I am back to CDs and tapes, I enjoy records but they got too expensive about 15 years ago now and aren't as versatile/portable as the other two formats. Let's be honest too, CDs sound better they have always sounded better.
I would say that 90% of the vinyl I buy costs $1.01 or less. Some things definitely sound best on CD, but I've yet to hear any digital format that can capture the raw energy of the original pressings on most of my punk rock 45s. I envy anyone who can pick on listening format and commit to it. I'm always comparing different generations of mastering between vinyl, CD, and hi-res streaming.
I certainly still pick up the occasional vinyl if I happen to find a good deal, but thrift shops around me are picked pretty clean by enthusiasts and likely resellers too. I appreciate the warm sound of analog very much, but from an audio science perspective, CD's are higher sound quality with less noise and interference. It's the audiophile equivalent of being a climate change denier to say that records sound better. Ultimately, what you prefer is subjective. Give this a read: https://now.tufts.edu/2016/07/11/does-music-sound-better-vinyl-records-cds
I had an incredibly interesting conversation this week with someone who used to oversee all the remastering for one of the big majors. I have some thoughts about mastering that I'm will share in the coming weeks. Let's just say that our friend from Tufts has some ideas that are not wrong in theory but tend to fall apart in practice. I'll do my best to explain and use examples.
Ive been buying used from Forevervinyl.com for the last 30 years. First on the internet when no one was buying used records and CDs via the Internet, it was too geecky.
I don’t own anything expensive enough to care about sound quality, but I love my turntable because it forces me to listen to one album at a time. The downside is of streaming music is that I’m like a five year old in Toys “R” Us with a gift card.
A general comment about your article (is it a blog? I don’t know anymore.). As someone who’s been in the game long enough to remember you when you were “Jim”, I appreciate your honest and accurate analysis of the retail music biz. You describe the life I lived for 40 years until I had to get out. I also appreciate the lack of superiority and condescension in your writing. Thanks for offering your qualified perspective, Jim, er, James.
^^^I can't begin to describe how much I learned from Chris as a stupid kid, plus he was the guy with the finest bootleg Big Star-related cassettes in the world. I probably learned more valuable information at the In Your Ear Allston location than I did at the school I allegedly attended across the river.
I still brag about seeing Big Star at Max’s KC in the spring of ‘74, possibly the same week as the live Ryko recording from WLIR studios (although research sez they played Max’s numerous times that spring). LX sang Motel Blues, forgot some of the words, asked the audience for help and, even though I was already a big Loudon fan, I was too nervous to assist. Doh!
I'm lucky enough to live within walking distance of a great 'record' store Portland OR and this all makes sense to me - they carry new and used physical media, along with lots of other things. These days the new CD section is shrinking and the new vinyl is taking up more and more space. I both buy (mostly used) and sell CDs/DVDs, and yes the markup is probably much more than 100% on used - but it's still a great deal and I find all sorts of good music and movies.
If it helps the store more than new sales, that's fine by me!
I do not use any streaming services at this time, and don't plan to.
Not sure what the solution is here, James, but I appreciate you being out there trying anyway. Americans (yeah, it's a generality, but I feel it's true) are lazy in their buying habits. Getting in their car and driving 2.4 miles to a retail store, "Are you crazy?" They'll order it on Amazon or some other platform. The whole sensory experience of retail, picking up that item and feeling it, smelling it, etc., is going away. We're forgetting that some items didn't just appear on our shelves. Small businesses went through many steps to get them into our hands, and when all of that disappears, do we think Big Business will go retro, put it all back for nostalgia's sake? I don't think so. Keep on truckin', James
Disclaimer: I’m 70 years old and bought my first LP in 1967. When I was a kid, you could buy records in LOTS of places. All the department store chains (there were more of them back then) had record departments, usually situated near where they were selling TVs, record players and radios. Two of the three drug stores in my town sold records…one of them even sold vacuum tubes and had a tube tester! The town hardware store had a cutout bin where I found my first Mothers of Invention LP (Absolutely Free). There was a TV shop that sold records…they actually had a copy of Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy for sale! I should have bought it because I couldn’t find a copy again for 5 years and it was a pressing imported from the UK. Eventually a record store opened up in my town, before that to go to a record store I had to travel to the nearest city which meant I couldn't get there until I had my driver’s license and borrowed my dad’s car. Now I could take a five minute walk to shop for records. When I went off to college, the bookstore there sold records, too. All those retail outlets are long gone. Just like when I was a kid I have to travel into the city (Boston, MA) to get to a record store. I haven’t set foot in a record store for more than a decade.
