I spent half my life collecting vinyl with greater and greater discernment for only the most exceptional titles I could find. But of late I've developed a renewed appreciation and preference for lossless digital content, advert-free from my personal media server. Particularly for my long-form ambient listening, investing in quality headphones and playing FLAC produces a better listening experience - zero noise floor, no getting up to flip sides every 20 minutes, (all the more important for 8-hour drone sessions), and I can enjoy hundreds of thousands of recordings from my personal library absolutely anywhere I go. I still make time for dedicated, focused listening sessions which parallels the interactive experience of vinyl, but without all the cost and hassle of lugging thousands of LPs around.
I understand that a properly-mastered lossless FLAC file enjoyed in a quality pair of circumaural cans with a decent DAC is just as good as spending thousands of dollars for an analog-mastered vinyl pressing on a higher-end table with an expensive cartridge, pre- and power amplifiers, decent interconnects, and high-end floor speakers. This is demonstrably true for the vast majority of comparisons between FLAC and LP. Greater convenience at a fraction of the cost.
But no one expressed the phenomenon everyone is describing here about imperfections more effectively or succinctly than Brian Eno in his published diary,
A Year With Swollen Appendices. This remains one of my favorite quotes about music and the format wars.
Eno brilliantly said:
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
