Download or CD or Vinyl?

lemonkettaz

lemonkettaz

lemonkettaz

Soldato
Joined
28 Nov 2005
Posts
13,049
Hello,

For some reason my attitude towards music has changed. For the last.. well.. 5-10year I have only downloaded my music..

I've always downloaded music of high quality though, I'm a bit of a stickler with my music quality..

this has led me to only want actual CD's now, the last few weeks i've been slowly replacing my music library with the CD's.

I just love the whole package, the booklet, having the CD case in your hands and just listening the album from start to finish in perfect quality, I enjoy my music as an experience and not just in the background.

I do think music is becoming less and less about an experience. I'd never buy music off itunes because it's nothing at the end of the day, well to me it isn't. Any track is just a click away and it's on as you surf the net or do office work... I find it distant, can't really explain, but say a CD or Vinyl makes you more interactive with the music and it's got more of a human element to it... Can downloads ever re create that kind of interactivety?
 
The thing I miss the most about vinyls are the white labels. You can spend hours listening to records and find a chooooooooon you never even know the name of.
 
I'm hoping so and I'm hoping the rumours about the Apple tablet are true. CDs and Vinyl can only last so long before record labels won't even turn a profit from producing CDs and shipping them around the world because of the numbers. Something like this is hopefully the way forward.

Industry insiders say that the big four record labels are working with Apple to boost full album sales, as individual songs have come to dominate digital downloads. A project called "Cocktail" is reportedly underway and set to launch this fall, which will bundle interactive "booklets" including artwork, liner notes, and other content with a full album purchase. Another interesting twist is that the new content may be launched alongside a long-rumored Apple tablet.
Click to expand...

More information here http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/07/apple-working-with-record-labels-to-boost-full-album-sales.ars.
 
Recently the Vinyls I've been buying have also offered the tracks for free on MP3 with card with redeem code inside.

SOunds fair enough to me considering each LP is £13-£15.
 
i always buy cds, rip to flac and never touch the cd again. if lossless downloads were much cheaper than cds (say half price) then i'd buy them. i'm not overly fussed about the inlays/booklets. :p

as for itunes, that's just insulting. lossy downloads that cost more than cd? no thanks. i can wait a few days for a cd to turn up. i don't "need" it this instant. :rolleyes:

(but it pains me say i've bought a few things off itunes because they have exclusives you can't buy elsewhere. :mad: )

(my reasoning for not wanting to buy mp3/aac isn't because i'm an audiophile. i can't tell the difference between well encoded lossy files and lossless. it's just the principle. why pay more money for an inferior product?)
 
CDs all the way. I'm getting increasingly annoyed that commercial sound quality is deteriorating though. Never had a decent vinyl record player though.

We should have gone down the road of DVD audio or SACD becoming mainstream and instead we get mp3s.

It's nice to have booklets etc but I care about sound quality most of all.
 
Vinyl sounds so much better than a cd , i do djing and copy my vinyl onto pc for scratching purposes with serato live , ive got the best equipment available for copying vinyl onto the pc and no matter what quality wav settings are used the vinyl will always give a better bass response
 
JohnRoss said:
Vinyl sounds so much better than a cd , i do djing and copy my vinyl onto pc for scratching purposes with serato live , ive got the best equipment available for copying vinyl onto the pc and no matter what quality wav settings are used the vinyl will always give a better bass response
Click to expand...

I would suggest that is an equipment difference rather than a source difference, but lets not go down that route!

My biggest bug bear with music these days is the generally appalling everything louder than everything else production, it seems that unless the music makes your ears hurt after 20 minutes then it's not right these days a particularly bad examples being the Artic Monkeys first Album.
 
CD for me ta, way too fussy about sound quality tbh. I used to be able to handle 320kb/s mp3s but now i've moved home (finished uni, no job, no money :() i've got my dads stereo to play with which far exceeds mine. Mp3s burnt to CD just sound terrible on it in comparison to an original CD, i'm currently going through the process of replacing my MP3 collection with CDs too.

I had a listen to a Bob Dylan SACD he's bought to show off his new CD player, i was dubious but tbh i ended up impressed. It could well have been a placebo effect but it still makes me wish SACD replaced CD.
 
Justin said:
CDs are the way to go!
Click to expand...

Indeed. I hate not having hard copies of things. And if I really 'respect' an album I want the artist and label to have my money in appreciation.

Having loads of mp3s just seems so.... unsolid. As for vinyl, I know next to nothing about it. It seems to have loads of kudos attached to it but no-one can really say why. In a digital age it's far more convenient for me to have CDs.

Uriel said:
CDs all the way. I'm getting increasingly annoyed that commercial sound quality is deteriorating though.
Click to expand...

Me too. Listening to the latest Scar Symmetry did it for me: it made me realise just how horrifically compressed modern mastering techniques are. As a result I have now taken to listening to metal solely from the 80s and 90s. There's not a great deal of decent stuff that's been released in the last couple of years anyway and it has taught me about a myriad of bands which make far more interesting and innovative music than anything of late. Most modern 'avant-garde' or fusion metal bores me to death.
 
Last edited:
The whole vinyl thing puzzles me. It doesn't sound better to me, just different, more gritty if you will. However with that said the most modern vinyl i've got access to is from the 80s so things may have changed, the deck itself is modern though.
 
bought my first vinyl in agres the other week and even then that was only because it was a limited edition

i buy downloads. mainly because i move around a lot and dont want or need to carry a whole collection of CDs from place to place. have recently been selling lots off
 
CD's, would have vinyl but I didn't have the funds when I started out so it was CD's, mp3's suck.

Keep meaning to get around to ripping all my discs to the pc in a decent format but I just don't have the space or time.
 
Dano said:
CD's, would have vinyl but I didn't have the funds when I started out so it was CD's, mp3's suck.

Keep meaning to get around to ripping all my discs to the pc in a decent format but I just don't have the space or time.
Click to expand...

Have any of you ABXed your CDs against properly ripped MP3s? I'm guessing not.

I buy CDs because I want to control what I do with that music, rip to MP3 for the nano or the car, keep as FLAC for backups and streaming at home :)

How can you not have the space, 1TB is ridiculously cheap now ;) :p
 
CD's, would have been Vinyl however I'm not starting my collection over again as I already have several hundred CD's. I also have a pretty decent CD player so I don't want to shell out for a record deck. I might consider ripping them to flac and getting a decent streamer + NAS but that would cost even more money so that won't be happening any time soon.

I really like being able to browse through my music on the shelves, its not the same having an library on the PC.

MP3 is only for the ipod as I only have a nano and there is no space for FLAC.

Dave
 
CD for me too. The quality is still excellent, despite it being from the 80's and with a good setup you can really get good results.

I have a record player, but I don't want to replace all my CDs with vinyl, especially as the shops are selling records for a hell of a lot more than the CD counterparts.

I also like to have CDs because they're convenient for my mp3 player. Ripping vinyl is a bit trickier.

The action of putting an album on to play is really satisfying compared to listening to a particular song over and over again in a vast library of mp3s. Random play is good, but it can get tiresome and frustrating after a while.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom