I’m writing this article on a typewriter, by candlelight, while I sup coffee from a mason jar. I’ll be using a Polaroid SX-70 to take the accompanying photos. Once it’s finished, I’ll rise from my vintage upcycled chair, pause briefly to wax my ironic moustache, and remove splinters from my posterior before jumping on my penny farthing and cycling to the office to submit it. That’s right – I’m a hipster with a low-tech fetish that’s supposed to spark a new dawn of nostalgic revivalism: Adopt the shoddy, outdated junk that I spend every waking moment seeking out, or risk being sneered at. (Actually, if too many of you find the same things charming, then I’ll move on because it’s not okay to like anything “lamestream.”)
Seriously though: What is with adopting long forgotten technology that doesn’t work very well? Idealizing the seventies or eighties seems like something only someone who never lived through them could do. We mass produced all kinds of incredibly wasteful rubbish back then. As a writer, I would never sit down and write an article with pen and paper, nor would I use a typewriter anymore. You know why? It’s because they are uncomfortable, impractical, and drastically inferior to using a word-processing program on a computer or laptop.
Tech from the analog age is dead for a reason. We developed superior tech. That nostalgic imperfection you find in old Polaroid or those scratchy vinyl recordings can be replicated in digital form if you have a genuine longing for something that reminds you of childhood or makes you feel all warm and fuzzy.
“We did it first”
No, no you didn’t. Stop and think about how that antiquated product, clothing, or facial hair style, came onto your radar. It’s because at one time it was considered viable by the general population. You are basically filtering for rejected awfulness. I can turn a blind eye to skinny jeans, big sunglasses and trucker hats. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather never see any of those things again, but I’ve come to terms with my complete lack of power over the fashion world.
What I can’t abide is people using impractical antiquated tech and pretending like there’s something great about it. Gigantic power-guzzling TVs with thick beveled glass screens were just rubbish. Ugly, cheap, plastic stereo units with hundreds of knobs and buttons are like the consumer tech equivalent of the 1970s tower block architecture that still blights the UK. Record players were a pain to use and vinyl took up loads of room, usually getting scratched while it did so. Physical books kill trees.
And don’t even get me started on the rash of faux-vintage products and apps that are flooding the shelves of boutiques in all the right neighborhoods around the globe. An obsession grasping for authenticity and nostalgia for a past that is somehow more real than the digital present renders an iPhone dock shaped like a rotary telephone and 75 percent of Instagram filters null and void.
Fake nostalgia
Speaking of nostalgia (and speaking to the under-30 leading edge of this annoying trend), it’s not possible to be nostalgic for something you never experienced the first time around. If you don’t know firsthand the misery audio cassettes getting eaten by your boom box or your floppy disks or the heartache of a love letter lost by the postman, then you’re just being different for the sake of it and the quickest way is to dig through humanity’s landfill. Forget about applying creativity toward something new, just backdate your conformity.
As for those of us with a legitimate claim to the tech of the 70s and 80s that’s so ascendant, I acknowledge the comfort of a nostalgic haze, but I ask: do you really want to trade your phone in for a Sports Walkman and a landline? Really?
I’m not the nostalgia police, but I am telling low-tech-loving hipsters everywhere to stop waxing their mustaches for a moment and think. It shouldn’t be difficult to look like you’re not trying. Why make life harder? Just because something is old or outdated does not mean it is cool (see Nazism, medieval medicine and outdoor toilets). Embrace new technology, forget the analog age, let antiquated tech die a dignified death, and focus on the horizon. With some proper damned sunglasses please.
[Image credit: Tube TV: LesPalenik/Shutterstock; Cassette: Shawn Hempel/Shutterstock]
I am 62. When I started college, I happened upon a very large stash of my parents’ and grandparents’ 78s, some dating from the WWI era, about 200 in all. I went out and found myself a wind-up, spring-driven “Victrola,” for 8 bucks in a Salvation Army store. The records were scratchy, the sound quality was barely acceptable, the styluses were about the diameter of a ball point pen tip that came to a point. But it was a hell of a lot of fun, we had dance parties that rocked to swing music, and my friends and I have never forgotten that recapturing of our ancestral past. About 6 years ago, the Victrola was sitting in my brothers’ garage and he wanted to make room for something or other. I had to move it to my place in Manhattan. When unloading it, some guy comes up to me and says, “Hey, you wanna sell that?” I got $800 for it. The writer of this article ought to loosen up, and anyone who wants to listen to analog recordings, knock yourself out and enjoy. Enjoyment is the key to life, not this crimped, crouching, small-hearted view of what’s cool, not cool, right or wrong. Plow your own fields, kids. Peace and love.
Instead of writing this article, you could’ve written one about record companies destroying all popular music since the late ’90s with dynamic compression. To make recordings “louder”, record companies have ruined millions of them. Sound quality peaked in the early ’90s; ask recording engineers.
It’s not just new recordings that have been destroyed; record companies are busily “remastering” their back catalogs and ruining generations’ worth of music FOR NO BENEFIT. They’re remastering FULL DIGITAL recordings. There’s simply no excuse.
Educate the public about the loudness war and why it’s the all-time biggest crime against music, and one of the worst offenses against art ever.
