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Vinyl Gets Its Groove Back
theodp writes "Time reports that vinyl records are suddenly cool again. Vinyl has a warmer, more nuanced sound than CDs or MP3s; records feature large album covers with imaginative graphics, pullout photos, and liner notes. 'Bad sound on an iPod has had an impact on a lot of people going back to vinyl,' says 15-year-old David MacRunnel, who owns more than 1,000 records."
I've been involved with club and event promotions in Melbourne for about 6 years.
When I first started out, all the DJ's across Trance/House would only DJ with Vinyl and CD's were unheard of. In the past 12-18 months though that's all changed. Vinyl sales are down as DJ's and enthusiasts are all moving to CD's. CDJ's are now excellent quality and offer much more dynamic mixing abilities with better effects, beat matching and looping and sampling.
At the same time, tracks being produced are instantly available on MP3 which allows DJ's to purchase fresh hits the day the producer is happy with it, other then having to wait for tracks to be pressed to vinyl.
I believe this trend has followed Europe where they have been progressively been moving away from Vinyl in the past 2-3 years.
Vinyl is still excellent, I still love to collect it, but technology has finally caught up in the club scene where MP3 and digital music now offers much much more advantage to the DJ, especially in price. Buying 5-6 new records per week to play in clubs is expensive, when you can buy the same tracks for 3-4 dollars each online and burn them to CD.
That's it exactly. A hot CD doesn't do justice to bands like Arcade Fire, so I'm willing to go out of my way to get the vinyl versions of certain albums even if it means I now have to worry about things like dust and needle wear. I'd prefer that the studios just digitally master these things correctly in the first place, but that's not going to happen as long as the engineers feel compelled to make their songs sound the "loudest" on the radio; and that won't stop until we can agree on a way to normalize the volume levels of CDs and other digital media.
There's a great YouTube video on this subject: "The Loudness War"
Anybody remember the Telarc digital recording of the 1812 Overture released on Vinyl? They used real cannons and the cannon shots were so loud, they had to dramatically increase the groove pitch in that area of the record to accommodate the waveform. It would have crossed over six grooves or so if they hadn't.
That record was literally a stereo killer. I saw phono cartridges lose the diamond tip or jump out of the groove when it hit that spot. Power amp fuses blew. Speakers were damaged etc. The only way I could capture it to tape was to play the record at 16 RPM, record the tape at 15 IPS and play it at 7.5 IPS (yes, there was a slight pitch shift but so what).
Most of the stuff on
And where exactly do you think the noise floor of a real LP player is?
That is after all all we are talking about, although I have doubts that that is often appreciated.
Of course, on a modern CD you are missing a lot of the harmonic distortion, random noise, and limited (yes, go look at the actual figures) high and low frequency response of a normal LP, but hey, who needs them.
MP3 is in a lot of ways a good match to vinyl, it actually tracks a lot of the same problems rather nicely.
The enjoyment I get out of it isn't just about the audio quality (although in some cases it is much better on vinyl). It's hard to explain, but the act of digging through a crate full of records, handling the vinyl, dropping the needle, even the light crackling sound you get on old records during the silent moments, it all adds to the experience. It's much more involved than just dropping in a CD or playing a file.
And, as a great bonus, you can pick up all sorts of old music you otherwise wouldn't have heard for pennies at a pawn shop, thrift store, Goodwill, etc. I made a habit of going through the records at thrift stores, buying anything with an album cover that interested me or made me laugh. Most of it was horrible, but for anywhere from 50 cents to $1.99 each you're not out much.
Ah, the kinds of things that "audiophiles" claim...
Probably the funniest was one on the HardwareCentral forum, which insisted that MP3's sound differently off different hard drives, and of course his superior ear can easily tell the difference between a Maxtor and a Seagate. He actually went into a funny (in a village idiot kind of way) theory about how it's recorded magnetically like on cassettes, and we all know how different magnetic coatings (e.g., iron oxide vs chromium oxide) in cassettes behaved differently in different frequency ranges. So it stood to (his warped lack of) reason that the same would happen to hard drives. Some would have better bass, some would have a greater dynamic range, etc.
Sad to say, no amount of explaining that a 1 is a 1 is a 1 on a hard drive and the MP3 read will be identical on any brand, made any difference. He was sure that that's nonsense, the magnetic coating of a HDD platter has no reason to behave differently than that of a cassette, and most importantly he had convinced himself that he can hear the differences. (Without a double-blind test, though. Funny how many "audiophiles" resent those three words.)
Also in the funny stupidity category, I submit to you such gems as:
- $1000+ power cables, and people swearing that their music sounds better with one,
- specially-tuned wooden volume knobs (no, seriously), and people swearing that their music sounds better with one,
- audiophile motherboards with one vacuum tube at the end of an otherwise 100% digital chain, and again people swearing that their MP3's sound closer to the original with that (never mind that it's really just adding the tube's own soft-clipping kind and harmonics, to those that the digital chain already introduced),
Etc, etc, etc.
It's just the emperor's new clothes story. Except the original story got it wrong. If you tell someone that only some kind of superior beings can see those clothes, or hear the subtle sound differences, they'll actually convince themselves that they really see or hear that. They won't fake it, they'll actually be convinced that if they squint just right, they kinda see the fabulous clothes on the emperor.
And a kid shouting "the emperor is naked", actually won't make any difference. That's actually what they want to hear. Being better is relative. You have to be better than _someone_. For you to be better, someone else has to be worse. So once they got it into their head that they must be one of the geniuses that see the clothes, other people shouting "The emperor is naked!" just provides ample "proof" that yup, others aren't that good.
In fact, here's an even more depressing parting thought: the more blatantly absurd and provably wrong something is, the more vehemently its advocates will defend it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
One day 20 years ago in a college physics test, the teacher (who was a bit of a showman, as I think all college physics teachers are) had a massive looking amp and speaker setup at the front of the lecture hall (a '20s era building with the large lab bench up front). After a few minutes, he looked at us and said "What is the matter with you kids? Don't you know loud music is bad for you!" and went on to explain that he was pumping out about 120 db spl worth of noise at 23Khz and that he was going to demonstrate why we ought not waste money on speakers that claimed 20+ Khz response.
He turned down the frequency generator to about 10Khz (when we realized it was super loud) and then the volume and told everyone to raise their hand and then lower it when they could no longer hear anything. 90% of the class had their hand down when the frequency generator hit about 19Khz, and the ones left were all girls and nobody lasted to 22Khz.
The other one is high fidelity in cars -- even the nicest "riding" car I've ever been in (Jaguar) still has an audible road noise floor which makes fidelity in the car pointless, especially if you're a wanker in a Honda like me.
This point needs to be driven home. For people looking for high quality qudio, you only need to rewind back to when CDs were released - they were considered an audiophile's medium.
Has it really been ten years since a well-mastered CD was released? I know otherwise. However, my parents came to me shopping for new audio gear. I suggested they bring 20 CDs they knew well to a sit-down listening of what new loudspeakers were available, hoping that one of them would be a "good" recording. Their recordings include a lot of easy listening, jazz, and otherwise off-the-beaten-path music, so I had hope.
Not one of them weren't compressed and limited to the very extreme. Afterwards, looking through their collection of about 200 CDs, there were exactly *two* that respected good mastering - The Soundtrack to the Lion King, and Enya "The Memory of Trees". Two. From the 90's.
Even re-released recordings of *oldies* on CD (my parents being their 70's) were compressed to completely numbing levels.
Anyone thinking they can go to a record store and buy a high-quality product of anything "hip" or "popular" on CD are sorely mistaken.
It's a damn shame.