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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.""
Its all like a bad episode of Sliders.
...the wax cylinders on my Gramophone
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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.
You release albums as individual cartridges for portable players... it gives you a tactile "thing" with a label, contains mp3's in a generic format, is in a durable case .. can even contain games and whatnot. The ultimate packaging. I still have sega carts I can look at and remember the hours of fun playing Sonic, or Toe-Jam and Earl (panic on funkatron)...
Even better, you release "blanks" EPROMs that can be burned once (or maybe twice - in case of an error) to integrate with all the online purchasing. (print the label too)
meh
Hey, remember back in the '90s, when you thought vinyl was dead? Well, we're selling just as many now as we did then! Hoopla, Janet!
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
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
Funnypics
Vinyl has already outlived 8-tracks and cassettes. Why is it surprising that it will outlive CD?
A friend of mine was looking at a USB turntable just the other day. As he was discussing it with me, I was pondering the archival potential of CDs as compared to records. IMAO, I was thinking that vinyl would last longer than the pits in a 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.
there is an inexplicable feeling that comes from the ownership of a vinyl record, rather than a cd.
It's the smell.
(sniffs record) Sweet, sweet acetate...
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Vinyl is still huge in DJ/hip hop culture. Especially Jungle / DnB genres of electronic music. In the U.S. however, prices for vinyl imported from UK/EU have skyrocketed due to many reasons, primarily the Dollar's strength compared to the Pound or Euro which then push consumers to more wallet friendly downloads. At my vinyl buying peak, I would spend $60-100 per week for 5-9 tracks. Now I spend $25/week for 12-15 tracks at full .wav (~1411kbps) quality.
But vinyl won't die and with the latest download sites, independant labels have found a happy medium of producing less vinyl and offering their tracks online. Many labels are vinyl purists and haven't yet entered the digital realm. Some label owners whom I've talked with have had increased profits but most said it stays about the same margin-wise without as much overhead.
See? Those RIAA people should have known that people still want to buy and own their media. The fact that MP3s are out there and are being passed about liberally is irrelevant to the fact that people want to buy and own. The reason for MP3 sharing, in my opinion, is partly convenience and partly to address the problem of scarcity and availability.
It's also nice to hear that the indy crowd is growing in force. It is about the only way, shy of legislation, to put the power back into the hands of the artists.
You mean they're enjoying the concept of OWNING music they like. Dude.. You just can't do that, the music wants to be free!!! FREE I TELL YOU!!!..
Oh... um... wait... I just got a memo from the RIAA, they say that they had dinner with "Music" last night and after a few drinks Music agreed that it would much rather simply be rented.
Can we put something in vynil records that will make them dissolve after 30 or 60 days?
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
It seems to me that the return to records really reflects the lack of excitement of redbook audio CDs as well as the onslaught of silly new disc-based media.
It is possible people are harking back to the olden days when music they bought would actually play on their hi-fi. Redbook CDs are also flawless in this respect, but I suspect the average person on the street doesn't realise that DRM encumbered CDs aren't actually real CDs at all, and therefore the redbook CD format isn't actually to blame at all. (This is the reason I like the idea that Philips won't let any DRM encumbered CD have the official Compact Disc logo. Sadly, I doubt anyone actually looks for it.)
Maybe everyone has their own cutoff point of which was the last "good" format that they want to stick to.
- Vinyl has a higher noise floor than CD. even on the best players.
- Modern day vinyl quality is *abysmal*. thin and cheap.
- Trying to fit a modern-day album onto vinyl drastically compresses the grooves. Albums aren't 35 minutes anymore, they're commonly 40-50 minutes.
- Vinyl can't replicate certain sounds. Try an out-of-phase bass signal across both channels, the needle would pop out of the groove.
- Think vinyl has a more "natural" sound? Then you're wilfully ignorant of the drastic equalisation mashing that is necessary to embed music on a record - the bottom end has to be all but removed, which the player then puts back in. Think any player gets it right? Or indeed the same as any other player?
There are many reasons to like vinyl, sound quality is not one of them.
Oh please spare us the elitist "higher range" of sound nonsense. On a vinyl album, you hear artifacts and noise introduced in the recording and by the player. If you're really fond of noise overlayed over your music you should be able to find some suitable sound mixing software to add it in with your digital audio. Alternatively, you can capture directly from Vinyl at maximum bitrate without any noise filtering and all your "higher range" enhancements will automagically appear in your digital music (assuming you have a decent setup to record from analog). If artifacts enhance your listening experience, more power to you, but "beyond the range of human hearing" means "beyond the range of human hearing". The sample rate of a high bitrate encoding is not flattening any sounds that a vinyl album is carrying to your ear. Now, if you are comparing vinyl to MP3's that you are downloading, then you're comparing musty old apples to scratch and sniff oranges.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
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
This was attempted.
