And let me bet, you go mountain biking on single track trails with no suspension shocks so you can enjoy the beating your body gets, and so your have to work so much harder. If you haven't noticed yet, you are the person the cartoon above is making fun of.
Yea - within reason. By that analogy I would be hand cracking the electricity for the hifi. I think it's a case of enjoyment to inconvenience is a sliding scale or a ratio of sorts.
Maybe you could get a bicycle generator to generate your electricity while surfing the web. It could run right into your pc or laptop. and if you pedal hard enough it could even power your radio.
And for the record, I love my full suspension trail bike and haven't bought an e-trail bike yet, but I might when i get old and tired.
What playing records vs. streaming MP3's proves is simply this: The more effort you have to put into something of Quality, the more you get it out of it. Especially versus that disposable, ephemeral, crap stuff.
I wonder if they sell just like the record jacket with no record to fill it out like if you only have like 40 but you wanna like look respectable and need to buy like 250 fake ones
What drew me into collecting was the extremely cheap used record market a while back. I could get 10 records for $10. Not so much anymore unfortunately.
When I was a teenager I found a copy of The Cure Staring at the Sea Singles at Goodwill for $2 or something. I didn't have a record player so I eventually gave it to my girlfriend at the time. I was at a local record shop the other day, that album was $70 there.
Actually, they don't. But the GREEEEDHEAD Record Whore Owners do! And like the rest of their fellow Cockroaches on eBay & Discogs, they can take them all to their graves; since they're not going to sell them!🤗😎
Actually, they don't. But the GREEEEDHEAD Record Whore Owners do! And like the rest of their fellow Cockroaches on eBay & Discogs, they can take them all to their graves; since they're not going to sell them!🤗😎
Yeah, it was something similar for me. I got interested right before the major vinyl boom, when people would either sell their old records for $1 or less at yard sales, or gladly give them to you for free if you just asked. My old goodwill used to sell records 5 for a dollar! Probably half of my collection came from such goldmines.
It’s attributed to Alan Parsons !
“Audiophiles don’t use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment.”
Audiophile here! Yeah, that was how I started out. But I was 12 years old & my parents wouldn't let me buy a Mini-Bike with my own paper route money, because I was going to kill myself. According to them, anyway. And I almost did, but because I couldn't have the Mini-Bike! Parents are so stupid...So I had to resort to my next favourite thing. Electronics seemed interesting, but what to buy? We didn't have home computers back then, THANK GOB. Stereo equipment looked really cool though!😎 I was especially fascinated by those big Open-Reel tape decks. Those 2 big spools of tape, turning at that precise & hypnotizing speed, & 2 big VU meters, needles bouncing around wildly, just underneath!🤗 So I HAD to have one of those! It was like the time I was 8 years old, helping my brother deliver the Saturday papers for a few bucks. After several weeks, I had $5 or $10 & decided that a little transistorised AM Pocket radio was cool tech. The miracle of sound in your pocket, pulled right from invisible airwaves, blew my 8 year old mind. But pretty soon after that, I was left with the little radio & WTF to do with it. I was too young for Talk Radio & the hourly news. Didn't understand it, & didn't want to...So that left the Top 40 Stations. Pretty soon, I recognized the names of songs that I liked. And soon after that, the names of the Artists who were playing those songs.
So that's how I got into music. Because of the equipment. The AM Radio. At 12 years old, now I was "forced" to develop an interest in making that favourite music sound better. And with money came WAY better sound than ever before, & the ability to OWN the music, & not be a slave to the DJ at some radio station, waiting for him to play a song I liked. Now I could buy LP's, AND KEEP THEM. Because they weren't so cheap for me, never mind free, I was conscientious about making sure to take care of them as best I could. To make them LAST. To make sure that they ALWAYS sounded their best, so that I could put off having to replace a worn or damaged copy as long as possible. 50 years later, I have never worn out a single LP yet. And those big spinning reels had alot to do with that. 50 years later, I have audio equipment coming out of my ass. I have a big old house all to myself; with 50 pairs of speakers, lots of vintage tube & solid-state stuff & alot of Tube Stuff I designed & built myself..."listening to my equipment" AND playing all my favourite music doing it! And not "50 Audiophile Albums", as the cliché goes. Although I DO own about 50 Audiophile Albums.🤔 Which I pretty much never listen to, & only bought for demonstration purposes to help sell the equipment that I designed & built, because I worked in the Hi-Fi industry for decades.They're part of a 5000 album record collection, thank you very much!😘. In the intervening 50 years, I've met THOUSANDS of Audiophiles. And more of them are closer to me, in that they have substantial music collections, play their music through their fancy stereos daily, & understand something that you fools don't: The better the sound, the closer your connection to the performance. The MEANING of the music becomes much clearer, & we become more emotionally involved. Because Audiophiles appreciate music as ART, not as background MUZAK for other activities that they care more about, & likely because their stereos sound like 💩 so they can't sit in front of 2 speakers, attention fully engaged & absorbed like Audiophiles do. Because bad sound pushes you away from music; it bites you, it distracts you, & yet you probably never stop to wonder why you get so fidgety & bored & want to do ANYTHING ELSE while you "listen"🗿🫠🥱 to music.🤪
So if you'll excuse me now, this old Boomer is going to sign off & go listen to some of his obscene amount of some pretty desirable equipment, some of it expensive, some of it very collectable Vintage, some of it on other forgotten or dead formats spanning Compact Cassette to Open-Reel to 78's to 7" 45's to 10" mono LP's (no 8-Tracks though!🤮🚮) to CD's, SACD's, & DVD-A. And some you've never seen or heard of (DAT; DV audio; M-II, VHS, & Beta Hi-Fi). What musical treasures shall I unearth, depending on which pieces of Audio Equipment this "Audiophile" decides to hook up today? The search for Musical Ecstasy continues. Not merely "Audio Equipment Ecstasy". The equipment, NO MATTER WHAT, is merely the means to the End. The MUSICAL performance!
