Vinyl records

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While the selection of CDs and DVDs in stores is decreasing, the selection of vinyl records in stores is increasing.

nostalgia is a funny thing, you long for things that objectively were more mediocre than the present.

I think vinyl is actually easier to store. And it's certainly easier to take an album out of a sleeve and put it back in. That said, I listen to albums on Youtube. I haven't owned a CD in ages. Not to mention a licorice pizza.

i have the typical aspie bad reaction to surface noise, i am extraordinarily sensitive to such and always have been, which is why i've spent $$$$ i didn't really have to find ways to eliminate surface noise on my collection of a few thousand old records in various forms [33&1/3, 45 and 78].

I've bought some special colored editions released in the last 5 or 6 years. Red, pink, blue etc. They are all for fans to collect rather than to play on the record player. Some are even autographed and numbered. I haven't opened any of them. I've bought the CD's of the same albums at the same time. I love the band.

I've got a few dozen vinyl LPs, none of which I've played since the late 1990s. I've still got my old turntable and amplifier, which may or may not work these days, but I no longer have any speakers. I also have fallen victim to the YouTube download option. Never really got into CDs either.

CDs are easier to store if you rip them on your computer & save em to your hardrive or SD card. I mostly want to listen to my CDs when I'm on my desktop. A lot of the physical CDs I bought were only taken out 1ce when I ripped em. I sometimes still buy physical CDs if I cant find the DL for free or for sale at a cheaper price than buying the physical CD. eBay & Amazon used to sometimes have good deals on physical CDs. Sometimes they were used but in like new or very good condition which was fine for ripping them.

I likely have close to 1,000 vinyl albums.
Most of them are still at my mother's house.

I have about 300 here, maybe?
My kids each have hundreds as well.

I own no vinyl records.

I can't even imagine ^.

They were always such a staple for birthday and Christmas gifts.

Did you have them when you were younger?

What about 45s?

Yep. Had 33’s and 45’s. Maybe 10-20. I got enough music from the radio.

I would tend to scratch them, though…..so I was glad the CD was invented.

The problem with radio is that I couldn't play songs on repeat for hours at a time.



I did invest in about 50 CDs for my car over the years but they were such bad sound, and they got scratched.

I didn't learn to do digital playlists or Bluetooth in the car until a couple of years ago.

I'm a song-repeater.

There was this kid in camp who played “Turn the Beat Around” constantly, ad nauseum.

Sometimes I do play a song more than once.

Do you play digital music / playlists, or just radio?

i think that the westrex 45/45 system [for record cutting on lathes] is highly flawed. sure, it was based on the good work done by alan blumlein et al, but it was just not ready for prime time in the real world outside of the laboratory. an experimenter named Cook had a competing system which, while clunkier, had much better sound, it was essentially, in a technical sense, a "dual-mono" system where two styli each "concentrated" on their own groove, left channel or right channel, with none of the compromise/distortion involved in multiplexing two channels in one compound groove. the worst part of any phonographic system is the "pinch effect" caused by the reduced vinyl real estate in the inner grooves closest to the hub, which causes increased distortion and reduced treble fidelity headed towards the lead-out. the only way i can think of to fix that involves analog/digital trickery such as dynamic progressive compression/EQ as the record plays and the effective record speed decreases, increase the record/playback speed on the last record track to give the stylus more "breathing room," or some kind of compansion allowing for reduced groove modulation in general. if i designed it, i would have standardized a 45 rpm record/playback speed along with reduced modulation [reduces stress on the recording/playback hardware and increases playing time], and used some form of compansion such as the CX noise reduction process CBS implemented on its last LPs in the 80s. a version of cook's dual stylus scheme, where the outer grooves reproduce the sum while the inner grooves reproduce the difference, would have been interesting. don't mind me, just some geeky observations here

You missed your calling