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Not All iPods — Vinyl and Turntables Gain Sales
Says the New York Times: "With the curious resurgence of vinyl, a parallel revival has emerged: The turntable, once thought to have taken up obsolescence with eight-track tape players, has been reborn."
Time to get that Betamax player out of the attic!
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
You only have to sell a couple albums more than usual to claim huge percentage increases.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Kids these days and their newfangled "vinyl" cheap rubbish. Give me my Bach on a wax cylinder, and then get off my long-dead lawn.
I hate printers.
and now try put disk copy protection on that!
oh wait...
-- "If A equals success, then the formula is A=X+Y+Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut." - Einstein
FTFA:
Interest from younger listeners is what convinced music industry executives that vinyl had staying power this time around.
Taking this at face value, it seems like the music industry execs aren't that stupid: the market wants something, let's give it to them.
Don't they worry about piracy, though?
Some are traditional analog record players; others are designed to connect to computers for converting music to digital files.
Hmm...
In any case...
At a glance, the far corner of the main floor of J&R Music looks familiar to anybody old enough to have scratched a record by accident.
I will not buy thees myoosic store. Eet is skrratshed.
Year of the Linux Desktop jokes in 3... 2... 1...
... with the oil prices going up again as soon as this crisis is over...
Sales can't drop below zero, at some point sales bottom out and then increase slightly (which may represent a massive % increase even though sales are still modest).
and now try put disk copy protection on that!
Actually, there are turntables for analog to digital conversion---I've wondered aloud what's going on here with no copy prevention. See http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1469166&cid=30350490
Every few months the media spits out a story or five about vinyl being more popular than ever. And they conveniently forget about it so they can do it again in another few months!
CDs are naturally dying, because broadband is ubiquitous and digital files are good enough to make the format an annoyance.
If you want to listen to music and have the physical media experience to go along with it, vinyl's a lot better than CDs IMO (and apparently in the opinions of quite a few others, too). Bigger art, more to play with, sounds better, etc.
That's not even taking dance music culture into account. I just didn't like CDJs' and Traktor's downsides, audio quality, and quirks enough to trade the convenience they gain over vinyl turntables. Also, Technics are cooler, and they haven't made a little wind-up truck that plays CDs yet.
No surprises. Vinyl sounds better.
Me and my friends have been talking about the resurgence of vinyl DJs for years. A friend who visits Japan every year to sell vintage jazz, soul and funk music (they love it out there) was telling me that DJ shops seemed to be catching up to guitar stores back in 1998. I almost think it's just about peaked myself. Then again maybe DJ Hero will cause a nice spike in sales.
Personally, I prefer to buy my music on vinyl, I like the huge cover art and the tactile interaction of playing a record. The nature of vinyl also doesn't lend itself to the Loudness War. The only things I don't like about vinyl is it weighs a ton when you're trying to get to a gig and when listening at home you gotta get up and flip the record.
I kinda think digital DJing has been gaining a lot of ground lately... there are so many Serato copycats) out there now (some are purely digital while Serto allows the use of timecoded vinyl for control. I've been a hardcore vinyl head and I'm finally considering going the digital route because of the convenience of weight saving and you can make your own remixes. Though it still pisses me off that I spent so much time and money collecting rare tracks when these days laptop DJs can just download them off the net. It's made it a lot harder to have an exclusive track.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
What did you expect would happen, people would start buying vinyl records, but just look at them instead of playing them? Is there some iPhone vinyl add-on I'm not aware of?
Tomorrow on Slashdot: A sudden increase in the sale of left shoes curiously correlates to a parallel increase in the sale of right shoes.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Seems like there is an article like this posted at least once a year by someone marveling at the "resurgence" of vinyl.
Whats surprising is how close this story follows the announcement by Technics that they're ceasing manufacture of their 1200 and 1210 turntables citing low global analog turntable sales. http://www.slashgear.com/technics-axe-1200-and-1210-turntables-2764581/
for people who think it's not high-quality unless you can hear the artifacts of how low-quality the recording is.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Somewhere, there's a recording executive reading this article and planning on dispatching a team to try to retrofit DRM onto vinyl records somehow.
Which I imagine would be quite a feat for a purely analog medium.
Either that, or said executive is now more paranoid about the "analog hole" than ever before, and now believes that people are turning to vinyl to pirate music somehow.
