by mrandish | 2025-09-27 18:46:37+00:00
> There is something wonderful about listening to physical music recordings without using a screen. It's like cursive writing, or knowing how to drive a stick-shift.

I'm old enough to have bought a lot of vinyl records, cassette tapes, VHS tapes, Laserdiscs, etc back when they were the mainstream consumer formats and there were no better alternatives, so I get what you're saying. However, it feels like you're conflating three different concepts here.

1. The abstract idea (or perhaps 'ideal') of using vintage technologies being an expressive act which demonstrates something about you and your values to yourself and/or others.

2. The internal physical sensory pleasure one might subjectively feel from performing a manual action, separate from the purpose or utility of that action - such as cursive writing, calligraphy, shaping a wet clay pot, etc.

3. The net utility and objective technical fidelity of an action like "playing recorded media".

To me, these are all significantly different things and blurring them together niggles at my pedantic, engineering brain. If you're talking about #2 (internal subjective pleasure you physically feel from 'doing it'), that's great! I'm happy for you - but it's purely a "You" thing which may or may not be experienced by others. As for #1 (expressive act demonstrating your values), your values and whatever emotions performing that act evokes inside you are purely subjective. One person's 'sacred temple' may be another person's 'old building'.

But #3 has elements which can be objectively evaluated on various dimensions. When we're talking about "playing recorded media", vinyl is objectively worse at recreating the full bandwidth present on the original studio master (probably an analog 2-inch master tape back in the day) - and I promise you I'm NOT being biased toward 'new' or 'digital'. Not all new technologies are necessarily better in all respects and not all digital processes are better than analog. For example, I posted here last week pointing out that there are still a few very specific technical parameters in which esoteric, ultra-high performance, high-definition analog CRTs costing >$20,000 (which most people have never seen in person) can outperform today's best reference-grade (>$10,000) flat screens (of course, outside those very rare, highly specific traits - most mediocre flat screens are objectively better than even a good consumer CRT TV).

My point being that with #3, we can have an interesting and potentially useful exchange about traits which can be objectively assessed. We may not always agree about the relative utility or value of various traits, but at least we're talking about traits which can be mutually measured and understood - so we know we're disagreeing about the same objective thing. Whereas with #1 and #2, other people may not share your exact values or the sense of sacredness they evoke in you. And, sadly, I cannot share the internal pleasure Yoyo Ma experiences in the act of playing the cello. Of course, I DO have my own flavors of 'meaningful rituals' which evoke ineffable feelings and sensations in me - but I've always understood they only exist in my own mind, not the external environment.