Slashdot Mirror
Return of the Vinyl Album
bulled writes "NPR ran a story this morning about the comeback of vinyl. It seems that sales of new vinyl records are up about 10%; sales will approach a million this year (as against half a billion for CDs). NPR mentioned the popularity of a turntable with a USB interface — they didn't specify the brand; could be this one, or this — and speculated on other possible reasons for the resurgence. They mentioned sound quality and lack of DRM as possible causes. Sound quality can and will be debated, but DRM rates a resounding 'Duh.'"
From a collector's stand point, vinyls never really faded from popularity. I still have all of my old vinyls and purchase new ones today by more current bands.
Didn't vinyl make a comeback about 12 or 15 years ago during the grunge era? What makes anyone think this is anything other than another small bump in popularity?
It just happens to be hip to own vinyl again, mainly due to "audiophile" acts like the White Stripes and Modest Mouse, and other hipster indie rockers wannabes.
This too shall pass.
record player with USB? doesn't that defeat the purpose of analog sound quality?
The social equivalent of tongue piercing. Once everyone goes digital it's fun to shock people by going analog. Plus scarcity creates value among collectors. One thing is true: vinyl will outlast CD in durability, and the error correction is much more robust on Analog.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
People are buying vinyl because it sounds better than digital recordings, and then using a USB turntable to make digital recordings of their vinyl records.
What am I missing?
I'm not sure I understand all the hostility towards vinyl. As an aspiring DJ myself, it has been my experience that vinyl is a much more popular (and accepted) medium for turntablism and club dj'ing. The electronic music and hip-hop vinyl industries have skyrocketed since the late 1980's due to the commercialization of the turntable and the fall of the club DJ. With anyone being able to go out and buy two turntables and a battle mixer, I can see why lately vinyl has been steadily growing more popular. There are numerous websites that sell vinyl now (most having popped up in the last 5 years), which have probably also helped bring vinyl to the 'masses'. And really, quality also really depends upon the needle, arm weight and quality of speakers/mixer too. Heck, if you take good care of your vinyl and clean them properly, they can last for a good while. Vinyl quality is technically infinitely better (and sound engineers can prove me wrong) than any compressed music format, and I think that's generally why you see many DJ still turn to vinyls over MP3 and CD-J mediums.
this
Nothing less.
If someone could set up shop pressing 8-tracks, they'd sell too.. People collect 'em
12" records have nice art and look good on the wall, etc.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Persistent analog storage may be best, but consumer analog formats aren't. "Archival vinyl" is an oxymoron unless you never play the album.
If records really want to make a comeback, they'll come up with a nondestructive way to read the disc, like a laser beam. Oops, they did that. It's called a CD.
I agree that high quality analog recordings are a good thing to keep around for posterity, but analog recordings certainly aren't better for home reproduction (they'll get a little worse every time you play them), unless you don't mind having to repurchase albums every so often. You don't need DRM when your recording format expires and can't be reproduced easily at home. There is, after all, no "vinyl burner" on the shelf at Best Buy for $40.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Copyright infringement isn't stealing.
It shouldn't even be a crime.
It's an obsolete social mechanism that causes more than enough harm to offset any socially redeeming qualities it has.
This imbalance between harm and benefit becomes greater as our technological capacities increase.
If you make any long term plans around copyright continuing to exist, you're a fool, because it's not going to.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
What I thought was most remarkable was that this was not a technological breakthrough, we've been able to record turntables since PCs had sound cards, but that it was the packaging that caused this change. Most people simply aren't going to discover that they only need a program like Soundforge and a decent soundcard to do everything these packages do.
All it takes is removing a couple steps to make something extremely attractive to the consumer
Photos.
One thing is true: vinyl will outlast CD in durability
When the apocolypse comes, give me a pin, a piece of cardboard, something to use as a spindle, and a steady finger. I'll still be rockin'.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
There's another reason that no one has mentioned yet. More space for cover art.
" Bzzzt! You just failed Common Sense 101. Stealing a car deprives the original owner of that car. Downloading an album doesn't deprive anyone of anything, especially if you've already paid for it. Come back when you understand the difference between information and physical property, OK?"