^This.^ I would be willing to concede that much of the perceived superiority of records (in many cases) may be in part due to the iterative and subjective nature of the mastering process, in which the engineer must often listen to multiple test pressings before arriving at the final product, while (in many cases) the CD transfer may have been approached less rigorously. This “before” considering the wholesale destruction of music engendered by the “loudness war,” about which I have ranted on numerous forums, on Facebook, and to anyone who would listen. Even though an old fart, I might want to buy some modern stuff sometime if it sounded half decent. A friend lent me an Arcade Fire CD; I liked it but the sound was all buzzy & sibilant. A quick peek at the waveforms showed why. I went on a limb and bought the LP, made a digital copy and compared in Audacity; the CD had the top 6 dB just clipped off, everything just crammed to max level. And this is by no means the worst example as a quick web search will demonstrate. Same friend lent me a Black Keys disc. I really want to like it but the sound gives me a headache. Sorry, a lost sale for them…
And as you say, it extends to recordings that were once released with better quality. No excuse for it. Any modern mp3 player can adjust its gain so that everything plays at a similar perceived level.
But mp3s are a whole nother ball of wax. Once you’ve chopped off all transients, ignored “masked” tones, and added wildly shifting dither noise, there’s no way to recover decent sound. Anyone can do this simple experiment using free audio editing software: rip a CD track to (lossless) wav or flac, then to mp3. Bring them both up in your editor, invert the lossless, and mix the two (this will cancel everything that is the same between the two.) The result will be a shocking mess of what is removed and what is added by the mp3 encoding process. On anything more complex than a sine wave, the artifacts will sound quite nasty.
Records might sound better because they can’t clip the audio without some serious damage to the sound. I challenge people to take a listen to CD masters from the ’80s after they figured out not to use vinyl masters and before the loudness war kicked in. Bad Company’s self-titled album comes to mind. Hotel California is another good old master that sounds loads better than its new DVD-A garbage counterpart. The DVD-A was recorded straight from the master tapes at 24/192, but they allowed clipping. What a waste. Rumours by Fleetwood Mac is another example where the old release sounds better than the new high-rez clipped garbage they recently released. You don’t need anything more than 16/44.1 or 16/48 if the producer or engineer knows WTF they are doing. I won’t even listen to any album that had Rick Rubin had a hand in. Death Magnetic being the main one. Californication being another. I have since procured the Guitar Hero version of the former, and the “unmastered” version of the latter. It’s a shame that now that we have awesome ADC and DAC technology that the music sounds like ASS because we’ve abandoned actual engineers for idiots who just look for the loudest poppy sound.
This article is ridiculous. Many of the “vintage” objects this writer talks about are creative tools used for making art, music and literature. This article seems to be hung up on hipsterism and there is a definite anger element that clouds the actual issues of validity of many of these objects. Chemical process photography will never be replaced by digital technology. They don’t even compare…so you cannot say one is better than the other. They are totally different. It would be like saying acrylic paint is better than oil paint, therefore an artist shouldn’t use oils anymore. Same with sound technology. Digital sound technology is a totally separate and different tool than analog. Analog tape produces sound qualities that simply cannot be mimicked by digital recording. Digital is a valid and great tool…and so is analog. I do have to argue that, as a music lover, vinyl records are way better sounding than mp3s and CDs. That is a personal opinion. I also love the convenience of mp3s though.
This article is really weird. Why are you so hung up on a small subculture of hip kids who have a fetish for older stuff? Who cares? And what about the advantages of reusing the vast amount of things we’ve produced over the last century, instead of being such a “throw away” culture? It seems like a win-win situation to me, for the many people who enjoy analog age technology and for the environment. I love new technology, and I think there are some amazing creative tools available. But to say that older technology is irrelevant and useless and inferior…well, that is a small-minded and quite ignorant argument. Lighten up on those hipster kids. And take some time to really look at photographs and really listen to music. Maybe you’ll change your mind a little. I doubt it though. Anyway, back to my morning jazz records. I’m going out to shoot some fall colors with my SX-70 later today. :)
1. Vinyl is BY FAR the superior method of reproducing the full spectrum of what the human ear can hear, plus both subsonic and supersonic frequencies that are felt and sensed, even though not as sound. (The perfect example: Take a look at a vinyl recording of the 1812 Overture with actual cannons used. The cannon fire is easy to find on the disc. The grooves are in gigantic (i.e. less than 20 Hz) waveforms. The human body feels the cannon (and the bass drum) as much as it hears it, and the CD and even SA-CD standards do not reproduce any waves below 20 Hz or above 20K Hz. By definition, the greatest SA-CD (or any digital standard) on the greatest stereo with the greatest speakers will be an inferior reproduction of a vast sonic field when it was recorded in analog and contains subsonic and supersonic frequencies (like an orchestra using cannon might).
2. Secondly, who cares if typewritten material kills trees? Trees grow back. They’re a completely renewable resource for building, paper, and many other uses. Don’t show your ignorance and the ease with which you’ll allow yourself to get pulled into dogma rather than being a researcher and learning facts.
Otherwise. Cool. What I’ve never understood goes into even further depths. For example, my generation (b.1961) and the previous generations spent a trillion dollars to build a telephone network that works 99.99999% of the time, carries its own damn power, works even when the electricity is out, and has sonic clarity allowing one to speak with someone in China, understand everything, and still hear a pin drop. But the kids seem to be perfectly fine with, or even prefer, a mobile network that drops calls, still isn’t duplex, and has at least 50% of all conversations still containing the phrase “Are you still there?”. I don’t get it.