Back in the heady days of the late 1990s, I had one of the first MP3 players among my group of friends. It was a thing called the Pontis MPlayer3, and used MultiMediaCards for storage.
The two advertised methods for acquiring music were either ripping it on your computer and downloading it to the device (via a serial port -- oh, the pain), or buying albums on pre-flashed, read-only MultiMediaCards. I never saw any in stores, and the format seems to have gone the way of the dodo now, but at the time, Pontis and a few other manufacturers were pushing it hard.
You'd get the usual packaging and liner notes, but instead of a CD you'd just have the chip. It wasn't erasable, so unless you physically broke it, you'd have a backup forever. One of my friends who went to Germany actually bought some albums in this format, although what they were I can't tell you. I'm not sure about what DRM it had, if any; I think it must have been minimal, because the machine wasn't capable of playing back anything besides straight MP3 files. (Heck, it was picky enough about certain types of VBR joint-stereo encoding and ID3 tags.) Perhaps this contributed to the lack of titles I ever saw in the U.S.
I thought this was a neat concept; except that the player was a failure and MMC got nixed in favor of that abomination known as Secure Digital (which the Pontis wouldn't use), I think it could have had a future. As I recall, the format had some sort of cute-ish marketing name, but I can't find it now.
That was also the last time I decided to be an early adopter...
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
As someone who has about 600 7"s, I can completely understand the reasoning behind this (although it's a bit hard to explain). For one thing, a 7" can typically only hold 2-4 songs, which means that the band putting it out usually needs to ensure that the songs that are committed to vinyl are their better ones (this usually excludes major acts releasing 7" singles for the "cred" that comes with it). Also, they usually only cost about 3 or 4 bucks (it's gone up in recent years though), which means that it's a very small investment to make to find out about new bands. Finally, as others have mentioned, there's the tactile aspect to the whole thing. A 7" has a decent sized sleeve that can contain a fair bit of information. It can easily be a 7"x14" folded double-sided cardstock with tons of notes, scribbles, drawings, etc, and it can easily include any number of inserts. I really don't think the 7" is going anywhere among certain types of fans.
This guy's the limit!
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!
The statement "Vinyl has better audio quality" has to be qualified. Heavily. In most cases it is effectively not true, either because the audio equipment is too crap for you to tell the difference - or the record is worn and has lost fidelity. (If you own a record player (and Microphone/neeedle) that costs under $250: it's not High Fidelity.)
If you have audio equipment that cost more than $3000 (purchased in the last 5 years), AND you know how to balance your mm/mc arm, and you go to classical (perhaps Jazz) concerts so you know what the music sounds like, you can ignore this post.
Boring details below.
It is true that as a medium, a LP record (or even a 45) inherently has truer fidelity than a CD. However this means that the records have a truer version of the music than the CD. (Some qualifications, assumes that the origional recording is done in analogue, or at a higher sampling bitrate than a CD. Decent transfer process, etc...)
To go from "Records are better recordings of music than CDs" to "Vinyl has better audio Quality" in the sense of the statement made: (e.g. it sounds better) is a bit of a leap. This leap requires High Fidelity equipment.
High Fidelity Equipment means 1) Good Audio Equipment (Speakers & Amplifier), 1a) Including good isolation for the record player (vibration: Bad), 2) A Good record Player, 2b)A good Mic and (unworn) needle, 2c) Correct wieghting for the playback arm for the needle; 3) An unworn / undamaged record. Some people have this equipment (not many), and the ability to set it up (pay to have it setup) correctly. Most people do not have this equipment.
For example: You will *may* hear better sound from a $250+ Amp with $400+ Speakers and a $250 Turntable/mic. (I'm assuming that amps have gotten much better than they used to be. In any case, you will need a minimum of $1000 in sterio equipment to hear an difference from Vinyl to CD. (True, and fake, audiophiles will say I'm wrong: it costs more.)
The USB Record Player I have seen was about $90. This means you can play records, not in High Fidelity. You need to have High Fidelity to hear the difference between a CD and a Record. Using your computer to play music pretty much rules you out. And what the hell, Ipods have a tactile feel too.