Sleeping with your wife while you're at work doesn't deprive you of your wife, as long as she's there for you when you want her.
Therefore, sleeping with your wife is OK!
Thanks!!!
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
If vinyl turntables (with USB, natch) used a laser pickup instead of a mechanical stylus, vinyl would be a lot more popular. Then records wouldn't wear out nearly as much. They could be sold used for more money with less damage. And a laser turntable could scan a record at high speed (maybe 333 1/3 RPM, 100x) for portable (lower-fi) playing on iPod, mobile phone, etc.
Laser pickups themselves wouldn't wear out like a stylus used to, which used to put the turntable out of commission until a new one was bought. Which was sometimes expensive, especially when the electromagnetic transducer cartridge needed repair/replacement. Those were expensive, especially the really hifi ones. Today, laser pickups would be cheaper than that old precision EM stuff. And they could still be analog, like an original videodisc, with audiophiles fighting over imperceptible differences in the analog/digital converter.
I'd get one. Vinyl sounded so much better at its best than any equivalent priced digital system I've ever heard. But then, I prefer to listen to music that was produced for vinyl's acoustic response. Kids today could get into it, too, though, if it really is a hybrid of phat old analog and cheap new digital.
--
make install -not war
[cue rumble at -45dB]
[cue surface noise at -38dB]
[needle drop BANG]
skritch...skritch...Yeah, man...POP...Iskritchgree with CLICK you totaskritchly. NothinPOPg like the skritchdelity of vinyl...skritch.
Oh, you meant tape?
[cue tape hiss at -60db]
That's better. But how many machines are going to be around and serviced 50 years from now to play back that carefully stored tape? Lots of rubber idler wheels to dry out and crack, capacitors to leak, parts to become unobtainable, etc. Let's hope that someone is storing a whole bunch of MCI JH-24s in a secure undisclosed underground bunker, along with a stockpile of parts and manuals....
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
A lot of vinyl-philes have this strange notion that an analogue recording is somehow capable of storing a perfectly accurate continuous waveform that is superior to digital media precisely becasue it is continuous rather than discrete. In a perfect world that might be true. In reality, it is not.
Four basic things contribute to the fidelity of all recording formats:
1. The tolerances of recording equipment. (e.g. How closely the signal produced by a microphone resembles the soundwave that generated that signal.)
2. Generational loss in mastering
3. Manufacturing tolerances that affect playback
4. Tolerances of reproduction equipment.
All formats are limited by #1, and #4 is in the hands of each individual end-user. (i.e. If your stereo sucks, what format you prefer won't matter much.) However, number 2 and 3 are biggies.
Generational loss means that if you want to do anything more than slap a live recording onto a LP with no post-production whatsover, the quality will suck. Nobody masters albums in analogue these days. 99.9% of the vinyl being released was mastered digitally and then dumped back to analogue, so kiss that analogue "magic" goodbye.
The manufacturing tolerances of LP's are also a huge issue. When was the last time you picked up a micrometer made out of vinyl? It's not exactly the most ideal material for making something that has to have hyper accurate spatial dimensions. It's easy to scratch, and has a large coefficient of thermal expansion. Just play it back at a different temperature than it was cut at and you're already pretty badly off. The tolerances of a pressed vinyl disk are also larger than you might think, and have the effect of greatly reducing the practical information capacity. (i.e. In theory, analogue recordings contain infinite infomation. If you could record a waveform with even just very very large precision in vinyl, digital media would be useless because you could pack much more data into an analogue pressing. Digital media dominates today. Guess why? The precision of vinyl sucks dingo balls.) Everything that can go wrong with vinyl will have a direct impact on the sound. The lowly CD, by comparison, has built in parity information that allow any decent CD-reader to extract bit-perfect copies that would be identical to the master.
That being said, many CD recordings do suck, but that's the fault of mixing engineers who want to push it to 11 instead of mastering at an appropriate volume that won't clip the waveform. If a recording is mangled in this manner it's going to sound like crap no matter what you record it on.
