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If I was doing it as a way to acquire music to listen to, CDs, it's easier and more convenient to rip them to a computer, they take up less storage space, and are more tolerant of a bit of neglect.
If I'm just looking to collect something for the sake of collecting something, probably vinyl.
I was in the record business from the 70s through the early 2000s, and oversaw the transition from LPs to CDs. I had a huge LP collection (50% classical), which I transitioned to a huge CD collection, and got rid of most of the LPs. I still have the entire collection.
CDs were the better format by a long ways, but I totally understand why people love vinyl. For one thing, the large format cover. I remember working for a classical record label, and we were looking at the final cover proof of the last LP we were releasing before going all CD, a particularly beautiful photo of the Alps, and my boss saying "Aren't you going to miss the big cover art?" And all of us nodded solemnly. It really felt like a funeral, like I was saying goodbye.
I also remember wondering how people were going to clean their weed, and roll proper joints without an LP with a gatefold cover.
Properly keeping a vinyl collection is a chore. First of all, if you are doing it right, ALL of your LPs are in a poly sleeve for protection, so the process for playing an LP is this:
Remove the album from the shelf, where it is properly stored upright and tight.
Remove the LP from the poly sleeve
Remove the inner sleeve/ dust cover from the cover.
Remove the LP from the inner sleeve/ dust cover, carefully using fingertips on the edges and label only.
Hold the LP, and look at it from the edge, to see if there are any obvious warps or kinks. Of course there aren't, you store it properly, but you look anyway.
You blow off any obvious hairs or dust.
Set it carefully on the turntable, trying to put the spindle through hole on the first try, without rubbing it around, making nearly invisible, but bothersome, marks around the hole, that will irk you every time you see them.
Carefully clean the surface with a Discwasher or some other cleaning device.
Use a stylus brush on the needle to remove any schmutz.
Carefully place the needle on the surface, and relax for the next 20 minutes as you listen to your music. Or dance. Or my personal favorite: Air Guitar (I play for real, I'm allowed).
Flip the record, repeat the entire cleaning process, and drop the needle.
Reverse the process, put the LP back into the inner sleeve, put that in the cover, put the album back in the poly sleeve, and slip it back into its proper place on the shelf.
That's a lot more complicated than simply dropping a CD into a drawer and pushing a button.
The psychological result of all those steps, EVERY time you want to play music, is that it starts to feel like a ritual, and takes on a feeling of importance. The music you listen to, the LPs that that you fuss over, that you preserve, and collect, take on a personal and cultural significance, that you feel a need to protect.
As new formats came along, CDs, then Digital Downloads, the ritual was removed, and music stopped feeling important. In the 60s and 70s, music was a significant factor in ending the Vietnam War, but it is hard to imagine today's music industry mobilizing against the government. Most people don't take their music as seriously as they did back then.
Yet some have rediscovered the satisfaction in having such a strong, PHYSICAL relationship with their music collection, and are collecting LPs again.
I get it. Music has ALWAYS been important to me, so I don't need the ritual to remind me anymore anymore, or maybe doing the ritual 100,000 when I was young wove it into my DNA. Either way, CDs have the durability, combined with the punchier sound quality, ease of use, and longer duration, and I was hooked the first time I saw one. I'll take the advantages of the CD over The Ritual any day.
I am so grateful to see someone write it out like this in ritual sense so that someone who didn’t have any records would understand. It’s downright reverent of the music. Thank you for that.
Very true. Many hobbies have rituals. Cyclists assemble their gear, clean their chain, and choose their wardrobe before their ride. Card collectors and collectors of all kinds of things often have detailed ritualistic organization of their collection. Potheads might pack and burn their bowl the exact same super optimized way every time. Gardeners might walk meditative paths and talk to their plants. Those descriptions are outside observations of people and their hobby rituals that anyone can make. OP has given us an inside look into their hobby, which is pretty damn cool and insightful!
Reverence is the perfect word for how performing the ritual makes you feel about the music.
What's your favorite purely classical LP to air guitar to
Andres Segovia playing Bach's Partita #3 for Solo Violin. I heard it first when I was a teen, and now I'm trying to learn it on electric guitar, as an oldster.
My family had discwasher but not needle cleaner. You are supposed to use it EVERY time???
My Discwasher came with a little stylus cleaning brush that fit over the top of the little bottle of cleaning solution.
