[Closed] Digital or Vinyl?

Vinyl FTW. Much prefer listening to my records than mp3s ala ipod.
MP3 = convenience.
Vinyl = connosieur.

edit- 28yrs, it just sounds better, there is the ritual of cueing it up as well that is enjoyable.

digital - just converted and replaced all my old (80-90s) vinyl for £2-£5 an album.

I used to love vinyl but the convenience of wifi music is making me enjoy music a lot more.

Vinyl. It sounds better and I like the process and interaction.

I don't smoke anymore, but as a very wise man once said, 'You can't skin up up on a download'.

as much as I fondly remember vinyl, digital all the way. Spotify rocks my world

I would just like to add that I've just discovered a massive scratch across one of my limited edition INXS 12"'s..... you don't get that with digital 🙄 🙁

If you grew up listening to vinyl ,it's hard to beat the cueing up sound.Hairs on the back of your neck an all that,but the choice ( and convenience )of digital music is amazing .

Can't imagine my kids getting anything out of listening to it,they gave me some funny looks when I showed them all the mix tapes I made for their mum 😆

Digital. Most of my old vinyl has been degraded to some degree by the huge amounts of hairspray I used in my youth 🙁

Both. If I'm properly listening to music, I'll get myself a nice brew and go up to the spare room (which is more of a library / music room), spend a while browsing my vinyl then just sit and listen through a decent hifi and enjoy it.

If we have folk round, or I'm cooking, or washing up, or doing work, or cleaning my bike, or, y'know, whatever, I'll either stick 6Music on or cue up a bunch of stuff on the MP3 player, then I know I can have uninterrupted music until I've finished whatever it is I'm doing.

Both are ace 😀

I would just like to add that I've just discovered a massive scratch across one of my limited edition INXS 12"'s..... you don't get that with digital

Nah, your HD can die and you can lose your whole record shelf

CD all the way converted to MP3 for the ipod/car

Vinyl sounds better, yes whatever 🙄

I love the sense of ownership with vinyl. Even with CDs I feel like I'm not getting the full package. That said my days of sitting and properly listening to music are on hold whilst I play Dad, so for me the convenience, portability and massive choice of digital music are winning me over.

Case in point? I'm sat typing this whilst listening to Underworld's Dubnobasswithmyheadman on Spotify. I [i]could[/i] go and get the vinyl from the lounge and put it on the deck behind me, but I'd be getting up every 15 minutes to change sides.

When the kids have left home I'm buying one of these and getting the hi fi set up "properly" like in the old days...

[img] [/img]

I've used CD's since they first came out-kept hold of my turntable (logic Tempo + Ortofon MC10 super)Now ripping all my CD's to flac to a NAS drive with Squeezebox. Sounds superb & mega convenient-still can't bring myself to part with my turntable even though I rarely actually use it. The day of reckoning is coming though as you just don't need a cabinet full of Hi-Fi these days. Vinyl sounds good still but with no cabinet where the heck do you put the turntable!!
Could put a couple of shelves up I suppose but that defeats the declutter objective.

Stilltortoise-you are a Baaad man-the engineer in me has just got me drooling over that!

Vinyl. It sounds better and I like the process and interaction.

That's its strength and its weakness. I do prefer the sound, but unless you have time to listen properly, digital is so much more convenient.

I still play Vinyl at home, that is, when I have my home to myself.

Still nice feeling though when you do find a decent bit of vinyl from the past in a shop and its in good condition, I think its more a collecting thing now though for me as I have everything on digital media as well.

😆

I've wanted one for years, and if it wasn't for the expensive hobbies of biking, climbing and skiing I might have bought one by now.

Clue in my forum name 😉

Both, but I'll never give up my vinyl. In fact I've just put up a couple of extra shelves (church pews!) and got a couple more boxes out of the loft.

I still DJ with a pair of 1210s too 🙂

Digital. I thInk I own maybe 40? CDs most of my stuff sits on my iTunes. Could never see how vinyl is "better" the music is more important to me rather than what it's played on

Both, for exactly the reasons flyingmonkeycorps gave.

That turntable is lovely.

I'm remembering the "getting up every 15-20 mins to turn the record over" bit now & it is stopping me getting any work done.

Still love the whole vinyl thing but yes, digital is more convenient if i'm being honest.

Digital, couple of reasons, I never kept cds good, I hated the things, flung them all out around 2000 or so. So good knows what I'd be like with records. And secondly, digital stuff is free, what's not to like! 😀

Next quetsion that makes sense to me is downloading or streaming? streaming is better imo than everything, they just need to get their business models up to scratch.