Second example: Television: Our generations built and subsequently allowed the Asians to build, giant HD televisions of 60, 70, 90 inches of near-perfect resolution, brilliance, and color. This was important for both sports and television drama. But here’s what I don’t understand: The kids now prefer to watch their “television” (for lack of a better term) on 2″ screens on their phones, with herky-jerky video. And, the kids have almost zero desire to be entertained by any television fare whatsoever that could, even by OUR terms, be considered to be dramatic, well-written (if written at all), funny, or emotional. The 75 year effort to perfect television has come to a generation that couldn’t care less.
Finally, music. I’m not even going to bother with whether today’s music is any good or not. But it’s the same thing. OUr generations worked for 100 years to perfect and improve sonic quality, and the ability to reproduce music in the home to as close as possible to what it might sound like live. Today’s kids don’t even realize that MP3 is a compressed version of music that has deliberately removed a load of the sound quality. And they wouldn’t notice anyway. They listen to their music on TELEPHONES. The billions of research dollars spent to make music reproduceable at a reasonably affordable price that comes so close to LIVE have now been entirely wasted! The kids can’t tell the difference, and wouldn’t care even if they could.
This isn’t even just hipster. It’s a bizarre, strange, and somewhat disturbing trend in our society away from excellence and toward mediocrity, ostensibly in the name of convenience, but anthropologically and sociologically speaking, I fear that it’s much worse.
perspective is another lost art as well, but you, johhny devoid, seem to have been able to hold on to a bit of it! kudos.
You’re full of crap and are another ignoramus who just doesn’t understand how digital sampling works, at all. Digital audio can reproduce “subsonic” frequencies just fine. The bottom shelf being 20 Hz is just inaccurate. A DAC can spit out DC voltage if you want it to. Oh, and a DAC can also reproduce the upper limit of hearing just fine. Vinyl cannot. High frequencies on a record are played back full of noise.
The author is obviously just angry because he cannot grow a proper mustache. Negative remarks against this form of facial hair are interspersed throughout the article leading me to believe that the author associates vinyl and the other mentioned technology with mustaches. Rather than write an article about his mustache deficiency, he has directed this angst elsewhere.
Vinyl will forever bee the best music format in my opinion …not every one likes to follow trends
I own a Well-Temprered turntable I purchased around 12 years ago. I’ve been purchasing records around that long. I own around 1200. And I also listen to CDs and music I’ve download on the net all the time. I prefer vinyl in general, more texture to the sound, mostly. And some records do sound better than the digital versions I have, the sound quality depends on the care each production team took when they produced the music. But some digital versions sound wondrous and terrific, and magical, it all depends.
And, I also have and use film camers, but the cameras I have make the Polaroid SX-70 the joke that it is.
Now, when I meet someone 30 or under who happens with the same interests, am I supposed to reject them as hopeless ‘hipsters’? How silly.
We are all creatures of the past, you and I are made of the past, things of the past are a part of you, you can’t reject them, no matter how much you try. The universe we see when we look out with the most powerful telescopes we have is the universe the way it looked in the past, not how it looks now.
Both analog and digital products have been and are being made and are being used by you and I with insanely destructive fossil fuels at this moment. Let’s see if your generation can clean up the greenhouse gases in the air and oceans and save this planet for human habitation; It perhaps is time for you to stop wasting yours and help it to happen instead of complaining.
That “texture” is called noise. You are among the weirdos who keep comparing apples and oranges. Nothing is ever done to ensure that both an analog version and digital version have the same master. There are sacrifices that have to be done to a master just to cut it on vinyl, and all of them are things that lessen quality. I won’t even get into your last portions of your hip[pie/ster] emo eco-fascist drivel.
Music is a form of entertainment – if you get more entertainment one way, and I get it another way – then we both are entertained! This is people making the most of their downtime – not finding a cure for cancer, world geopolitics, etc. If someone gets great pleasure listening to yodeling though an old cardboard tube – why should anyone spend time trying to tear him or her down? Just do what you want how you want and let the rest of the world sort itself out.
And if someone doing something different than you – regardless of the technology employed or the method they enjoy it – and it detracts from your enjoyment – might I suggest that it is not them that is the problem?
The name of this article is awkward at best. “why dinosaurs and mammoths should stay dead and why polar bears should join them.” Wouldn’t polar bears have to already be dead in order to also “stay” dead? Then there isn’t a problem, EH? And why do people even get so mad about hipsters, anyhow. They keep junk useful instead of letting it find the landfill, and seem to mind their own snotty business. What about, like, terrorists or something? This article and this comment have joined together to make sure that the last 15 minutes of my life “stay dead.”
You, sir, are an asshole. It’s an experience, it’s not anything practical, it’s a wholesome, deep sentimentality that appreciators of the old ways get. It’s the pride you get when you’ve split your own damn firewood with an axe, when you’ve used your own damn legs and stayed in kickass shape by biking everywhere. Is it necessary to keep the old alive? Maybe not. But it has it’s place. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be listening to classical music (it’s been “replaced” in great part by all the music to come since it’s heyday), everyone would’ve dived into adopting touchscreens over mice/trackpads for computers, etc, etc.
I’m a mastering engineer, so I likely have a bit more experience that most posters here. I just finished the masters for Cashing in on Christmas volume IV on Black Hole Records, which comes as a package on vinyl and CD. Because of the limitations of vinyl, two completely different masters are made. The CD is actually much closer to the files the bands send. Every tune gets transfered over the Internet when it gets sent to my studio for mastering, then is transfered to the pressing plant as a digital file over the Internet when I’m done with it. Almost all my mastering processing is done in the digital domain.
All that said, cutting out the high end from 8 kHz up so it will actually work on vinyl makes the vocals easier ti understand.
