Records Outsell CD !

[watchnerd]

For the bank balance of those on the supply side, yes. Not so for the ears.

Money is a fair normalization metric for what kind of art provides the greatest utility to the largest portion of the populace.

I may not think Taylor Swift is all that great, but the number of people who are willing to vote with their wallets and buy her stuff tells me that she is providing entertainment value to a lot of people.

 

[mansr]

I guess ”The Monkeys” show the value of marketing, but there still was a lot of talent (even with the performers). People who become popular do have talents, no doubt (cf. Yuja Wang, who certainly is an excellent pianist), but not all talented people become famous...

In some cases the "talent" consists solely of being a good-looking woman.

 

[watchnerd]

Non sequitur. Really pointless, not interesting.

Q: Hey what do you do when the music you want to hear hasn't even been written or recorded yet?
A: Add the person who asks this kind of stuff to your ignore list maybe.

Huh?

You act as if everything recorded made it to CD or has been digitized.

I have LPs that were written / recorded and never went to digital.

 

[watchnerd]

In some cases the "talent" consists solely of being a good-looking woman.

I don't have a problem with good looking talent.

It's an entertainment business.

Even the classical music world uses honey shots.

 

[Jimbob54]

People who become popular do have talents

Just not necessarily in the performing arts.

I find the "I'm popular, therefore I must be talented" line a bit too close to the thinking of a certain world leader for my liking. But that's for a different forum.

 

[watchnerd]

Just not necessarily in the performing arts.

I find the "I'm popular, therefore I must be talented" line a bit too close to the thinking of a certain world leader for my liking. But that's for a different forum.

Well, circling back to money...

Unless you have a rich patron, being talented but unpopular may not be good for your pocket book.

 

[mansr]

I don't have a problem with good looking talent.

Me neither, but I when the subject is music, I value relevant talent over looks. Lingerie models are a different matter.

 

[garbulky]

I think the computer audiophile crowd has pointed out an irony with digital.

Namely, "audiophiles" feel the need to tweak, season to taste, etc.

So, strangely enough, digital can lead to irrational tweakery of a near flawless medium, while analog can lead to rational tweakery of a highly imperfect medium.

There's tweaking you can do with CD's. You can use different software to rip. Choose different dacs (multibit, tube?). Your CD player could be vintage multibit or a CD streamer to a dac. Perhaps you just want to go for a CD changer. Choose between different digital output connections (AES, BNC?) . But I agree that it's nowhere near as tactile as vinyl - that's on a whole other level.

 

[watchnerd]

Me neither, but I when the subject is music, I value relevant talent over looks. Lingerie models are a different matter.

For me, it depends on the genre.

If it's pop and there is going to be dancing, yeah, I like visual appeal.

 

[watchnerd]

There's tweaking you can do with CD's. You can use different software to rip. Choose different dacs (multibit, tube?). Your CD player could be vintage multibit or a CD streamer to a dac. Perhaps you just want to go for a CD changer. Choose between different digital output connections (AES, BNC?) . But I agree that it's nowhere near as tactile as vinyl - that's on a whole other level.

I wasn't speaking of tactile.

I was speaking of the kind of intentional sonic coloration attempts you're alluding to.

 

[restorer-john]

I buy CDs only. Don't really care about anything that isn't, or wasn't released on CD. If that rules out a whole bunch of music going forward, I really don't care that much. I'll cross that bridge when I'm bored with what I have. Everytime I try streaming, it leaves me utterly cold, bored and unfulfilled. It's like fast food.

There's simply so much music available on the secondary market, so incredibly cheaply on CD now, that I think I've picked up maybe 5000 or more discs in the last 10 years. Stuff I would not have spent $25 a disc on, but at 20c to $1, it's a baragin.

For classical, my father's enormous (many 1000s) vinyl collection goes back to some of the earliest recorded music right through well into the 90s with a huge crossover as he embraced compact disc in 1983. He's stopped buying any media as I do it for him. We have a joke that we could break a stylus everytime we play a record and probably never run out of NOS spares.

 

[mansr]

For me, it depends on the genre.

If it's pop and there is going to be dancing, yeah, I like visual appeal.

I don't have associated video for most of my music collection, so it doesn't matter.

 

[watchnerd]

I don't have associated video for most of my music collection, so it doesn't matter.

Well, my FLACs, LPs, and reels don't have video, either.

But YouTube does.

 

[watchnerd]

Everytime I try streaming, it leaves me utterly cold, bored and unfulfilled. It's like fast food.

I sometimes have the same reaction to streaming, and I'm not sure why.

I thought it might be compression, but it happens even if the stream is allegedly lossless.

Any thoughts?

 

[mansr]

Well, my FLACs, LPs, and reels don't have video, either.

But YouTube does.

Why does it matter if it's the same person singing and dancing, though? It's all lip-synced anyway.

 

[watchnerd]

Why does it matter if it's the same person singing and dancing, though? It's all lip-synced anyway.

Because dancing is visual entertainment.

And music and dance have been entertwined for millenia.

Watching the hand gestures of a fado singer is just as much a part of the performance as listening to the music.

Or watching Michael Jackson in his hey day.

 

[restorer-john]

I sometimes have the same reaction to streaming, and I'm not sure why.

I thought it might be compression, but it happens even if the stream is allegedly lossless.

Any thoughts?

Mostly psychological, but very powerful in my opinion. For me there was always time, effort, expense and then reward with music. You had to make the time, find the music, pay for it and then sit down a obtain the reward. It's imprinted in my brain from my earliest years with music in the home.

Streaming chucks all that out the window and just feels completely wrong. So I get no reward. The feeling is missing.

People who grew up misappropriating music or hearing it for free, may not have the same connection. Streaming is like Netflix- there's decision paralysis when being presented with so much stuff you end up choosing nothing. In sales, you always present a minimum number of choices (A or B) or a customer will be unable to make a decision.

I can't change it in my brain and don't really want to.

 

[Robin L]

I just bought this:
View attachment 83221

Ten CDs, $27, shipped. Showing up tomorrow. I can stream this via Amazon Music, but I want to compare the two, already love three of the performances in this set, sound quality is as good as Redbook gets. With classical music, which presents situations that are better dealt with in digital media, there is motivation to get these seriously cheap cd boxes before they disappear, subsequently becoming collector's items. Many times the streamable versions have sonic compromises not found on the CDs.

Showed up Today. Along with A Topping L30 headphone amp, so I'm currently listening to Fleetwood Mac on my DAP. Have to hook up some sort of disc player for the Bruckner.

 

[raistlin65]

I sometimes have the same reaction to streaming, and I'm not sure why.

I thought it might be compression, but it happens even if the stream is allegedly lossless.

Any thoughts?

I dislike all of the streaming interfaces I have tried. I much prefer to use MusicBee with my digital collection on Windows, and Poweramp on Android.

I suppose if the only music playing app for Windows was Microsoft Goove Music, I'd dislike playing media on my PC, too.

Then again, perhaps sense of ownership of the media has some expectation bias effect on the sound quality.

 

[bigLP]

I'm still not sure you're grasping the key message. Forget CD, it serves little to no purpose. Just think digital vs LP.

I do understand! The article I posted referenced cd and vinyl in light of the growth of streaming. It intrigues me that vinyl is winning the archaic physical media battle in the growing shadow of streaming and file downloads.
I teach high school and younger kids look at cd players in almost the same light as they do turntables. My unitiqute brought me back to hifi due to the ease of access and awesome sound. My post generated far more issues and observations than I considered.
Edited for length!