @ 5:11am GMT on 19th Feb [Score:2 Underrated]
I suspect it's like the old Vaseline on the camera lens bit, there are times when a more softened version of reality may be the more aesthetically pleasing version.

Didel said @ 5:29am GMT on 19th Feb
The thing is, all analog studios basically no longer exist and all digital studios don't exist. What you will find is that everything is going through some analog aspects and probably being recorded into a computer digitally through very high end analog preamps/DI's/your-method-of-choice and into a very high end analog to digital recording system. Those same signals may even be put back out through a high end digital to analog converter, run back through analog effects/what-have-you and then put back into a digital system. Or maybe those analog recording systems are using digital effects at some point. There's so much that goes on in recording music that to say "analog is better/digital is better," it's actually quite a silly argument. Even more so when it comes to CD/digital vs Vinyl, especially newly pressed vinyl that for most artists comes from a mostly digitally recorded album, mixed and mastered digitally and just pushed out at the end for a Vinyl pressing.

I think it's just a silly argument all together. But I'm probably in the minority as I think the actual music is more important than the media onto which is recorded/presented.

mechanical contrivance said @ 5:40am GMT on 19th Feb
Naturally, the music is more important than the medium. But once you find a piece of music you want to hear, it's nice to have it in the best sounding format.

granitewitch said @ 6:29am GMT on 19th Feb
Dire Straits, "Brothers In Arms". Purely digital, the first album to be produced that way.

mechanical contrivance said @ 4:21pm GMT on 19th Feb
Also the first cd to sell a million copies.

endopol said @ 5:51am GMT on 19th Feb
You can apply all sorts of digital transforms to duplicate that warmth on a CD. You can't duplicate crispness on vinyl. What I like about vinyl is the fact that I am very subtly destroying the music every time I play it.

burning1 said @ 7:19am GMT on 19th Feb [Score:2 Insightful]
A while back, I dropped a few thousand dollars into an extremely nice home audio setup for music. What I found was that the ability to enjoy the system was very dependent on the kind of music available.

It was stunning for listening to well mastered DVD or super audio CD media. But, really brought out the flaws in a lot of CD mixes. The clarity of the system with good source material made MP3s sound pretty terrible.

I learned that some music just isn't great on a crystal clear system. Was enjoying the Black Eyed Peas at the time, and found that the proper listening environment was a car with the windows rolled down in summer. Just sounded soul-less on a really nice stereo, and benefited from the noisy environment of the car.

Unfortunately, a lot of modern CDs are mixed pretty terribly - the mixes suffer from the loudness wars, and seem designed for noisy environments, MP3 compression, and cheap ear-bud headphones. All dynamics are lost. Unfortunately, a lot of people like that particular sound, due to their preference for louder music, or environmental factors. So, my library suffers.

Conversely, with a good system and an excellent digital source, you can close your eyes and the speakers disappear. You can really imagine sitting directly in front of the bad. Media induced 'warmth' takes away from that experience.

I understand why someone might prefer the sound of Vinyl, but I don't see it's particular flaws as being a benefit any more than compression is a benefit.

b said @ 5:42pm GMT on 19th Feb
Sorry, but the Black Eyed Peas? You put a few thousand dollars into a home audio system so you could listen to the Black Eyed Peas? I weep for you and your children and your children's children.

burning1 said @ 7:18pm GMT on 19th Feb [Score:1 Underrated]
Actually, I spent a few thousand dollars to listen to Pink Floyd, Bach, Nora Jones, A Perfect Circle, Accept, System of a Down, Louis Armstrong, Queen, Zeppelin, etc. etc. etc...

Also nice for movies - probably a better buy at the time than a huge TV.

I had a feeling that there would be someone who couldn't let a reference to BEP pass. Had great time cruising along the beach in Aptos with their music playing, and remember it as a good example of a band that doesn't sound good on a high end audio system.

herra turpa said @ 10:53am GMT on 19th Feb
there is also a matter of how the record is mastered. you make different master settings for vinyl and different for cd/digital. for example if you have a shitty vinyl master and it has a lot of "peaks". So when you cut it down on vinyl record, needle can jump easily on those spots if not mastered properly.

i for am a vinyl guy my self, 90% of records i buy are vinyls, rest 10% are CD´s from flea markets or some local bands albums from their gig.

i have found out that more and more albums bands release on vinyl lately have also a code inside that allows you to download that album digitally from their homepage or from record label. i think it´s a win win situation anyways.

here is the last album that i just bought, it had a download code also

bltrocker said @ 4:29pm GMT on 19th Feb
In what way does it matter if you have vinyl or digital if the entire recording is distorted guitars and screaming set to 11?

