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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.
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?
There's another reason that no one has mentioned yet. More space for cover art.
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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.
Others like Mark Farina use cds. Final Scratch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Scratch is still in use as well.
Judging by what was seen at the winter music conference this year, th stand set-up is four decks- two for cds and two for vinyl. Five years ago vinyl was the standard, but times are still changing.
Vinyl is still in common use, esp. for local or regional artists, but of the people I know who actually make their living off of playing music none use vinyl exclusively anymore.
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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.