I listened to Max & Match by Loona Odd Eye Circle tonight, a 2017 K-pop album. Now, I’m not familiar with K-pop in the slightest, mostly due to finding the whole inflated suicide rates and extreme fakeness a bit distasteful. I do listen to other music from that part of the world but it’s usually the more alt stuff like Mid Air Thief. After seeing how much buzz this album has though, bizarrely 4 years after release, I thought I’d give it a go. It’s honestly a really good album, catchy with some great hooks. I can see why it’s built up a following. I’d definitely recommend it if anyone enjoyed the pop wave last year from people like Charli XCX, Jessie Ware and the like.
Interesting talk on music consumption. I don’t buy CDs very often anymore; it’s the occasional bit of vinyl but mostly digital (majority via bandcamp).
Bandcamp is good as more money seems to go to the artist. The one thing with only buying that way is that I like to support good independent music shops like Banquet and Drift Records so buy from them when I can.
I do feel a little bad reading their new release emails and then buying it digitally though..
As others have said, CDs feel silly now as I only open them once to burn onto iTunes and then they just go on the shelf. My planet saving self is also aware that it’s quite a lot of plastic and other stuff which is pretty unnecessary if it’s only going to end up on a shelf to gather dust.
@nessisonett Oh man, I don't know the first thing about K-pop except this:
There's a venue in my city that's the main place for larger and medium-sized metal shows (2k capacity) and they've been also doing occasional K-pop shows in the last few years (except 2020-21, understandably).
They always sell out instantly even if some have Rolling Stones level ticket prices. Then a big chunk of the audience (which is mostly teenage girls) show up at the venue 12 hours early and practice choreography in the parking lot all day.
The shows itself are lip-synced dance routines with a pretty light show (I know the crew at the venue so I can 100% confirm it's lip-synced). It's like an alternate reality and it's wild
@Voltan Now that we've discussed Emerson, Lake & Palmer, how do you feel about Emerson, Lake & Powell? Are they similar? I would expect them to be. Would you recommend them?
"Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation." - Alasdair Gray
@TheBrandedSwordsman Emerson Lake & Powell was kind of an answer to Asia, which Carl Palmer went on to form with Steve Howe (Yes), John Wetton (King Crimson) and Geoff Downes.
The music is much simpler, radio friendly, but still very good!
I have the album on vinyl and I like it a lot. I sometimes joke that it's my favorite Asia album
At the moment, I rotate five albums on my phone every week with ones I haven’t listened to in at least 12 months. If I don’t particularly like it anymore then I delete it off my laptop. Most of these older albums I probably have on CD anyway if I really wanted to listen again but it’s one way of not storing an endless amount of music.
@TheBrandedSwordsman That's a tough question actually, I have no idea. All the ones from the 80s are good ("Asia", "Alpha" and "Astra"), but the one's they recorded after the classic line-up's reunion ("Phoenix", "Omega" and "XXX") are really good too.
To respond to an earlier "discussion". I have a pretty good cd player, record player and streaming device. They're all connected to my amp.
CDs and vinyl (when in good state) sound exactly the same to me. I'd say there's something going on within your setup if vinyl sounds different - not the medium itself.
Spotify, or other streaming services, do have a different, of course worse because compressed, sound.
(Also, most vinyls of modern day music are mastered digitally anyway.)
I love vinyl. From a technical and tactile viewpoint, also aesthetic. But I'm not going to pretend it sounds better of so different from cd, because it doesn't.
And I'd much prefer cd quality over Spotify. @nessisonett I think you're just plain wrong
@Kidfried Yes, they are mastered digitally but the medium's limitations force some differences in the process. Fortunately loudness wars have been less prevalent lately than they used to be - but it was never a thing of vinyl because using a limiter that aggressively could cause tracking problems. Also recordings are often made and mixed at higher sample rates than what makes it to a CD (44.1 KHz, meaning you can't have any harmonics higher than 22.05 KHz). You can have a wider range of frequencies on vinyl. Now I'm not going to pretend I can hear the difference in that regard myself, but it is a fact Mastering for streaming, while more similar to what's done for CD, is also often different - because it can account for compression algorithms and streaming platform's volume normalisation.
Secondly - there are more elements in the vinyl signal chain that affect the sound than in a digital one. A different stylus, cartridge (which is like an electric guitar's pickup), the phono stage pre-amplifier, even a different setting of the tracking force - they all affect how music on vinyl sounds, even if they are very subtle changes. So I'm not saying it's always a big difference or that it's always better on vinyl but no, a difference doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the signal chain.
And finally - the difference between CDs recorded in the 80s and their analog counterparts is in fact HUGE In the early 90s though, when vinyl was already in decline (soon to be dropped almost entirely for years), it's actually often the CDs that sound better (I could get into some possible reasons too ).
@TheBrandedSwordsman I'm not very familiar with his other work. I'll have to do my homework.
@Kidfried Eh, connecting my CD player to the same speakers as Spotify, I can’t hear much of a difference. Granted, I have a fairly old CD player and I use Spotify’s Extreme sound quality. Connecting my turntable and putting on a record from the pre-digital age though, there’s a clear difference. But then, I like the imperfections you get from vintage media. I have cassettes from the 70s and 80s that are slightly degraded but for certain genres that can be almost welcome. Especially some of my underground hip-hop and punk tapes. There are absolutely different sound profiles you get from different set-ups and mediums, but only if that album is properly mastered. If you’re only buying new vinyl which is mastered from CD-quality compressed files then of course it won’t sound any different. However, if you’re buying vinyl which uses uncompressed audio designed for vinyl then it’ll sound different.
@Voltan I probably should have emphasised ‘new’ as in meaning a particular brand of ‘new’. At least in certain shops in the UK, there’s a new trend of records going for £25-£30 of artists like Harry Styles or Billie Eilish with utterly rubbish mixing. I struggle to find a word to describe that trend. Suggestions are welcome.
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