Let's try and get 1,000,000 replies to this post

Everything you say is true, @Diesel 11, but that doesn't diminish the wtf factor for those of us who thought they'd seen vinyl die in the 80's and 90's. I remember that as early as 1990, I looked on my parents' LP collection as an outdated dust-gatherer. Portablity wasn't the reason the CD replaced the LP. Mobile and car CD were a thing of the future, we still predominantly used tapes until the late nineties, but the CD replaced vinyl nevertheless, because it was generally considered the superior medium. If in 1993 you'd have told me that in 30 years, the LP would outsell the CD again, I'd have told you to get off whatever you were smoking. It's like suggesting today that 30 years from now people would be using old brick phones rather than smartphones.

Obviously the full story isn't that vinyl outsells CDs because vinyl is killing the CD, but that vinyl is outselling the CD because streaming is killing the CD. As a medium, streaming has about the same advantages (or more) over the CD as the CD did over the LP. But nowadays people overwhelmingly buy physical carriers as collector's items, and I do guess that vinyl is more attractive than a CD in that respect. But it really is a bizarre development if you look at it through the eyes of someone who grew up in the eighties and nineties.
 
Diesel 11 said:
The biggest downside of vinyl is its lack of portability.
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Yes, but let's consider all the other downsides as well:
  • Holds less music than a CD
  • Track order is often disrupted on multi-disc releases vs. the intended order on the CD
  • Hissing, popping, and crackling during playback
  • Tempo warbling during playback unless you have an amazing turntable
  • Each playing of the disc causes wear and reduces the fidelity of future playbacks
  • You have to physically flip or switch discs every ~23 minutes or less
  • One vinyl record has 12x the carbon footprint of a CD, and many albums these days use multiple vinyls (so much for millennials and Gen Z caring about the environment!)

Diesel 11 said:
Vinyl may not be a perfect format, but they have way cooler album art because the sleeves are so much bigger.
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So display your digital album art on a large monitor or TV, and then it's even bigger than the vinyl cover.

Diesel 11 said:
And I would also argue that putting the needle down and flipping it over halfway through connects you more, makes you feel like you’re part of the experience instead of just experiencing it.
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OK, but that's just emotional and aesthetic. Does that alone really outweigh everything else? I suppose for some people it might, but enough to justify vinyl outpacing CD sales with all of its inherent disadvantages? That's just bizarre.

Diesel 11 said:
But I do collect LaserDiscs over DVDs for the reason that others collect vinyls over CDs: cooler artwork and flipping it over partway through connects me more to the experience of watching the film.
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How does interrupting a film that was meant to be watched straight through without interruption connect you more to the experience of watching the film? Would the same apply to watching a film on TV with periodic commercial interruptions? Or watching one on YouTube, where you have to physically click to skip each ad after 5 seconds? I just can't wrap my head around that mindset. So again, you hipsters are nuts, get off my lawn, etc. :ninja:

Another fun fact about carbon footprint -- streaming music is estimated to hit the same greenhouse gas emissions as the production of a single CD after 5 hours of streaming, so if you plan to listen to an album more than 5-7 times, it's better for the environment to just buy the CD. (Yes, there's incremental impact if you rip the disc and play it digitally, but still way less than cloud streaming.)
 
I don't think it's a case of people buying vinyls instead of CDs.

There's a generation of people who've never bought a CD and don't have a CD player. They are streaming music instead, and some of them are buying vinyl in addition to this, for whatever reasons, but they were never going to be buying a CD.
 
I have a question for all 'Muricans on the board - how much time do you spend on average on your taxes and is it true that you have to work out yourselves how much you're going to pay?
 
Perun said:
I have a question for all 'Muricans on the board - how much time do you spend on average on your taxes and is it true that you have to work out yourselves how much you're going to pay?
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Pre-retirement, with tax prep software our joint return would probably take 3-4 hours to complete and review. Post-retirement it’s more like 1-2 hours. If you did it on paper it would take noticeably longer. Yes, you have to compute your own tax (or at least look it up on a tax table in the end).

If you only have wage income and you’re below a certain number you can fill out a simplified form and it’s much quicker.
 
And here I was thinking that taking an hour to fill my form due to a very complicated income situation last year was long... most of the time was really spent looking up what's deductible and what not. Really glad I don't have to do American taxes.
 
Perun said:
And here I was thinking that taking an hour to fill my form due to a very complicated income situation last year was long... most of the time was really spent looking up what's deductible and what not. Really glad I don't have to do American taxes.
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We hire a tax person to do ours since they're a bit too complicated for us.
 
You have all this nice discussion and arguments about pro/against vinyl/CD/streaming and meanwhile I can't fathom the fact that audio cassettes are making a comeback.
Like, seriously, WTF?!
So in a way, I understand what Perun is talking about.
 
It's quite easy to make my taxes as I own almost nothing plus I receive salary all clean and arranged by my company. But I still hire someone to do that job for me. As soon as I can outsource a job confidently, I do without any hesitation.

Outsourcing is key to success or balanced life if you will; one needs to be focused to the things one can do better than others. Time is valuable.
 
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