You can hardly know unless you subtract the non-audio factors that bias preference.
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Why do records sound so much better than digital?
- Thread starter don'ttrustauthority
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You can hardly know unless you subtract the non-audio factors that bias preference.
Please dispose of them responsibly. Recycle, don't burn.
Oh shit. My computer hard disk just crashed and I can't listen to anything. I don't know what to do. I'll be forced to go back to playing my analog piano.
Whew, I'm glad I made backup(s) on portable drives. Why, here's one in my coat pocket! Good to go.
Said it before, say it again: the 'ideal' physical release format would be small discs + old-fashioned packaging (LP-size sleeve).
Robin L
Master Contributor
Glad to hear you made the switch.Yes, digital audio sounds much superior to analog. I have the graphs 'n charts to prove it. I am in the process of burning my entire vinyl and tape collection and the turntable and tape machines are now on the curb for trash pickup tomorrow.
Oh shit. My computer hard disk just crashed and I can't listen to anything. I don't know what to do. I'll be forced to go back to playing my analog piano.
My Martin DRS2 is also all analog.
I did manage to erase some fifty-odd titles from the computer mini-SSD.
Fortunately, they are all backed up on the tiny Micro-SD chip in my DAP.
MakeMineVinyl
Major Contributor
A guy with a shopping cart has already taken them away. I don't know what he'll do with them, but I'm sure he will do the responsible thing. However I did notice a sign on the front of his cart which read "Perfect Sound Forever".
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Newman
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LOL. Or how about nano-SD cards, or little USB-C sticks?
In fact, to those who feel so impoverished by non-physical release formats, why don’t you buy downloaded music and burn each album individually onto CDs or save onto individual 1GB cards or sticks, so you have a physical ‘album’? Because it would make you look weird? Or is the truth that you are more into the package than the physical playback medium disc/stick/thing? In which case, why don’t you print onto A3 sheets of premium photo paper, the cover art of each album you download, plus each album you save to library of your streaming service, and stack them all on a shelf in your listening room? Or frame and hang them? Or wallpaper your room with them?
What I do, however, think would be really cool and a big step up from LP covers, would be if digital music was sold with some visual non-video accompaniment, that could ‘slide-show’ on our screens as the music played. For example, if the LP or CD had cover art and booklets, sometimes with lyrics, let’s see that included in the download or stream, and have our music players page through it automatically, with manual override. Would be cool IMHO. Plus our screens are brighter than printed cover art, don’t need room lights directed at us, and can be much, much larger than a puny 12” album cover, plus can be magnified for easy reading.
Cheers
The “Squirrel Nut Zippers” released such a CD back in the 90s or very late 80s.
What he's going to do is to change someone's life.
"I Swapped Spotify for Vinyl and It Changed My Life"
"I listen to music every single day—it’s one of my favorite things in life. I also bought my first turntable a few months ago and have wondered what it’d be like to only listen to vinyl for an entire week. So recently, I did just that and I have a lot of thoughts about the experience. My...
www.audiosciencereview.com
Uh, just so you know, in the computer industry "hard drive" is a term that refers to non-volatile magnetic storage on spinning platters, and now they're mostly referred to as "HDDs", for Hard Disk Drives. SSDs, or Solid State Drives, are in a separate category altogether. SSD is actually a stupid name, derived by marketing people from disk drives to tell the non-technical folks that an SSD would fit in the same form factor as an HDD. The term "drive" to designate a storage device is also a marketing term, derived from a time when storage could be on magnetic tape, spinning platters, or magnetic cards (CRAM), and a "drive" mechanism was required to generate the movement necessary for the oxide-based media to be read or written by the "head". So a tape deck was a tape drive, and why a CD player mechanism is called a CD drive.It was the "C" SSD. No joy. No streaming. No nothing. Just the bleakness of looking at previous printouts of frequency response graphs. The year 2022 just turned impotent.
SSDs also don't actually "crash", they just fail to function properly. Crashing refers specifically to the heads in an HDD making physical contact with the storage media platter. Nonetheless, SSDs do fail at about the same rate as HDDs, because most SSDs use flash memory, and flash has limited write cycles, or "endurance", before they cease to reliably store data. SSDs also have complex firmware in their embedded controllers, and the software is more prone to bugs than the electro-mechanical actuators in an HDD.
MakeMineVinyl
Major Contributor
I know this. I'm a non-pedantic software / hardware engineer. More to the point, my original post was written as a joke.
Indeed, or even just a link to a lossless download.
You can't clean weed with a video screen, maaan.
fieldcar
Addicted to Fun and Learning
I always despised hearing people say "my hard drive crashed" for any matter of hard disk failure.
It's rare, but sometimes HDDs actually do crash. The most prevalent example I've seen is in offices, where people walk around with an open, running laptop containing an HDD in the midst of doing I/O operations. When you put a computer to "sleep" the HDDs are signaled to "park" their r/w heads in a safe, off-platter position, so crashing can't happen. But there's always some dummies who are too lazy to close their laptop and then reopen it and sign back in when they reach their destination. Years ago, when HDDs were the norm in laptops, if I saw someone in my groups do that they always got a private lecture on the topic, where my displeasure was obvious.
Records sound better because that nifty little needle is CREATING music right there in front of you, in real time. It may be following the script that is the record groove, but it is actually creating the music, physically.
Digital is just a cheap recreation in comparison.
Digital is just a cheap recreation in comparison.
No. That niftly little needle is pretty stupid, just going through the motions. It is not creative at all.
Whereas a dac only has a series of coordinates. It has to calculate everything according to those coordinates. That is pretty smart. And we all prefer smart over stupid, huh?
Do you understand sampling theory?
How many records do you have that did not go through a digital stage?
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The needle is not stupid. And it is not simply creating an electrical signal. It is creating sound, as well as acting as a transducer.
I have no idea whether a DAC is smart or stupid, but I remember a team of robotics engineers saying they felt the robots' mechanical abilities came first, and as these improved, their intelligence improved. Walking then talking.
When I pull out my violin and play a solo fugue by Bartok or Bach, I sure hope you don't call me stupid.
We can get into a discussion on different philosophies of music ("arrangement" genres like classical and rock, and improvisatory music like jazz and some avant garde), but that is for another time (and place, most likely).
I view my tonearms as colleagues, analogous to me recording myself performing written music. In fact, I have learned more about my bow arm from working on tonearms in the past decade, than any viola guru or treatise.
I have no idea whether a DAC is smart or stupid, but I remember a team of robotics engineers saying they felt the robots' mechanical abilities came first, and as these improved, their intelligence improved. Walking then talking.
When I pull out my violin and play a solo fugue by Bartok or Bach, I sure hope you don't call me stupid.
We can get into a discussion on different philosophies of music ("arrangement" genres like classical and rock, and improvisatory music like jazz and some avant garde), but that is for another time (and place, most likely).
I view my tonearms as colleagues, analogous to me recording myself performing written music. In fact, I have learned more about my bow arm from working on tonearms in the past decade, than any viola guru or treatise.
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