Is the payout scheme the only thing people are mad at Spotify about? I really don't get it. Personally, I've had music on most of the streaming platforms for several years now and I have YET to get any streams on Apple or Amazon — kinda doesn't matter if they pay more. On the other hand, even without really telling anyone... I have several tracks on Spotify that are about the break 1,000 stream threshold for displaying the number of plays. Sure, I'm not getting paid from Spotify either, but... at least people are listening. Can't say the same about the other platforms.
Lots of people have an issue with the fact that they're paying musicians a flat fee to make tracks that the company then owns so that Spotify can dodge royalty payments. They add those tracks to their recommended playlists and don't disclose that they commissioned the tracks. Some of those tracks are very good, but it's a sleazy move if you're not transparent with your customers and the musicians you're supposed to serve.
Other people object to the fact that Spotify is spending huge amounts of money to offer access to exclusive podcasts and audiobooks. Those products dilute the royalty pool.
I'll just answer all of these points in one go... (i know this won't come off great in text, but..) I... don't really care about any of these things. As much as people complain about the algorithms, I think I've actually trained them pretty well... they mostly suggest stuff I already sought out on my own, but based on that they do get a few good ones in there now and then that I missed.
I also tend not to listen passively all that much unless it's to playlists I've made... I spend lots of time searching for stuff off the platform, but also through the "Listeners also like" listings on Spotify, which I've found a ton of gold doing: https://ifrqfm.substack.com/p/ifrq-fm-playlists
I dunno... I don't really care about the aglo on Spotify because they have a discovery system that rewards people who look.
Spotify works pretty well for a lot of people. I just want to encourage anyone who cares about audio to check out the other options so that they're at least making a choice with full knowledge of what they might be giving up.
LOL... I thought there was just one point to reply to and I was like.. I'll reply later, I'm not in a rush, then I saw all your replies to yourself and realized there are 3 more points to address.
So.. first... I don't really care about the "substandard sound". I live in NYC in an old building with shitty windows on a block that has an out of control intersection on one end and a hospital & fire station on the other, and I use an old pair of powered Tannoys plugged into the headphone jack of a mac studio with a janky 1/4" to 1/8" connector! lol I don't think I slight upgrade in fidelity is going to be noticeable... especially since the cat bit a hole in one of the woofers, and now if you push it too hard it has some pretty cool distortion, though it's not ideal.
If I was still producing, I'd have more of a proper set up, but... just for listening to music while working and watching YouTube videos, it's more than acceptable. I really don't see the sound quality thing ever convincing me (because even as an artist, I know for a fact Spotify generates the most streams... it doesn't make sense to cut them out if you actually want to heard. Streaming platforms aren't labels, you can be on all of them)
I wouldn't be surprised if you could tell the difference in sound quality, even with that setup. If you've figured out how to get their algorithm to work for you, then they've done a good job of locking you in.
All of my algorithms are screwed up because I use streaming services to research my box set projects, artists who we might book to film at Soapbox, and even a bit for my writing here. My recommendations on Apple and Spotify are all terrible. I'm sure everyone could add a data point where I could mark something as "Do not include in my recommendation algorithm," but tech companies have never used their own music services through the perspective of power users.
I have seriously enjoyed your last two articles. This was excellent. I was one of those people who would go to Best Buy or Circuit City to get the CDs for $9.99 back in 1990. I was 14 years old and spending $10 on a CD was a lot more palatable than spending $16 at my local Twisters Music & Gifts record store.
