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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.
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?
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?
You're joking, right? The White Stripes and Modest Mouse are shining examples of lo-fi. There's nothing "audiophile" about them.
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Surely you don't think they're going to put the raw analog signal right in the vinyl so you can copy it! They're not about to make that mistake again. A generation of USB-enabled record players will come out that will be able to play your vinyl records from the attic, and also some goofy "new and improved" vinyl hi-def format where you drop the needle on an encryption key instead of the first track.
I dispute that they "keep better". If you have an analog tape master, it will have a finite life no matter how much you pamper it. Thus the existence of techniques such as tape baking. The only way to preserve this tape over the long-haul is to transfer it to a fresh tape or other medium sometime before it is completely degraded. Every time you transfer the analog tape, you degrade it by a generation... doing the same with a digital master would give you an exact, or near-exact copy. You could do this as many times as you wish with no generational loss.
At the very least, you should immediately digitize the analog master so that you have the digital first-generation copy "forever".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
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Promoting DJs. Ew.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
While you may think I'm joking I note that a 30-40Kb/sec stream is more than suficient to store audio at near CD quality in real time. You can send 30-40Kb/sec over a telephone which has a small fraction of the bandwidth of a record. Thus I can actually encode about 8 simultaneous stereo streams
since audio records last about 40 minutes, 8 streams gives me 320 minutes of near CD quality music which is longer than an audio encoded CD can provide. Next up VCD on Vinyl
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Amusingly enough they did it for Vinyl as well: http://www.elpj.com/main.html. Sure as hell aint cheap though.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
One thing is true: vinyl will outlast CD in durability, and the error correction is much more robust on Analog.
I don't think so. the abuse a standard CD is subjected to would utterly destroy a record. how many people put a dozen naked Records on top of each other in a care that goe over bumps. 2 bumps and you have yourself a pile of useless plastic. I do the same to CD's and they last about a year with this abuse. Records last a long time now, because those who buy them treat them properly. CD's have finite lifespans because they are small, and versatile and thus often abused.
CD's and Records fail in different ways. A light scratch across the record will render every track with a regular periodic snap/pop or even render it unplayable. A light scratch on a CD may result in a bit of a skip or no data loss. A deep scratch on both results in an unplayable disc. Multiple light scratches on a CD will still often be playable and often without quality loss while the same for a Record renders it unplayable. Repeated play degrades a record, while it doesn't really degrade a CD. And Vinyl is not as mobile.
Also, You can back up a CD. You cannot back up a Record into the same format. Error correction on analog data is not more "robust" it's different. Critical failure on an anologue system is different then on digital. If I introduce random noise to a CD, I can digitally filter it out if I know how. The same type of error on a anologue signal might result in static. cleaning up such a systemic loss is hard on analogue. When the damage is mroe severe the digital may be unrecoverable while the analogue may still cary some of th edata. Digital has a recoverable area/damaged area rate that looks like a inverse log. 0-50% damage = 100% recover 50%+ = 0%. While Anaglogue has a linear decline.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
There's another reason that no one has mentioned yet. More space for cover art.
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.
Oh I get it! The RIAA wants these to come back so that they can get you to download and pay for a digital copy for your portable media player and have to keep repurchasing your physical medium as well!
This is the "new" "old" DRM. Vinyl, the gift that keeps on giving...to the RIAA.
Before you even concern yourself about the quality of any modern consumer electronics product with a well-known name, find out if that name is still worthy of its history. Many of the former greats in audio reproduction have sold out to Chinese manufacturers, sold their names, their brands, and the respect they earned in the marketplace. Now they're nothing more than marketing fronts, shadows of their former selves.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
switch from MP3 to WMA so you can add DRM and I might be interested. But I'll have to wait for the Zune version so I can squirt my Vinyl. Chicks dig me.
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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.
The last two records I bought on vinyl (the new records by Of Montreal and M. Ward) came with a coupon for one-time download of DRM-free MP3 versions of the album tracks from the label's Web sites. So I get the big cover art and the intangible experience (they're both double albums on vinyl) but I can still play 'em on the computer without sweating over the process of digitizing vinyl.
Fact is, the vinyl version of the Of Montreal record (which is awesome) has a scratch that makes track 3 repeat the same crazy groove over and over, and it sounds intentional and much, much better than the digital version, which now seems weirdly short. And it comes with four bonus tracks, which are included in the download too but not on the CD version. Obviously some small record labels are betting big on vinyl as a way to keep people buying records, and I'm all for it.