If we're talking harder rock, I'm more concerned about how different mediums or compression levels could affect cuts such as this:

herra turpa said @ 10:19am GMT on 20th Feb
try listening the record from somewhere else then youtube, and you might find out stuff...

mechanical contrivance said @ 2:43am GMT on 19th Feb
Whenever I buy a cd, I always buy the original pressing, not the remaster. When old albums get remastered, the engineer compresses out all the dynamic range of the music. It's what record companies want these days.

The trouble is, I think music sounds a lot better with the dynamic range left intact. If an album is new, then there is no old copy with the dynamic range intact. It's compressed or nothing.

I like to fantasize that new bands will one day rerelease their albums with the dynamic range left in, instead of the exact opposite of that, like we get now.

theolypse said @ 2:45am GMT on 19th Feb
I suggest smaller labels, then.

mechanical contrivance said @ 5:41am GMT on 19th Feb
Trouble is, the bands I like are all on major labels.

Isosceles Lockâ„¢ said @ 3:37am GMT on 19th Feb
I hate reissues that apply a hiss filter, sure it removes the unwanted hiss, but it leaves any cymbals sounding underwater.

mechanical contrivance said @ 5:43am GMT on 19th Feb
The remastering team used a noise filter on the recent Beatles reissues. They only used it in places where the hiss would be obvious, though, like quiet parts. I think that's the best compromise until someone invents a better noise filter.

Mr. Langosta said @ 3:58am GMT on 19th Feb
The Foo Fighters' latest album was recorded analog.

mechanical contrivance said @ 5:27am GMT on 19th Feb
And according to measurements presented here DR Database, the vinyl version has a fair amount of dynamic range. The cd version has very little, as usual.

Vinyl can't be made as compressed as cds. It's a limit of the technology.

hellboy said @ 9:41am GMT on 19th Feb
Conversely, vinyl cannot have the same dynamic range as a CD. Also a limit of the technology.

mechanical contrivance said @ 4:26pm GMT on 19th Feb
I hate record companies.

bltrocker said @ 4:42pm GMT on 19th Feb
How are these numbers determined, in layman's terms? If a song has a bunch of garbage above 10,000 Hz, would the number be really high?

mechanical contrivance said @ 8:58pm GMT on 19th Feb
People run a piece of software called DR Meter. There's a download link on that site. It's measures the loudest part of a song and the quietest part, then gives you the difference. The smaller the number, the less dynamic range.

ckfahrenheit said @ 4:04am GMT on 19th Feb
hm
maybe they compress it to death for rock, but I always felt that classical digital recordings went too far on the dynamic range for my taste ~ near-inaudible to ear-splitting a lot of times, and then I missed my LPs with their compression and no need to have one hand on the volume.

What I HATE about some CDs I have is when some dolt engineer falls asleep and lets the level get so high it clips.

mechanical contrivance said @ 5:32am GMT on 19th Feb
Yes, classical and jazz typically have the dynamic range left in. Other genres typically have the dynamic range compressed out.

Clipping is another problem. Highly compressed recordings usually have more clipping because they're so loud. Death Magnetic by Metallica is an excellent example of this.

azazel said @ 3:22am GMT on 19th Feb
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Loudness War only because of digital recordings? I think someone told me that you couldn't do the same thing with vinyls.

corwin said @ 4:40am GMT on 19th Feb
Correct—and they sort of explain why in the NPR link. Because sound was physically recorded on vinyl, the more dynamic and harmonic range you included, the bigger and deeper the grooves got. Bass, in particular, had to be limited because the big waves actually took up a lot of space on vinyl. If you didn't compress things, you could actually pop a needle out of groove, or end up with just 10 minutes of music per side. On vinyl, compression moved both volume and tone toward the middle (maybe this is the "warmer" sound that is often cited by vinyl fans?). Almost immediately with CDs, engineers realized they could pack huge amounts of bass in, comparatively—because it was just a number, it didn't take up any more space than any other part of the spectrum. Same thing for volume—just a number. Then there was what amounted to an arms race in loudness: compress the shit out of the dynamic range so that there's a tiny distance between the quietest quiet and the loudest loud, and then raise the loudest point just shy (or over!) the threshold where the volume "clips" or digitally distorts. Our perception of loudness is not merely peak volume, but how sustained loud sounds are. When you compress something and bring it up to the clipping threshold, it sounds very, very loud indeed—and really cuts through the engine noise and squabbling children. So your music gets noticed, and the executives ask the next engineer to make it just a little louder… Anyway, you couldn't do that on vinyl.

cskrat said @ 5:12am GMT on 19th Feb
The loudness war is just a modern trend. Having a digital mastering process may make it easier to add that effect but it doesn't force it by any means. FTA, digital recording and distribution actually allow a larger dynamic range and a more accurate and consistent reproduction.