So effectively, the origional post is wrong. Records have the same crap sound as CDs, in most cases. If you can hear the difference between a Record and a CD, probabily your record is damaged or your needle is. Either that or you have a ground loop on your mm/mc that you think sounds nice.
Bite me: I'm Jealous because I used to have a music system where I could hear the difference between a good LP and a good CD (Say DSOTM), now I don't
The problem with blind tests is that they are done with music people aren't familar with. Take a group of audiophiles and their favorite track and then perform the test, and they'll get it every time.
So does vinyl sound better? Well, better, worse, whatever, are opinions. But here is a fact: A well mastered vinyl pressing will ALWAYS have MORE of the original audio signal than any CD will. A CD samples the original analog signal, where as a record will contain nearly all of it (actually more, with artifacts and what not, but I'd rather have more than less, even if they are "flaws".)
When a track is mastered to a CD, it is sampled. This sampling process uses an algorithm to decide what frequencies are being played simotaenously and then decides which one the human ear has a harder time hearing. The frequency with the least chance of being heard (such as a high hat played over a strong bass line) will be squared out. In cases of extreme compression (low quality mp3), it's all but removed and all you get to hear is that annoying tinny sound you may be familar with when listening to 64k mp3s.
Yes, it's true that the human ear can not hear all frequencies at once well. But these sounds are put together not because we can hear them perfectly, but because they shape and compliment eachother. A mathmatical computer algorithm does not know or care about this and just removes what has a statistical probability to not be noticed. Well it is noticable.
Are you missing out on much by listening to a cd instead of vinyl? No, not really, it's not a huge loss and CDs sound pretty damn good to this audiophile. But vinyl will always have more of the original analog signal. So whether or not they sound better to X person, they still contain more "information than" CDs, Super Audio CDs, or any format on the horizon.
Can everyone tell the difference? No. Does everyone who can tell the difference care? No. Is vinyl convienent? Not compared to CDs or digital audio. Does convience have anything to do with sound quality? No, they are seperate attributes and should be argued seperately.
I may be mistaken, but I think he was talking about the "wicka-wicka-wicka-wicka" type of scratching, and not the "sskkrrreeeeaccccchhhh" kind of scratching.
This guy's the limit!
I've not seen those for years...and actually would like to get one to at some point, transfer a lot of my vinyl only stuff to digital.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
USB Turntable. Welcome to 2006.
"It's the warmth of vinyl, man! It's got a richer tone!" -- Trent Lane, Daria, "That Was Then, This Is Dumb."
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
This post is but one of dozens here in support of the "superior" sound quality of vinyl that are complete hogwash and reveal through their descriptions of digital recording that they have no technical knowledge.
... none. The sampling process simply requires that there be no content in the signal prior to sampling that is above 22KHz. There are precious few that can hear a signal this high in frequency and no studies that have demonstrated any perceived difference between music with or without frequencies above 20KHz filtered out ... as long as this filtering doesn't disturb the frequencies below 20KHz that one wants to keep. The best way to do this is to oversample the music by at least 2x, moving this filtering requirement to 44.1KHz, which is easily done in the analog domain without disturbing below-20KHz information. The rest of the filtering to remove the above-22KHz data and resample down to 44.1Ksamples/sec can be done in the digital domain. The result is flat frequency response and a noise floor of -96dB ... completely inaudible in most music (unless you turn the volume way up) and far better than with any vinyl.
... through a variety of intentional distortions required to suit the capabilities of a mechanical recording medium.
First of all, it's time to stop confusing a CD recording with a compressed, encoded recording. Compressing to too low a bit rate and/or with a poor algorithm will of course degrade sound quality. However, let's stick with the CD, since, like a vinyl album, it's also a physical object that one can own if one wants to.
A properly recorded CD can accurately reproduce the entire audible frequency range, from 20Hz to 20KHz with a completely flat response and with distortion that is far below detectability. No frequencies in this range are lost
On the other hand, the analog signal for a vinyl record goes through an intentional frequency and dynamic range distortion (i.e. intention dynamic range flattening to fit the capabilities of the medium, followed by an "undoing" of this process upon playback). The actual vinyl stampings are made from an original master, introducing further distortion. The stampings have an inherently higher noise floor compared with 16-bit/44.1KHz digital recordings and, in addition, are subject to artifacts from any dust or defects that might be present in the grooves. The grooves degrade further with each playing, too. Plus, there's the issue of wow and flutter from difficulty in controlling the rotation of the platter accurately.