I recently ordered a copy of 'Them Crooked Vultures' on Vinyl, sounds fantastic! With the Loudness Wars [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_wars ] going on for the last while, music is becoming harder to listen to with all the compression, you lose the dynamics of the recording. I've recently gotten back into vinyl because of this. My ears have been thanking me ever since!
Before the anti-audiophile crowd comes in screaming about how digital is a more accurate reproduction vinyls are typically mastered for their audience so they often are not compressed to maximum loudness that you hear in modern CDs so you actually have some dynamic range.
I really don't think that a 1% market share can be counted as a rebirth. What did it get down to at the lowest point? 0.5%? I wonder how long 8 track tapes still sold after the compact cassette became popular.
The format must be helped by the DJs who still use records. Having such a high profile usage of the format must have kept it in the minds of the buying public in a greater way than records, cassettes, reel to reel tapes, 78s, cylinders, and pianola rolls ever had.
And there are some advantages to the format. With a proper pickup (not some cheap crap), the sound is wonderful. 16 bit audio was only ever a feeble approximation of original sound. Also, there is a physical sense to getting a record that CDs never quite had.
But more importantly to the crowd here, record covers were the pre-Internet soft porn for kids. There were some damn fine covers (NSFW) back in the day!
Living in Oslo, Norway, I have been watching this trend for some years. The number of shops selling physical CD's is steadily decreasing - either they close or they are converted to DVD- and/or game-shops. At the same time, the number of shops selling vinyl is increasing. Every self-respecting hifi-shop has turntables on display in their windows. And who even buys CD players anymore ? Some years ago, only niche-titles got a vinyl release. Now even chart-topping big names release on vinyl. This ain't a fad. We will all live to see the death of the music CD. The vinyl will live on, as the sole medium for physical distribution. It will serve a distinct market - people with a keen interest in music, sound/hifi and/or collecting records. For these customers, portability and convenience is not high priority. Cover art and lyric booklets are. The music industry will embrace the trend, as piracy / copying will not be an issue. Vinyl rips are too inconvenient to ever threaten digitally distributed music. The vinyl record has outlived the CD in all respects. Some of my oldest CD's - 20-25 years old - are being refused by my CD player. While I have vinyl records from '65 that sound just as fresh today. I buy 30-40 records a year, around 4 out of 5 on vinyl; I select the titles purely based on musical merit, and buy vinyl if available. Luckily bands within the genres I prefer almost always release on vinyl.
"And you are dying so slowly, you believe to be living" - Bertrand Besigye
People are just starting to realize that digital DJ equipment tends to suck compared to a set of real turntables and a mixer board with crossfader.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
A few years ago I worked in a record store where we actually sold more records more than cds. I own a relatively large number of records, contemporary and otherwise. Despite all this, It's my opinion that this is just a fad, one strangely ambling along at a lazy pace. I think the only reason it has been able to gain traction is because people don't realize all the pitfalls of records. To start, yes, records can theoretically sound better, but there are Many things that can get in the way of that: virgin vs. recycled vinyl, cold pressings, warping, dirty or worn stylus, imbalanced tonearm, etc. Even under optimum conditions the quality advantage of a record is gone after 5-8 plays, as friction heat from the stylus literally melts the signal irreparably; from then on, the sound quality will continue to deteriorate with each play. Most people start out saying that they like records because analog sounds better. Then, after I tell them this, their reasoning changes--they like records because the hiss and pops are warm and soothing. The question of quality aside, records are a pain to deal with! You have to handle them carefully, clean them often with specific supplies. After a couple of songs have played, you have to stop what you're doing and flip the record over (don't try putting on a Barry White record, it may set the mood, but only for a few minutes... and hopefully that's regarded as a problem). Some people say they enjoy the whole process involved with records, that by having to do all that work they are able to appreciate the music more. Fine, but personally, having to constantly fidget with the record player interrupts the pleasure I get from listening. Also, consider the weight and space records take up: I estimate about 50 records occupy a cubic foot and weigh at least 25 lbs. On the other hand, you can fit thousands of digital albums in your pocket. Records do have a certain sense of novelty to them, but it wears off fast; digital music is and will remain an incredible thing.
the most powerful intellect is that unbounded by indubitable preconception
It makes sense. Vinyl is not seen as distribution anymore but as artwork. The vinyl is going to get more and more popular because it is a presentable form of artwork that has far more class than the CD and a more tangible experience than a digital file. It's also way more fun than a CD to operate and creates a much more interactive environment, especially in a social setting. If every band released their albums in vinyl format, I would purchase everything that I could, simply because I would rather own a vinyl album as a piece of artwork over a CD any day.