The tunes that come in sounding the best were often started on analog tape. The one called Fairytale of Mongolia started on 4 track cassette and was the lo-fi track of the bunch. The quality of your equipment matters, almost as much as your talent.
Oh, my! Glad I’m not busy trying to be a hipster. And that I don’t really care what anyone else thinks…
So, let me get this straight. I should just toss out thousands of records & tapes because… why? Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against progress, I do tech work developing 802.11 systems for a living. I’ve been copying records to the PC for a while now (it’s the new cassette!) Just the other day I did Dark Side of the Moon. There’s stuff up to 35 kHz in the chimes! No, I can’t hear that, but it can play heck with imperfect Nyquist filters. So I keep the 96k stuff. But I also make CDs to play in the car, and mp3s for portable devices. None of those sound quite the same, even if I can clean up the occasional click.
I’m a scavenger. There’s a recycling shelf at work where stuff sits a few days before being hauled away. Mostly prototypes, obsolete products, old PCs, etc. Couple months ago a nice little PA amplifier shows up there. Says me, I’ll take this home and play with it. Small, light for its power rating, modern, efficient. Put it in the living room system to audition. Played a lot of music through it, sounded OK more or less. Last weekend sat down for some focused listening, evaluating some of the latest CDs I made. Put on ELP’s “Tarkus.” In 30 seconds it was obvious something was missing. “It’s not coming up out of the ground like it should.” Swapped back the 35 year old amp (no, it’s not tubes) and that fixed the “oomph” factor. Played a couple more, enjoyable enough… until the CD player started skipping. Says me, “enough of this” and grabbed the record. Takes all of 20 seconds to pull out the disc, run the dust brush over it, and lower the needle. Took less than that for me to say “aaah…” And my wife, who doesn’t really care about hi-fi, came in from the other room and said “this sounds nice” so we sat and enjoyed the tunes together for a long time.
Oh, and I haven’t seen my upper lip in 40 years.
Thanks for all the comments, keep them coming. Just to clarify I never said everything new is better than everything old, I talk about specific devices which have been improved on, in my opinion. This is an op/ed. Interesting to see the angry response it has provoked from audiophiles and the number of comments that overlook the point I’m making about people adopting old tech as a fad or fashion trend. I barely even mention vinyl but I’m starting to feel like a mob of angry record owners is going to sacrifice me on a giant turntable. To answer a couple of points, I don’t care about owning physical things or where I was when I bought something, why does that matter? I also don’t buy things because of their resale value. Digital copies are generally cheaper which is a pretty big incentive to buy them rather than physical media. I’ll admit I probably don’t have the greatest auditory palate, but then I never make any claims that digital music is better quality than analog, simply that the tech is better and a lot easier to use. If everyone felt the same way as the commenters here then we’d all still be using vinyl.
I think the litmus test for truthfulness and resonance with reality lies in the comment section. This is the problem with wannabe journalists. This would have never passed muster as a newsworthy article had there been a seasoned editor involved.
The author is an asshole. What would be the purpose of deriding people’s enjoyment of analog playback? Why does he care so much?
What an opinionated a**! Ask any sound engineer who knows anything really scientific about the quality of mp3/mp4 sound technology, which is what they sell you at iTunes for 99 cents (not even good quality digital files), and you’ll find that vinyl beats it for sound quality hands down every time. And further, turntables are far easier to use than iPods and the like. None of my vinyl is scratched because the tip of the needle is the only object that has ever touched any of it in fifty years and I bought much of it new in the 60s, not the 70′s or 80′s. On top of that, I bought the music and I own a physical recording of it that I can re-record, convert to CDs, loan to friends or take to parties. What do you own, but a digital file that can be lost to corruption, a crashed hard drive, a problem between you and the cloud, etc. You really only own a limited license to play the songs for your own use, you don’t physically own anything.
Vinyl is easier to use than an iPod? Are you kidding me? An iPod works right after you put music on it. A turntable you have to take the record out of the sleeve, clean the record, put it on the platter, lift the tone arm, and then gently place the needle down. You have to pick up the stylus to skip to a track, and sometimes flip over the record. Seeking to a track creates a dent in the record that will show up as a nice pop in future plays. Every time you play the record its frequency response decreases. Vinyl can be recorded digitally and represented with only 12-13 bits, but only with top-of-the-line vinyl playback equipment. Factor in that most people just use some Technics 1200 and a < $1,000 cartridge, you're looking at probably 10-12 bits of real information. RIAA equalization is stupid. It's done in the analog domain, and electronic components have tolerances, so the EQ curve is never the same. If you have a real cartridge, and not something like a P-mount, it has to be aligned. The end (inside) of a record has less detail than the beginning (outside) of a record. Surface noise. Sibilance. The stylus is at a different angle to the track between the outside and inside of a record because the tone arm pivots instead of taking a linear line across the record, like the cutting head does when making it.
You can lose a digital file? If you own the CD, there shouldn't be a problem. Re-rip it. If you need data to be available 100% of the time, you should have a complete backup.
Digital is better than analog. Hardly ever do you get the same master that is pressed on CD. They usually use a different engineer to go back and make a totally different master. If they would properly master CDs, the CDs would blow away vinyl, but it's just not happening. They seem to be just saying "screw CDs, everyone is content with listening to them in the car or on their iDevice earbuds, so we'll only give the vinyl a good master." With an identical master, the CD will win. All of the warmness and other audible things attributed to vinyl are not because some pseudoscience BS like the analog is an infinite line with no steps. Vinyl's warm sound are a result of it's faults and inferiority. You can get the same thing with digital filters.
