Vinyl LP record? Yes PLEEEASE! :D

I hear mentioned a theoretical vinyl LP for the PA soundtrack. I'd gladly pay 50 USD for it plus shipping.

I even bought the Bioshock 2 Collectors for the LP record it had. I haven't even unwrapped the game box. >_>

Just putting it out there if you guys seriously consider it.

I wondered how long it would take for this to come up ha ha

I would by Vinyl Soundtrack!

YESSSSSS, I am a vinyl collector. I love that vintage sound! Great idea Howard! Although I wont be disappointed if you all are unable to fulfill such a release.

Wouldn't be the first time I bought something like this. I bought the Shatter soundtrack when it came out on vinyl, and I don't even have a record player!

Actually that's not true. I got it as a Christmas present, but I was going to buy it anyway.

Yeah it'd be neat to hang on my wall or give to an older relative who can play those things. But in the dark future I don't even have a cd player anymore (that's not part of a computer tower), let alone something that can play records.

I'd buy it, also.

I for one don't see the point of having a record. I mean, it can't be played in the car or put on an MP3 player, so what're you going to do, sit in your living room and listen to it?
A CD, like every other game nowadays, would be better, and straight up digital download would be far superior.
If you want a record, well, the 60's called, dunno what they wanted, didn't leave a message.

Some people like that analog sound rather than the digital sound

Yeah, I never understood the draw people had to vinyl, and there are even arguments about how all the purported advantages you gain from listening to vinyl are overwhelmed by the disadvantages when compared to digital.
However, I do think it would be very awesome to provide a vinyl release of the PA soundtrack for those who do want it, especially after all the effort going into making it.

As a side note, on the other end of the spectrum are those who argue that 192kHz/24bit audio is the best way to go, and I was one of them. However, this fascinating article has nearly convinced me that perhaps 48/16 is the better choice.

So many points of contention when it comes to audio quality . . .

In general, the benefit of vinyl is that it is an analog medium. This means that sounds provided through vinyl are a richer quality compared to mp3/digital where sampling of the music has taken place. Sampling can be considered as a form of compression, as it approximates the music.

I don't own vinyl myself, but I have spoken to people who have.

Lately all music i save on HDD is in uncompressed .wav.

On topic i would find it awesome if uber makes a LP out of the Soundtrack. But i cant promise to buy it at least for me. Maybe for someone else as a present

As much as I like Vinvyl, I would rather have a FLAC or WAV at the bitdepth/frequency it was recorded/rendered. It'll be huge, but that's the closest you can get to the source. And then, there's dust.

Yes I have a room where I sit and listen to vinyl and do nothing else. It is a nice time for me.

I could also give you a nice list of reasons why vinyl is discernibly better than CD for playback on a nice set of speakers/headphones.

Well, no.

I mean, originally, when CDs were first released they probably had an inferior quality to LPs, which were at that point a mature technology. The same thing with transistor amplifiers vs. tubes.

But today, CDs are basically indistinguishable from vinyl. Digital sound has caught up to analogue. MP3 rips are better now as well because the people writing the algorithms understand more about how and what audio data they can throw away while maintaining high sound quality.

I would bet dollars to cents that a proper double-blind testing regime will find no difference between modern analogue or digital music formats. The cognitive biases of analogue afficiandos are provably wrong on this count.

Exactly. Also, take a look at the article I linked. There's a part of it where it goes into the mathematics of digitizing audio and how it compares to analog, and it turns out that not only is digitized audio as good as analog, it's often better. And people also tend to forget that there's a certain limit to how accurate an analog recording in vinyl can be.

It's much like how standard negative-based photography is limited by the grain of the medium, meaning that there's a certain point where digital photos have a higher resolution than even the highest quality negative-based photographs.

As for the file format, FLAC tends to be ideal, as it employs lossless compression (don't waste space with uncompressed wav files), is an open standard, and has a lot of excellent features (5.1/7.1 surround, 192/24 quality, etc).

In the end it's a collectors thing, people are allowed to collect anything.

for me personally, neither my ears nor my hifi is good enough to tell the difference between LP and CD (given good recordings on both parts); so it doesn't matter.

Vinyl vs. digital audio (CD), transistor vs tube, they're all a matter of preference more than anything else.

Vinyl, as an analog format, is theoretically capable of storing higher fidelity sound. CD audio has lower fidelity, but is overall capable of being more accurate to the original source. Even if vinyl is capable of storing higher fidelity, it's not capable of playing back that audio at as high fidelity as digital because of physical limitations of a needle bouncing across a surface, and usually concessions have to be made to the audio quality to deal with the realities of cutting groves in to a solid medium further reducing the theoretical stored fidelity. More over, pretty much every vinyl album made in the last decade probably came from the same digital master as its cd counterpart, or perhaps even just the cd itself.

Recent blind tests show people more frequently choose low quality MP3 as the one that sound "best" compared to other options. It's the sound people are now familiar with even though a low rate MP3 is qualitatively less accurate than pretty much every possible option.
There are a couple of sites out there that let you take similar tests; it'll play an audio track recorded in different formats / compression rates and ask which one sounds "best". The results might be surprising to you.


As someone who grew up listening to vinyl, cassette tapes and cds, I would contend that vinyl and cd sound very different. As for what sounds "best" I have a personal fondness for holiday albums on vinyl, but it has nothing to do with them sounding better, it's just what I grew up listening to.

Oh, vynil... Last time we needed to by a replacement needle into the player they had to order it and it was for like 20€ or so (the order was like from 2000 or so).

The problem in the end may not be getting the vynil LP but something that can actualy play it .

I actualy offered my mother to convert her vynil library to MP3, OGG, FLAC or whatever but we never got to it...

This is a classic "I'M MAKING NO PROMISES" post.. But i have started to investigate what the costs of printing up a few hundred vinyl's would cost to make, prep and ship.

At some point, I'll have to put a survey up somewhere about what format people would like, probably wider scale than the forums. Just like the game, digital distribution will be our principle distribution method, but doesn't mean we won't look into alternatives if there's lots of demand.

At any rate, if we decide it's something we'd consider making available on our store, I'll post a link to the survey. At a bare minimum, for any given format, we'd need at least 500+ of any type of physical medium to make it worth the amount of effort and remastering involved, and possibly more than that. It's a fairly work intensive process. Printing the actual vinyl is probably the easiest part. ;-)