Any preference for vinyl stems strictly from either comparing a poor CD recording to a great vinyl one, to preconceived notions that influence opinion, to nostalgia or to an actual preference for the types of distortion that vinyl produces. In the latter case, the vinyl sound can be completely simulated by intentionally applying the same distortions to CD output. As one poster mentioned, you could play back the signal from a vinyl album being played on a quality, high-end turntable and record it digitally onto a CD. The result would replicate all the effects that the vinyl lover formerly attributed to some superiority in the medium.
Here's an excerpt from the recording submission instructions of a commercial vinyl album-cutting facility that can be found online:
"As such, cutting a loud dynamic record presents many challenges not typical to the conventional recording and mixing process. Trutone's mastering engineers enjoy decades of experience specific to the analog format. This expertise facilitated by their use of our classic, vintage analog tube compressors, limiters and equalizers, afford our engineers the ability to provide all final EQ and level adjustments as your music is being transferred to the analog master. The result? A rich warm sound that transcends the digital phenomena, indicative of why vinyl remains the medium of choice for promoting and marketing music."
It's amazing that they make this last statement given that they practically tell you why and how they get this sound
David
Indie used to be independant record labels, now it means you wear tight jeans, vintage clotes and have a mod haircut, whilst listening to sh*t like the jam, arctic monkeys, razorlite, the rakes, the paddingtons, the kooks and a variety of other sh*t.
Nope, it's not just Detroit. The article is written/published in UK. I think the US has ditched the vinyl, but it is making a "comeback" in the UK.
After all, when was the last time you saw a vinyl record player in Circuit City, Best Buy, SAMS Club, etc?
if (!sig) { printf("Signature Unavailable\n"); }
To be accurate, analogue vinyl recordings have the bottom registers compressed in order to minimise distortion at the stylus level, and also to minimise wear on the stylus, and incidentally to increase the play time of an LP. That's why we have phono (pre/)amplifiers - i.e. to reverse that compression algorithm so that what we hear is closer to what the recording engineer intended. It's also why you can't just plug a turntable into a "line-level" socket on an amplifier and expect it to sound OK.
When I became a DJ, I spent many hours talking to Those Who Came Before Me, and they all had one thing that they agreed on: If you want the real experience, you want vinyl. It does not matter what genre you are into, digital turntables do not compete with vinyl. (Of course, there is final scratch, etc.) The feeling I get when I grab that true vinyl record is proof that they are correct. I've played CD turntables, and they can be fun, but they will never perform at the same level as vinyl, nor will the sound quality ever compete.
h tm - be sure to look at the graph. It makes it pretty obvious.
As for today's vinyl quality VS yesterdays, I'm the proud owner of 6 original pressing Beatles LPs and the first 3 Led Zepplin LPs, and none of them are pressed on vinyl that is as good of quality as some of my 12" singles of today's EDM music.
And yes, there are some very very low bass sounds that could make vinyl skip, but compare that to every sound ever put on CD, and RTFM on how sound waves are all naturally analog, and just what happens to sounds when they are digitally compressed. Read more about CD compression VS. Vinyl sound quality here - http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question487.
Then, come back here, and we'll have an intelligent conversation.
"Most music is recorded in analog because it does sound warmer."
No its not. In the major studios, digital is king these days. I've worked professionally in the field for about 20 years on and off.
Of course, a lot of people mix down to analogue to get that sound. It is an effect and nothing more than that. And its not terribly difficult to get in the digital world either -- just inconvienient.
Beyond that, there are many different aspects of 'recording in analogue'. Is it the tape sound? The nice bit of distortion you get as you've abused the tape? I can safely say that I love the sound of tape as it gets older. I had friends that would buy up crappy 2" masters that even the original artists decided it wasn't worth having around and using this stuff. One of the reasons mixing to tape is better is that you don't have idiots trying to make things 'perfect' and moving stuff around and trying to pitch shift the crap.
Beyond tape the other bit of 'analogue' folks generally refer to is analogue summing. There is some truth to the idea that analogue summing is special. It reacts a little differently than a simple digital addition. You know in an analogue summing, strong frequencies in one input might slightly distort the frequencies of other areas. Running correlational studies on these summing units, its not hard to reverse engineer how this stuff works. Gets a little crazy when trying to analyse the sums of more than a dozen inputs at the same time though (i.e., more computing power than I have access to) -- but the end result is something that can be equated out to DSP that plays on most modern computers with not problems.