One way to think of it is to compare audio recording to photography. for the sake of this discussion, let's pretend that 1 hour photo processing doesn't exist in order to limit the comparison to professional photography vs. studio recording.

With film photography you have certain deviations from the real subject that will be introduced by the film, processing chemicals, photo paper and human timing in the developing process. There are effects and deliberate manipulations that can be done to accentuate or diminish those deviations or, even, fundamentally alter the reproduction to further remove it from the original subject. However there will always be limits to such manipulations, based in the chemistry and physics of the process, that can be pushed but not outright broken.

With digital photography you will have a copy, ready for viewing or distribution, without any deviation from what the camera captured. The dark room step is now optional and any changes from the source material are now deliberately done in Photoshop. Any manipulation that can be imagined and many that have yet to be imagined are all possible without limitation.

Audio is similar in that analog mastering with vinyl distribution will add certain characteristics by default and digital mastering will require the audio engineer to add the characteristics of his choosing deliberately.

This has just been a comparison of mastering techniques in this post because comparing vinyl at different RPMs to 8-track to cassette to CD to MP3/AAC at different bit rates is an entirely different can of worms. In both analog and digital you will see effects of media choice. In analog, there will always be some loss with each media type introducing a bias as to what that loss sounds like. In digital, loss is a decision to balance fidelity, cost and convenience with the option, however rarely it is exercised, of releasing lossless reproductions produced at sample rates and bit resolutions that greatly surpass the resolution of human perception.

cskrat said @ 5:18am GMT on 19th Feb
Easy reader version:
Analog forced studios to work with the medium.
Digital allows studios to ignore the medium and do whatever bullshit sells the most units.

mechanical contrivance said @ 5:37am GMT on 19th Feb
According to the loudness war article on wikipedia, some labels, like Motown, started making their records as loud as they could back in the 60s. If one record in a jukebox is louder than the rest, it will get noticed more.

azazel said @ 6:30pm GMT on 19th Feb
Maybe I should have said that CDs made it get out of hand, instead.

bltrocker said @ 3:23am GMT on 19th Feb
Oh also, for those who watched the Grammys and heard all the "who is Bonnie Bear?" stuff when Bon Iver won, Bonnie Bear from babyfirsttv has responded

drewski3420 said @ 4:44am GMT on 19th Feb
+1 Nude Girls, Random Facts. Although I feel like I exhausted the list pretty quickly. Hopefully they post more.

rndmnmbr said @ 8:13am GMT on 19th Feb
I can tell you why I like vinyl. When I put on music for background noise, I don't honestly care about the media it's on - it's meant to fill a sound hole. But when I seriously listen to a record, the whole little ritual - clean the record, turn on the old tube amp and let it warm, set the needle in the groove, turn the lights down - it's a mental preparation to expend the effort to hear every bit of the music.

As for "warmth" or "crispness", I let the audiophiles duke it out.

mechanical contrivance said @ 4:27pm GMT on 19th Feb [Score:1 Insightful]
Music foreplay.

bltrocker said @ 4:51pm GMT on 19th Feb
Bend over, and I'll fill a sound hole

yogi said @ 8:14am GMT on 19th Feb
I'll throw out some random observations on dig v. ana.

First, lots of analog from old times was recorded very softly. Michael Hedges' Aerial Boundaries just doesn't get a lot of volume on the iPhone music player. At some point I may have for bring it over from CD again just to see.

But I think lots of digital is recorded louder than the analog.

Second, I have a rather severe hearing loss and listen to music exclusively through headphones nowadays, and the kind I use these days are noise-cancelers. The ones supplied by Apple just don't cut it. I can't hear as much of the highs as I want.

Third, that means that sounds that I used to be able to hear--the seagulls at the beginning of A Salty Dog (even the high overtones of the piano on the youtube recoding of such)--are gone. The magic of the high bright guitar in Baby Britain is gone.

Don't listen to radio.

But fourth, interestingly, I heard, for the first time, and this was recently on the bluetooth connection from iPhone to the crappy sound system of my Nissan Leaf, I heard for the first time the intake of breath on a wind instrument in the song called "Song of Complaint," from the Peter Gabriel produced Sources album of long ago. That was absolutely stunning to hear.

Overall, though, in terms of separation of sound, analog helps me distinguish between different instruments, as they are placed across the stereophonic spectrum. For me it's much more enjoyable. I remember the first time I heard digital versus analog--the digital wasn't quite so alive.

