Unfortunately that is the nature of the beast when playing in car players, the car doesn't stay flat all the time and you're always going to be putting the cds at risk of scratching and laser damage as it bounces up and down.

I like Vinyl artwork and the warmth for some styles of music, but not so much for others. Also I'm 24 and move from place to place fairly often, so having most of my music digital is a huge plus for moving houses and storage in small rooms in shared houses!

That's why I only play MP3 CDs in my car. If it gets scratched up and starts to skip or repeat I just toss it and burn a new mix.

On the original topic.... I didn't read the whole thread but real sound is analog. That's just the matter-of-fact science of the thing. Therefore any digital representation of real sound will have inherent losses as well as erroneous artifacts. It's inescapable. Sorry if that's already been said.

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Just think of how awesome a guitar player you could have been by now if you had only spent the last 10 years practicing instead of obsessing over pickups and roasted maple necks.

I won’t argue the sound quality aspect. Sound quality is lost on my tinnitus ridden ears anyway. But I voted NO because digital music is so much more accessible. Back in the days of vinyl, you put an album on and listened to the whole thing. If you wanted variety, you had to do a lot of needle lifting. Thus came the cassette tape. Then you had to do a lot of FFW or rewind to navigate. But with digital, every song in your library is at your finger tips. I can stream music throughout my house on multiple devices. I can carry more music than I could listen to in a month around with me in my pocket. And best of all it will never wear out!

i see no one has mentioned mini discs yet so i will what has been said about cds losing some of the sounds is true , but when you record them onto mini disc you hear things that werent there on the cd , on example would be the pulp fiction soundtrack , when sl jackson is reciting izecuel (spelling ?) and the auto handgun starts going off , on the recorded MD you can hear the shell casings hitting the floor and bouncing , i cannot hear this on the cd just thought i'd throw that into the mix and yes i still use mini discs i have hundreds of them , cheers
Alan

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+1, well said.
I've still got a lot of old lp's stored in vintage, pre metric milkcrates and intended to digitize them, but when I got my turntable out, I found that the rubber belt had disintegrated Now I have to go and try to find a replacement.
My sons want my old lp covers as artwork for their walls.
I agree with others that some of the nice aspects of the lp's are the artwork and album notes. For some reason, the notes on CD's are not only in a size 1 or 2 font, but also in a colour similar to the background and hence even more illegible

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......it's a topsy-turvy world when noses run and feet smell...

On the other side of the coin, people used to listen to their LPs a whole lot more frequently than they do with CDs or MP3s and I am convinced it is because they simply sounded better on a level that may not be entirely conscious. When I bought a new LP I would record it to tape on the very first play and then put it away and listen to the tape. I did this to protect the record from the wear and tear that came with normal play plus the additional abuse they got during party times. I actually kept my records in a separate room (office) with a lock on the knob. The thing is though, I would listen to those tapes over and over again until they wore out and I'd have to make another one. I know I'm not alone on this. In those days we'd get a new album and listen to it over and over again. It was in the 80's when I noticed I wasn't doing that anymore. Exactly at the same time that I started buying CDs instead of LPs. I'd buy a new CD and I'd play it once through and put it in the collection and bring it out once in a while. I pondered the question of whether the phenomenon was related to getting older (maturing) and I deduced that it wasn't. I could still take out In Through The Out Door on vinyl and listen to it 3 times from start to finish on my Dual 521 with that quarter gram Shure diamond stylus. I believe there are nuances of sound and tone in an analog recording that are simply not present in digital format. I just don't get the same pleasure from listening to digital music as I do when I listen to anaolg recordings. Even to this day. There may be scratches on my old records and they may not be as convenient to use as MP3s but they sound orgasmic to my ears in comparison.

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Just think of how awesome a guitar player you could have been by now if you had only spent the last 10 years practicing instead of obsessing over pickups and roasted maple necks.

If we're talking pure sound quality, I'll take vinyl (along with all the cracks and pops) over CDs or digital downloads any day of the week. Everything I listen to on my iPod sounds kind of thin and tinny in compared to its vinyl equivalent.

That being said, nothing beats digital downloads in terms of portability and convenience. It would be pretty tough to take a turntable out for a jog or a trip to the gym!

Yes indeed!

Some of those scratches became part of the music and when we moved on to CDs you almost had to learn the album again without all those familiar blemishes. I do think there is a nice warmth of sound on LPs, but it is minimal and far outweighed by the tedium of keeping the records clean and maintaining the equipment - and getting up every 20 minutes to change the side! Oh man.

I have a good quality LP deck but I clumsily broke the stylus a year or two back and still haven't got around to replacing it. I wonder why? On the other hand, I also have a top end CD player I bought mid-80s and it still works flawlessly nearly 30 years later with zero maintenance. Good stuff.

I still have all my old LPs and it's a nostalgic thing to spin a few now and again. But good grief, CDs were a massive step forward. MP3s not so, as far as sound quality is concerned, though the convenience is fabulous. My iPod contains about a quarter of my music collection and tells me it currently has 12.7 days of music on it - about 25% of its memory. All contained in a shirt pocket. That's handy.

BTW: we've mentioned LP album art, but anyone of my generation remember the joy and silliness of coloured vinyl? And picture discs? Ah, the old days...

Cheers - C

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One of my favorites from "the old days" is a Black Sabbath album on clear vinyl.

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"Life is like eating jalapenos. What you do today may burn your arse tomorrow"

Hee-hee - somewhere back at the end of the '70s in an attempt to show respect to someone else's taste I bought a single called Life Begins at the Hop by XTC on clear vinyl. What a heap of crappola. I was so relieved about 15 years later when a cat peed on it and I could legitimately throw it away.

Still. Yellow cat pee on clear vinyl. The ultimate expression of post-punk nihilism...

Cheers - C

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Interesting wieving angle I've always had good experience with MD - I even recorded much of my vinyl to MD, and I was very confident with the result- good sounding , and same scratches Could it be that MD's record with another (and better) kind of algorithm than mp3's? The MD-player is still in my rack, -with my cassette-deck. Nowadays in ever use any of them. Perhaps this evening ?

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A-man

I vote for blu ray. Really just better quality digital than CD.

I've got the Pink Floyd, DSOTM emersion release. Remastered at higher digital resolution, and 5.1 to boot. Sounds excellent to me.

Hopefully over time more of the classics will be remastered at higher resolution digital, and maybe at a lower price than the Pink Floyd ones.

The Loudness War

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

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-T

"You can't spend what you ain't got, you can't lose what you ain't never had" ~ McKinley Morganfield