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this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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chapotraphouse
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Yep this is the audiophile community. The same kind of people who buy Monster cables
you will never in a million years convince me that vinyl sounds better than digital. how this argument even gets off the ground is beyond me.
Records do tend to sound better to a listeners ears because of a bunch of psychoacoustic effects that make live instruments sound better than recordings though.
The sound of something like fast car is a classic example of applying those effects to a recording in the studio.
As a medium I will die on the hill that vinyl is better than digital for a bunch of reasons other than objective or subjective quality, but when you start measuring quality what you’re even trying to figure out gets muddy real quickly.
That's where you completely lose me.
A medium can do more than just convey information. Minidisc, for example, is a better medium than cd.
gibberish
Minidisc natively supports a solution to the problem of copying that existed with cassettes and reel to reel before it, something that cd didn’t address. Minidisc supports recording in stereo as well using a pair of headphones which have separate grounds, a rare feature on cd players or even high end audio equipment.
Minidisc was portable and much more resistant to skipping or read error than cd. Minidiscs themselves were more durable and outlasted cds in every type of storage condition I’ve encountered.
Minidisc had inline controls.
Minidisc is a better medium than cd and all the reasons I listed have nothing to do with any subjective or objective judgement of quality.
its 2025, man. I don't think people still use minidic or CDs.
ongoing cd revival as reported on by rolling stone magazine - almost every record store I’ve been to lately has a growing and often new releases selection of cds.
website about new releases on minidisc as of 3 years ago - I can also attest that the players, parts and media have become insanely expensive lately because there’s a lot of interest in collecting and using them.
The point of course was not that those things are popular now (although they absolutely are!), but that some purportedly objective or subjective measure of quality isn’t the be-all end-all of formats.
Even when some measure of quality is brought up, it needs examination so that the importance of whatever numbers or prose recorded as justification for it can be considered reasonably.
My go-to example for this specifically with vinyl records and cds is channel separation. It refers to how “left” and “right” the left and right signals on a stereo recording actually are. You measure it by running a signal you know the loudness of into one channel and measuring how much of it you get in the other channel. For a record this means a track whose groove only has modulation on one side and for a cd it means a track whose information is only encoding one side. Lower numbers of decibels are better, perfect is zero.
Cds have much better channel separation than records. It’s obvious why, records make a sound by vibrating a coil or magnet next to its counterpart and vibration on the right coil or magnet will be picked up in a small amount by the left equivalent. How much? -20 to -30 db worth or so. Cds easily boast channel separation in the -50 to -60 db range.
Seems like an open and shut case, cds are better! Well… not really. You see the channel separation between two cochlea about six inches apart anchored to the same arch of bone is barely -20db.
So your own ears, wearing ideal headphones, couldn’t perceive the difference. Sure theres a measurement that says cd is better there, but it doesn’t actually matter.
The point of tee-ing myself up like that is not to shit on some format or laud another but to illustrate that measurement of quality has to be actually interrogated before its importance can be established.
ableism my ass. what i said was nothing but the truth. if this sub doesn't like the truth, than it, and its mods can do me a favor, and get fucked. Yeah, you the mod that deleted my previous comment. go fuck yourself.
Removed Comment ..... this is all pointless. why you want physical media you don't need when 100k cds could fit on a single NVME drive is beyond me. you sound like you really really really want to live in the past. maybe you just like having the clutter of cd cases. I don't know. but this all sounds like the ramblings of a madman. by
MangioneDontMiss reason: ableism
I went back in the modlog and read your post. You can fit much more than just a paltry hundred thousand cds on an nvme! Of course, all flash memory degrades over time and with write cycles, and one way those failures show up is when the memory is left unpowered for a while.
I can listen to a cd 20 years after its manufacture and assuming it’s been stored decently well I can enjoy it just like if it were new.
I can listen to an lp seventy years after its pressing and hear it just as intended.
I own some 90 year old 78s that playback perfectly fine on both my hand crank victorola and on a normal electric turntable with a 78 width cart and stylus.
I have also personally seen how bad flash memory handles “cold” storage (it’s very sensitive to heat, so the quotes are there to indicate unpowered storage as opposed to storage in a freezer) and watched as the whole world begins to realize that flash ccd cells degrade with longer power off time.
Maybe you get five years out of them before errors start to creep in.
So, like I was saying, there’s more to the overall goodness and badness of a format than it’s objective or subjective quality. You can fit many more than a hundred thousand albums on an nvme, but will you be able to dust it off and listen to them?
Vinyl does sound different though, and some audiophiles are so far gone that they think their own preferences are objectively better.
If you think that's bad, ask them about 256k MP3 vs. FLAAC lossless
well, i've always thought the difference is completely imperceptible from lossless after about 96 kbps per channel. that said, if you're using certain types of components that read certain codecs like truehd, there can be a very perceivable difference between a truehd track and a compressed E-AC3 track.
320 is fine enough for even concert levels. You only need anything else if you're doing serious mastering, and even then...