Isn't Vinyl just Physical Rights Management? My car can play a burned CD, even one with MP3s or WMAs on it. I haven't seen a turn-table since I was like 4 (I'm only 21).
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Well, an interesting thing happens when you compare CDs and vinyl records. Turns out that CDs do a much, much better job of reproducing the original recorded waveform than vinyl. I.e, for sound fidelity, CDs totally kill records. It's not even close.
Now the interesting part. It seems that humans don't really care about sound fidelity. They care about things sounding good, which is actually not the same thing. The vinyl records introduce a whole range of coloring distortions into the audio. This is made far worse by the noise reduction circuitry and lousy, thermally varient amplifiers (I'm talking to you, tube-amp owners). This radically changes the way the sound comes out (go ahead, compare the waveforms using an oscope). It also makes them softer, warmer, and generally more pleasant. The real world has a lot of harsh edges, ringing tones, and crackles that really don't sound too pleasing.
So, in conclusion, vinyl is crap for reproducing audio. It's good for making sounds pleasing to humans (except for the horrible scratching sound, of course). Ever wonder why the totaly voice-synth'd Britney Spears albums sell so many?. It's the same reason that people like vinyl records.
At 25 I just inherited my dad's vinyl collection and I've found they make music fun again. When digital distribution of started to catch on I stopped buying CDs, but then it felt like I was just buying filenames. Even when I occasionally bought a CD, I would just rip it to MP3 and put it on my shelf never to bother with it again. Convenient yes, fun not so much.
With vinyl all this convenience goes away. It's fun to go to the record store and sift through 1.00$ bins, or find pressings of newer groups. Then when you get home, you play it. You don't put it into your computer and hit button. You open it up, carefully take the disk out, notice the large liner notes, spin up the table and enjoy. It's more of an event than just rip. burn. play.
Sure it's analog, and there's the occasional distortion, but with a decent cartridge and stylus it's amazing how good new vinyl sounds. Finding spare sleeves to put your favorite albums in then putting the cover them on your wall make for some good excellent wall art too. To me it's similar to why I buy books even when I can get e-books. Life it's just about making everything streamlined and perfect, sometimes you need a little analog grit to keep it interesting.
Of course, I negated myself already by writing about ripping vinyl with 100% Free Software , but that's more for getting my dads old albums onto CD for him.
Are you quite serious?
Let's think about the actual downsides of DRM. Needing a special player? Turntables are not exactly readily available all over. Not being able to make copies? How do you intend to make copies of a vinyl album? Not being able to just drop songs on your MP3 player and go? Not going to be easy with vinyl.
If you want to produce a readily-transportable, widely compatible, copy-able file from a vinyl album (such as an MP3), you're going to need to record the output from playing it on a turntable, and then digitize that. Which you could do with any DRMed file. The old "analog hole".
I know this is /., but not every story that involves audio needs to whine about DRM.
Never mistake "can" for "should".
(It doesn't help that some DRM/watermarking techniques for digital sound degrades the quality further than the mere absolute rates would account for.)
Frankly, I don't expect this to be a major resurgence of vinyl/analogue formats, but if it forces even a few labels to beef up the stuff they're producing, I'm all for it. Who cares if vinyl "wins", if we all "win" by getting a better product? Of course, a better product really isn't likely, but the 0.01% hope that something could improve is better than the near-certainty of nothing changing if nothing challenges the status quo.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Right, but you can make a bit-perfect copy of a CD as many times as you want. A reasonable backup strategy for digital media would be to make several bit-perfect copies of the master, and then make several more bit-perfect copies of those copies at a regular interval of time. Doing this would retain the original "master" quality indefinitely, and would insulate you from format changes, as you could just backup onto whatever the prevalent format of the time is.
This would not work at all for an analog master - you are stuck with only one "master" on whatever format you recorded it on. A good example of why this is bad is the Apollo moon tapes. If these were digital, it wouldn't be such a shame that the originals were missing, and it wouldn't matter that only one facility in the world is still capable of playing them back.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's not about making the sound EXACT, it's about making the sound BETTER.
