Favourite Format Of Music

[Si Hunt]

Justin Timberlake prefers vinyl (he would!) saying it's "warmer". Is he just trying to be cool or does he have a point?

Perhaps you yearn for the days of rewinding a cassette. Do you prefer an Mp3 to a CD you can carry around but which can stick? Make a vote, and state your case!

Si.

[Si Hunt]

WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE FORMAT OF MUSIC?

[Lissa]

Shouting - I can't get enough of shouted music.

Actually it's MP3 because I have thoroughly unrefined ears and can't tell the difference between lossless CDs and 160kps MP3s. Having everything I could possibly want on demand means far more to me than any kind of ultimate sound quality from a physical format.

[Antony Cox]

MP3 is obviously the most convenient these days as you can store thousands of files on the tiniest of devices, and the sound quality is good.

But I must say that there’s something special about listening to music on vinyl, and especially if you watch it too.

That may sound odd, but you only get the full effect if you actually watch the record going round and round and look at the stylus as it crackles along the groove. There’s a certain immediacy with it, as if you really can ‘feel’ that you’re there at the time the recording was made. Obviously it was only 70-odd years ago that recordings were made directly onto acetate discs; subsequent to that things were recorded onto tape and then transferred onto vinyl, but you can still ‘feel’ that vibration as if the sound is just being made, live, as you listen to it, and you don’t get that with any other format.

The actual sound quality may not be as good as CD or mp3, but the listening experience for me is far superior.

[Perry Vale]

My ideal option isn't available in the poll options, which is SACD. It really is noticably the best sound reproduction I've ever heard, but unfortunately it never took off and will never be more than a niche market now.

From the available choices I'd definitely go for vinyl over the others in a perfect world, I do really prefer the sound (and experience as Ant mentions), but for convenience the choice has to be mp3. I'd love a huge house, with rooms full of vinyl and cds (and dvds/blurays), but the realities of my life dictate that will never happen, so I am currently putting all my cds on to an external hard drive (at 320 kbps), along with some choice vinyl to mp3 rips.

The actual sound quality may not be as good as CD or mp3...

It may not be sometimes, but vinyl certainly has the ability to be better than both. A well mastered vinyl, on a good quality pressing, will I'm sure sound better than cd because of compression. As Lissa mentions though, many people will find it difficult to notice a difference.

[Awesome Wells]

To paraphrase old what's-his-name: "It's what's in the grooves/metal tape/digital encoding that counts..."

I wanted to put cassettes, because the principal source of music in my all-important adolescent years was the cassalbum, the cassingle and the copied-from-somebody-else's-copy-or-from-the-one-borrowed-from-the-library C90. But I never listen to any of my tapes anymore, even though I still have them all, because I've spent the last decade or so duplicating their contents in digital form. I still haven't quite managed it... if anybody has a CD or mp3 of Great Northern Electrics' "Sunday's Child" or "Konspiracy" by Candy Flip, please get in touch.

So cassettes are out - what about vinyl? Well, I've got a stack of albums and 7" and 12" singles, and my housemate is a vinyl aficienado - I can see a huge collection of sixties, seventies and eighties LPs from where I'm sitting - so I can't claim I never listen to them. But I never went through a vinyl phase; not really. My albums (and particularly my singles) may have reached parity with my tapes, but they never superseded them. So if I can't call it for them, I can't call it for the records, either.

That leaves us in the realms of digital music; and specifically, the CD, because everything I have as an mp3 (on my iPod, for example, and my phone) I also have on CD. Everything I've ever downloaded, I've burned to CD. If I was to make mp3 copies of them all, it would take years. If I were to back up all my other CDs as well, it would take decades. So much as I like mp3s (I particularly love the anal retentive's joy of making sure the sleeve artwork is right, particularly on home-made compilations), I can't really claim them as my favourite.

So it must be CDs, right? I have almost everything I own on the other three formats on CD, for one thing; and I'm still buying CDs, twenty years after I was given what was still just-about known at the time as a ghetto-blaster. I was also given a chance to go and buy a CD to go with it; and I chose the first (and, as it later became clear, only) album by the La's. I still have that CD now, and despite warnings that compact discs would wither and decay, it still plays as well as it did in 1990. It's not looking as sharp and shiny and spangly as the new Manic Street Preachers album (my latest CD purchase) but it's still going strong.

However, I can't say CDs are my favourite, either. I'm more precious about them than I used to be (back in my youth, when I was skint, I sold several, including New Order's "Low Life" and Jane's Addictions "Ritual De La Habitual", at my local Chain-With-No-Name store for money) but it's the music on them that I love, not the actual silver discs themselves. I like their physical existence, sure - if I didn't like that, I'd have converted to mp3 and shoved them all in the loft like so many other people have - but they could quite easily be tapes; or records; or minidiscs or SACDs if they'd caught on.

So, after waffling on for quite a long time, I'm admitting that I'm not voting for any of them, and merely misquoting the misquote at the beginning: it's the music that counts for me, not the disc or tape or hard drive it's on. The format is the medium, not the message; and medium doesn't cut it when (cliché alert!) you want to have it large.

[Rob McCow]

I've got a lot of nostalgia for the cast-ette tapes of my youth. The pleasure of putting together a compilation in real time and pressing / depressing the chunky record button is something I'll never forget.

Because it took so bloody long!