Indeed. What the GP is talking about would be a record player that requires vinyl, but plays only enough of the vinyl to do a Shazam-style identification and then stream the remainder, adding vinyl-sounding noise with a DSP. (Alternatively, the stylus is entirely fake and contains a camera that identifies the album by label, and is moved toward the center using a stepper motor.)

I really hope no-one ever makes such a monstrosity.

Early CDs would sometimes be made just from the vinyl master. They didn't sound very good.

> there’s a certain magic and immediacy to knowing you’re using a physically destructive playback mechanism—that this right now is the best this record will ever sound again

Maybe I just don't get it - I'm much younger than the average HN user, growing up with physical media but not physical media that rapidly degraded on use like how vinyl does. But to me this sentiment is so alien that it seems like some kind of a milder nostalgia Stockholm syndrome.

When we think of other physical media, no one ever romanticizes that type of thing because degradation never really existed there. Would you want a photograph that faded away a significant amount each time you looked at it? A book that had the ink on its pages visibly rub off?

To me it just seems that the hard technical limitations of a long bygone era (that some people would've undoubtedly hated at the time) were given a mystique to them when people come back to them. Is the harsh fact of media degradation really inherently "magical"? Or is it that people ascribe good qualities to it because it's just the way it was?

These are easily fixable problems! M-Disc exists for disc longevity. High quality cases exist.

I realize this isn't the world we live in so I guess I'm just yelling at clouds. But come on, Vinyl is just so obviously a bad way to preserve music...

It can bitrot tho.

Hard to play without a screen though!

Digital is digital, but you’re ignoring multiple places where things might not be the same:

That $30 CD player… if it’s connected to headphones, how were the headphones driven? Especially if you have nice headphones, it’s very easy for a cheap device to not be able to competently drive them.

Vinyl vs CD mastering is a thing. There could be differences there. Additionally, depending on how you ripped the vinyl (especially with a “cheap dongle”) that may introduce its own color to the record.

There’s a reason why music collectors differentiate between every single source, because often there are differences (sometimes small, sometimes big) between the various sources.

Usually that means the record was mastered differently (because you literally physically can't make a record as "loud" as a CD).

It's not the CD's fault, it's the mastering engineers.

If you used an analog audio output of the cheap CD player then the "digital is digital and it shouldn't matter that it was cheap" argument may not hold. The low quality of sound could be due to low quality of Digital to Analog Converter in the cheap player, not due to low quality of CD records that you have tried.

If your CD player had cheap anti-skip it probably does lossy digital audio compression before output. A lot of the CD-player-as-a-package chips had older, crappy lossy audio compression and saved to a small bit of RAM on the CD player. Not much of a power envelope for compute power for audio compression logic. With memory being really expensive back in the day and prices being cutthroat there wasn't much memory for the blanti-skip buffer. So you needed fast, cheap, and really compact audio compression. Nobody really bothered improving it once MP3 players came out and memory got cheaper, so even "new" CD players use the same hardware portable CD players were using in the 90s.

And even then, it's not digital square waves coming out of your headphones. At some point that digital signal needs to be converted to analog waves. The quality of the DAC matters as well and can give a different quality of output.