High-rez formats like SACD and DVD-A are worthless.
Ummmm…not every advancement in technology has made things better in terms of quality.
Questions for you, Simon:
1) For taste, would you rather have a McDonald’s burger or a burger made with grass-fed, free cows from an organic farm served at a steakhouse?
2) Which instrument likely sounds better? A factory made plastic (or even wood) violin or one made by hand by a master luthier such as Stradavarius?
3) Would medium of painting is better — an airbrushed painting or one done in oil or watercolor? Airbrushing is quicker, but is it of better quality?
4) Which makes for the better print of a color drawing — An ink jet printer or a 4 color lithography?
5) Hand-knit sweater or one made by machine?
6) Your mama’s chicken soup or one from a can?
7) The wonderful mixed breed rescue that licks your face in the morning from the local shelter, or a virtual dog yapping at you on the computer screen?
Vinyl was created about a century ago, and I highly doubt that they intended for it to be the best thing for all of time. Analog storage was made invalid in 1980 with the CD. Vinyl, cassettes, and CD are all ways to store audio. They all originated from an analog signal, and they all end up at the speaker or headphone as an analog signal. Your artistic questions make no sense. Art is subjective. Audio reproduction is under science, which is objective. If you can’t understand how digital audio and the sampling theorems work, just don’t comment. Digital audio and solid state amps give the best representation to the original sound as much as possible. Vinyl, cassettes, and tubes do not. The warm sound that people enjoy are because of the technical deficiencies of those old technologies. It’s a purely emotional attachment.
You are a clueless putz and should refrain from commenting on subjects you are woefully lacking knowledge in
What a well thought out and intelligent comment. The fact that you couldn’t even pick out a specific thing I said to have been supposedly clueless about just shows that you are pissing in the wind and your response is purely emotional.
Oystercopy? yup. Loved your comment… and the dumbing down part is right on…. and not just the mind. Our ‘higher tech’ is dumbing down everything. Our machines are getting to the point where everything we want and need is designed, manufactured and eventually used by those same machines. We, the inventors, originators and consumers of said products are becoming obsolete also. E.G. Which of you ‘techies’ know how a pair of shoes are made? … oh, and shut my mouth if I dare to mention the use of animal skin to make them. With that said, how about the horse saddle? You can probably count on one hand the number of people on the planet that can make a pair of shoes or a saddle… by hand and from scratch. Bottom line? We have shelved ourselves along with our “Old Tech” to somehow enter into the new glory of the future. Why do I say that? Our RESOURCES are becoming as scarce as our ability to survive without our technologically advanced civilization’s idea of utopia. Oh, excuse me. Gotta go… my phone’s ringing. ;)
Dear Simon Hill.– Have you ever heard the saying: “Live, and let live?” It is hard for me to understand why “some” young people let their arrogance win over their modesty. Should we destroy all classical music because modern music exist? Try to make any digital recording reproduce the depth of the stage in which the music was played and recorded, you may fail to it, you know why? Because digital is about two bits, which equals two vectors: wide and tall. The grove of a vinyl record is a tridimensional feature capable to store and reproduce sound in three dimensions as it exists in Nature, in other words, a real sound wave printed in the vinyl: so then, when played back we’ll hear width, height AND depth. Of course, you will need an expensive cartridge to get those results, and not a plastic box from the 70′s as you call it. It is my wish that you would get better educated before writing your next article bombarding vinyl records as I won’t always have the time and patient to deal with your ignorance. Thank you.
What are you ranting and raving about? If you don’t like the stuff, don’t use, nobody’s forcing you to. You sound like a religious fanatic – or an atheist fanatic – the kind who is compelled to make the whole world adopt his views. I embrace BOTH technology and my records, fountain pens, typewriter, rotary phone and film cameras. Relax Max, and don’t worry about changing the world to suit your views. It moves along at it’s own pace.
Mentioning Nazism as something old or outdated and associating it with the idea that at one time, it was or may have been cool, just proves what a dolt you are. If you can’t hear the difference in sound between clean vinyl and tape and low-sample mp3, then your ears are bad too. I’m not advocating going back to records and turntables, nor do I want my old tube TV back, but tell me….. how many tattoo’s do you have proving your individuality? I just wonder.
oh and those stereo units with the “knobs” you hate so much….those are called EQ and if you know shit about music, their quite useful.
your like my dad, been there done that. guess what, no cd will ever duplicate the sound of a vinyl, and CRT screens actually produce a higher resolution than LCD….you sir are an idiot.
I was born in ’60, so I lived through the “Analog” age…. there is NO DOUBT in my mind that LP’s sound warm and inviting. You know, the opposite of receiving a TEXT instead of a phone call today. This “digital age” we live in has actually reduced society’s ability to interactively function with each other. I used to LOVE listening to my music on vinyl and when you recorded it onto metal cassette tapes with equalization, it sounded equally AWESOME. I used to invest lots of $ in my gear so that it sounded great both at home and in the car. CD’s and digital tech may be simpler and more accessible, but like most other “newer” technologies, it DUMBS DOWN the experience, the same way television programming severely dumbs down the mind.
Television dumbs down the mind because there is utter filth on TV and research has shown that TVs flickering actually puts people into a dream-like or suggestible state (they are half asleep). CD does no such thing to music. The experience of dealing with a record, getting off the dust, getting a cartridge aligned, getting the platter to exactly 33 1/3 RPM, etc. are all a pain in the ass and by the time you get to the actual music you’re left frustrated and usually have to get up again to deal with a skip loop.