Me? I like the sound of digital. I've worked in this medium for longer than I had to deal with analogue. The original CDs sucked because they used mastering that was intended for Tape or Phono without doing any deemphasis of the original filters. The RIAA had (has) specific filter curves for both mediums that one used to ensure proper playback. CDs had no such need for these. Beyond that, cheap bargin basement digital equipment that used non-matched parts 'because it was digital' ensured that the state of the art equipment actually sounded worse than their analogue equivelents.
This only took a few years to figure out, and soon you had folks using natural EQ that wasn't designed to either overload radio signals or jump the needles out of the track -- along with audiophile digital equipment (you'd be surprised to see how bad the original digital gear actually was) -- and once this was fixed, digital was proven to be and sound much better than its analogue equivelents. Unfortunately, the idea that analogue was better had taken hold and idiots decided to parry around memes such as dynamics and warmth.
These days, when I want analogue, I switch on the paper cones and I have what I need.
I keep hearing this same ill-informed claptrap from people. You are simply wrong about many things. This "fact" is wrong. I refer you to the Nyquist-Shannon theorem to refute your assertion and perhaps educate you at the same time. This also has been proven wrong (I'm sorry I can't link you to sources, you'd have to be a member of the AES). The reliability of auditory memory for the purposes of comparative listening tests is very short; a minute at the outside for even the most "trained" of audiophiles. Familiarity with the source material does not objectively affect a person's ability to differentiate* between sources. The "golden ear" is a myth.
* Notice I said "differentiate", not express a preference. All a good double-blind scientific test can do is tell whether a person can consistently tell the difference between two things (i.e., beyond the statistical probability that they are guessing). It does not try to determine which is "better". What you describe here in rather rough terms is the psycho-acoustic phenomenon called "frequency masking". This is but one of the tricks employed in lossy compression schemes like MP3 and Dolby AC3 encoding. This does not happen with the PCM encoding that is used for CDs.
And last, but certainly not least, you state:
I guarantee you that anyone can tell the difference between vinyl and CD. And in the majority of cases, they will prefer the CD recording.If you prefer vinyl, then that is your perogative. Some people enjoy Limburger cheese too, but they don't try to deny that it stinks or trot out pseduo-science to try to persuade people that stinky cheese is inherently better than non-stinky cheese.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
So basically you're proposing to eliminate the whole "blind" out of "double blind". Let's bring back the Emperor's New Clothes phenomenon, shall we?
Unfortunately, the "blind" part is there for a very good reason, which again basically boils down to the Emperor's New Clothes. If you get people thinking they're somehow superior (smarter, audiophile ear, whatever) if they see or hear something, they _will_ convince themselves that they actually see or hear what's not even there at all. There's no limit to the idiocies people will convince themselves that they actually see or hear if their self-esteem depends on it.
E.g., literally, there was a thread on Hardware Central where someone fought to the bitter end with his claim that he hears the subtle sound differences in MP3's based on... the hard drive they're played off. No, really, I'm not making it up. Once he's got it in his head that the recording on a HDD is magnetic, same as on a cassette, and different kinds of analogue cassettes and cassette players had different fluctuations and distortions... nothing could stop him any more from hearing the same different fluctuations and distortions when the same MP3 is played off a Maxtor instead of a Seagate. Any explanations of digital sound, or that an MP3 is played from RAM not directly off the magnetic medium, etc, just went right over his head. He had found such belief that his audiophile ear can spot the differences between a Maxtor and a Seagate, that nothing could snap him out of it any more.
E.g., literally, see people who can testify that a certain audiophile power cord makes their music sounds better. Once you get them in an Emperor's New Clothes scenario, namely that only superior beings (e.g., real audiophiles) can spot the difference... guess what? They want to be superior beings too. They'll believe with all their mind and soul that a $600 power cable actually makes the sound richer and lets them hear more frequencies.
1. A distortion is a distortion is a distortion. If it differs from the original signal, that's that. You can't just hand-wave that differences on an LP are somehow good, while differences on a CD is bad. There is no such thing as one being inherently "more" and the other being inherently "less". Both are just deviation from the original signal, and both can be equally defined as "more" than the original (e.g., hey, the CD too has "more" of certail harmonics due to sampling, even if they are way above the range your ear can hear) or as "less" than the origina (e.g., "more" artefacts means "less" fidelity for LPs too.)
2. There's a reason we gave up on analog stuff, and that's because each step along an analog chain introduces more distortions. E.g., the recording on tape of the original performance, the reading of that performance from tape to make the LP master, the writing on the master, the transfer of the master to the actual pressed LP, etc, all the way to the physical properties of your turntable reading the LP. Add some more mastering steps in between, actually. Each step along that chain introduces more inaccuracies and deviations from the original signal.