34yo btw.

The "vinyl is better" argument is pretty simple really, if the music was mastered, mixed etc. analoguely, then the groove on the vinyl gives you an analogue of the sound the musicians made in the studio.

It's like the difference between having an original painting / drawing or a print. Yes, your print could be a very high quality reproduction, but it's not the same thing.

Or, think about a simple diagonal line drawn on a piece of paper, and the same simple line drawn in MS Paint on your PC - if you zoom in far enough on the digital version and see the pixels, it'll not look like a diagonal line, it'll look like a set of stairs. The hand drawn line will still look like a line when magnified. A slide guitar lick will be the same - it's a slide on vinyl, it's ultimately a coded set of downwards steps in digital.

However, for reasons of practicality and having lost all my vinyl a few years ago for reasons too convoluted and dull to go into, I'm now an exclusively digital consumer. Damn.

Digital. 30000 tracks on my iPod that I can carry around, play in the car, on the bike, in bed, anywhere!

I still have all my vinyl going back to T Rex albums from '73.
Still have a load of minidiscs (which was the BEST format for copying and editing stuff - eg. recording radio shows and keeping the tracks you want.)
Still have all my CDs and still buy CDs cos I do like to have the "object" sometimes and I can't play digital in the lounge yet without turning on a computer..
Not anal about perfect sound quality, if its good music it can be a crackly old 7" single or a 128kb mp3.

I am in my late 40s (and OBSESSED with music!)

Myself I prefer vinyl for listening to at home

which is why you've just dug your turntable out after a decade 🙂

There are lots of qualities surrounding vinyl that are easy to get nostalgic about. What cyber-video-kids-of-the-throwaway-age (people under 30, like Emsz, the forum home-help) won't remember is music used to be something you had to hunt for. I have a 12" that Don Christie's tracked down for me, they knew there was a copy sitting in someone's garage in Nottingham - had to wait weeks and weeks for it to be passed from person to person til if finally got to me. All that for a track that I'd heard about, but never heard. All that wait and a fiver to then sit on the bus with it still unable to hear it til I got home.

Then if you liked it - you couldn't play to to often because you'd wear it out, so you had to ration your enjoyment.

Theres no such delayed gratification with spotify 🙂

but digital media has changed the way I consume music and vinyl rarely fits into how and when I listen to stuff now. I did start to digitise some vinyl stuff as there are some odds and ends that have never made it into the digital sphere, but I stopped. I'd rather save it for high days and holidays.

The "vinyl is better" argument is pretty simple really, if the music was mastered, mixed etc. analoguely, then the groove on the vinyl gives you an analogue of the sound the musicians made in the studio.

It's like the difference between having an original painting / drawing or a print. Yes, your print could be a very high quality reproduction, but it's not the same thing.

Or, think about a simple diagonal line drawn on a piece of paper, and the same simple line drawn in MS Paint on your PC - if you zoom in far enough on the digital version and see the pixels, it'll not look like a diagonal line, it'll look like a set of stairs. The hand drawn line will still look like a line when magnified. A slide guitar lick will be the same - it's a slide on vinyl, it's ultimately a coded set of downwards steps in digital.

However, for reasons of practicality and having lost all my vinyl a few years ago for reasons too convoluted and dull to go into, I'm now an exclusively digital consumer. Damn.

The perfect philosophical appreciation, delicate and easily lost when considering the technicalities.
Dobedoooo

Vinyl. You don't get an album cover to look at on a download.

I don't get the obsession with vinyl.

I was at Camp Bestival last year, and one of the events they had was a vinyl listening provided by "Classic Album Sundays."

In a cosy stone-built room, a dozen of us assembled to listen to Dark Side of the Moon on a state-of-the art HiFi turntable and assorted electrickery. I've had cheap turntables in the past but nothing remotely high end so I was looking forward to it.

They played the album after a bit of preamble and we sat and listened. In and of itself I wholeheartedly agree that people should listen, actually [i]listen [/i]to albums more. The album sounded warm and rich, granted, and I appreciated that. But it also sounded, on the quieter passages of this classic album on their multi-thousand pound stereo system, like someone was in the next room frying chips.

I get that vinyl is a "nice" thing; it's a large tangible media with glossy artwork, and putting on an album is a bit of a ritual as you wipe it down, cue it up. I'm right there with you on the 'needle hitting the deck' thing. I have a Laserdisc player which has a similar appeal, those large shiny discs are just beautiful things.[/i]

What I just don't get is the fervent claims that vinyl sounds better. I know some people like the imperfections inherent in the medium, perhaps arguing that it adds character or soul or something, but that's not "better," it's simply a personal preference for "worse." You're not a connoisseur, just nostalgic. Which is fine of course.

