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Analog Revival Means Vinyl Will Outlive CD
An anonymous reader writes "In the age of the iPod, an unlikely revival is taking place — kids are turning to 7" vinyl to get their kicks. Sales of 7" singles are apparently through the roof. Bands like the White Stripes are releasing thousands of new singles on the format, and record purchases have risen by over a million units in the last year — back to 1998 levels. NME told CNET: "it's very possible that the CD might become obsolete in an age of download music but the vinyl record will survive,". The article explains how indie kids are drawn to vinyl because "the tactile joy of owning a physical object that represents your attachment to a band is infinitely more enjoyable than entering a credit card number into iTunes.""
The stupidity of consumers is directly proportional to the perceived cool factor of the product.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
One thing I've missed with CDs is the smaller form factor has led to less inspired covers. Less Detail. Fewer painted covers. It's an art that faded away without nearly enough notice. Replacing cover art is most cases are vanity portraits of the artist or band, with poor photoshop work to tie into a marketing theme.
If vinyl makes a comeback, I hope new talent following the footsteop of Roger Dean take up this opportunity.
I guess the one thing that never goes out of style is blinding stupidity.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Vinyl has already outlived 8-tracks and cassettes. Why is it surprising that it will outlive CD?
Their opinions will change the momment they want to move out of their parent's house and have to carry boxes of vinyl up any number of flights of stairs.
Thinking about that again -- that's a stupid question. We have an Internet nowadays...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Vinyl never really went anywhere. I'd been buying vinyl for the last 15 years. It's always been popular for the "underground" (how I hate that word) music culture. The only reason this is getting play at all is because the White Stripes, a former "underground" indie band, has hit it big and is just doing something that's always been done but is now in the public eye. No news here at all.
"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability."-Oscar Wilde
mod parent up!
saying vinyl is 'dead' is like saying apple is 'dead'. just because it has a smaller market share limited to fanatics and afficianadoes instead of the top-40 masses doesn't mean vinyl ever went anywhere.
here's news for all you computer geeks: there are music geeks too, and they think pretty much the same way. just think of 7" records as the audiophile version of the command line.
2 1337 4 u!
Wait a minute. The fact that vinyl has many disadvantages does not imply that it is a completely inferior format. Problem is, a lot of "audiophile" airheads have no idea what they're talking about because they don't understand anything except "I paid $2000 for this turntable, therefore it must be better". Subsonics is a big point for me. If you have a decent setup or truly high quality headphones this does not go unnoticed and gives a certain atmosphere to records which I have not, to date, been able to reproduce with CDs. This is notable in the Dark Side of the Moon LP, as well as any jazz record with contrabass. And while people go all around claiming that a vinyl record is unable to reproduce many shapes of frequencies, the PCM encoding used in CDs is unable to either (neither can reproduce a square or sawtooth wave), so we can call it a toss-up. What matters most to me is the fact that the mastering of the time of vinyl is of much, MUCH higher quality than today's. Despite the higher noise floor of the vinyl medium, audio engineers of today feel the need to compress an entire album to a range of a only a fraction of the potential of PCM. My god, there's CLIPPING in modern records, for God's sake. The loudness war on CDs is taking a toll on the quality of modern music. That being said, there is absolutely no reason for vinyl to come back. While it is my perception (this cannot be objectively measured) that vinyl sounds more pleasing to the ears, it is too much of a hassle to maintain it in a proper condition, and the inevitable degradation of the medium and the scratching make it too inconvenient, not to mention that if the mastering of a record is done digitally, the analog conversion loses any advantage it might have had. Conclusion: records from before the use of digital mastering == good. After that == waste of your time and money.