I always wondered why a place like Twisters just didn't sell their CDs for $10. 14-year-old me probably just assumed it was because Best Buy, at a corporate level, bought in bulk. It seems that was partly correct. But I never thought about the main culprit that you noted: namely, that those big retail chains were using them as loss leaders.
In any case, it's a shame. Those stores had no soul (and still don't). I don't buy a ton of vinyl but I have taken to ordering directly from bands (e.g., the Cure's last album in November as well as the live concert at the Troxy that was recorded in November and released on vinyl in February). Most of my music is consumed via Apple Music for the same reason you have it. And, damn, it is convenient. I would gladly pay more for it so that the artists I listen to could get more money.
I think you've convinced me to become a paying subscriber. I'm dropping The Free Press and subscribing here!
Thanks! Comments like yours definitely help keep me motivated. A lot of what I'm doing is sorting through all the chaos in the years after the collapse of the CD business. So many of us were totally burned out by the experience. Writing for people who are interested in a forensic examination of the record business definitely helps.
I remember when CDs came out. They were a dollar more than vinyl. Now the equation has flipped so far in the other direction, it's mind blowing. In Australia, $60-80 for a new vinyl release is just untenable in the long run and if, as you say, that's on meagre markup, the retailers are in trouble. JB Hifi, which started out as a record store, now has more space dedicated to coffee machines. There are no easy answers.
Agreed with pretty much everything here except: "Streamers don’t charge enough to pay a fair royalty to artists..." - As a recording artist, I've been hearing this noise for over a decade. We've all got opinions, where do they come from?
Should DSPs be forced to charge people $25 or $50 or $100 a month for access in the US so artists can be paid more? What's the sweet spot to make it "fair"? (spoiler alert: the answer is always going to be "more".) And what about the rates in other countries?
Let that one go, if you can. There's no rational economic argument to be made on that topic. You're always going to run into Ramsey Pricing problems. Artists should focus more on D2C.
I've heard tech bros make the argument that musicians and copyright holders are greedy for the past three decades and it's not any more true now than it was then. None of them have a business without artists, no matter how many times they try to degrade our work as "content."
Labels blew it. They had a chance to create a digital distribution model in the 90s, one that would have valued music at a price more in line with what consumers would have been willing to pay before file trading destroyed the model. That's not really an "opinion," more of an analysis based on me being one of the major label employees who saw it coming at the time.
I worked for a major telecommunications company in the 90s that's no longer around, testing early VOIP. After I had a bunch of calls that sounded 'good enough' I was like, "This is going to destroy our long distance business, especially international..." and I was told, "No, it's not. We're going to build portals on the information superhighway..." Direct quote. So many bad ideas.
Another way a recording artist can make money is if a presidential candidate pays them to read a three minute speech after making fans believe there would be a free concert in order to fill the stadium
ok so this is all nuts. No one making selling (new used or whatever from past technologies that are now very very niche) deserve to make a lving doing this? Vinyl is absolutely inferior technology to digital streaming just in terms of preservastion and absolute sound quality. I an a fully old school and new school audio practitioner (70 years old EE and member of AES for 5o years since college. I have 3500 albums that are all from the mids 80s or before, I only buy uses records from the FULLY analog era. How can you possible buy a vinyl copy of music that was mad completly in the dgital domain, and then made technically inferior by pressing it as a record???? It is absolutely your right to setup a record store - you have absolutely zero deservement or expectation that it would ever make a dime and only loose money. NONE. Please dont come back with irrelevant personal attacks - this is how the LEFT and the RIGHT equally brought in TRUMP and Biden.
I’ve made it clear here that I think almost all music (consciously or unconsciously) is recorded to sound best with the most likely delivery format. Very few 90s LPs sound good on vinyl and a lot of 50s LPs have never sounded as good on CD as they do on a clean vinyl pressing from the original plates. Almost everything we hear is compromised in some way.
Thanks for reading. Some people like the distortion of vinyl. I just paid an outrageous amount of money for a sealed mono copy of Gene Clark With the Gosdin Brothers (1967) and I have to say that any digital version I’ve heard of that album (CD or streaming) cannot compare to the vinyl on that title.