Here's a final impression: I remember hearing Hedges' Aerial Boundaries when it first came out. This was about 1984 or 5, and I had just come in from skiing, I think, or something which made me relaxed. I was lying on the floor at someone else's house. I'd heard the recording before, probably at a party, but this was first time I actually carefully counted the number of guitars I thought Hedges was using to overdub himself, not knowing he did the song on one guitar.

The separation was delicious. Now, knowing how to play the song, I always think back to that soft moment when I hear the song. See his live version on the CD Solace, from Windham Hill. Absolute joy.

ComposerNate said @ 9:47am GMT on 19th Feb
320kbps Mp3 - massive, selective, convenient and mobile library, easily shared, indistinguishable from what the musicians/engineer decided was perfection

DarkShadowRavenDragonGrrl69 said @ 10:11am GMT on 19th Feb
Pssh, ogg vorbis is way better.

ComposerNate said @ 10:39am GMT on 19th Feb
A blind comparison four years ago told me different, ogg sounding so relatively bad I never bothered with it again. I thought it only good for licensing avoidance in video game speech files.

DarkShadowRavenDragonGrrl69 said @ 11:14am GMT on 19th Feb [Score:1 Informative]
Really now? What bitrates and genres are we talking about? I found the aoTuV encoded songs I tested at relatively high bitrates of 192+ to be almost indistinguishable from their uncompressed or lossless counterparts. 256 kbps was already what I'd consider good enough on a high-end home audio system and a pair of Beyerdynamics headphones (can't remember the model number).

Granted, that was also quite a few years ago and I'm pretty sure audio codecs improved in the meantime anyway. I'm still waiting for the release of Opus and the newest AAC codecs are also apparently up there as far as fidelity goes.

Oh yeah, I went for pretty much the full spectrum of genres myself: Classical (whatever that means), folk, hip-hop, acid house/techno, prog metal

ComposerNate said @ 12:26pm GMT on 19th Feb
The genre was the Composer album I was recording. On your advice, I'll try again once reaching the mastering stage of my current song, and after updating my codecs. My software allows for seemingly unlimited variety as for ogg bitrates, something I didn't realize before just now, so could also compare with 460Kbps ogg or higher fidelity. Thanks!

Ever found a player which couldn't read ogg files natively?

High bitrates (more than 128 kbit/s): most people do not hear significant differences. However, trained listeners can often hear significant differences between codecs at identical bitrates, and aoTuV Vorbis performed better than LC-AAC, MP3, and MPC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis#Quality:_Codec_comparisons

It seems I should install and maybe begin using aoTuV Vorbis.

ComposerNate said @ 12:58pm GMT on 19th Feb
Sent my wife an ogg file, she says: can't open the song :(

ComposerNate said @ 2:02pm GMT on 19th Feb
Associated it SPlayer and it could be read, but none of the four players on her PC were automatically ready.

DarkShadowRavenDragonGrrl69 said @ 2:05pm GMT on 19th Feb [Score:1 Informative]
That's probably the biggest problem with vorbis. It's open-source and completely free but still less-widely accepted than mp3 and AAC.

I'm pretty sure no apple products support it natively but don't take my word for it, I don't actually own any ipods, macs or iphones. I know there's ways around it since one friend of mine once told me about a mp3 player firmware called Rockbox that adds a ton of features including support for a wide range of codecs.

Of course Android supports it because Android's for nerds. I THINK there's native support for it through HTML5 in most current web browsers. Possibly everyone except for IE and Safari.

If you really feel like wasting a few hours you could probably read through the official wiki.

As a consumer I always appreciate it when I get the choice of my preferred codec, usually when buying something from bandcamp.

Anti-fuites said @ 12:42pm GMT on 19th Feb
see also:

Vacuum Tube vs Solid State Amps

half said @ 1:36pm GMT on 19th Feb
vacuum rocks.

mechanical contrivance said @ 4:34pm GMT on 19th Feb [Score:1 Informative]
Vacuums suck.

sacrelicious said @ 9:53pm GMT on 19th Feb [Score:1 Funny]
vacuums aren't environmentally friendly. in fact, nature abhors them.

half said @ 1:40pm GMT on 19th Feb
see also :

Speakers; When is good enough, enough

sacrelicious said @ 9:27pm GMT on 19th Feb
wasn't the whole technology of THX invented for the express purpose of accurate reproduction of the sound design from one theater or home theater to the next? granted, to be in line with a THX standard you actually had to have a sound tech from the company calibrate the system from the sound board, to the physical speakers and their placement, all the way down to the acoustic properties of the venue itself. all of which were out of the reach of the non-wealthy individual user.

so speakers alone obviously could never meet that standard, and without access to high-end professional calibration it is indeed too much to expect. but it's entirely possible.

mechanical contrivance said @ 1:50am GMT on 20th Feb
Other than that, THX is great.

yogi said @ 3:33pm GMT on 19th Feb
After I went to sleep, I thought about what I wrote. There seem to be, as noted just above, so many ways to record, that I wondered if anyone had tried to make a digital recording sound like analog.