You probably didn't have to clean it every time, but it wasn't a bad idea to give it a quick swipe and remove any grit that accumulated from the last playing.
Same as I do now.
CDs.
You can rip CDs to digital easily. You can get them cheap at resale shops and garage sales.
I buy and listen to vinyls, but also I moatly only buy them for my top 5 artists, partly for display. I do buy some if Infind them cheap or they are special, but I don't really collect vinyls. They are impractical.
Vinyl is trash coming back to sell to collectors.
If you want to put covers up in a room or something go for it. But for listening to music they are the dumbest shit imaginable.
Preach. I am so fed up with vinyl. I hope more artist will continue releasing their music on CD instead.
Por que no los dos?
Some people like collecting vinyl records, others like collecting music on CDs.
To each their own, live and let live.
If I weren't allowed to stream or pirate, then CDs.
If I am, then Vinyl.
My wife is totally into vinyl but I keep telling her, the best it will ever sound is the first time you play it and it degrades just a little bit every time the needle hits it.
CDs are consistent. The same data every play, and it's easier to rip them to digital.
I knew guys who were so weird about their LPs, that they wouldn't play something because they didn't want to wear it out, which is stupid.
I also had customers (I worked at n record stores back in the day) that would play certain records EVERY day, and would buy a new copy once a year. Dark Side of the Moon, Rumors, Led Zeppelin 4, and Lynyrd Skynyrd were common ones.
Hard no. Hauling this shit around and finding a spots for it is not something I would've chosen if I didn't already have the nostalgic attachment.
That being said! Can't lie I do still love it.
CDs for sure but then again I never stopped collecting them. They can be played as is with no loss of audio quality. They are easy to store, and serves as a backup after you have ripped them to a harddrive. So should your hardware fail you can always start over.
There is also a lot of music I might have forgotten about if I only had streamed it, but finding it on my shelf years later gives the music new life again.
CDs. They take up less space. Especially if you throw the casing away and just have the actual CD. I don't have any device that can read either so keeping them usable is not a priority.
I'm aware of the correct interpretation of the question but I found this more amusing.
It's a tough one because vinyl records are objectivity inferior in every way. However, for some weird reason high quality dynamic masters are used for vinyl records but not CD's. There's no reason they couldn't use dynamic masters for CD's and digital but they don't. Read about the loudness wars if you feel like learning about the subject. If anyone needs tips on CD ripping or anything of that nature feel free to PM me.
If you want the highest quality, lowest cost, and most convenient listening experience (especially portable) then get CDs. If you enjoy the ritual of using the turntable and you also want something that looks good on the wall, get vinyl.
Or do like me and get some of both!
Same as I do now, vinyl. If you're listening to CDs, which are digital, you may as well buy your music digitally from Bandcamp or wherever and you have no need for physical media.
CDs also suffer from bit rot so they won't last forever, best way to keep them forever is to rip them, but at that point, again, just buy the music digitally.
Vinyl doesn't give you the best sound quality, it can be annoying to have to flip the record over or change records, but there's something about it being tangible, it's a real thing, you can see the grooves, you don't even need power to play a record. And with care, they'll last a lot longer than a CD.
Vinyl isn't a perfect medium, but that's kinda what makes it so fun and special
Your point is true until you find a lot of music that is mostly accessible via CD only. I'm with you, getting stuff at bandcamp is great. But I have so much music that does not exist any other way that I got a CD player for the PC to rip the cds and find CDs at second hand market (and also, the CDs are so bloody cheap for a lot of good old music)
Vinyl. If shit hits the fan and there are no music players left I think I might possibly get vinyl to play manually/mechanically somehow.
I think I'd go for CDs, I could get a blu ray reader to also collect movies
I collect both but have begun focusing more on CDs for their portability, price, and their ease of digitization. I'm actually in the middle of extracting CDs I recently picked up at the thrift store as I type this. I have an MP3 player and I load them on there, keep them on my hard-drive AND a separate back up. I still have CDs from the 90s and have had no issues with them playing or being digitized.
I like both. Vinyl is fun because you have to more actively deal with it, which keeps me engaged with listening.
CDs are good because they are cheap and I grew up in the 90s, and I like the selection. There are some things you just can't get on vinyl. They are also nice because you don't have to flip them.
