[71 dB]

I think you are being too harsh. He loves the sound of vinyl just like some people are crazy about birdwatching. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Nothing wrong with loving the sound of vinyl. Vinyl creates certain type of distortions and people find those distortions pleasing. The problem arises when vinyl lovers think the pleasantness of the sound is a sign of higher fidelity. That is not true. Vinyl is lower fidelity than digital formats. Digital formats add hardly any audible distortions to the sound. They are audibly transparent except for lower bitrate lossy formats.

Now, what I am interested is why the distortions of vinyl are pleasant and what can we learn from that? Adding vinyl type of distortion to masters of digital formats would make the digital versions similarly pleasant (but without the clumsiness and problems of analog formats), but it is important to understand when to do this. I wouldn't "ruin" recordings of classical music with vinyl distortion, but maybe metal music benefits from it?

Vinyl forces left and right channels modulate each other and this creates "out of focus" soundstage which can "hide" unnatural aspect of it. Because of RIAA corrections, the distortions created by vinyl playback are massively lowpass filtered which also probably feels pleasing.

 

[bigshot]

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature... all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure." Brian Eno​

 

[bigshot]

My theory of why people find LPs attractive has to do with the fact that they are almost perfect sounding. If all of your ducks are in a row, then a record can sound as good as a CD... almost. And it's the "almost" that makes the format interesting. The challenge of squeezing a little more out of the sound is fun to people who are interested in the mechanics of the thing more than the purpose of the equipment. The fun to them isn't listening to music, it's listening to records. They focus on the artifacts and strive to reduce it incrementally through calibrating and recalibrating their tracking, fetishistically cleaning their albums, and shopping for more and more fancy cartridges, turntables and LP preamps.

This isn't just LP fans. It's a broad range of audiophiles. I remember going to an audiophile acquaintance's house to listen to his system. He had those big six foot flat speakers and built in cabinets with huge amps and players. He asked me what I wanted to hear and I asked to see his collection of music. He only had about 100 CDs and SACDs and they were all audiophile demonstration records. I pulled out my iPod and he patched it in and we listened to "good music". He never listened to music. He just listened to his system.

I imagine there are home theater enthusiasts who just watch the same sequence from Top Gun over and over again, artists who spend more time organizing their art materials than drawing, and musicians who collect guitars they can't really play.

 

[old tech]

I think you are being too harsh. He loves the sound of vinyl just like some people are crazy about birdwatching. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Well that depends on the type of birds...

 

[endrasarios]

I think a lot of it comes down to nostalgia tbh, there's been times where a band I like has released a remaster of an album I listened to a lot as a kid, and even if it's technically better I prefer the older mix because that's what I got used to over the years and associate with the emotional experience.

 

[endrasarios]

My theory of why people find LPs attractive has to do with the fact that they are almost perfect sounding. If all of your ducks are in a row, then a record can sound as good as a CD... almost. And it's the "almost" that makes the format interesting. The challenge of squeezing a little more out of the sound is fun to people who are interested in the mechanics of the thing more than the purpose of the equipment. The fun to them isn't listening to music, it's listening to records. They focus on the artifacts and strive to reduce it incrementally through calibrating and recalibrating their tracking, fetishistically cleaning their albums, and shopping for more and more fancy cartridges, turntables and LP preamps.

This isn't just LP fans. It's a broad range of audiophiles. I remember going to an audiophile acquaintance's house to listen to his system. He had those big six foot flat speakers and built in cabinets with huge amps and players. He asked me what I wanted to hear and I asked to see his collection of music. He only had about 100 CDs and SACDs and they were all audiophile demonstration records. I pulled out my iPod and he patched it in and we listened to "good music". He never listened to music. He just listened to his system.

I imagine there are home theater enthusiasts who just watch the same sequence from Top Gun over and over again, artists who spend more time organizing their art materials than drawing, and musicians who collect guitars they can't really play.

haha reminds me of that video about those Japanese audiophiles who are obsessed with building the perfect sound system, with one going as far connecting his setup directly to the power grid via a utility pole he build in his backyard to "avoid impurities that taint the sound". At that point it stops being about the music and it's just about chasing the "perfect system", which I don't think is a productive mindset to have when in hifi audio, you're still a human trying to enjoy art. I think you can even see it on his face when they show him listening to music with it that he's still not happy, he can't listen to music anymore just technical characteristics and performance metrics. As someone with a tendency to OCD that is something I'm trying to avoid in my "audiophile journey", but without sacrificing care about detail and technical excellence too much. You need a balance basically.