Cyberstrike nTo wrote:If you look after one it will last and if you don't look after another it won't
Brief flirting with having an opinion followed by the usual veer into slow handclap territory. Keep firing that neuron, champ! You'll get there!
Jewel cases are shit - three brittle pieces of plastic; breaking one makes it look awful. A simple plastic bag however protects a record just fine.
Denyer wrote:Eh, in twenty years and buying second-hand CDs in volume, I've run into the problem in low double digits.
Bit of a dicier hit rate here, though in fairness I take better care of records.
Work in a player, not necessarily, but given reasonable optical drives it takes a bit of effort to destroy the things to the point they can't be read and as high a quality as was originally put on them obtained.
Which surely just makes them data discs? I'm all for digital music but MP3 players, decent-sized computer hard-drives, all music being free now and all that jazz effectively makes CDs just expensive and inefficient to my mind; they're too shit to be a physical manifestation of favourite music and not useful enough to be convenient (remember balancing your personal CD player on public transport like some sort of robot waiter?).
There was some fun stuff with CD packaging and gimmicks as well. The Wildhearts did a lot of it -- printed images in the same colour as the case, lenticular, fake money, textured sleeves, grass mat for you to water, one of the promos had a miniature pump...
Coloured vinyl, picture discs, gatefolds, diecuts, scented lyric sheets, art that isn't the size of a coaster (seriously, take any great album cover; shrink it by 75% - improvement?), looped playouts...
Big pluses of vinyl for me:
- Gigantic artwork. If I'm buying an album so it's a physical representation of said album it needs to be worth buying.
- No bonus tracks. If it was good enough to be on the album it would be on the album.
- My record player is louder than guns.
- Really easy to see whether a record's going to work or not. Records either work or don't work the same way on whatever record player.
- You can't skip tracks. You want to skip tracks? Get an MP3 player or like better music, because you're doing albums wrong either way.
- Don't come in jewel cases.
- Booklets that can be removed without the edges being destroyed by those stupid little stubs to stop them falling out of the badly designed cases