The cost of LP's and CD's - an observation

@orpheus10 Idk - I believe the convenience of a cd - being able to skip and select tracks at a whim - was a big factor in people moving over to that medium. Add to that their portability (who here once had a Discman of any iteration?) and it's no surprise they became so popular.

I imagine most were not playing them on systems with any real fidelity, either.

Simao, all the people I knew were impressed with the "noise less" fidelity; which was far superior to "mid-fi". The convenience was just icing on the cake.

Even today, while vinyl is being pushed, CD's are still better than "Mid-FI" and all these thing people hear with "Lo-Fi" vinyl are things we didn't hear during the 50 years preceding CD, but people are convinced that they hear what we didn't hear during all those years.

The only thing different today is the "expensive Hi-end" analog rig, which was also available back in the day, but few people had them. Not until CD did the masses become interested in "expensive analog rigs". Only after the "high enders" began to preach that vinyl was better than CD did they want to discover.

I feel sorry for people buying cheap record players and looking for something special because they got a vinyl record.

In regard to price; that "see-saw" thing has little to do with the cost of production, but the simple law of supply and demand; all of a sudden records are in demand. When CD's came out they were overpriced because CD's were in demand; capitalists got to make money.

When I went to college we had records and cassette tapes. Records were a problem in dorm rooms. My roommate had a B&O turntable with its own suspension but it was still not enough for the bouncy floors in our 70 year old dorm rooms. We even suspended it from the ceiling using webbing. It worked in terms of isolation but it swung around in a gentle circle which was disconcerting.

So we waited until we could be still and quiet and dubbed the vinyl onto cassette tape. We had a nice Nakamichi tape deck (but not the Dragon). We obsessed over which "metallic" tape to buy and then we obsessed about the settings on the tape deck even though we had very little idea what we were doing.

The end result was decent cassette tape recordings.

When CDs came out and became affordable that’s all I wanted and even though no longer in a dorm room, I had no desire to go back to vinyl and or cassette tapes.

@orpheus10 "All the people I knew were impressed..."   Possibly because you hung with other people who cared about the sound? Most of the people I knew during the cd-days of the 90's didn't care. I liked them because they were easier than tapes AND because they didn't have that tape hiss and muffle, but that was a baseline preference.

I don't know what generation you are, but most of my Gen X'ers who came of age with cd's liked them for their mechanical benefits, like convenience and that they wouldn't get eaten or tangled. Yes, there was some acknowledgment of their superior sound quality, but as most of us didn't have amazing systems, that was secondary.