I used to think Television’s “Adventure” sounded blah next to “Marquee Moon” until I bought it on vinyl. I’d had one of those quick and dirty 90s CD remasters (looking at you Dylan back catalogue) and the vinyl blew it away. I’d like to think there was someone out there remastering properly for CD but capitalism does not favour such notions.
again I apologize for the sharp tone on this (again shell shocked by too much youtube, which is a bad excuse!) - sounds like we are mostly in agreement. I do love records BTW. I again love used in good shape vinyl that come from the fully analog era (no later then mid80s) and also love working with engineers and musicians in nashville with a recording studio called welcome to 1979 that does 100% analog workflow that is mixed and mastered live to a late 70s Neuman cutting lathe to cut a lacquer master. They then plate this in their plating facility to create a father, mother,and stampers THey have used the father alone a few times in a 1 step pressing process. All very cool, and 100% unadulterated analog (which i love even though it colors the sound much more that pure digital)
no - for sure your reply was absolutely not personal. So sorry if it sounded like I was pointing it at you. I have given up on the youtube audio community -- at least the really mediocre 'audiophile' equipment reviewers and others selling products and are supposedly tech wizards/ experts that have no clue... they just want subscribers period
I’m a big fan of John Darko. Our taste in music and gear tends to line up, plus he allows that not everyone is going to have the same experience he does.
I am back to CDs and tapes, I enjoy records but they got too expensive about 15 years ago now and aren't as versatile/portable as the other two formats. Let's be honest too, CDs sound better they have always sounded better.
I would say that 90% of the vinyl I buy costs $1.01 or less. Some things definitely sound best on CD, but I've yet to hear any digital format that can capture the raw energy of the original pressings on most of my punk rock 45s. I envy anyone who can pick on listening format and commit to it. I'm always comparing different generations of mastering between vinyl, CD, and hi-res streaming.
I certainly still pick up the occasional vinyl if I happen to find a good deal, but thrift shops around me are picked pretty clean by enthusiasts and likely resellers too. I appreciate the warm sound of analog very much, but from an audio science perspective, CD's are higher sound quality with less noise and interference. It's the audiophile equivalent of being a climate change denier to say that records sound better. Ultimately, what you prefer is subjective. Give this a read: https://now.tufts.edu/2016/07/11/does-music-sound-better-vinyl-records-cds
I had an incredibly interesting conversation this week with someone who used to oversee all the remastering for one of the big majors. I have some thoughts about mastering that I'm will share in the coming weeks. Let's just say that our friend from Tufts has some ideas that are not wrong in theory but tend to fall apart in practice. I'll do my best to explain and use examples.
Ive been buying used from Forevervinyl.com for the last 30 years. First on the internet when no one was buying used records and CDs via the Internet, it was too geecky.
Great piece. New subscriber here. I knew you had to be in ATL area as soon as you referenced Little 5 Points. I'm in the north-suburbs myself.
I don’t own anything expensive enough to care about sound quality, but I love my turntable because it forces me to listen to one album at a time. The downside is of streaming music is that I’m like a five year old in Toys “R” Us with a gift card.
A general comment about your article (is it a blog? I don’t know anymore.). As someone who’s been in the game long enough to remember you when you were “Jim”, I appreciate your honest and accurate analysis of the retail music biz. You describe the life I lived for 40 years until I had to get out. I also appreciate the lack of superiority and condescension in your writing. Thanks for offering your qualified perspective, Jim, er, James.
Chris from In Your Ear Records, Boston
^^^I can't begin to describe how much I learned from Chris as a stupid kid, plus he was the guy with the finest bootleg Big Star-related cassettes in the world. I probably learned more valuable information at the In Your Ear Allston location than I did at the school I allegedly attended across the river.
Also, I started the confusion with my name to confuse the search engines during my notorious years. It mostly worked. You call me whatever you like.
