this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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The concept of vinyl still blows my mind... The fact that you can recreate every possible combination of sounds and etch it in grooves on a thin piece of plastic, then you can drag a needle across those grooves to hear the sound combinations again...
How does a person even create something like that? It's mind blowing.
Vinyl does have significant limitations in what sound it can produce, especially in terms of dynamic range. Wikipedia has a good breakdown of analog vs digital recording.
While digital is not perfect, itβs generally better in every regard that humans can physically perceive. That said, people will always romanticize physical things of the past, be it confirmation bias, survivorship bias of good examples, or just enjoying the ritual of physical interacting with a thing.
Well sure... But I can still speak a sentence nobody has ever uttered into a recording device, press that into tiny grooves on a plastic disc, and then play back a pretty damn faithful reproduction of the thing I said.
You seem to think that I was supporting a return to vinyl or something, but I did no such thing. I'm well aware that the technology has gotten better by orders of magnitude.
I understand there's obviously limitations, but just the basic concept is mind blowing to me.
I think it was done with wax cylinders first, somewhat earlier! So at least for vinyl, there was strong technological precedent.
In the early days, it was quite a simple device! Sort of a cone to focus sound waves, with a membrane at the end attached to an engraver that carves wax. I bet it was quite hard to make those mechanical systems reliable, but I can sort of see how someone goes from "sound is a pressure wave in air" to that device!