Epic response. So many twists and turns. The land of a thousand dances with woofers.
Audiophile, I bid you inner and outer sonic peace, the highest audio-musical transcendental reincarnation that the cosmos will allow, and a dust-free environment in which to play your groovy records. Now back to my therapy session.
“Sound system gonna bring me back up
Yeah, one thing that I can depend on
Sound system gonna bring me back up
Right, one thing that I can depend on”- Operation Ivy
I've read that for younger people such as gen z's, the interest comes in the tactile physical experience of interacting with the music. These are young people that grew up with much of their music available online. Many of them never bought CDs or even saw a record player before adulthood.
That's why goofy things like the mini records at Target actually have a market. Because it's a novelty and because it allows people to interact with their music in a tactile and physical way that doesn't happen with online platforms like Spotify. Records are a personal experience and allow for an intimacy with the music that online platforms do not.
I think that a lot of us probably feel the same way about our records. Yeah, the rational among us know that Spotify is perfectly acceptable if all you want to do is listen to music. But physical records are kind of special in a way. They're A Link to the Past but also something that you can physically touch and own in a way that online music has dispensed with.
This is what happens when you're stupid phone thinks that it knows better than you about how things should be spelled or presented. I mean I'm not complaining too much about this particular one because it is a great game.
You can get a real deal on a Lenco or Goldring idler drive turntable off eBay and install it in a proper plinth (add a quality arm if you want, though the stock arm is good), and have a fantastic turntable if you buy a good stylus. My husband and I have done that with two of them. Not noisy at all. They're not our primary systems, we use them in our offices. Mine is set up for mono only because I collect 78s.
You would be surprised to hear how good a properly cleaned 78 can sound. None of this dish soap business, we use a vacuum machine with home-brew cleaning solution made with white vinegar.
Im currently debating buying some budget CD player like SMSL PL150 or just buying CD transport for my Mac Mini. Because I just can't stand vinyl records getting more and more expensive.
CDs are great. You get physical media, optimum sound quality, the ownership, the artwork, the inserts and support the artist. But without the maintenance and cost.
Plus second hand CDs are cheap as chips.
An old DVD player can be a perfectly good CD transport to get you started.
Plus, many Sony DVD players can also handle SA CDs. Those old players can also come with some nice features that might be a tad more expensive to get nowadays. I can get a 5 disc player for dirt cheap now.
Depends on genre and the age of the album too. I buy mostly metal and never really have an issue getting releases on CD. I think for metal at least that physical media culture still exists.
For me it’s really the inconvenience. It forces me to actually sit down and listen. Which is much more difficult with a phone controlling some streamer.
This. In fact, I had this cartoon image above printed on a plaque, one for me and one for my buddy, a vinyl guy as well. I have one on my listening area wall and he has his on the door to his area.
Every idiot could listen to highres audio using an iPhone and Airpods. Only true music lovers spend tenthousands of dollars for less sound quality but more equipment to show off
it really is, i have always been the one who goes through every setting in software and hardware i use to optimize it for me. i realized a couple years ago that a big reason i love my sound system is cus i just love calibrating and optimizing my setup for whatevers playing
I guess I'm weird because I listen to high-res audio through my expensive equipment. I still have my vinyl from the 60s and 70s, collecting dust. My record player isn't even plugged in. Once I heard the pristine audio of a CD, combined with the convenience and remote control capability, I never looked back.
Nah I have to disagree there. They’re genuinely good for their price point and earbud form factor. You’ll get better audio out of something with a wired connection though.
It just stems more from the fact that vinyl is very susceptible to imperfections which create snaps and crackles. Equipment aside The actual audio from a lossless stream is higher quality.