I still brag about seeing Big Star at Max’s KC in the spring of ‘74, possibly the same week as the live Ryko recording from WLIR studios (although research sez they played Max’s numerous times that spring). LX sang Motel Blues, forgot some of the words, asked the audience for help and, even though I was already a big Loudon fan, I was too nervous to assist. Doh!
I'm lucky enough to live within walking distance of a great 'record' store Portland OR and this all makes sense to me - they carry new and used physical media, along with lots of other things. These days the new CD section is shrinking and the new vinyl is taking up more and more space. I both buy (mostly used) and sell CDs/DVDs, and yes the markup is probably much more than 100% on used - but it's still a great deal and I find all sorts of good music and movies.
If it helps the store more than new sales, that's fine by me!
I do not use any streaming services at this time, and don't plan to.
Not sure what the solution is here, James, but I appreciate you being out there trying anyway. Americans (yeah, it's a generality, but I feel it's true) are lazy in their buying habits. Getting in their car and driving 2.4 miles to a retail store, "Are you crazy?" They'll order it on Amazon or some other platform. The whole sensory experience of retail, picking up that item and feeling it, smelling it, etc., is going away. We're forgetting that some items didn't just appear on our shelves. Small businesses went through many steps to get them into our hands, and when all of that disappears, do we think Big Business will go retro, put it all back for nostalgia's sake? I don't think so. Keep on truckin', James
Disclaimer: I’m 70 years old and bought my first LP in 1967. When I was a kid, you could buy records in LOTS of places. All the department store chains (there were more of them back then) had record departments, usually situated near where they were selling TVs, record players and radios. Two of the three drug stores in my town sold records…one of them even sold vacuum tubes and had a tube tester! The town hardware store had a cutout bin where I found my first Mothers of Invention LP (Absolutely Free). There was a TV shop that sold records…they actually had a copy of Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy for sale! I should have bought it because I couldn’t find a copy again for 5 years and it was a pressing imported from the UK. Eventually a record store opened up in my town, before that to go to a record store I had to travel to the nearest city which meant I couldn't get there until I had my driver’s license and borrowed my dad’s car. Now I could take a five minute walk to shop for records. When I went off to college, the bookstore there sold records, too. All those retail outlets are long gone. Just like when I was a kid I have to travel into the city (Boston, MA) to get to a record store. I haven’t set foot in a record store for more than a decade.
Is the payout scheme the only thing people are mad at Spotify about? I really don't get it. Personally, I've had music on most of the streaming platforms for several years now and I have YET to get any streams on Apple or Amazon — kinda doesn't matter if they pay more. On the other hand, even without really telling anyone... I have several tracks on Spotify that are about the break 1,000 stream threshold for displaying the number of plays. Sure, I'm not getting paid from Spotify either, but... at least people are listening. Can't say the same about the other platforms.
My main problem with Spotify is the substandard sound. Full rant here: https://starsafterstarsafterstars.substack.com/p/stop-using-spotify.
Lots of people have an issue with the fact that they're paying musicians a flat fee to make tracks that the company then owns so that Spotify can dodge royalty payments. They add those tracks to their recommended playlists and don't disclose that they commissioned the tracks. Some of those tracks are very good, but it's a sleazy move if you're not transparent with your customers and the musicians you're supposed to serve.
Other people object to the fact that Spotify is spending huge amounts of money to offer access to exclusive podcasts and audiobooks. Those products dilute the royalty pool.
Finally, there's the fact that Spotify has a free tier. Those "free" streams drag down the per-stream royalty for everyone.
I'll just answer all of these points in one go... (i know this won't come off great in text, but..) I... don't really care about any of these things. As much as people complain about the algorithms, I think I've actually trained them pretty well... they mostly suggest stuff I already sought out on my own, but based on that they do get a few good ones in there now and then that I missed.
I also tend not to listen passively all that much unless it's to playlists I've made... I spend lots of time searching for stuff off the platform, but also through the "Listeners also like" listings on Spotify, which I've found a ton of gold doing: https://ifrqfm.substack.com/p/ifrq-fm-playlists
I dunno... I don't really care about the aglo on Spotify because they have a discovery system that rewards people who look.
