Exactly that, hence my comment that "not skipping" would be a good reason to turn to vinyl is not valid per-se, it is and has been available many decades with CD's, that's all i meant.
If someone wants to go back to vinyl (for whatever reason!), fine by me.
Well turning to vinyl so as to help focus attention and resist skipping tracks isn’t of course for everybody. No solution is.
But there are clearly good reasons why this “ encourages more relaxed and focused, listening “ aspect shows up again and again among vinyl enthusiasts.
It’s simply a fact that
how you experienced something can change the experience.
There are all sorts of aspects of buying and playing a record that encourages a sense of investment and attachment to the physical object and the music on that object. Everything from the vinyl generally requires a greater commitment in terms of money, and often searching for and even physically having to go out and find and buy the item.
Right down to the sense of connection of opening up the record, holding it in your hands, the owning of and certain amount of care for a turntable, placing the record on the turntable, usually with the expectation you’re going to be listening to more than one track track, etc.
These are the type of factors that really do influence experiences in human beings.
So it’s understandable the theme comes up over and over about how vinyl encourages a somewhat different mindset during the listening process from streaming.
To acknowledge these facts doesn’t mean that every single person would have the same experience. People have different criteria.
But it explains why many people do have this experience.
Can this same difference I’ve experience be achieved with another physical format like CD?
Yes. Some people find CDs themselves to be a desirable form of physical media.
Here’s a photo of somebody’s CD collection from the CD collectors Reddit:
So clearly some can have a connection to the physical media. I think in the majority of cases it doesn’t take the level of commitment vinyl can, but it still something you have to put in a CD player.
So I can see how listening to CD can also help focus somebody’s attention more more than streaming.
On the other hand, with most CD players, you’ve got a remote so you can easily skip tracks, unlike with a record. And also, it’s hard to know whether CDs compete quite as well with vinyl in the “ I enjoy it because it helps me better focus attention through entire albums vs streaming ” aspect. This comes up routinely with vinyl, but I don’t see it nearly as much from what I’ve seen from CD collectors.
I just went through a thread on Reddit with over 500 comments about why music enthusiasts were collecting CDs. There was the occasional “ I tend to listen to a full album when playing a CD” comments, but they were relatively rare. There was a lot of talk about enjoying the physical collectable aspect. But it was also common for people to say they rip the CDs immediately, so they can play them anywhere. Which is quite different from the vinyl experience.
And even in a thread devoted to CD there were people still bringing up why they prefer vinyl as their physical medium, e.g.:
“
I decided to switch to vinyl because I feel like I am more particular with it (grabbing whole albums of enjoyment vs. endless cds where I only like 1-2 songs on them). Considering I have a bit of hoarding tendencies, it is better to pick the thing that actually pushes me to be selective.”