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Comment by nocman | Hacker News Reader

No, I don't think I missed the point.

My point was that he was unnecessarily tying the listener's activeness/seriousness/whatever with/about the music to the medium it was on.

I totally get the point about there being different levels of interaction with music. I just don't think that listening to music on vinyl equates to you being a more active listener. For some it might help, I suppose, but I think it is far from universal. Also, the implication was (as I read it), that if you listen on vinyl you are tons more likely to be an active listener than someone who is using a more modern medium, and I just don't think that's true.

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It's a similar argument to digital vs physical in other areas. Ebooks vs real books. Evernote/Notes vs a real notebook and pen.

There is research which says our minds react differently to the physical world than to the digital one. So from the idea it follows that using a Vinyl itself may not be better/worse than digital, but the mental state you enter into because of the higher activation cost (decide to play music + go to place where music is + select music + play music + go back to place to relax) as well as the reduced control (requires significant movement to pause/play/go back/go forward vs a digital device in close proximity) that it makes a difference in appreciating the music that is playing because of that investment of energy.

If you play something on Spotify you just aren't invested as much and aren't as likely to pay as much attention to the song as you would if you had invested that energy into playing it on vinyl.

So not so much that you can't do it with modern mediums, but that the modern mediums are not designed to inherently provide that feeling or bring you to that mental state.

Depending on what you're listening to (and more to the point - how what you were listening to was recorded/mastered), an analog medium sounds better. Same can be said for a digital medium, of course. It is a tool box. I put the tools I need in the box.

In that light, medium does somewhat equate to being an active listener - you evidence that you care about how the music was made in the first place.

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