Spotify works pretty well for a lot of people. I just want to encourage anyone who cares about audio to check out the other options so that they're at least making a choice with full knowledge of what they might be giving up.
LOL... I thought there was just one point to reply to and I was like.. I'll reply later, I'm not in a rush, then I saw all your replies to yourself and realized there are 3 more points to address.
So.. first... I don't really care about the "substandard sound". I live in NYC in an old building with shitty windows on a block that has an out of control intersection on one end and a hospital & fire station on the other, and I use an old pair of powered Tannoys plugged into the headphone jack of a mac studio with a janky 1/4" to 1/8" connector! lol I don't think I slight upgrade in fidelity is going to be noticeable... especially since the cat bit a hole in one of the woofers, and now if you push it too hard it has some pretty cool distortion, though it's not ideal.
If I was still producing, I'd have more of a proper set up, but... just for listening to music while working and watching YouTube videos, it's more than acceptable. I really don't see the sound quality thing ever convincing me (because even as an artist, I know for a fact Spotify generates the most streams... it doesn't make sense to cut them out if you actually want to heard. Streaming platforms aren't labels, you can be on all of them)
I wouldn't be surprised if you could tell the difference in sound quality, even with that setup. If you've figured out how to get their algorithm to work for you, then they've done a good job of locking you in.
All of my algorithms are screwed up because I use streaming services to research my box set projects, artists who we might book to film at Soapbox, and even a bit for my writing here. My recommendations on Apple and Spotify are all terrible. I'm sure everyone could add a data point where I could mark something as "Do not include in my recommendation algorithm," but tech companies have never used their own music services through the perspective of power users.
I have seriously enjoyed your last two articles. This was excellent. I was one of those people who would go to Best Buy or Circuit City to get the CDs for $9.99 back in 1990. I was 14 years old and spending $10 on a CD was a lot more palatable than spending $16 at my local Twisters Music & Gifts record store.
I always wondered why a place like Twisters just didn't sell their CDs for $10. 14-year-old me probably just assumed it was because Best Buy, at a corporate level, bought in bulk. It seems that was partly correct. But I never thought about the main culprit that you noted: namely, that those big retail chains were using them as loss leaders.
In any case, it's a shame. Those stores had no soul (and still don't). I don't buy a ton of vinyl but I have taken to ordering directly from bands (e.g., the Cure's last album in November as well as the live concert at the Troxy that was recorded in November and released on vinyl in February). Most of my music is consumed via Apple Music for the same reason you have it. And, damn, it is convenient. I would gladly pay more for it so that the artists I listen to could get more money.
I think you've convinced me to become a paying subscriber. I'm dropping The Free Press and subscribing here!
Thanks! Comments like yours definitely help keep me motivated. A lot of what I'm doing is sorting through all the chaos in the years after the collapse of the CD business. So many of us were totally burned out by the experience. Writing for people who are interested in a forensic examination of the record business definitely helps.
I remember when CDs came out. They were a dollar more than vinyl. Now the equation has flipped so far in the other direction, it's mind blowing. In Australia, $60-80 for a new vinyl release is just untenable in the long run and if, as you say, that's on meagre markup, the retailers are in trouble. JB Hifi, which started out as a record store, now has more space dedicated to coffee machines. There are no easy answers.
Agreed with pretty much everything here except: "Streamers don’t charge enough to pay a fair royalty to artists..." - As a recording artist, I've been hearing this noise for over a decade. We've all got opinions, where do they come from?
Should DSPs be forced to charge people $25 or $50 or $100 a month for access in the US so artists can be paid more? What's the sweet spot to make it "fair"? (spoiler alert: the answer is always going to be "more".) And what about the rates in other countries?
Let that one go, if you can. There's no rational economic argument to be made on that topic. You're always going to run into Ramsey Pricing problems. Artists should focus more on D2C.
I've heard tech bros make the argument that musicians and copyright holders are greedy for the past three decades and it's not any more true now than it was then. None of them have a business without artists, no matter how many times they try to degrade our work as "content."