That doesn't mean that the CD should go away. I really hope that artists and labels alike see the value in both the CD and the digital file for what they are. Vinyl's resurgence is a guarantee, but the CD's value is not lost on the public if it can be sold as something that's more than just music on a piece of a plastic. Consumers value choice over all else and a CD can be a very inexpensive alternative to those looking for the experience of owning something similar to vinyl without the cost and space expenses of vinyl. Though I think the CD will probably go away after time, but hopefully only because something more appealing has taken its place.
Besides the joke, I always thought that this vinyl resurrection is being promoted by the bad guys, it is of course not impossible, but far more difficult to copy than a CD. And even if you make a digital copy of it, you will never have the same (vinyl) thing.
My other signature is a car
Compared to your average mp3, wma or other lossy compression algorithms coupled with very bad mixing in studios vinyl sounds better in many cases. Vinyl vs CD is more a matter of taste but all in all we dont really care if whats comes out of the speakers sounds like nails on a blackboard.
Its no coincidence that hifi has been declining lately. You have to search like a mad to find a recording worthy of a good hifi setup. I often find myself cringe when i put a pop CD into my rig because its obvious its been compressed and processed for crappy systems. Everything seems tailored for iPods, mobiles and micro systems. Sadly that makes it sound like crap on a good system.
HTTP/1.1 400
It's not really becoming popular because it is better to hear music off one. The vinyl turntable is a performance instrument all of its own.
About a year back I ran into someone who had a vinyl turntable hooked into Ubuntu studio. He'd essentially use the turntable hooked into the MIDI port(?) which lets him control any soundtrack with a touch of his finger.
The guy was explaining how the user interface of a turntable supersedes anything else out there for what he's doing. That in some sense, it's the touch screen of the music man.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I listen my vinyl music on my iPhone. Main reason for vinyl -- before recording the audio to CD, the CDDA audio was "pre-processed", usually a simple +10db gain, to make the sound almost clip, the worsen sound was not revers-able. I have 70% of my own song digitize by myself, with proper encoding in 48KHz, CD just let me down.
Hong Kong - International Joke Center (after 1997-06-30)
Excellent! That leaves an opening for my half-million dollar turntables with the moonrock platter, musk-ox felt platter isolation pad, maglev suspension, hand-wound drive motor made from .999 fine gold windings and magnets made from civil-war cannonballs, turning a belt made from whale foreskin.
Installation by factory representatives is mandatory. $500/hour per man, minimum crew of 16, travel time included. To ensure that they do the best possible job (you know you can hear the difference), I'll send my crew to you on a private jet.
And of course, that doesn't include the tonearm or cartridge.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
At least for a long while. There now is in the form of Final Scratch. What it does is encode a timecode signal on a record, which you then feed to a soundcard. Final Scratch then interprets that timecode to tell what you are doing with the player and can control the speed and seeking of the digital files associated with it. Works great, I've seen it in action a number of times.
Another factor was the processing power for good resampling. These days that is trivial but it wasn't when digital first came about. If you are going to stretch the sound a lot by slowing it down, you need to properly resample the data to make it sound smooth. You'll get nasty artifacts otherwise.
Net result is non-degraded digital sound, with turntable controls. You can reuse the same timecode record quite a few times before ti becomes damaged to the point of having to get a new one.
These days, however, if you aren't scratching and such, software can beat match way better than you can. Songs can be tagged with BPM (or measured) and you can visually set cut points. Not as much fun though.
The compression on CDs is not manditory, and indeed you find some CDs without it. However if high quality sound is your goal, well then DVD-A and SACD are the places to look. Like records, they are not produced for everything, but they tend to be extremely well mastered for what they are done with. Nice wide dynamic range. They also have the advantage of being all digital, and extremely high resolution: 96-192kHz 24-bit for DVD-A, 2.8MHz 1-bit for SACD (equivalent to about 20-bit 100kHz). You are also usually going to spend less on hardware (a cheap SACD/DVD-A player can be had for less than $200) and your recordings don't degrade every time they are played.
