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I occasionally find myself at flea markets, often browsing just to see what interesting things people are selling. These days, electronics and related items make frequent appearances, including all manner of media-related items. Vinyl is, as you might expect, quite popular, due to its resurgence. DVDs are also readily available. VHS tapes, on the other hand, I've noticed are decidely less common, a trend I've noticed month after month for over a year now. I sometimes wonder why this is. Is it because everyone already got rid of their VHS tapes? Or everyone that still has any is holding onto them?
DVD is objectively a superior format to VHS in many ways, the quality being one. Notwithstanding that, I happen to like the VHS format, if for nothing else, because it's analog. See, physical analog media has an intrinsic value to it that physical digital media simply doesn't (or has less of, if it does). Analog media can't be easily and exactly duplicated the way digital media can. You can easily rip a CD or DVD, and then use the ripped copy thereafter — assuming you use the proper settings for a lossless rip — it's the exact same bits, after all. You can even burn additional copies of the CD or DVD fairly easily. The optical drive in your computer is the only equipment required.
Analog media is far more complicated. Yes, it's possible to duplicate tapes, but this is an inherently lossy process, which results in more and more degradation as more and more copies are made, the same way NTP can become less accurate as you move away from Stratum 0. Doing this kind of duplication requires equipment to read from a tape and simultaneously write it to another tape, which most low-end consumer A/V equipment obviously won't support. The barrier to entry, so to speak, is much higher.
Combine that with the usefulness of the media itself. After ripping a CD or DVD to, say, a file share on a network, one can easily play back any song or video file with just a few clicks. And because it's exactly the same audio or video that was stored on the DVD, you can more or less have the same experience consuming the copy of it. (I'll note here that I'm comparing physical analog media to physical digital discs, not digital copies that may be stored on hard disks or other file storage.)
Analog media, on the other, can't just be ripped to a file share in a way that allows you to consume it the same way you would the original tape. It can be digitized, certainly, but the digital copy is not the same thing as the original analog media. I can start playing a tape, stop halfway through and turn the player off, and come back days later and resume exactly where I left off. The analog media is stateful, because playing it involves physically moving the media. Digital media is also physical, technically (optical drives seek over the grooves in the disc), but the media itself is stateless — without the player itself having a mechanism to store state information, you're back at the beginning the next time you start playing.
Not everyone may appreciate the utility of being able to do this, but there are little things like these that make it worthwhile to have and consume analog media, even if the quality is objectively worse in many respects. If I've ripped a DVD and happen to later misplace or break the DVD, it's not the end of the world. I can literally create an exact replica later, even I even want another physical disc at all. But if I misplace the VHS tape — well, I'm going to feel that loss much more, because the only way to be able to consume that content exactly the same way again is going to be to get the same title on VHS again, which, particularly these days, is far less trivial.
There's also the fragility of optical media in general. I've broken many CDs in my lifetime, but I can't really recall any occasion where I've completely ruined a VHS tape. This despite not being particularly careful with tapes, and handling CDs and DVDs like explosives that might go off if disturbed.
So for these reasons, even though I don't watch everything on VHS, it's something that I appreciate and value and gladly let take up space at home. Its physicality is useful in a way that allows me to consume it a certain way. In contrast, I just don't get that excited about DVDs, given that I have digital copies that behave exactly the way the physical disc does.
I'll grant that DVDs and CDs often have nice cover art which gives them an aesthetic that playing a file off the network doesn't have, but analog media often have nicer aesthetics at that (for starters, just look at the artwork on any record album), and to me, that alone isn't enough to compensate for the other "deficiencies" of physical digital media.
Over the years, I've shared this perspective with other folks who don't really seem to get my argument. "Digital is objectively superior", they'll say. "VHS is an objectively worse format." But in making this argument, I'm not actually talking about quality at all, by any metric. I'm referring simply to the physicality of the media, and the inherent value that a physical copy of the media provides. With analog media, there's inherent value. You need the physical thing to play it back! But with digital media, you don't need a physical disc to consume digital media. I suppose at one point, you really did — if you go back to the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, before computers were commonplace in media systems. But for most people today, CDs and DVDs are not the most convenient or preferred way to play digital content, and that's true because discs are just one method of playback now. To play analog media, you need the media — it's really just as simple as that. This gives analog media an inherent intrinsic value that physical digital media simply doesn't have.
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