Labels blew it. They had a chance to create a digital distribution model in the 90s, one that would have valued music at a price more in line with what consumers would have been willing to pay before file trading destroyed the model. That's not really an "opinion," more of an analysis based on me being one of the major label employees who saw it coming at the time.
I worked for a major telecommunications company in the 90s that's no longer around, testing early VOIP. After I had a bunch of calls that sounded 'good enough' I was like, "This is going to destroy our long distance business, especially international..." and I was told, "No, it's not. We're going to build portals on the information superhighway..." Direct quote. So many bad ideas.
I’ve tried to tell young folks that my management company phone bill was at least $1k/month in the early 90s and they can’t believe it.
D2C is an excellent business model for artists who benefited from promotion and radio play in their younger days.
Another way a recording artist can make money is if a presidential candidate pays them to read a three minute speech after making fans believe there would be a free concert in order to fill the stadium
I wish people would stop banging on Killer Mike for doing those Bernie Sanders events.
ok so this is all nuts. No one making selling (new used or whatever from past technologies that are now very very niche) deserve to make a lving doing this? Vinyl is absolutely inferior technology to digital streaming just in terms of preservastion and absolute sound quality. I an a fully old school and new school audio practitioner (70 years old EE and member of AES for 5o years since college. I have 3500 albums that are all from the mids 80s or before, I only buy uses records from the FULLY analog era. How can you possible buy a vinyl copy of music that was mad completly in the dgital domain, and then made technically inferior by pressing it as a record???? It is absolutely your right to setup a record store - you have absolutely zero deservement or expectation that it would ever make a dime and only loose money. NONE. Please dont come back with irrelevant personal attacks - this is how the LEFT and the RIGHT equally brought in TRUMP and Biden.
I’ve made it clear here that I think almost all music (consciously or unconsciously) is recorded to sound best with the most likely delivery format. Very few 90s LPs sound good on vinyl and a lot of 50s LPs have never sounded as good on CD as they do on a clean vinyl pressing from the original plates. Almost everything we hear is compromised in some way.
Thanks for reading. Some people like the distortion of vinyl. I just paid an outrageous amount of money for a sealed mono copy of Gene Clark With the Gosdin Brothers (1967) and I have to say that any digital version I’ve heard of that album (CD or streaming) cannot compare to the vinyl on that title.
I used to think Television’s “Adventure” sounded blah next to “Marquee Moon” until I bought it on vinyl. I’d had one of those quick and dirty 90s CD remasters (looking at you Dylan back catalogue) and the vinyl blew it away. I’d like to think there was someone out there remastering properly for CD but capitalism does not favour such notions.
I think those Television CD masters are a miss. I need to write about the various iterations of Marquee Moon because there's a story there.
Andy John’s stories about Verlaine saying “No we want small, dry sounds!”
Apologies if these count as personal attacks.
again I apologize for the sharp tone on this (again shell shocked by too much youtube, which is a bad excuse!) - sounds like we are mostly in agreement. I do love records BTW. I again love used in good shape vinyl that come from the fully analog era (no later then mid80s) and also love working with engineers and musicians in nashville with a recording studio called welcome to 1979 that does 100% analog workflow that is mixed and mastered live to a late 70s Neuman cutting lathe to cut a lacquer master. They then plate this in their plating facility to create a father, mother,and stampers THey have used the father alone a few times in a 1 step pressing process. All very cool, and 100% unadulterated analog (which i love even though it colors the sound much more that pure digital)
There’s so much nuance with these topics and I’m determined to write in the gray instead of defaulting to black or white.
no - for sure your reply was absolutely not personal. So sorry if it sounded like I was pointing it at you. I have given up on the youtube audio community -- at least the really mediocre 'audiophile' equipment reviewers and others selling products and are supposedly tech wizards/ experts that have no clue... they just want subscribers period
I’m a big fan of John Darko. Our taste in music and gear tends to line up, plus he allows that not everyone is going to have the same experience he does.