You could compare an old black & white movie to a modern Imax extravaganza, perhaps. The B&W films have a lot of appeal, shot in styles that we just don't get any more. But does it look and sound better? Really?

I should add,

The auditioning was awesome, and I'd love to go to another, maybe even regularly. I just don't agree that it should be exclusively "vinyl only."

Forum home help??

Vinyl for me all the way, I am a little biased as I run a record label that is exclusivley vinyl, but they are just beautifull things. A lot of the points on this thread are valid, I like them as a purely tangible object with the full artwork as intended and their collectability. As for if they sound better? That is surely in the eye of the beholder, you do find that certain acts or certain types of music DO sound better via this particular medium, it lends the sound more of an organic feel and a truer representation of the orginal performance (if a live act) wheras MP3 will inevitably sound better when it comes to dance/eelctronic music, being as the orignial source was born from the digital realm to start with. I buy vinyl to spend quality time listening to an ALBUM (as opposed to playlists or just random tracks) and I use MP3 as a pre-screener before I buy the vinyl or for on the move. Personally though nothing beats vinyl.

emsz - Member
Digital. I thInk I own maybe 40? CDs most of my stuff sits on my iTunes. Could never see how vinyl is "better" the music is more important to me rather than what it's played on

Totally. The music IS the most important bit, be it on MP3, tape, vinyl, 8 track, whatever. But like others have said, there's something about the physicality of vinyl, the ritual of getting up and flipping it over, the crackle when you drop the needle that I just don't get from a digital download.

It's a bit like reading books - I'll always prefer an actual real paper book to a digital equivalent, and I'll always print copies of my photographs (digital AND film) to frame and put on the wall.

But each to their own and all that innit. I'm sure it's an age thing, I remember listening to John Peel of an evening then scouring local record shops and mail order places trying to find obscure records... And I'm only 32!

Oh yeah and I am 29

Amen to the John Peel reference! I suspect that is what turned me onto vinyl in the first place as well...

Also, vinyl artwork can be AMAZING. Check out the sleeves for In Bocca Al Lupo by Murder by Death or Un Jour Sans Lendemain by Mihai Edrisch...

Well said Cougar. (Although the last thing in this world I would do is sit in a darkened room with other people listening to Pink bloody Floyd!)

Its not just about the music or what it's played on. With an LP it's abot the whole experience. Album artwork can look great on a big 12" sleeve. It looks shite on flimsy paper in a jewel case and is non existent with a download.

Spotify for casual listening and vinyl for when Ive got time to sit down with a botlle of wine and the feet up.

To truly appreciate vinyl you need to hear a decent setup. A midi system with a built in record player is always going to sound worse than a cd player.

DezB - Member
Well said Cougar. (Although the last thing in this world I would do is [s]sit in a darkened room with other people [/s]listen[s]ing[/s] to Pink bloody Floyd!)

FTFY 😉

That too 🙂

[i]time to sit down with a botlle of wine and the feet up.[/i]

And just when you've relaxed, you have to get up again and turn the damn thing over 😉

time to sit down with a botlle of wine and the feet up.

And just when you've relaxed, you have to get up again and turn the damn thing over

Actually, it's a particular problem with modern music - studio albums are no longer edited to fit on a single LP, so you end up with a double, complete with 2 or 3 tracks per side, and an enormous run-out groove.

That Stewart Lee clip is a perfect example of how sound quality can be lost in the digital medium 😉

I just like music, the format that it's presented to me on is largely irrelevant.

I had vinyl and cassettes in my youth, then dabbled with minidisc for recording and portability but I largely settled on CDs for many years.

While most of my listening these days is of MP3s or Spotify style streaming (for convenience), I much prefer to buy the CD and rip it as there's some comfort or intangible satisfaction in owning a physical item.

I've sometimes considered running my speaker-out through a distortion pedal in order to give my MP3s that genuine warm vinyl sound. Hi-fi buffs, should I go with the classic Boss DS-1?

Obviously I will use a gold directional patch cable 😉

I've sometimes considered running my speaker-out through a distortion pedal in order to give my MP3s that genuine warm vinyl sound. Hi-fi buffs, should I go with the classic Boss DS-1?

Ibanez Tube Screamer FTW.

Sold mine for £150 a few years back 😯