CDs win for exact replication, but for things like club music, with lots of sharp synth sounds, bass, etc. A little "natural interference" from the actual physical motion of the vibrating stylus can make it sound "naturally artificial", or, quite to the effect such music attempts to achieve, surreal.
Plus, spinning vinyl is a HELL of a lot of fun. CD decks, not so much.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
so, you could have all this technology in place and filters and so forth to take out the noise in order to get 8 128Kbps tracks... As each side of a record can hold ~25 minutes, that works out to 8*128kbps*25*60 bits of data per side... or about 192MB of data per side. That works to about 384MB that could be stored on a record... Even assuming you could fit 8x more data, that is still only 3GB of data on a record.
Lets compare this with a cd which is much much smaller than a record and can hold 700 MB per side (a two-sided one would hold ~1.4GB). Not quite up to the theoretical maximum that you claim your record could get, however consider the size, or the fact that a DVD, which is the same dimensions as the CD, and uses similar technology as it can hold up to 4.7GB on a single layer disc. This is far more data than the record can hold, and requires less sensitive electronics, and much less processing power to decode.
Looks like my "CD" beats your record after all.
In this world, it is a trivial enterprise to make vast libraries of culture and knowledge accessible to peasants in the jungle.
How? I mean, effectively. Will the peasants in the jungle even be interested in this panacea they're being offered? Or will it merely be someone thrusting "civilization" and "culture" upon them? Will they be interested in using computers to access this information, or will it merely homogenize them into the vast global monoculture?
It is trivial to find the idle time to set your hand to it.
Is it? Quality, anyone? Or have the great works of art that form the foundation of our history and culture been the work of hobbyists? Professional writers, musicians, painters, etc...have been around a long time, as much for the passion of their work as for the ability to pay their bills and put food on the table. In a world that is so quickly migrating to obtaining all this culture via a vast electronic network, how will these professionals (the one's who created the genuinely powerful, memorable, and quality material) be able to afford to continue to do so? Will the great works of tomorrow be the homogenized sound of Billy in his bedroom in his spare time, scarcely able to use the tools the develop such a work? When will he hone his skills? Has he heard of craft?
Where's the money gonna come from?
Brainstorm for other ideas on how you might get subsidized by our society without it being necessary to keep people isolated from what you've created, and throw your weight behind getting them into place.
You don't think artists try to do that all the time? Except for the large corporations and the elect few, art/music/writing/etc... is not all that lucrative a career choice unless you take advantage of every avenue you can possibly exploit to make money off of your work (and it is WORK.) Eliminating copyright makes it that much harder. Now, I'll be the first to admit that our copyright laws may have pushed the boundaries too far (I don't need a copyright that continues for an entire lifetime after I'm dead and gone, and frankly neither do my heirs), but eliminating copyright does not fix the problem.
This kind of mentality is part of what is killing the potential quality of art. Not the innovation part (for that I applaud you...artists should be innovative in all things, including how they do business), but the notion that anyone can do it, that it's easy, and soon everyone will do it and that's the end of that. Well, five minutes of fame on YouTube is fine, but that's it. It's no guarantee of establishing a place in culture except as a footnote. It's no guarantee of quality.
Soon, it will be trivial to provide a copy of every creative work ever made to every man, woman and child on earth.
At which point, the only thing holding us back from doing so will be small-minded dickheads harping about their "rights".
And then it occurs to me: this is all about the free lunch.
If you're a creator, stop thinking about copyright.
But if you're a consumer, get everything you can for as free as you can. If you're not willing to pay for quality, copy it. Spread it around. There was one copy that the artist made 65 cents off of. That's enough. That's all it's worth, because the copies are free.
Rights. Creators don't have rights. Only those looking for handouts do.
Do You Experiment?
"Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don't have any surface noise. I said, "Listen, mate, life has surface noise."
Stupid people think it's cool. Smart people thinks it's a joke; also cool.
Very funny! Why is it always that I see good stuff when I don't have mod points and there are days of drivel when I do?!
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com