I have one friend who listens to music on (or at least collects) vinyl. I have another friend who listens to casettes and makes mixtapes. I don't know anyone who uses CDs.
What is this purpose?
Personally I'm borderline tone-deaf so I can't tell the difference, but I'm not going to call the people who say they can tell the difference liars.
They're not liars, there are just 2 cases:
(a) They confuse harmonic and other types of distortion (e.g. from tube amps) or the extra compression applied to vynil as better than cleaner signal. Which, subjectively, might be.
(b) They are delluded (as opposed to liars), and wouldn't be able to perform their "tell the difference" in a blind A/B test.
Badly designed DACs tend to produce third harmonic distortion, which sounds "harsh" or "bright" (= like a cafe with lots of hard surfaces and people crashing their cutlery around).
There are very few badly designed DACs being manufactured any more, but the loudness wars have made music sound both bright and "lifeless" (lacking in dynamic range).
So yeah, (b). (B) has been found to be the case even among people who make audio equipment for a living. People hear what they expect or want to hear, just like with vision.
Edit: main reference: Floyd Toole, Sound Reproduction. Toole worked in an acoustics research lab for a Canadian government, and then ran Harmon Kardon's research lab for many years.
Analog loses even more information.
First, something being "continuous" doesn't make it an accurate representation of the original continuous signal, or a better than digital representation. Among many factors, how deep/heavy the head goes into the groove for one affects the fidelity of the signal and how much DR you can have (that's why heavier vinyl is for more expensive/premium releases).
There is other loss of information between the signal (e.g. voice) and its transfer to the vinul, more so than with digital.
Vinyl also has more compression and more equalization thrown in to cut frequencies (heavy bass can make record player heads skip, so it's cut at mastering).
Cassete tape also has more compression (loss of signal dynamic range), more noise (loss of signal), than CDs, plus wow, flutter, etc. It's not even comparable, despite being "analog".
Also, contrary to popular belief, and simplified "layman" posts, digital doesn't produce "square-ized" versions of waveforms due to quantization.
If you digitally sample a pure sine wave, it comes out as a pure sine way when you play it (you can check that on an oscilloscope).
What vinyl does offer better than CD/streaming is lack of convenience (I consider it a pro: it forces more focus and dedication when listening), better tactility, better collectible value, better sentimental value (patina, etc), and extremely better showcase for the cover art.
I've known musicians who think this way! So it's not just layman.
Anyone who thinks this should look up the Nyquist–Shannon Theorem.
No. Digital audio with 44.1 kHz sampling rate is capable of perfectly reproducing all sound waves in the human hearing range. If any information is lost during the conversion from analog to digital, it is due to the quality of the recording hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
Unfortunately they seem to be down at the moment, but wayback machine to the rescue:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200202124704/https://people.xi...
> Playing discs on the $795 Rega Planet is a lot like playing LPs: You can read the CD label as the disc sits inside the player, and you can see the disc spin as it plays.
The early model of Discman skipped really bad, so anyone listening to music while doing some physical activity mostly stuck with Walkman. It wasn't until memory was cheap enough that they could have decent buffers that people started using CD players more, but not long after that, MP3 players started to become popular.
CDs were more of a car thing. Everyone at my high school had those big ass books of CDs in their cars, even if they all also Rios for personal listening. Then the big 20GB HDD-based MP3 players came out and that's what everyone had.
I'm sure there are some people playing vinyl, but I also bet a lot of these are never being played, it's just decorative.
It’s not something I do every day. Most of my music is streamed. But I find when I stream I rarely listen to a full album. Apple killed the full album.
I guess we never know if we're typical or not, but I tend to add an album at a time to my collection and listen to them that way as well.
If anything is killing the album, it's that it is a somewhat artificial medium, dictated by the constraints of records and later, CDs.
It seems like it's surviving on its own merits, there are a couple of albums from this year I really enjoy. But it's bound to be less popular now that it's just another way to listen to your choice of music, instead of the only way.
Apple started selling individual songs and for the first time people were able to buy music without buying the whole album. So yes, Apple killed the album.
Though I gotta say: I was around and listening to music at the time, and it was Napster which struck the death blow. Apple came along a couple years later to put the album out of its misery.
The album doesn't seem dead, so much as diminished, but I know a harmless rhetorical flourish when I see one...
I occasionally buy vinyl, I have some vinyl Super Deluxe editions around me, and getting the free FLAC makes the purchasing decision much easier for me. I get the album in full quality to play, plus all the bonus tracks & physical merch and something to put in my display cabinet.
CDs were a step in the wrong direction
Plus if you're into audiobooks you could get away with 64kbit mono MP3 which doubles the capacity.
What you said is true when compared to analog mediums like vinyl. Even the dust that's sitting on top of the record can color the audio and that's before we even consider the quality of the turntable hardware. People actually perceive vinyl as the better medium because of this.
It's one of those "paradox of choice" things; the more decisions you have to make, the less happy you are. When listening to a record, I just have to decide to put the record on, and then all choice is removed from me and I just sit back and enjoy the ride. I don't have to decide whether to skip a track or whether to jump from a playlist to a specific song I just thought about; the "would I rather be doing something else?" part of my brain takes a break.
It’s like keyboards without printed keys for those aficionados who prefer to learn to type without looking down. Just don’t look down, problem solved.
Oftentimes, something is far easier to type than it is to do. If you have a reliable way of implementing self-control this simply, please share it.
But things like “I don’t buy junk food because if I do, I’ll eat it right away and gain weight”. This... this is a problem with self control. My point was that justifying records because it forces me to listen to the whole album without skipping is an artificially constructed self imposed problem.
It may not be a brain bug everyone has, but the point is to pick a method of relaxing that doesn't exacerbate it.
When everything works, I am relaxed. When I am artificially constrained, I am not relaxed.
CD players attempt simple interpolation to hide errors, so the sound has started to degrade long before you start getting clicks and skips. Clock jitter is also an issue.
I started ripping my CD collection to FLAC in the mid-2000s, because it was obvious that ripped FLACs were cleaner and more accurate than the audio from my not-cheap CD deck. Now all my music is on a NAS in a spare bedroom with RAID and a separate occasional manual backup to yet another drive.
I have no interest in vinyl in at all, or in analog nostalgia, or in having yet more stuff to manage in my space. I spent too many hours moving huge boxes of vinyl around and trying to hear music through crackles and pops. So I wouldn't care if every LP and turntable in the world disappeared overnight.
While a lot of vinyl fans would be very upset if this happened, I wouldn't be one of them.
I sometimes wonder about selling limited edition physical artwork off the back of music projects.
They went right in the trash.