With this logic you can argue the best audio medium is dirt because if you made good music with dirt, the music must have been so incredible to have counteracted the flaws of dirt as a medium. Ignore the fact that dirt cannot be used as a music medium. (Vacuous truth)

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cluckindan 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Early Motown records were tracked in a room which had a dirt floor.

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atoav 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, but your "IF" is doing the heavy lifting here and it would be your burden to proof how dirt would be a means of artistic expression before anybody could take your argument seriously.

As a musician myself I can assure you that the high stakes releases for any musician are vinyl releases. They also happen to be the ones with which most musicians earn the most money.

Now technologically vinyl isn't superior (and anybody who claims it is is an idiot in the sense of the word), but technology isn't everything. A noisy casette tape can evoke the same (and sometimes more) feelings than the digital recording. A vinyl record with a big cover, an inlay with band info, that you specifically chose to put on the record player while reading the liner notes and examining the design is in a ritualistic sense a thousand times more gratifying than having spotify select a song for you without knowing why, in the background of the daily life. That is like the difference between a candle light bath and getting wet in a rainshower.

Now that doesn't mean people will be binary either 100% vinyl or 100% digital. Vinyl is for the special occasion or for DJ sets, digital is for everything else.

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mcdeltat 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes that's my point with the "if"! And in general I largely agree with you.

The parent comment basically argued vinyl is superior because when artists used vinyl the resulting music was creatively better (because of whatever process). Sure, but then you can't selectively ignore the great music that has been made with other recording technologies. I can point to a lot of good music recorded on tape or digital. Unless we are arguing that music back in the vinyl days was broadly better than now? (Different argument then...)

As for artistic choices, I totally agree that vinyl can be a valid choice! Then it's silly to say one thing is "better" than another.

But in terms of raw technology, I say it's just copium to claim vinyl is in any way superior to digital. Digital's recording capabilities are a superset of vinyl's. There is no magic sauce killer feature unique to vinyl.

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atoav 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Adressing your points:

Music may have been a bigger culturual force during the heights of vinyl record sales. Whether that translated to better music or whether it is some form of survivorship bias: I don't know. In fact I doubt it. But there is something to the music that happened when it was new, e.g. Punk music was better when everybody was still trying to figure out what is punk and what isn't, while today it feels like most bands just copy was has been made in the past. You can extrapolate the same idea to many other genres that developed. So was the music better on average? Probably not. Was it more exiting and had more impact on society, fashion, culture? For sure.

As for vinyl: I agree that digital is superior in terms of sound quality. Nearly every vinyl record is pressed from a digital master nowadays after all. Even those who want "vinyl warmth" could have that easily emulated in digital nowadays. Digital is endlessly flexible, you could theoretically envision (and some have done) a vinyl experience that is purely digital under the hood – or you could do whatever netflix is doing.

But in practise vinyl comes with the experience, forces you to do the ritual, to listen to the whole album, is immensly direct (just the waveform pressed into the material) etc. This is a limitation if vinyl is all you have, but in times where you could listen to 10 nameless streams of sounds at once for the whole day that limitation has become a popular feature. I have friends with pressing plants and all of them have more job offers than they could realistically fulfill for years now.

I'd advice against too easily dismissing the value of the ritual a technological dispositif forces onto the people interacting with said technology. Listening to a vinyl record in a time where people rarely ever sit down and just listen to music in a concentrated way is a thing people look for. Those who say it is because vinyl is technically superior are wrong, but the limitations and the listening habits a technology enforces are unseparably a part of the technology itself. And if you are looking for what vinyl gives you, vinyl is the thing that gives it to you best.

	▲	ghaff 15 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I have huge nostalgia for older analog audio and photo formats for many many reasons. I also don't really miss them. Had a lot of fun and memories with vinyl and processing B&W film in a darkroom--also shot a lot of slides--but you can't go home again and all that.
	▲	otabdeveloper4 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Digital is endlessly flexible Not really. Analog electronic instruments are based on non-linear feedbacks loops. Those are pretty much impossible to emulate digitally without emulating actual electric circuits and current flow. (Yes, I know, irrelevant to the vinyl discussion.)

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mort96 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No, you can't argue that the best medium is dirt. Just like you can't argue that the best medium is vinyl.

But you could maybe argue that there are advantages to dirt (at least a hypothetical dirt which can be used as a musical medium somehow) which you lose by going to CD or vinyl. If this hypothetical dirt managed to be constraining in such a way that it produces kinds of musical works which would not have been produced for CD, is that not an advantage?