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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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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.
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.
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.
- 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
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.
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