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Vinyl and Cassette Sales Continued To Grow Last Year (fortune.com)
Albums sold on vinyl and cassette both saw a growth in sales according to BuzzAngle Music's End-Year Report profiling U.S. music industry consumption for 2018. From a report: Vinyl sales grew by just shy of 12% from 8.6 to 9.7 million sales, while cassette sales grew by almost 19% from 99,400 to 118,200 copies sold in the US, The Verge reported. Sixty-six percent of those vinyl sales were of albums that are more than three years old and feature classic bands like The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, and Pink Floyd, reported BuzzAngle. Cassettes saw popularity in newer releases. CDs on the other hand have declined by 18.5% in popularity leading to a total decline in physical album sales of over 15%, reported The Verge. Meanwhile, audio streaming saw an increase of 41.8%, the largest of all music consumption.
Some people get their hiss and crackle that way. I choose fire and snakes to accompany my digital music.
“Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continues... AAY!"
You can also buy "raw water" for $20 a gallon, but that doesn't mean it's better. Old records suck and cassettes are even worse. Tube amps suck too. I've lived with all of them. It's cool for a retro experience, but that's about it.
The problem is that people think digital results in a different waveform than the original analog waveform. They can't understand how you can go from a stairstep digital signal to a smooth analog signal, and incorrectly conclude that something must be lost when you store music digitally. Yes something is lost, but it's only frequencies higher than Nyquist - half the sampling frequency, which is carefully chosen so the only frequencies lost are those beyond your hearing range (and weren't captured in the original analog recording anyway).
Monty Montgomery demonstrated this in a video using an analog wave generator, an analog spectrum analyzer, an analog oscilliscope, and A/D and D/A converters. At 20 kHz, the stairstep digital waveform is an awful mess, but after conversion back to analog it's still a perfectly smooth sine wave.
The mistake people make is thinking that the digital signal is a series of stairsteps. It's not stairsteps, it's just the corners of each stairstep. The sound's value is only defined at each corner. In between the corners, it's undefined. And it turns out that there is only one analog waveform which can be drawn through every one of those corners, yet contain no frequencies higher than Nyquist. So the digital sample of the waveform can perfectly recreate the original analog waveform (within the chose frequency limit).
Vinyl is the music equivalent of homeopathy.
Cassettes more portable? I guess you never experienced the glory of a turntable in your dash...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
But, as the Tortoise points out to Archilies, if the play back device is of sufficiently high fidelity then a cassette could be constructed that will produce resonances that will cause it to self destruct. And no matter how hard Archilies tries to fix his machine, the Tortoise can always produce a new machine destroying tape.
Has something to do with Godel. And possibly Bach and Escher.
there are still ways to tell the difference, especially on tracks that have any waveform that are close to a fundamental harmonic of the sampling rate. You can actually hear the sampling beat frequencies injected into the music and distortion
So you have not heard of Nyquist frequency or sinc filtering. If you can actually hear beat frequencies than your hardware (software?) is misdesigned. It can be mathematically proven that you can't hear such beat frequencies in a properly engineered system. Of course I realize I am telling this to someone who *believes* in vinyl, so it probably fell on deaf ears.
Anyway, I can guarantee that you are wrong about the other guy being wrong. This is science.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
A cassette tape will never install a rootkit on your tapedeck.
Neither will a standard Red Book audio CD.
They will never be able to take your cassette tapes away from you due to some rights-holder asshattery.
Neither will they with a standard Red Book audio CD.
A cassette tape doesn't care what region your playing it in.
Neither does a standard Red Book audio CD.
Cool old cars have tape decks.
My cool old car has a CD changer.
Creedence is supposed to have those hiss and pop sounds.
If so, they put it on the master so it should show up on your standard Red Book audio CD.
Tapes come with cool album art, lryics, and hidden messages.
So does a standard Red Book audio CD.
Tapes work offline.
So does a standard Red Book audio CD.
Tapes don't report your listening habits, location, duration, sexual preference and political affiliation so some corporation.
Neither will a standard Red Book audio CD.
Fuck it, this is too much work... romanticize all you want, just keep it to yourself!