By comparison, a digital signal can be copied with exactly 0 (ZERO) further distortions any number of times, because a 1 is always a 1 and a 0 is always a 0. Whatever differences the digitization itself introduced, that's the _only_ distortion in that chain. It can be copied and re-copied a thousand times and it won't lose anything more in the process.
3. Or 2b, if you wish: playing the same CD repeatedly won't make
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Something to consider: Vinyl can be read by archeologists; by looking at the groove under a microscope, they can infer that it's sound. CDs use a complex error correction algorithm that will take years to reverse engineer, and decoding an MP3 off of a hard drive will be even more difficult.
For more information, I've written an extensive study of the merits and drawbacks of vinyl: http://www.andrewrondeau.com/Writings/My%20Love-Ha te%20Relationship%20With%20Vinyl%20-%20Or%20-%20Wh y%20We%20Should%20Keep%20Making%20Vinyl.html
From my article about its limits:
No, I will not work for your startup
"Vinyl sucks; it always did and people who love it today love it in spite of how terrible it is."
Agreed. I became really interested in music in the 1970s, when vinyl was king, and well remember how horrid the things were. You had to store them just so to avoid warping (more of a problem with albums than singles, though), even though most of them were warped when purchased anyway; good record decks had stroboscopes and arms with little weights and dampers hanging off them at weird angles, all of which had to be adjusted just so or things didn't work properly; they also had to be very flat, so the best ones had sets of little sprit levels that could be centred by adjusting their legs; it was impossible to keep dust out of record grooves, so audiophiles used elabourate wet-tracking systems to float all the crud to the top where it didn't make so much noise; high-end cartridges had ludicrously low outputs that required massive pre-amp gain, and therefore extra electronic noise; the fact that the whole assembly was microphonic meant that it had to be stood on little sets of shock absorbers to avoid picking up audio interference; and those with less than solid floors had better walk carefully lest that arm tracking at 1.1 grammes skip merrily across the surface of the record, damaging both record and stylus.
Then, to add insult to injury, the oil crisis during the 1970s meant that materials were difficult to come by, so the companies recycled old vinyl to make new records. Unfortunately, the fact that the paper labels on the middles of these old records were never centred properly meant that the machines which stamped the middles out left bits of paper that got into the mix, and therefore the records, meaning that paper started coming through the grooves of your new album after a couple of plays. Not only did this make a very horrible noise indeed, but it could also damage the delicate stylus assemblies of the most expensive cartridges, which hadn't been designed to withstand being dragged through a lump of ragged cardboard.
Of course, there are probably people out there who enjoyed the ten minute ritual that was required to extract each record from its sleeve, apply at least three different cleaning systems to it, apply another three cleaning systems to the turntable mat, place the record on the turntable using the special felt record handling thingies that no audiophile would be seen without, set the wet tracker up, adjust the turntable speed using the strobe, raise the arm with a hydraulically-assisted lever, move it carefully over the grooves with a little device like a gun-sight, and then use the hydraulic lever to lower it slowly onto the record surface (no decent record deck worth the name had any automatic facilities -- they were only present on "grockle crap"). I however was not one of them because I wanted to listen to music, not spend hours pissing around with the mechanics of getting it to play, so for me vinyl sucked donkey balls, and I'm willing to bet that it still sucks donkey balls, even though the "nouveau vynel" set say otherwise.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
CD/DVDs introduced a problem. The ability to create perfect copies.
The RIAA/MPAA rely on consumers purchasing copies when theirs break. They don't want consumers to have the ability to make an exact copy of the data because this destroys their enforced rarity of the medium.
DRM in digital (lossless) media, such as in Blu-Ray, has progressed to the point that the BD-ROM is essentially analog -- Thanks to many artificial/legal restrictions, you "cannot" make a perfect copy of the data. I've consoled myself with such DRM by thinking, "Well, now it's like we're back to vinyl again. One copy, and if it breaks I need to buy a new one." This way of thinking has actually made DRM much easier to swallow.
The culmination of DRM is analog.
Vinyl is physically a limited format, and not any amount of romanticism is going to change that.
I got this great usb turntable for my birthday made by Ion Audio (http://www.ion-audio.com/ittusb.php). Records my records down with great quality even with regular windows recorder. What I haven't found is a way to just listen to the records without recording it first. That is, on my computer...I can hook it into a receiver and enjoy the vinyl. ;-)