Metallica

Jer said:
Eh, not so sure about that. If you’re used to owning your music, being able to listen to it anywhere regardless of whether you have network access or not, and you find the idea of songs being removed from your collection or replaced with different versions without notice and without your consent to be appalling and borderline theft, not to mention the big data abuses that are almost certainly going on behind the scenes, then you’re probably too old for Spotify. I sure am.

I will only buy uncompressed, non-DRM’d music that I own, and that cannot be taken away from me.
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I used to think like that. And I will continue to only buy physical releases, or lossless if there is no physical release available.

However, the free spotify is great and really should be a no-brainer for everyone for 2 reasons:
1) Handy for checking out albums you don't have before buying, or a song or two that you like from an artist you otherwise don't
2) using it as a surrogate jukebox and casting to a decent hi-fi/tv
 
Jer said:
Since it’s not DRM’d, I can make and keep copies and other derivatives. So the compressed copies on my computer and my phone wouldn’t be stolen if the physical master CD was stolen, and vice versa. That’s enough of an insurance policy for me. And as better compression tech emerges, I can recompress from an original CD or FLAC as I choose to.
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Hate to say it, but a housefire and you're done. You'll never replace a lot of that stuff. I get it, of course - but CDs are already going the way of the dodo when it comes to new tech integrations. You're more and more reliant on a home computer to rip/convert/store/transfer. And that's fine - good on ya - but I decided a long time ago it's way too much effort for me for a .5% increase in audio quality, especially as the same tech improvements mean we increase closer and closer to live lossless streaming.
 
LooseCannon said:
Hate to say it, but a housefire and you're done. You'll never replace a lot of that stuff.
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I thought about this a bit afterward and the physical CDs would actually be covered by my home insurance for replacement cost, so the only issue would be with the ones that couldn’t realistically be replaced. And there’s no guarantee I’d have access to those particular versions through a streaming service either.

I get it, society’s become more ephemeral, I should live in the moment and get with the times. But I didn’t grow up with zero privacy, zero ownership, subscription fees for everything, and an assumption of constant internet connectivity, so I’m really just not on board with the direction a lot of these things are going. And I still get to laugh every time I’m on a road trip and the young ones start bitching when they lose network access while my music keeps playing just fine, so I will keep putting up with the mild inconvenience of the ownership model. But I will probably move to more DRM-less FLACs over time, rather than physical CDs.
 
I have all Metallica albums (including Garage Days, which was a specialty) up until the Black Album - on cassette tapes. :bigsmile: Boy did I listen to them when I was young! Haven't had a cassette player for years, I just keep them as memories, because they meant so much to me. I also love owning stuff. :) I used to have free Spotify, but I thought it was too much of a hassle, so didn't upload it on my current phone.
 
What I'm glad about is that streaming services have provided a non-piracy alternative for discovering and listening to music. I still download albums that are not available on streaming services, but other than that all but phased out the illegal downloads - which I feel good about from an ethical standpoint.

I buy physical copies both for collection purposes and as a way to support the artists. Only buy the most cherished albums, though. CDs are becoming obsolete, so I moved to vinyl but they're crazy expensive nowadays due to the economy.
 
The Flash said:
CDs are becoming obsolete, so I moved to vinyl
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A sentence I literally never thought I’d read, but here we are.

CDs replaced vinyl and cassette because the sound reproduction was superior (unless you have literally superhuman hearing) and they didn’t degrade with use. Now vinyl is cool again and I’ll never understand why. The hissing and popping and record flipping and changing needles and all of that was a huge annoyance and we left it behind for a reason. Same thing with having to fast forward and rewind cassette tapes.

It’s true that vinyl potentially captures all of the ultra high frequency stuff that you can’t actually hear, and the giant album sleeves are nice to look at. But I lived with analog hiss for years before CDs, and I just couldn’t fathom going backward on sound quality like that.
 
Jer said:
Now vinyl is cool again and I’ll never understand why.
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It's a cooler collector's item, bigger artwork and all. It also has a different procedure of listening, which gives it a niche appeal.

Pretty much all younger vinyl collectors I know listen to music mainly on digital. It's not either/or, it's both.
 
I'm just an avid archiver. I've always loved archiving/recording stuff, it's not just music. Since music is probaby my biggest passion in life, it just translates into record collecting. I actually don't even have a record player at the moment.
 
Black Wizard said:
There's no excuse for this in 2020.
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I'm flat broke; it's a fine line I have to tread between legality and audio quality. For an example (since this is the Metallica thread), take Death Magnetic. It's got two versions - the headache-inducing original, and the immensely improved remaster. The problem, then, is that only the first version is available for streaming (I can't get an iTunes subscription). As a result, I end up pirating the remaster.

Besides, there are some albums my streaming services just don't have, such as Countdown To Extinction by Megadeth, Paradise Lost by Symphony X and Oceanborn by Nightwish.
 
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Vinyl, even new vinyl, is often less compressed. CD is, technically, a far superior format. But that doesn't count for shit if what you fill it with is squashed to death. Priest's Firepower is 10 dB(!) more dynamic on vinyl. It's basically the mix transferred to vinyl, while the CD release is highly processed in the mastering stage.

So I've moved to a combination of vinyl and digital.
 
Yax said:
Vinyl, even new vinyl, is often less compressed. CD is, technically, a far superior format. But that doesn't count for shit if what you fill it with is squashed to death.
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OK, this is an argument I can understand.
 
Yax said:
Vinyl, even new vinyl, is often less compressed. CD is, technically, a far superior format. But that doesn't count for shit if what you fill it with is squashed to death. Priest's Firepower is 10 dB(!) more dynamic on vinyl. It's basically the mix transferred to vinyl, while the CD release is highly processed in the mastering stage.

So I've moved to a combination of vinyl and digital.
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This is exactly my rationale.

The problem with vinyl is that most people who buy vinyl do it for collecting purposes and if they do listen to it, it is on very bad equipment. The pressing plants know this and are able to cut corners by transferring digital/lossy mixes onto vinyl. Sometimes they even try to fit too much content onto a side. So you end up with an inferior product. Luckily that is getting better recently, but sometimes the CD or digital version is the best. Book of Souls and Firepower are great examples of recent vinyl that sound superior.
 
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