Quote Originally Posted by magiccarpetride View Post
My problem with CDs (and other digital artefacts) is that they are being marketed/sold to the populace as the final frontier. Sort of like 'finally, now we all have access to the entire content, to our entire cultural heritage! It's just a two, maximum three google clicks away."

Well, I'm calling baloney on that. The way I see it, digitized content is merely a tip of the iceberg. There is an enormous body of content invisible to google. This content has never been digitized (nor will it ever be). The only time publishing houses choose to digitize some heritage content is if the digitization/packaging/marketing and distribution can be proven to be commercially viable.

That leaves a huge bottom of the pyramid in the digital darkness.

I go to my local record stores and I find tons of amazing LPs that are virtually unobtainable on google. They will never become obtainable for the above mentioned reasons.

Furthermore, even the ones that are obtainable, have been mostly extremely poorly digitized. To the point of 'why bother?' Incompetent people have proven to be phenomenally good at delivering botched CDs, hi rez formats, etc. Just because it's a no brainer to push a button and transfer analog signal to digital, doesn't mean the job is done and you can now go home. But that's how they treat it, and are allowed to get away with murder.

That's why I made a comeback to LPs -- realized that most of the precious, fulfilling content still remains buried in the pile of old used LPs.
Nice line of argument but any darkness on a pyramid is hugely against vinyl content. And anyway if it's in darkness on vinyl, nobody is buying it or it's old hat. The way I see it, vinyl creates a kind of bridge between the people who want the music on vinyl as being some form of zenith of smooth reproduced analogue music of a source from a largely bygone era, against digital people who want and are after music now and readily available for most of almost all music , to the extent that for some audiophiles it possibly doesn't become so much about the music anymore, but it's analogue quality. Music and its availability is why we buy hi fi in the first place, otherwise there is no point substantiating expense for formats where music isn't wholly available. My dacs handle streaming, CDs and downloads, but a phono stage only a record which isn't widely available on that source.