The Old World (Part 1)

Absent a stunning reversal, Sony will begin phasing out discs for their PlayStation consoles in a few years. The trend towards digital purchases, which bring undeniable convenience alongside undeniable profit margins for companies, has felt inevitable. Most of us probably buy our movies, music, and video games this way, taking the realm of the physical for granted. Still, it feels crappy for it to go away!

You can make arguments for physical formats being superior in one way or another, depending on the medium you're talking about. Even then, it might depend on the literal format you're talking about. Preferences are a rabbit hole, strongly held but loosely justified.

But is there anything wrong with that?

Is vinyl the superior format, or simply your preferred one? Do you have a wall full of discs because you use them, or is it cool to hand a friend a movie you enjoy, so they can puzzle over it?

You would not be shocked to learn Patrick and Rob have many thoughts on this, which is why this letter series has spilled out into a two-parter. You'll get the other half of this conversation later this weekend.

Patrick: I don’t remember when I started collecting horror movies. I was always doing it and never doing it. Enough times, I said “hey, I would be neat to own this,” largely driven by special features, and it became clear that I’d only been rationalizing that for horror movies. Thus, the large stack of now-overflowing discs that adorns the right side of my television, a stack that I’ve put a temporary pause on until we figure out a new situation for the family room, was born. 

There’s no official count, but it’s enough that at least four or five times I’ve bought a movie twice. The number is in the several hundreds. Multiple box sets. Mostly Blu-rays. Some 4Ks. Only steel books when I’ve been forced to buy them without another option. Full price? Never. Which is why those discs end up getting tossed in the direction of my friend, who I’m not even sure owns a device capable of playing them. They, like me, are fine with a shelf becoming a library.

Part of the reason I’m bummed about Sony dropping support for discs, which heralds the rest of the industry eventually dropping support, is others are being robbed of falling into a similar rabbit hole with games. I don’t collect games because games are such a big part of my life that to be reminded of games by looking over my shoulder would be, I think, a tad overwhelming.

(My one exception would be for PC game boxes. Those hulking motherfuckers are so cool. I spotted a used BioForge that was north of $50 locally and the only reason I didn’t impulse buy it was because my kids were with me and I would have had to buy something for them, too.)

Of course, you’re more of a PC person than me. PCs abandoned the disc ages ago. I’m sure it’s cool to collect old games on old storage formats, but you don’t see PC players lamenting it the same way. Perhaps console video games will head down the same path. What you put on a hard drive, how the emulator cares for running the game, will mean more than that old disc.

Still, you started collecting vinyl. You can tell me it’s because the audio sounds nicer, and maybe I half believe you, but what is it about vinyl that makes you want to physically represent music?

Rob: Initially? Nothing. There are no magical formats, there are magical sources. The metrics about the audible frequency response a format can reproduce, or how fast its sample rate can get, simply describe capabilities in a laboratory vacuum. A significantly compressed MP3 rip of an amazing CD is going to blow the doors off a super high-fidelity lossless file of a bad remaster. And unfortunately, a lot of albums that have been remastered or produced in the streaming era have been engineered with earbuds and car stereos in mind, meaning they can't get quiet or people start riding the volume controls and then get their ears blown out when the music gets loud again. 

When people say a mix lacks dynamic range, this is what they mean: volume level doesn't change even if the music is crescendoing or the movie you're watching just exploded into a massive action sequence. A sound meter will show you that it is almost exactly as loud as it was in those huge moments as it was in the ones that are obviously supposed to be quieter.

The reason I finally gave vinyl a shot after years of not rolling my eyes at arguments that a format with such obvious, measurable limitations was somehow better? I listened to a streaming version of The Walkmen’s Bows + Arrows, one of the albums that defined my college years and early years with MK. It's one of our favorites and we'd just gotten an absolutely sick new amplifier and we were excited to hear how it sounded.

And buddy, it sounded like shit.