Also, from the article, and from the above, the engineer's viewpoint versus the layman's can account for a LOT. That is, I bet something like the placebo effect comes in, or Heisenberg's Uncertainty, where if we're told to listen for something, more than likely we will. So an engineer may say, "Listen for such-and-such," and it could be there, just cuz the engineer helped create the sound and knows what to listen for.

In a similar view, I knew a guy about 15 or 20 years ago who had a small studio. When he mixed a song he used two speakers. I was surprised at that, cuz I thought you would have wanted to hear the sound closer to the ear--cutting down the ambient "noise" of the space from a speaker four or five from the ear to the insertion or use of headphones.

In a similar vein, a couple weeks ago there was a youtube thing on a George Harrison solo in a Beatles' song which had never been heard, and which had been uncovered by his son and George Martin. Even listening with the headphones I could not hear it well.

That means that this post, and my last one, are heavily influenced by my hearing loss.

Um, thanks for listening...!!

Supreme_Coconut said @ 4:30pm GMT on 19th Feb
As Mr. Langosta mentioned elsewhere in here, the Foo Fighters' most recent album was recorded in analog. Hell, the first video they shot for it was also shot on film:

ComposerNate said @ 5:16pm GMT on 19th Feb [Score:2]
Liked the idea of reversing polarity on a lossy format, joining it to the original wav, seeing what crunchy upper-harmonic trash character had been lost.

graham said @ 6:08pm GMT on 19th Feb

sacrelicious said @ 6:45pm GMT on 19th Feb
those things are notorious for destroying records.

graham said @ 1:06am GMT on 21st Feb
yeah, WORLD RECORDS FOR AWESOME.

Baron said @ 7:07pm GMT on 19th Feb
Speaking of music.

There's something I miss about CDs and tapes versus having your ipod with you in the car.

With physical media, you'd have to change the disks and cassettes manually. "What do you wanna listen to?" "Pass me the cd booklet and i'll pick one!"

Its just not the same with the ipod. click click click "Ahh, here we go"

Am I making sense or just talking outta my ass?

bltrocker said @ 7:14pm GMT on 19th Feb
Totally. It's teaching people to have this kind of music ADD, to the point where I've been in cars where I hear intros, first verses, and first choruses the entire ride.

sacrelicious said @ 7:32pm GMT on 19th Feb
I have to control myself when shuffling tracks on my mp3 player. I'll often go "*click* not really into this one right now. *click* so sick of this song. *click* meh. *click* this one's pretty good. *click* ooh, I love this song! *click*" I don't do that so much when listening to them as albums, but when it's random tracks it can get out of hand.

therefore I offer up a new concept for digital music players: Attention Span Mode - in Attention Span Mode you may pause, but you may not skip. so in shuffle mode it will play the song all the way through, and then the next on too, and in album mode you must listen to the entire album. if you stop the song and walk away it will remember where you left off, and continue from that point next time to start it. the feature can be disabled with a password, but you must back out of the music player entirely to enter said password. thus it may be more convenient just to listen to the song/album.

ethanos said @ 12:17pm GMT on 21st Feb
You ARE making sense
but
You MAY be talking out of your ass at the same time.

foobar said @ 9:33pm GMT on 19th Feb
40 years from now crusty old fogies and ironic hipsters will go on and on about the oaky finish and fruity aftertaste of music played on a vintage iPod.

ethanos said @ 12:23pm GMT on 21st Feb
I didn't read the whole thread, so sue me.
But here's what I think: the OUTSIDE tracks of an LP sounded a lot better than the INSIDE tracks.... something to do with speed and fidelity.
And if I could find a rubber band suitable for my belt-drive turntable and an amp and speakers, I would do a LIVE TEST and report back to everybody here.

ethanos said @ 12:36pm GMT on 21st Feb
Okay, okay. Wait. The REAL problem with vinyl was you were the victim of the recording INDUSTRY which saw fit to package music in some arcane order to maximize profit at the expense of art. Otherwise, I agree with the tactile guys on this topic: touching the music is good.

mechanical contrivance said @ 11:25pm GMT on 21st Feb
Ok, Music. Show us on the doll where ethanos touched you.