Hacker News Reader

Comment by minikites | Hacker News Reader

To those who would ask "why rip vinyl instead of getting the CD?", there are lots and lots of records that never made it to CD.

View on HN

"lots of records that never made it to CD" is a great phrase! Of course we're still stuck using the lingo created at the start of the recording industry boom of the twentieth century, much as we're likely to continue saying "disk drive" although we've already moved away from spinning rust.

Many records are still never released on anything apart from vinyl. Many subcultures in music have returned to/continued releasing on that medium for aesthetic or commercial reasons: most often it's either to encourage physical DJing, the relationship with the music as an artefact, or because exclusivity makes business sense.

Great comment. You need only Google "vinyl only 2016" or any other year to see how relatively common this is.

There are also other relatively compelling reasons around quality.

And I'm not referring to the idea that vinyl is an inherently better quality format than CD, but rather that many[0] actual pressings have been mastered in higher quality in practice.

[0] http://dr.loudness-war.info/

I'm firmly in the camp that mourns the victims of the loudness war, but it's important to keep in mind that "quality" is not something that can objectively measured, and every generation has its own perception of it. In MP3: The Meaning of a Format by Jonathan Sterne, he cites research done on "The MP3 generation" -- people who came of age when Napster was on the rise -- that found those listeners preferred the sound of 128kbps MP3 over any other format or bit rate. The technology of encoding created an aesthetic.

And then of course you have Brian Eno:

"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

Eno was dead wrong about that. Outside of a marginal Kickstarter project - probably for a Japanese fanbase - I don't think anyone is going to pay money for a high-jitter 12-bit resolution retro CD player.

Comparing that to the stylised imperfections of a human performer is unconvincing.

I do think there's an interesting effect where as soon as a first-to-market technology becomes good enough to avoid being hopelessly terrible, its characteristic flaws set standard expectations for a medium. Hence retro anything - guitars, synthesizers, cars, recording equipment, tapes, vinyl, paperback books, computers...

How likely is it that the early designers were so awesome they hit a technological bullseye with these things - apparently almost every single time anyone developed a new technology?

I can't quite believe that's how it works.

Personally I have no love at all for the sound of vinyl, even on stratospherically expensive hardware.

I've paid money for software which emulates a 12 bit ADAC, with a knob to adjust the jitter etc. I have several such items in fact:

https://www.plogue.com/products/chipcrusher

https://tal-software.com/products/tal-sampler

That chipcrusher thing in particular does some crazy stuff.

Are they on the high or low end for pricing of plugins? I can imagine a full setup (excluding hardware) gets very, very expensive.

I think you're confusing hitting an objective "technological bullseye" with creating something that a specific niche audience will someday see aesthetic value in; the former of course doesn't happen with every new technology, but the latter most certainly does (albeit with different size niches for different tech: guitar distortion and 8-bit music are a lot more popular than 12-bit CD players)

Eno is spot on in this quote

But there are chip tune bands who emulate 8 bit. That people pay money to see. So I can well imagine a niche for emulating flawed CDs.

At the end of BT's Somnambulist there's cut up samples that sound exactly what you'd get with a skipping Discman. I'm not sure I'd go out of my way to listen to something like that but I'm sure there's someone experimenting with those sounds.

I love how people naively pass judgement on an aesthetic, as if everyone's tastes were like theirs.

Besides, it doesn't matter if it sounds human or not, that's not the point. Old hardware introduces a lot of weird harmonics that often affect future stages in the signal chain in a big way. Predictably enough that one can make art with it -- and it's hard to emulate that in software.

As a counter example, there are bands whose aesthetic is defined by what Brian Eno described - taking the sounds of old hardware & exploiting their points of failure. Boards Of Canada uses 80s hardware, preserving/amplifying the sounds of grain & hiss in VHS tape and other analog mediums, and uses it not just as an aesthetic but exploring the theme of society on the brink of collapse as well:

Reach For The Dead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jTg-q6Drt0 Album trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2lyYEUPat8

It's something else. Take the old synths for instance, their sound wasn't specially great by themselves, but guys like Kraftwerk and Telex, and Black devil disco club were excited with them and did commit a few good tracks. Then the unstable blur of these sounds became something. And more people try to get this sound back, with some success. Music id like the air, it will fill all the space available.

When I go to buy a title from bands that I like, but never got around to buying back when they first came out, I now shop at discogs.com instead of Amazon or Apple. That way I can specify what release it is (typically mid 90's or earlier) and not get a super-compressed recording.

And lately I see a lot of special editions and "bonus" tracks only on vinyl.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com