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Nostalgia for Physical Media

While I have access to streaming services that offer most of the music that the labels the services deal with still publish, I also have a significant collection of music on physical media, and do most of my listening to prerecorded music by playing entire albums, in order, from a physical format. I recently shared a not-entirely-serious overview of the nostalgia for physical prerecorded audio formats with some friends, and here’s the annotated version.

HDCD, SACD, DVD-Audio, and HFPA Blu-ray may all be “better” on the spec sheet, but unless you’re sitting in the centre of a perfectly set up room listening to something that was mastered at very high fidelity, and are young enough that your ears can physically react to the higher frequencies, none of that matters. Often this doesn’t lead to any observable quality degradation, but later players and recorders supported the MD-LP format which used more aggressive compression to achieve higher run times, and you can sometimes hear that like listening to a 2000s-era MP3 file. There’s a sounds-too-good-to-be-true story that MD and DCC were demoed at the same event, and that while playback sounded great from both formats, there was an awkward silence punctuated only by the giggles of journalists when the Philips rep switched to a different track which involved fast-winding the tape.

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