I felt this video was far more about the compilation that the medium, though the medium was important.

It's the same message that Adele recently gave by demanding that Spotify make their default setting to not shuffle; That her album was a compilation of songs intended to be played together in the order she'd put them.

I have an album from a couple or so decades back by Savourna Stevenson (Celtic harp), called "Tweed Journey" and it's a collection of instrumental pieces reflecting a walk along the river Tweed from its source (in Scotland) to the sea. Each piece stands alone, but the sounds evoke that journey, from the stream in the hills, down through the villages, forest and towns. To listen to one piece is to miss a large part of the point of the album. It's similarly true of many other albums.

I despair the accelerating trend towards shorter and shorter attention spans, which seems to me self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling. I find it deeply frustrating and more than a little troubling.


On sound quality, cassette and 8-track were always poor, no matter how good the machine and the tape. 3-3/4 ips open-reel was rarely much better.

Vinyl & CDs were capable of good quality, but the former needed fiercely costly cutting machines, turntable, arm, cartridge and stylus, together with good RIAA equalisation throughout. The latter didn't really become comfortable until ADCs and DACs were well sorted and able to oversample both for record and playback. With CDs it was never that much about the data itself, it was far more the limitations of the filtering used at both ends. It's infeasible to filter and then sample at 44.1kHz or 48kHz and avoid passband ripple, ringing, upper-sideband and phase-shift. It only really cleaned up when things were routinely sampled at 96kHz or 192kHz or higher and then resampled intelligently to or from the 44.1kHz or 48kHz. Even quite low-cost DACs do that now.

"Notes" observation that vinyl and tubes introduce distortions that are "pleasing to the ears" is quite right and a well documented phenomenon. Gentle second-harmonic distortion adds warmth and richness to the sound. Whether or not is should is left to the discretion of the reader :-)

Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful.
AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11
BIAB2025 Audiophile, a bunch of other software.
Kawai MP6, Ui24R, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Scarletts
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