That's the problem I have with the audiophile record crowd: There ARE digital technologies better than CD, much better, and measurably so. Thus, if your goal is highest fidelity sound, then that is probalby what you should be getting. Goes double since most recordings these days are produced digitally, so you are getting "digital sound" like it or not.
I'm fine with people who like records for nostalgic reasons, but I don't get the "Oh records sound so much better crowd." No, not so much really. Sure, compare a $5000 turntable to a $10 CD player where the CD is limited all to hell, the record player sounds better (unless the record is scratched). However compares that same record player to a $200 DVD-A player and the DVD-A will be better.
If you're still spinning records like it's 1989, you're carrying around a flight case containing 2 turntables and 1 multichannel mixing board with cross-fader. You've also got at least 1 amp, two speakers and a box full of various cables, jacks and plugs in case shit breaks. In addition to all that you've got several crates full of records; any self-respecting DJ wouldn't travel with less that 3 crates of the hits, unless they're playing a preselected playlist with no requests.
In order to carry all of this equipment around, you'll be required to have a large car, or van, which means you can't drive a cool sports car to work; you gotta show up in your crappy perv van, complete with the shag carpet interior - or worse - You have to borrow your moms mini van, complete with audio books with Fabio on the cover. And you have to load and unload that equipment not once, not twice, not three times, but FOUR TIMES! Why? Because if you're a mobile DJ your music and equipment isn't insured unless you're doing really well. You haul it to the van, drive to work, haul it into the club, do the gig, haul it back to the van, drive home, then haul it back in the house. I did exactly that from 1993 to 1997, and I swore I'd never do that again.
By 1997 I got my first dual CD player with pitch controls, so I was able to fit all my music and equipment in the trunk and back seat of my car without too many problems. That lasted until 2000, when I quit DJing to get a job as a computer technician.
6 months ago I decided to check into what was new and cool these days. I found a subscription to a CD/MP3 music pool that has all the current songs and remixes for a lot lower price than what I was paying 10 or 15 years ago. I also got a "complete" DJ package in a Numark Omni MIDI Control and a copy of Traktor Pro. Sure, not top-line stuff, but I was amazed at how simple mixing is today.
With beat-grids you don't have to worry about fighting the pitch during a mix; the computer syncs everything. If you need to nudge it a little, there are marked buttons on the controller that work like a charm. In fact, while I'd say the controllers are still early in their design, I can manipulate my music in ways I couldn't even try with CDs or Turntables. Mixing with 4 turntables is exercise. Mixing with 4 audio players was so easy that I wanted to get another 4 players going, but the software is limited to 4.
That said, when I walk into a club now I'm only carrying my backpack (laptop, midi controller, back-up HDD). I drive a MINI Cooper so I had to stop taking jobs at clubs with no sound systems of their own, but I think it's much more enjoyable being a DJ now than it ever was before.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOHW8l7FyH4
If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
Haven't you ever called a collection of songs by the same artist an album? What is an album? When I think of album, I think of the really good ones, you know, the ones that sell like a million copies. Don't they call that, "having a gold album"?
You can't call an album anything else, or else it's something different. Yet that's what everyone calls them... well... other than records.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Maybe they can find a way for MP3's to degrade with every play so they can again compete against the turntable?
First of all, we need to keep this in perspective. TFA says that through November there had been 2.1 million vinyl records sold in the US. That's far less than individual albums once sold, so vinyl hasn't staged some glorious comeback, it's just establishing itself as a minor niche.
That said, I'm a vinyl junkie and am happy for its continued survival, if only because it means that I'll be able to get new parts for my turntable for a long time yet. I think that the biggest advantage of vinyl is the physicality of the product. This includes of course the artwork and liner notes, which will be much larger and usually more attractive than with a CD. But there's more than this. Purchasing records often involves flipping through large bins of vinyl, something you sort of get with CDs, but instead of the clack or platic bins you have a nice soft thwap of cardboard album sleeves. Playing vinyl is also a much more physical act than playing a CD. With a CD you open the tray, put the disc on, then press a couple of buttons. With vinyl you have to open the lid, put the record on the turntable, line up the needle and plop it down, then come back and flip it over in twenty minutes or so. Choosing a specific track involves some pretty careful aligning of the needle. It forces you to become more engaged with what you're doing and promotes a more active listening; you can't so easily slap something on and ignore it, and the 6-disc changer (and, god help us, the random button) don't exist. You have to interact with your music because there will be a little bit of physical labor involved in keeping it going for more than 20 minutes at a time.