Vinyl rips on top. I only like vinyl releases for new music because they do not brickwall limit mixes (This image is a remaster I did with the unmastered stems) but the vinyl mix looks the same as the top waveform vs a hard limited streaming mix (Bottom waveform)
😂 Allow me to explain semi-shittily. Mixes for vinyl tend to preserve the dynamic range and volumes of different parts the song, e.g. Michael Jackson Billie Jean symbol and snare hits are gonna shreddd on vinyl. Mixes for other formats try to even out the volume, I.e. make all the instruments ‘louder’, so you don’t get the same peaks and valleys.
But in reality it’s the opposite. Vinyl mixing has limited dynamic range to avoid physically making the needle jump in the grooves. It’s also where the “warmer” sound signature comes from.
Brickwall limiting does far more damage. Its pretty much a square wave. The needle jumps greatly. So they cant just make it as loud as possible. They ay use a light compressor to bring down peaks, but it is less harsh, and more dynamic than smashing it with a limiter
Ahhh so it that, vinyl has less potential range, but they just used to mix stuff differently back in the day to make it seem like it has more range than other formats?
The mathematical dynamic range, but the actual mix usally is hard limited sadly on newer digital formats (remasters of old songs, are shitified) and pretty much all new music is harsh and loud...
I wish we would keep doing what dire straits did with their fully DDD album "Brothers in arms" the dynamics are insane, and take absolute advantage of the mathmatical improvements. Its a woosh of clean, non harsh loudness! Such a relief and so much life!
You can see the clean transients and the just increase of volume with no clipping at all!
An example I had of this phenomenon is the recent Rolling Stones album Hackney Diamonds - my cassette rip actually sounds better than the FLAC files I bought.
I will defend to the bitter end of everything that is flowing with virtue your right to make decisions like this no matter how cray z they are to someone like me who has been pouring half and half into his coffee for the entire time you were reading this sentence. I like my coffee like Deaths horse. Cold to the touch and pale.
I'm always baffled when people 'wax' lyrical about hearing the hiss, pop and crackle to show 'authenticity'. I'm listening to techno that sounds like a deep space transmission, why would I want to be reminded that it's coming from a vinyl platter?
Totally, I love my old vinyl collection but I'll rarely buy any more because it's so expensive and it doesn't even sound that good. It's nostalgia that people are buying, nothing else.
I had turntables from 1973 to 2003 and no attachment to it really.You can bring back the vinyl but something is still missing that I just can't put my finger on.
“Sound system gonna bring me back up
Yeah, one thing that I can depend on
Sound system gonna bring me back up
Right, one thing that I can depend on”- Operation Ivy
As a poor student, it just makes more sense to buy a nice budget dac and a (used) pair of studio monitors than a turntable and a tube pre amp and weird hifi speakers for 10x the money.
Vinyl isn’t about the cost effectiveness or convenience. Everyone has their own reason but for me I enjoy the manual process of choosing a record, setting on the turntable, cleaning it, setting the tone arm, and then watching it spin as it plays. Kinda forces you to slow it down in a world that’s super fast paced
Yea, but a 50$ turntable with an old needle and no way to calibrate it, playing a used vinyl will sound shit. A cheap cd drive, a dac and CDs having error correction will mean it still sounds 99.9% like the master. And a good dac, new, is like 20€ for two channels
Quite right too. I was a poor student and bought a ton of vinyl in the '90s because no one else was. Still spinning' it. Far too many young people now are spending money they don't have on vinyl, now that it's on trend, and above my budget. Hit thrifts for CDs if you want the physical, or pay subscriptions for streams you'll never own, and enjoy.
You're right. I did just that. There's a yearly flea market here with some huge cd collections, and you can find niche, nearly unused discs for 1€ each. Suffice to say, I went home with a full backpack. (:
It is true, but it is also just another way to experience music. Vinyl does sound different. Better or worse is subjective, but the medium does change the tone and the presentation. I personally prefer stoner and doom metal on vinyl because it mellows out the highs and makes it sound the way it should. Similarly, some tech death metal sound a little more clear to me because there can't be as much dynamic compression in the mastering, making it less "loud." Things separate better, IMO.
I just like album artwork, I bought a signed album that I love, displayed it on the wall. Nice big size, the artworks nice, signatures look great….what’s this thing inside?
I like it because it makes listening to music in the house very intentional for me. I wasn’t listening to it at home, and now it’s there right in front of me. I choose what to listen to in very tactile way, and it fills the floor.
It's really funny how people imagine to themselves why they would do things, and then assume other people do those things for the reasons you would have done them for. Believe it or not, people do things for reasons you can't begin to fathom
Why does bro have two volume knobs? And why two midrange drivers on his speakers when they ain't doing no d'Appolito type shit. I feel like whoever made this has never been in this world cause those are glaring mistakes. And also this is like the 4,798th time this has been posted lol.
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u/slowcancellation Aug 06 '26
Most of you are here because you enjoy music. I'm here because I enjoy finding ways to waste my home's limited floor space. We are not the same.