And I bet horse carriages outsold the Ford Model-T this year too
If you’re curious, nearly half a million cassettes sold last year, too, according to Billboard.
I’m more curious about who’s still selling music on cassette and who’s willing to buy it.
Prisoners.
Someone else told me that. What bullshit. “You can’t have audio technology that was developed in the 1980s” is a fucking stupid punishment. Why not just make them listen to Edison cylinders?
I think there was a 99% invisible podcast episode about that, it’s prison inmates. For some never-changed rule they are only allowed music on cassettes, so they are probably the target audience mainly.
Just a few years ago I had an old car with a cassette player/radio, and from time to time I enjoyed the cassette player with some leftover stuff, but in most cases I just used an FM transmitter
The prison system sucks in so many ways. Legal slavery with archaic rules that would be considered hate crimes or human rights violations if they happened to people in the U.S. who aren’t incarcerated.
As far as old cars with cassette players. Like you said, you can use an FM transmitter, but I also remember having a fake cassette with an aux cable so you could plug it into a CD player headphone jack. I would bet they have a bluetooth version these days, so you don’t have to listen to cassettes even in those cars.
That reminds me of something though. When I was a kid, we had a Toyota Corona station wagon with an 8-track player. My father had this converter device that you plugged into the 8-track and it had a little tray that you laid a cassette into so you could play it. I don’t remember if the sound quality was worse than playing a cassette in a player designed for it.
Sure, there are transmitters without Bluetooth. I somehow preferred the SD card, as it would hold a few Gb of music and needed no internet connection. The only downside was if I was driving short trips only for a while, and it stuck with a 20-min long Deep Purple concert track every time :)
I knew piracy was eating into music sales but poor artists and distributors only generating less than $2 of revenue in the US per year? That’s like 1 CD in a clearance sale. They should start a charity.
What is everyone’s opinions on the sound quality of vinyl?
I understand the collectibility of physical media, and the novelty of owning a vinyl and the machine that plays them. The large art piece that is the case (and often the disc itself). Showing support for your favorite artists by owning physical media from them.
Those are great reasons to collect vinyl.
But a lot of my friends claim vinly is of higher audio quality than anything else, period. This is provably false, but it seems to be a common opinion.
How often have you seen this and what are your thoughts on it?
Technically CD quality digital is superior, but the recording and mixing can have a lot to do with it. For example, it could be that an decades old Dark Side Of The Moon on vinyl (played on proper equipment) could sound better than a modern remastered CD with maximized loudness (See the “loudness wars”).
It’s not impossible, although the loudness wars are pretty much over nowadays. All major music services and players have volume normalisation, many by default, so there’s not much point to it any longer.
Also it’s pretty tough to find a decades old record still in mint condition, and the sound quality of vinyl gets worse every time you play it.
I know it’s not highest quality.
For me, the imperfect sound is what makes a nicer experience. Slight hum, little pop once in a while, teensy skip, etc.
Not to mention that I’m far more inclined to listen to an entire album because of the need to interact with the vinyl to set the needle and flip sides.
At the risk of sounding critical of your hobby, to argue the imperfections improve the experience sounds somewhat culty.
I understand there is something akin to “character” which you don’t get from something highly polished. I know when things sound too clean it can feel sterile.
I accept vinyl has a collectors value, but anything claims regarding preference come across as either pretentious or deluded (to me, as someone who probably can’t tell the difference).
I don’t proclaim that vinyl is superior or something everyone should listen to.
Just trying to convey how I hear it.
98% of my listening is my MP3 playing from my phone’s Bluetooth.
Higher audio quality than CD? No, that is demonstrably false.
More pleasant to listen to than CD or other digital formats? Yes, that I agree with. It’s entirely subjective, but I’m definitely not alone in the feeling. The fact it is hard to quantify is why lots of people don’t “get” vinyl until they’ve sat and heard it on a decent system. Something about it is pleasing. As another commenter mentioned, it might just be the imperfections.
So I guess it’s a bit of a philosophical question. If CDs technically sound better, but vinyl sounds more pleasing: does the vinyl then sound better? People tend to chase pleasure, and in the time it takes someone to explain how much lower the noise floor is on CD or how we can only perceive so many samples, etc, etc – you could have been chilling with multiple records and had a great listening experience.
Something about it is pleasing. As another commenter mentioned, it might just be the imperfections.
I think it’s the slight hissing sound you hear as the needle drags. That faint, slightly pink noise isn’t dissimilar from white noise people use to go to sleep, and I think human brains like that sort of sound.
IMO is just placebo effect. In a blind experiment, all else being equal, I doubt you would be able to tell the difference between a vinyl and a CD. That’s my two cents
I know for a fact I would hear the difference – but primarily because of the imperfections in the vinyl, as well as the different bass response. I can rule out placebo.
Wow. What is that ‘other’ physical medium? Is MiniDisc also coming back and beating CDs?
There are things like Super Audio CDs and MACDs etc… I believe there may even be some blue ray audio releases.
Those are kind of rare, though; can they really be outselling CDs by so much? Or maybe the author mislabeled the key and ‘other’ is supposed to be the sliver on top?
I don’t know how widespread it is outside of metal, but I’ve been seeing more and more bands offering tapes. Sometimes a release is only on tape, other times the tape might be $6, the CD $15 and the LP $25, so there are different ties available for those who want a physical copy. I probably got 10 tapes or so within the last year.
Poeple jerking off CDs here dont understand down sampling and the average quality of CDS. they think that just because it is digitally mastered that it therefore must be the master that is put on CDS, its not.