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.
Absolutely right. As usual when someone posts something really smart that bucks the CW my mod points are taking a tropical vacation.
Sadly, CDs are not great either, for different reasons. Where vinyl introduces the uncontrollable variables you talk about (thermal variations, electrical noise affecting the very-low-voltage signal, never-ideal disc and needle quality, dust) CDs, because of their low sampling frequency (which should have been 96kHz from the start), mangle the waveforms at high frequencies. Still, CDs come a lot closer to delivering accurate reproduction in any form of real-world use. For starters, you just can't always keep dust away from your needle...
As for amps, it has always amazed me that people *love* the ones that introduce distortion and claim the accurate ones are "cold" and "technical." It's not the amp's job to be warm and emotional; it's the musician's. I run away from any component that advertises "warm" or "musical" sound; those are code words for distortion.
My own setup consists of various digital sources playing through a big Class D amp into speakers with poly cone woofer/midrange and planar tweeters. Everyone complains the sound is too cold. But it's dead-accurate with test signals and I can actually hear the detail in my recordings, not just "warmth" that may make me feel good but isn't there.
Have you seen and heard a DJ with vinyls? I mean, a real DJ, someone who mixes. I was peacefully sipping some malt liquor at a random electro industrial bar on a slow day. It was probably in the middle of the week; I recall that we were no more than five in the place. An electro industrial bar is not a place where you expect a skillful DJ. You expect a DJ knowledgable in the latest trends with a huge collection of obscure music that he had from download^W import from Germany or something like that. Songs go one after the other and there is some effort to keep that BPM constant and to make the transition beat-into-beat. I thought that this was the essence of mixing. Then, out of nowhere, came this rave DJ. He was actually a former electro industrial DJ who was visiting his former workplace. And he made a set.
I don't know how to describe the experience. He started a hard song on the CD player (Funker Vogt I think) then he attacked the turntable. He started with a Depeche Mode vinyls, and I hear you scream at the idea of eletro pop being mixed with Funker Vogt, but what he did was brilliant. He jumped on the EQ and isolated the good baseline so typical of Depeche Mode and gently blended it into the hard stuff, just the baseline. A moment later the vinyl was doing backflips over his head; he wanted to plug in voice sample that was on the other side. It was almost instantaneous, he waved his hand over the EQ, the voice sample played, the vinyl flipped again and we were back with the baseline. We assume that vinyls have poor seek time but, in the hand of an expert, a vinyl will seeks much faster than a CD. The DJ continued his dance, mixing in some elements of trance and goa, building an elecro industrial song out of other songs from a wide repertoire of electronic music. When he left, he was not the resident DJ after all, nothing was the same anymore.
I had discover that mixing was in fact a form of composition but it was all gone. I now pay attention to the work of the DJ. The DJ is an artist an his medium is extremely expressive. A good DJ will keep the dancefloor full but only a greet DJ will coerce people into dehydration and renal failure. When I see a DJ lifting the dusty cover of the turntable, I know that I'm in for a good show. I keep the ear open and I enjoy this rare skill that the CD almost killed.
You're being fooled by distortion. Your vinyl isn't even close to as accurate as your CDs.
Your CDs have slightly fucked up high frequencies that *may*, if you have golden ears, make the recording sound somewhat harsher than a live performance and screw up your soundstage a bit. They also have a signal-to-noise ratio of >100dB, huge dynamic range, high-voltage output (for minimal noise after the D/A conversion stage), and they don't require equalization from your components.
Your vinyl has a signal-to-noise ratio of 50dB if you're lucky, low-voltage output that virtually guarantees that some level of 60Hz hum will get into the signal, a shitload of equalization by your record player, and very low dynamic range. You only have any highs at all (and the soundstage they bring) if your needle and record are both perfect. The reason you think your vinyl sounds better is precisely because of these traits. You hear them as "mellow," "warm," and "not harsh." Maybe you like to be protected in a bubble from what your recordings actually sound like, and that's fine, but what you're hearing is not better or more accurate sound... it's precisely the opposite.
