I keep hearing about vinyl sales booming, driven by Gen-(whatever we're up to).

I still have shelves of original vinyl from back in the day, but I'm far more inclined to spin a CD.

(What's a CD grandpa?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaIVv6v8aUY

I have a computer full of music and have it connected to my stereo and just use that instead.

I've still got a bunch of LPs and cassettes, but never use them - I should really just throw all that stuff out.

The CD collection is still in good shape, they last a long time and are far superior to analogue music in every way.

I've still got a bunch of LPs and cassettes, but never use them - I should really just throw all that stuff out.

Hated cassettes with a passion. Still have visions of pulling tapes out of cassette drives.

Still have my reel-to-reel.

Sell your LPs (or give them to an Op Shop to sell).

What I really like about CDs is the amount of content per side. Changing LPs over sucks (not to mention the surface noise on most of them).

Your records will sound better with an au$26k cartridge! https://elusivedisc.com/clearaudio-goldfinger-statement-mc-cartridge-0-9mv/

Trouble with that is my ears are over days27k.

I have a Dual turntable still set up and connected and 100's of vinyl LP's for nostalgic purposes only.

However I listen to 95% of my music in FLAC format from a server and I don't care what the vinyl brigade say.

The digital format is far superior to vinyl in so many ways.

As a younger person, I find vinyl to be a neat format and one that can have incredible album covers etc, but I don't find anything particularly special about the sound from them. To me at least, vinyl can sound like a CD quality recording with the bonus of a heightened noise floor at best. at worst, it has pops, crackles, wow and flutter, not to mention compressed dynamic range. and they're fragile as hell.
I can get behind any physical media that can be held and enjoyed still being produced today, but vinyl isn't something that I'm personally going to put any real money into.

On the cassette note, I've used decent Yamaha decks to record and play back reasonable quality tapes, and they're not bad. And I don't have to worry about a spec of dust landing on the surface of one. Plus, Dolby NR works wonders in terms of reproduction quality. I could happily listen to cassette for hours and am probably more likely to over vinyl. Though it helps I can record whatever I want to a cassette beforehand.
Pre-recorded cassette's on the other hand, they were mostly garbage to begin with, designed for mass production and not audio quality.
There is a reason why those who could do it would buy the new vinyl they wanted and dub it to tape to listen to back in the day.

Had a large tape collection when that was the only way to play your music in the car. Background noise counted for nothing given the amount of road noise. But once CDs come along the tapes were eventually abandoned.

Part of the attraction of LPs was the technical process of getting control of all the factors like, noise, wow, flutter etc that decrease fidelity. The advent of CDs cured that.

To my way of thinking if you want true fidelity you can't go past a DDD CD played with a good solid state amplifier. If valves and LPs sound better it is because you prefer that sound, not because of fidelity: the valve and LP become part of the music production, as well as reproduction.

The drawback with the CD music format is a lack of true bass. The record company has to synthesise the output to increase bass and it doesn't sound as good as the bass coming from an LP or from other digital formats. Philips and Sony knew of this when they were developing the system but it wasn't considered bad enough to warrant correction. Let's face it - someone pays a few dollars for a CD and plays it on what is ultimately rudimentary equipment in a domestic setting. Good bass isn't a requirement in most cases because if it were, the neighbours would be bashing down the user's front door.

CDs should still be popular today though - they work, they last longer than the original guarantee provided they are looked after and they are extremely portable. Most cars don't come with CD players now because the car makers don't give a hoot about road safety. They are all more concerned about the driver being able to connect their mobile phone and spend lots of time faffing around for music playlists instead of just spending five seconds taking a 5in disc out of a cover and sticking it in a slot. Add to this the almost cinemascope sized touch screens and we have a recipe for disaster as inattentiveness is now the leading cause of motor accidents. I'll keep using CDs in my car for as long as they are available and as long as my dinosaur remains driveable.

For home though, I will play LPs for a multitude of reasons. The big problem there is that not all titles are available on LP.

I wasn't aware of a bass problem with CDs. There is a coverage of the subject here
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/question-about-bass-on-early-cds-wheres-the-bass.822349/

It seems that many early CD producers didn't always bother to properly adapt existing tapes for LPs for transcription to CDs, and it wasn't a really failure of the CD medium.

I agree that for most use you are putting on some music as a background as you work on something else eg a radio. So quality isn't paramount. Not like when a good set of headphones are plugged into a CD player like Sony's D-50 compact CD player from 1984, and the music has your full attention.

I’ve never heard that about CDs Brad. This is a real problem with LPs and the deemphasis of the bass response so they could 1, fit the grooves on the record. (bass frequencies take up a lot of realestate) and 2, so the stylus can track properly and not jump out of the groove. Pre-emphasis was also applied to the high frequencies to reduce surface noise. This system was standardised with the RIAA curve which had to be incorporated in all preamps which never tracked 100% to the original and varied with manufacturer.

As STC alluded to, it is probably a case of what we are accustomed to listening to. Quality does vary in all forms of recording too. I have 78s and LPs that don't go snap, crackle and pop. There's not that many but it was possible to make shellac and vinyl pressings with very little background noise. In the case of LP and CD the problem with bass is the same but obviously caused by different things and the same problem affects AM broadcast radio transmissions with their tiny channel spacings - bandwidth. On an LP, the grooves have to be spaced wider in areas on the pressing where there are lower audio frequencies and you can see this with a magnifying glass on an LP with a recording like the 1812 Overture - where the cannons blast the changes in the grooves are quite visible. You won't see this on a CD though as with digital recordings it is all about the encoding - all tracks on a CD are equal, right throughout.

Domestically, I also do my ears a favour and listen to anything on good quality loudspeakers. Any amplifier can produce audio between 20Hz and 20kHz, the average normal human hearing range, but speaker quality varies greatly. On good speakers, anything will sound good.

Early on in the piece with CDs they were designated DDD, ADD, or AAD for Analogue or Digital recording, mixing and mastering. It isn't always possible to find this coding on a CD. Perhaps all newly recorded CDs are now DDD. But it certainly wasn't the case early in the piece for CDs when there was a rush to get existing master tapes onto the new medium. I have some CDs (AAD) that I only listened to once the quality was so bad. After that I only bought ADD or DDD.

Records mastered on a 30-inches-per-second tape machine had less noise/distortion but bass roll-off below 60Hz

Records mastered at half speed on special cutting lathe sounded noticeably better, like those on the Megatone label.

Back in the 70's and early 80's when I was buying vinyl I always bought imported pressings from an outlet in Melbourne.

The sound quality was always superior to local pressings and the sleeves were made of a heavier grade material.

The place was, IIRC, called Gaslight records.

It was worth the trek into the city to buy them.