I can’t hear anything above 20 kHz, and neither can most people. CD audio is passed through a 20 kHz lowpass filter. It is then sampled at 44 kHz. Due to the Nyquist Shannon Spamling Theorum, when sound is digitally sampled at just above twice the rate of the source audio, converting it back to analog perfectly reproduces the original waveform. And I do mean perfectly. The exact same waveform. (The extra 4 kHz is to prevent artifacts in frequencies very close to 20 kHz.)
Therefore CD audio is perfect unless you think you can hear above 20 kHz. (Spoiler: you can’t) There are a few good YouTube videos on this topic, and the best ones are very mathy.
Is there something I’m missing? Do I need to educate myself some more?
You are correct, CDs can reproduce the human audio spectrum perfectly, IF AND ONLY IF certain rules are followed, and I think that’s why earlier CDs sounded weird. For example: how good were low pass filters when digital sound first arrived?
I really don’t care to comment anymore on your FUD.
I don’t know shit about fuck, but you explanation seems correct.
I do remember hearing that precisely because of the limitations of vinyl compared to CD, music is mastered differently for each medium. So the CD master of a certain song might be more compressed (dynamic compression, not digital compression) to make it sound “louder”, while the vinyl release has a wider dynamic range. So some people might prefer the vinyl version because it actually does sound different to the CD version.
Keep in mind tho, I might be spreading misinformation here.
The loudness wars were definitely a thing; you are correct. But that was a choice and not a limitation of the medium. Plenty of CDs were not produced that way. But that’s not what the OC was talking about. They were talking about down sampling, not dynamic range compression.
I’m a music collector and saw this coming. “Music” went from a product you buy, into a service you pay to gain access to. You don’t pay for music, you pay daddy Spotify for access to HIS music.
Vinyl has turned back into the only form of physical music collection.
I hate subscription services, for the cost of a Spotify subscription I can but one or two CD albums a month.
I buy a vinyl here or there but just to collect. I listen to my CDs.
I tried Spotify but it only has about 70% of the albums in my collection. I used to love google play music because you could upload your media and it would be included in your library.
I liked Google play too. I was not pleased when they moved to YouTube music and made accessing your own music a total pain in the balls.
Plex and plexamp is how I listen to music now.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll check it out
Edit: It needed me to sign up with an email address and I saw it had in app purchases that put me off a bit. But when looking for that app I found Musicolet which looks pretty perfect, just a simple ad free music playing app without all the bollocks!
the in app purchases are mainly if you want to buy PlexPass which unlocks additional features. I bought the lifetime pass years ago when it was on sale for $75 so I can’t quite remember which features require plex pass. Its primarily for video but the music section with Plexamp on my phone and laptop is a nice little bonus.
Legit didn’t know people still bought music. CDs though? How does anyone still have cd players, and why. Vinyl is a hipster fad now so I guess that explains records.
My car has a CD player. It sounds a lot better than the radio or any streaming service’s compressed audio. I used to have a SiriusXM subscription and their audio quality was absolute garbage. I don’t pay for any streaming music services now, and have no plans to ever do so.
I buy CDs of every band I like, because I know that music will last in its perfect quality form for decades and nobody but burglars can take it from me. I use my blu-ray burner to rip them to high-bitrate MP3s for phone and Plex library usage.
I also have a pile of records that I don’t listen to because I don’t have room to set up my record player right now.
Audiophiles is why. Why CDs? Because the music in a CD is raw uncompressed. So if you got a good amp and speakers, earphones or IEMs you can hear the musicians scratch their beards while playing jazz, or maybe you can hear the sound of dacer’s boobies rubbing against the spandex or clapping harmoniously. LOL 😂, the rest of us will tin can and string headphones, we make due with mp3s.
why did you have to make it weird
Hey now you know how the Spanish do their cevillana clapping trick!.. You can imagine how their guys do it. Yes it’s painful at first but it gets them ready for war once them clapping things go numb.
I feel like I am the only person who still buys MP3 files direct.
CD fans right now:
yeah, because if you buy something digitally, it will get stolen from you.
CD’s are real objects and not digital goods.
I always thought it had more to do with the aesthetic of vinyls rather than any sort of ownership dilemma. A good chunk of my friends own multiple vinyl records but no record player. I also wonder what the production rates are like for vinyls vs CDs, are we producing about the same quantity of them?
One of my favorite things about vinyl is having to flip the record over. I think it demands more active and respectful listening.
I love that on the CD version of Full Moon Fever they added a bit to the end of Running Down a Dream telling CD listeners they’re going to take a break so that people on vinyl and cassette can switch to the other side.
Many albums, especially comedy albums, relied on you flipping over the record. They would have jokes that talked about things on the other side. There’s a Firesign Theater album where one of the characters says, “wait a minute, didn’t I say that on the other side of the record?” There’s a Monty Python album with a locked groove that says, “oh sorry, squire. I scratched the record.” Which is brilliant.
Edit: There’s another Monty Python album that has two sets of grooves and what you hear depends on which groove the needle hits first. Again, absolutely brilliant.
More famously, the end of the Beatles’ peak album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band contains a locked groove which was snippets of recordings mashed-up in a bit of short multi-track recording experimentation. The CD only repeats it 2 or 3 times. The record was designed to play indefinitely.
So yeah, CDs took that away from recordings, but on the other hand, it’s a lot harder to damage a CD and get an unintentional looping segment.