I own well over 1,000 pieces of vinyl, and many of them sound better than the CD. This isn't because vinyl sounds better, but because either the master was damaged or poorly remastered for CD. It is amazing how poorly mastered some CD's are. Digital recording does not compensate for an idiot behind the sound board, in fact it makes it much worse.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
When you said near CD-quality, you weren't thinking of 8 track tapes were you?
Let's try the math again. First many digital radio stations use ABBAcast or something like it for near-CD quality at 33 to 40Kbs. Even if it's not CD quality it's certainly higher quality that anything that came off the vinyl in the first place. But let's ignore that and incorrectly assume we need 128kb/sec and see how the math comes out.
Audio modems don't actually use the full spectrum of the phone. last I looked they used about 3Khz. Now a vinyl record has a lot of bandwidth. the main limit on the bandwidth is the needles voltage/amplitude response falls off. That's why you equalize them. (which is why your stereo has a different input jack for phono than for tapes) You can only equalize then so far and get a decent sounding thing but you could push this much further if you went to a an analog coding scheme other than amplitude modulation. (hey that's what modems do! how about that).
So just to have some numbers lets make some up that are not completely crazy. Lets say we could push audio signal recovery out to 30Khz. So that gives us ten 3khz wide modem channels. And since the record is stereo that gives 20 total channels.
20*56kb/sec = 1060 kb/sec
1060kb/sec
Hey! that's what I claimed to begin with. I claimed I could fit about 8 cd quality channels (and here we mean 128Kb/sec) on a Vinyl record.
But wait! that's actually a gross underestimate. What determines the bits per second on a modem. it's a combination of two things, bandwidth and signal to noise. A vinyl record has enormously better signal to noise than a telephone. So the number of bits pers second my vinyl can support is vastly higher than the phone.
the shannon capacity scales as:
Bandwidth * log_2 (1 + SNR)
(where SNR is the singal to noise ratio in power)
to if I had 128 times better SNR on a record then that's about 8 times more bits per second.
So you see my Digital Vinyl smokes your CD.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Depends on what CD you're talking about. The Loudness War has adversely affected CD quality for a decade now. The LP version of the latest Chili Peppers album doesn't have anywhere near the amount of clipping that the CD version has. It has a higher dynamic range.. this isn't "feels warmer" this is "measurably different wave forms".
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.
I think we just witnessed the nerd version of a bar brawl...
Obviously, this means the LaserDisc is going to make a comeback soon.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
First off, CD quality in 30-40k. Really? Then why the hell haven't we seen it anywhere? You don't think Apple would kill to have a more efficient format for storing and distributing music?
Well I can't find shit on anything called ABBAcast. To me it sounds like you confused ABBA, an old Swedish pop band, with Abacast, a radio streaming service. Of course, Abacast doesn't have their own codec, they use WMA, AAC, and MP3. Well 30-40k WMA is NOT CD quality, not even close, never mind MP3. The good codecs, like AAC and Vorbis do a decent job at 128k, it sounds as good as CD for most music on lower end gear (like portable players) but still not even close. You are talking in the range of 256k with most codecs to get something that is reliably as good as CD on good gear.
Also you seem to have no understanding of the problems of encoding to a broadband format.
For one, you can't stack your channels right on top of each other. You'll find that you have all kinds of problems. Look at any real broadband system, and you'll find out they've built in space between channels for just that reason. For example TV channels are specified at 6MHz each. Within that 6MHz is a video, colour, and audio carrier. Channel 2 is from 54-60MHz. However, the video carrier is at 55.25MHz, the colour at 58.83MHz and the audio at 59.75MHz. Channel 3 is then from 60-66MHz. You might notice that means there's nothing in the lower edge of the range and you'd be right. The reason is that you don't want the channels bleeding in to each other. You need to leave space if the system is to work.
Next, you've got the problem of assuming that two stereo channels can be used separately. Errr, no. In any analogue system, two adjacent channels will have some amount of crosstalk. That is to say a signal on one channel will bleed over to the other to some degree. You'll notice that most stereo amplifiers specify this amount. Well, with records, it's pretty high due to the way that the stereo signal is recorded. It's horizontal needle deflection, not two discrete tracks. Not a big deal for stereo audio, it's highly correlated anyhow and we don't need a ton of separation to hear stereo, however it'll fuck with your encoding real bad.
Then of course we get to things like error correction, assumptions that the SNR is equal with regards to frequency (it's not) and so on. I'm not going to go in to all the problems in detail since it ought to be apparent at this point that you didn't think this through.