CDs are analog are not BETTER but they are easier and CDs and DvDs scratch just as easy if not easier than vinyl.
my biggest complaint with cassette tapes was they were the most fragile system.
a couple of tapes I just loved broke fairly quickly and I could never find them on CD.
What an idiotic article. Just because a certain technology is new doesn’t mean it’s superior to an older technology. It would seem that this individual is somewhat ignorant of the key difference between digital CD recordings of music and the older vinyl technology or maybe he just has a very limited hearing range.
I grew up through the vinyl era and into the digital age so I’ve been observing and using both technologies for all my life. So I know first hand what the difference sounds like between the two technologies.
The problem with modern CD digital recordings where music is concerned, especially older music that has a range of subtlety lacking in much of the so called modern music of today, is that almost all digital CD recordings do NOT record the entire audio stream nor the entire audio range.
Unlike the old analog audio recording methods, the newer digital methods actually record by sampling (i.e. recording only parts or bits of the audio stream at specific time intervals instead of the entire audio stream) only a portion of the entire audio stream and they also chop off the top and bottom ends of the audio spectrum on the recording which ranges from 30 to 16,000 cycles per second. Most CD recordings for instance chop off the entire audio range above 10,000 cycles per second.
The end result is that you do NOT get to hear the entire audio track the way it originally sounded.
But with vinyl, you get to hear the full audio track across the entire available audio spectrum. No bits are left out because the entire audio stream is recorded rather than just “bits” of it based on the sampling rate being used. This is why those of us who love music prefer the vinyl over the digital CD.
The only digital CD recordings today that can truly compete with vinyl are the old SACD versions which featured much higher sampling rates than digital CDs use and also do not chop off the top and bottom ends of the audio spectrum in a particular recording.
This means you get to hear the full range and depth of the music including subtle nuances that are lost in regular digital CD recordings. This is why vinyl recordings will always sound better and richer than any standard CD or MP3 or whatever digital version ever could. Unfortunately the SACD format never gained wide popularity because mos people didn’t even realize what they were missing in the digital CD format.
While there are many new technologies that I agree are superior to their antecedents, such as PCs and word processors over typewriters and pens and pencils (I’ve used all of them at one time or another), where music is concerned, vinyl is still superior in terms of enjoyment value over the digital CD IF you have the ears to hear the difference.
Well said, the Nyquist frequency, understanding it is the key.
Having said, I have come to find that much new music does not sound better on vinyl. I suspect that this is an effect of the protools generation of home studios generating huge volumes of material that are not only full digital creations, but low resolution digital creations from performance through mastering. If the original performance is low res, not amount of effort downstream is going to increase that.
I love my vinyl and am in full agreement that a proper analog recording will always sound better with a fully analog playback. But, much new music that I like can be fully realized in my iTunes collection because that’s all that was ever there.
CDs can reproduce from 0 to 22,050 Hz, which is 2 kHz above a new born’s hearing range. Add some years of life, and it easily goes down to 15 kHz by the time you’re 30. There is no accurate high frequency content on vinyl or cassette. If you actually studied that ultrasonic sound you would realize it’s very full of noise and is actually not musical content, but harmonics and such from the turntable (tone arm) and not any musical harmonics contained on the record. Even so, you can not hear or feel them. They aren’t even produced by your speakers. The fact that CDs throw out those sounds actually makes the sound better, since they can create unpleasant audible resonances in the tweeters.
You obviously don’t understand digital sampling and you are likely one of these people that think what you get on playback is just some jagged staircase of voltages.
Wow. I totally missed the part where you claim that CD only captures 30 to 16,000 Hz, and mostly only up to 10,000 Hz. What a load of steaming crap. The highest frequency that can be represented on CD is 22.05 kHz, or one half of its sampling rate. Of course with anti-aliasing filters and such we have a transition band that lowers that, but still to a frequency that we can’t hear. I don’t know where people get this 20 Hz number from for the low end. It can capture DC voltage, or 0 Hz. It can capture ELFs. I wouldn’t count on frequencies up around 20 kHz on vinyl containing anything musically relevant, but rather just noise, and at levels pretty far down, and decreasing with each play.
I will say again that you obviously don’t understand sampling, and I can assume that you are one of these people that think you need to capture the beginning, crest, zero-crossing, trough, and end of a wave to sample and play it back accurately.
Michael Fremer. My audio hero. Thank you for remaining the champion of true sound reproduction.
I listen exclusively to a Dual 1219 turntable with Shure ML140HE plugged into a Fisher X-202B tube amp.
Speakers are Pioneer CS-99A with Heils on top.
ANALOG [EVEN PHOTOGRAPHY AND TELEVISION] STILL ARE THE MEDIA THAT ARE MOST TRUE TO REALITY.
Michael Fremer . You are my audio guru.
I listen to a Fisher tube amplifier /Dual 1219/Shure ML140HE/Pioneer CS-99A with Heils on top.
I would be out of my mind to trade down to a digital audio system. Or to a non-CRT video system.
What an idiotic story written by a very bitter individual who apparently doesn’t enjoy his digital music as much as he claims.
First of all, I can provide a list of award winning recording engineers and mastering engineers as well as recording artists who prefer analog recording to digital and yes, vinyl playback to CDs.
Records sound much better than CDs to many music lovers—including more and more young people—and whatever their minor flaws, digital technology has its own flaws that many find more objectionable to vinyl’s.
A good friend of mine engineered many of the great rock records of the ’60s and he positively detests digital and thinks the CD versions of his recordings are JOKES. I’m sure his resume beats yours, that’s for sure.
