2. analog
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Would vinyl even be invented today?

Records, cartridges and tonearms seem like such an unlikely method to play music--a bit of Rube Goldberg. Would anyone even dream of this today? It's like the typewriter keyboard--the version we have may not be the best, but it stays due to the path dependence effect. If vinyl evolved from some crude wax cylinder to a piece of rock careening off walls of vinyl, hasn't it reached the limits of the approach? Not trying to be critical--just trying to get my head around it.
128x128jafreeman
tubehead21
23 posts
 
@dentdog_a terabyte? Got a link you can share on that? Would love to read up on that.
dentdog's avatar
dentdog
498 posts
 
Tubehead, I'll look around for it. It was Feickert or one of his buddies. Bottom line was that it would probably take north of 300-400 gigs before double blind testing vs a Terabyte would yield the difference undetectable. I still think it may be like being able to do time travel-only you lose your soul.
gdoodle
113 posts
 
If someone woke today in a non vinyl world and dreamed it up today, they would certainly say "yeah, but there's no decent new music to record on it." Then rollover and go back to sleep.
schubert
7,386 posts
 
Lots of good jazz and classical music to record, there never was any good rock music to record.
tonywinsc
583 posts
 
Imagine a stylus rigged with cables tied directly to speaker cones through a system of levers and pulleys. No electronics to color the sound. Then we would have discussions about the advantages of different cable sizes, tension and materials and the affects of various bearing grades used in the pulleys. Oh, I just realized that I just described the first player pianos...
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