I had an old receiver so I just picked up a cheap dvd player with OSD to handle playing CDs and it has worked really well. I just switch inputs depending on my mood for maximum nostalgia.
If I had no other option to get music, I'd take the CDs to rip them.
CDs, hands down. Never liked vinyls for a myriad of reasons.
It's up to you.
Vinyl: bigger collectors value (old releases), nice album art, pleases multiple senses at once.
CD: convenient to use, better audio quality (vinyl can come near only if you are willing to spend thousands of dollars on equipment), easy to rip or copy, compact (as the name says)
This is pretty much right on, especially the part about spending so much on audio gear to get vinyl's best sound out of it.
I'm frugal audiophile...okay, I'm a cheapskate. Right now, I'm rocking a cheap SONY CD player, a $45 tripath amp, and a set of Boston Acoustic speakers that I bought nearly brand new from Goodwill for $10. The entire set-up was well under $100, and it sounds way better than the system I put together in my youth, which was more like $1000.
To put together a vinyl system that sounds as good as this cheap crappy system I cobbled together, would cost me thousands.
CDs
Disk rot is a real issue, but I can make ISOs from them and back them up with my current hardware. Records are all fun and a better decor item, but if data preservation is the goal, I need to be able to make my own copies.
If I was starting today probably CDs because the price difference is significant. Ive collected vinyl since the 80s though and acquired the bulk of my collection when former vinyl enthusiasts foolishly unloaded their collections for pennies on the dollar to get cds instead. I dont buy many new LPs nowadays and stick to thrift stores and discogs bargain deals.
Vinyl, without a doubt. Because it's analog.
CD's are lossless 16-bit/44.1 kHz PCM digital audio. You can already get that in file form. Why would you want digital audio that's stored on media that degrades? It doesn't sound any different...it's quite literally (not figuratively literally but literally literally) the exact same data.
It's easy to buy and sell CDs second hand.
With most digital media these days you don't buy the actual media. You buy a lifetime license. For your life or the life of the host platform. Whichever is shorter.
CDs so I can rip it and store it on my raid array.
I will buy digital if I can find it ofc.
Depends on what you use it for. I love buying records and listen to them only in a specific way. I listen to records only in the living room with a chill vibe. I enjoy the intentionally of picking a record and turning it over. I lose that for CDs but do enjoy them in the car when I get sick of the radio
I like the ritual of playing a vinyl, they require intention.
Second hand CDs are very cheap and much easier to rip.
I don't collect either but when I buy something I buy vinyl, they feel more like a physical object.
Vinyl is cool and cozy but I couldn't be bothered. It's a bad tech / product overall.
Too much space, too clunky of a tech to not lose interest in a few months and I don't believe there's an audio difference a human ear can notice. So you're just having a bunch of square posters that you sometimes look at - might as well just do posters then.
crack...pop...pop...skip...crack ...pop....pop. Pretentious media.
No, I could never I would NEVER. I just see physical media like CDs as a waste of money/space and generally an inefficient way to consume/store media. I would/do horde books though I love books and I luv me bookshelf.
Cassette tapes with a special pencil for each one.
Neither. CDs are only useful as a digital copy and 700MB is a quick download, and many discs can fit as FLAC on a microSD the size of my pinky nail. It might even be cheaper nowadays for them to mass produce 512 MB micro SD cards to put FLAC albums on them. If anybody wanted physical albums. It would be hilarious to just have a QR code on a tiny cardboard envelope.
If we want analog music, which is a cool idea, we should replace vinyl with something better. We can still use an optical laser disc but encoding stereo audio tracks as analog laser etches rather than zeros and ones. That way we could reduce the cost, and increase the quality at the same time. Might even be able to print them on glass for longevity. Then you might have an audiophile quality LP that doesn’t need to be flipped. Also in terms of longevity - an analog laser recording could be reverse engineered and listened to after the apocalypse, while binary CD format is a bit more opaque.
I still buy music CDs, and rip them to digital media. CDs are a lot easier to rip to digital media, but vinyl is cooler, but I listen to local music mainly through strawberry media player (or USB stick in a car)
Vinyl, since I'm buying something that can't get replicated via other digital means.
I've got both and prefer vinyl. If I was starting from zero now I would focus on CDs. Not everything is available in every format but I think CDs have the most coverage.