The idea that anything new is better than anything old is idiotic on its face.
But what’s really curious about this story is how angry and bitter it is and how closely it resembles other stories written by equally angry and bitter people who have nothing but contempt for people who prefer something other than what they like.
It tells me they are not all that satisfied with their digital world because you know what? Those of us who love analog don’t feel compelled to write angry rants that lash out at people who like their CDs and MP3s. Hey, as my grandmother used to say “Es dreck.” Of course you can expect an angry response to a stupid story like this but writing an anti-digital rant in 2012? Why bother?
But for some reason, the digiphiles have this need. They’ve had it since the CD was first introduced and it just doesn’t stop and guess what? YOU WON THE WAR. You folks are SORE WINNERS.
But of course you’re really losers because as long as there’s a substantial and growing number of music lovers who prefer vinyl and think vinyl sounds more like the real thing, it clearly will continue driving you CRAZY and you’ll feel the need to lash out… what a hoot!
In closing: I am NOT a Luddite, and not a technophobe. Nor are any of us. I have thousands of CDs on a Meridian Digital Music Server. I have downloaded hundreds of 96/24 files that sound WAY better than “perfect sounding CDs, but to my ears and to the ears of a hell of a lot of people AROUND THE WORLD, vinyl still produces the most realistic, musically satisfying sound and digital after a few minutes makes us want to stop listening to music and do anything else but listen to music.
We put on records and we can listen without distraction for hours at a time. Most people in the digital world can’t do this. That’s why listening to music has become a background activity. In the digital world people listen to music while they do something else. In the analog world it’s an activity unto itself.
For some reason this just drives this Hill guy CRAZY! Well dude, you are going to STAY CRAZY because we’re not going anywhere except up. Go visit a record store and see who’s buying: KIDS.
And why? Because they are discovering that what you’re selling is B.S. They are discovering that they’ve been deprived of a most enjoyable experience and they want more of it. And they turn their friends onto it and they want it too.
You see, what’s happening is like MP3s, vinyl is now spreading virally.
So get used to it!
Michael, as a fellow professional I feel the need to explain that there have been many psychological studies explaining the author’s angry bitter “tone”. (pun intended). Analog distortion is mainly composed of even order harmonics due to the gentle compression slope of overdriven analog devices. Digital distortion is primarily composed of odd order harmonics due to hard clipping. The best way to describe the effect is that analog hums, digital buzzes. Countless studies have shown that prolonged exposure to odd harmonics leads to irritation, anger and frustration. The author of this article may well be a victim.
I’m a young person and I tried this vinyl fad before the hipsters got to it. I hated the ritual, the dust, the sibilance, and other horrid distortions so much that I just went back to my loudness-warred digital formats which don’t need cleaning and don’t change from play to play. It’s just a hipster fad. Old people have never left it, and never will, but the hipsters will abandon it once someone decides it’s not trendy anymore. The hipster idiots have never heard good digital audio, so naturally the first thing that sounds better than their iDevice and iEarbuds did is going to get their attention, along with the equipment just being retro and ugly.
Thanks for the article. I live across the river from Portland Oregon. A place where, as with other cities there are areas where people can’t live in reality and think the 70′s & 80′s were better, technologically speaking. My wife and I were in downtown at a very large popular used music/video store with my Collectorz mobile phone app on my droid. She has the same app for her iPhone. Both apps link to our database at home. It gives us full details of every movie and CD we own and a wish list for everything we were searching for.
As I’m browsing I see a guy walking around looking for movies as he thumbed through pieces of ratted paper that have been removed from different notebooks. One had what appeared to be a coffee stain smudge on the top half making the words hard to read. (Yes I was looking over his shoulder) He would search for a movie then make a mark on his paper if he didn’t find it as I easily swiped the screen of my droid and scrolled alphabetically through my wish list. After about 20 minutes of him doing this he came back to the section I was looking through. A few years ago I was in a slightly similar situation as him regarding my movie organization but no bushy sideburns and knee high basket ball socks. Wanting to enlighten him as someone once did to me I said, “Hi, I noticed you writing these notes on your papers and going back and forth between letter and sections. Are you aware of the program Collectorz that enables you to create a database and link it to a smart phone? If you don’t have a smart phone you could print only your wish list and bring with you”. His reply, “Oh, no. Technology scares me. (Raised Eyebrows and dumb look from me) My paper never fails me.” My response (In my head of course), “You’re an idiot!” My actual response to him, “Um, OK. Your paper may never fail you but it appears your coffee may have been trying to fail your paper.” He gave me a 70′s dirty look, stuck the stained paper in the back of the stack and went to the vinyl section without another word.
I had an 8 track, cassette and record player. Been there, done that! I moved on. You can resell vinyl and other things as long as there’s people willing to buy them. I buy DVD’s & Blu-ray’s because they’re cheap and I can watch them whenever I want even when you can’t find it on netflix. I buy a digital copy of a book for a fraction of the paper cost so there’s no need to resell it to make that money back. Buying old systems or appliances to feel better seems foolish to me. You can do more with less, usually cheaper and more efficiently.
I buy vinyl because it sounds better than CDs. I buy Blu-rays because they look and sound better than DVDs. I download 96/24 files because they sound better than CDs but not as good as vinyl.
Prove that 24/96 is superior to 16/44.1. A blu-ray looking better than a DVD a pretty objective and provable statement. Your blathering about audio is pretty foolish.
