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I will happily pay the absurd modern prices for vinyl if I know for a fact there is a digital download card inside. Record companies need to put a fucking sticker on albums to let us know this because not getting one feels like an actual scam.
Also pretty much everything is digitally mastered anyway so if anyone judges you ask them if they own ANY analog albums
Wasn't there even an "all analog" label in the US that claimed to use a fully analog pipeline in their process. People were saying it sounds so much better than the digital garbage we have, until somebody found out they were secretly using digital sources in their process and now the company got sued.
For all the recording nerds out there I highly recommend the book "Perfecting Sound Forever" by Greg Milner, which offers really good insights from both sides of the analog/digital debacle.
Yeah, Mobile Fidelity
https://www.audioholics.com/audio-technologies/mobile-fidelity-scandal
Yeah. And even when I'm deeply in the all digital FLAC camp over here, I truly understand the frustration people had with digital audio. The biggest reason for that was the radio wars of the 90's, where every station wanted to be louder than the others to get better reviews and more listeners. And this pushed the studios to use all the headroom and compress their productions so even the CDs were already as loud as possible. This trend took over a decade, and kind of made music lovers think that vinyl sounds better than any digital audio. The early D/A converters were also kind of bad, so the early sound of a CD was not as good as vinyl was.
Nowadays we have the streaming services already normalizing all the tracks, so the mastering doesn't have to be loud anymore. Actually even these 90's and early 2000's masters sound really bad when you normalize the audio. And whatever sound card you have in your phone or computer has a pretty good D/A converter, so today digital definitely can and will sound better than the vinyl. Of course vinyl has better aesthetics with the beautiful cover art, so it is nice to own if you have space.
Edit: for analog, reel-to-reel tape sounds absolutely amazing. Too bad it's really hard to source any albums in this format.
VHS Hi-Fi is the best quality analog audio format, it's so good you may as well use a CD for the marginal gains.
When people talk about analog they are almost certainly talking about the noise floor that isn't present in digital, I believe reel to reel is equivalent to 8 bit audio depth. that's what the tape hiss is all about .
We used to record radio programs to VHS back in the days. Again, one medium really hard to source original content in...
Some have something like a sticker saying there's a digital download on them.
If there's not.. I put on my pirate hat
to be fair I don't buy a lot, mostly because of the price, but I've never seen a digital card advertised. it's always just been a nice surprise in something I was buying anyway. so I'm saying I'd buy more if it was a standard practice or advertised better.
I think Bandcamp gives you this for all vinyl purchases.