These guys probably spent seconds making their lists. How much time did it take you to update your database every time you added to it. How long did it take you to set up your database. It seems like such a waste to do all that when it only requires seconds to jot it down with a pen and paper. Who’s the smarter one?
With my barcode scanner I got free from a closing video store or the barcode app on the phone I can add a movie with full info (actors, plot etc) in about 10 seconds each since it pulls from an online database using the UPC code. Once the movie is in the database, it’s there. If I sell it I select a button that puts it out of the collection but still in a list that I had it. If it were on the wish list and I buy it I just click the “In collection” button. I take my phone with me when I’m out so my list is always with me. It’s pretty cool (this is Digital Trends website) and it’s pretty quick.
Your whole argument falls apart on one point: I can resell my vinyl, cds, books, etc…. you can’t resell your digital copies and in fact, you probably don’t even own the digital copies. You’re technically borrowing them. I’d rather even buy a copy of a cd or vinyl and transfer them to digital myself, via usb since many things are still not available in digital format and then I can always resell them. You buy a digital version of a cd for $12. I buy it used for $5 and then I can resell it and make money back. You want to buy a book for your Kindle, read it once and then what? I can resell a book. Have fun wasting your money, sucker.
I know where i was when I bought every one of my most cherished LPs. How many kids in 30 years will be able to say “I remember where I was when I downloaded that MP3!” (Answer: NONE).
Analog tech can be understood by everyone with highschool level knowledge of physics. Digital tech feels more like magic to the general populace.
Using typewriters, vinyl, casettes, writing letters by candle light – some of it is just for fun, but some of them also give you a feeling of control over the world instead of using magical appliances that probably could just as well put a curse on you.
No MEMELO, most people into vinyl today are into it because IT SOUNDS BETTER not because they are afraid of “digital.” Take my word for that. I know.
No, people who don’t understand how digital audio sampling work are afraid of digital audio and their minds automatically bias that the digital audio is going to sound unreal and harsh. These same people think that because the recording looks like a staircase in some computer program that that is what the DAC will output.
Last time I checked, pops, clicks, and hiss weren’t present from the singers’ mouths or from the instruments. They are artifacts introduced in the playback mechanism (a vinyl’s needle, or a cassette’s pickup head) and they actually make the sound more unrealistic. The “warm” sound that people so carelessly flaunt is just distortion and lack of high frequency detail.
The experience of these crappy old analog formats and their deficiencies might please your senses, but it’s certainly not because it’s a better representation of the original sound.
I dare someone to insert an ADC-to-DAC stage into a purely analog playback chain and undergo some real double blind testing.
Not true. I’ve been building my own computers for many years and have a degree in Computer Science. I’m not afraid of digital, but like Micheal said, vinyl sounds better. Most CD’s created for the masses sound dull in comparison. They lack resolution at the higher frequencies and a great deal of micro detail and harmonics that makes things sound more real.
You really don’t understand how digital sampling works then. I really don’t care what degrees you have. If you can’t understand that a 44,100 kHz sampling rate can reproduce a perfect sine wave from 0 Hz all the way up to 22,050 Hz, then your degree means nothing to me. Even if you understood it, it still means nothing. Vinyl actually lacks high frequency detail. You have it backwards. They take out high frequencies on vinyl to deal with the needle jumping around in the rut from resonance. Harmonics don’t matter if you can’t hear them. Harmonics outside of the audible range are actually a problem in recordings. In real life, they’re fine. They aren’t passing through a mic and out of a speaker.
Not everything old is nazi’s just because it’s not compatible with whatever screen you stare at the most. Even the best video game, cell phone or digital camera is it’s image will break down to the pixel. A polaroid photo breaks down at the molecular level, and does it completely uniquely in each photo.
I can understand frustration with markets that refuse to adapt to new technology but at the same time it must be understood that the same stupidity asks us to chuck things out just because something new has come along.
Vinyl will always be here. I don’ t know about the other items you mentioned but Vinyl will never die.
Of course. What a bitter stupid rant.
That’s all we need. A self-appointed social critic of tech who thinks his peronal ambivilence toward nostalgia should influence the personal tastes of others….no, we don’t have enough of those kind of people.
Actually, largely because of the “new tech” we have far to many of them!
I have a Pioneer “rack system” with a turntable that I bought in 1978. It works flawlessly.The replacement parts for the turntable are getting difficult to come by,but I rarely need them. My Bose 901 speakers will still rattle the windows! I also built my own Gaming PC, love my MP3 player, and go virtually no where without my Tablet. They both have their place to people who find pleasure in it.
So quit being such a buzzkill. Old tech, just like old gas-guzzling, smog spewing cars, can be fun.
Skrillex has a daughter?
hahaah! i thought the same thing!
At first I thought it was Skrillex..
lol..was thinking the same thing
Cassette tapes are the worst medium for audio ever. The only advantage they had over Vinyl or CDs was we could record on them.
Don’t write out all old technology just because it’s old. Yes I’ll give you Penny Farthings and typewriters as a part of a current hipster/vintage fashion but seriously, replace physical books with ebooks because they kill trees?
Not entirely serious, but actually ebooks are great, I’m not about to throw out all my physical books but when I buy a new one now I generally buy it for my Kindle.
I can see how ebooks can also be good for a lot of reasons, but just because they’re a new technology doesn’t mean that physical books are any worse, and outdated.
Physical books do have a certain aesthic that is hard to replicate but e-books are great!
Cheaper to produce / market / distribute
Only take up digital space which means you can have more and take then with you anywhere
They allow for a wider array of reader conditions due to features like the backlights