Of course, playing 7" singles is even better for this, because you're hopping up every three minutes and constantly having to think, "What would sound good with this?" Vinyl is far better for an evening devoted to listening to music because it really encourages you to make the music the central part of the evening. Too much distraction and there's no more music. That contrasts with CDs, and is entirely different from mp3 listening. Banshee tells me that I can start playing my mp3 library and continue for 22.5 days. That sort of thing promotes an extremely passive kind of listening, music as just something that's there.
A final thing to consider: I have a few CDs that have become scratched and are now unplayable. I have a bunch of LPs that have become scratched and now have a little scratch on them when you play them. My LPs are going to outlast my CDs.
Before the 2k's there was 90's dance music. PC's were barely capable of handling multiple audio streams and musicians had minimal computer skills. Dedicated hardware was quite common, samplers, effects, recorders. Even analog equipment was still around and highly sought after, such as the old Roland x0x series, TB-303, TR-909, TR-808. The late 90's generation of hardware was pretty much aimed at re-creating vintage analog sounds with companies such as Novation, Access, Waldorf, and Clavia. Vinyl was quite common in the 90's and we heard the same stories about the resurgence of vinyl. We even had three or four local stores that primarily sold newly pressed vinyl.
Something that has not changed for the past 30+ years is the design of the Technics SL-1200. Some would call this the best turntable ever.
...in the same way that life is merely the precursor to death.
And so, when there is no room to appreciate an art, but everything becomes about progressing to something new, we are only being hypocrites by not hanging ourselves today.
The compression on CDs is not manditory, and indeed you find some CDs without it. {...} but I don't get the "Oh records sound so much better crowd."
I think you partially answered your own question : Most of the music-lovers probably don't appreciate the way most CD are mastered. And indeed to them the records sound better - not due to some inherent magically properties of the technology, but just the way the media are mastered.
Well, of course, there is also another crowd saying this too : the crowd which buys over expansive monster cables. For digital sound transmission.
And there's rest of us who are pretty much happy listening to some radio stations, which use a lossy digital compressed archive, transmitted over plain FM.
There ARE digital technologies better than CD, much better, and measurably so.
Which still suffer of a limited library.
But probably a real music lovers has all of them at home : DVD-A and SACD for modern recordings available on these media, an analog turntable for older recordings, and some hiquality CD play when there's no better media available. :-P
The turntable probably uses a laser pickup
The audidiotphile has a digital turntable with a 200$ Monster USB cable between it and the HTPC :-P
And I'm just happy with my dead cheap FM/DAB hybrid.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'm still using vinyl, 12" records as main source to play with as DJ, cd's are having their own limits while vinyl does handle easier/better and sounds overall warmer in a club too...
Vinyl is still for sale in shops all over Belgium and Holland ; basically it never died .. it only got it's wintersleep because they tried to forget it ...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
You are one dumb mofo, mofo !! Backups are the way to go !! In the day, we put our prized LPs on reel tape, at 15 fucking gloarious inches a second. Sort of like encoding in WAV today. We were smart mofos. For a few years. Our tapes turned to moldy heaps of fragile crap. Our LPs warped so bad we couldn't play them, those that didn't break when moving. That's right. We were smart mofos, mofo. Turns out, it didn't help. Back up those CDs you stupid mofo, mofo !!
I think it's been said above: vinyl is a bit more robust and has the advantage of being much simpler to decode (I know, turntables are expensive, but the physical principle is much simpler than with CDs or digital formats). That means in 100 years mp3 may be all but unknown, but vinyl will still be read the same way. Much like books: even if they make an ebook reader just as easy and inexpensive as a book, and despite the conveniences of the digital format, paper books are still more robust and will still be readable when the Kindle is just an obsolete memory...
although some may disagree that vinyl is a step backwards in terms of sound quality, it is definitely a step backwards in terms of environmental impact. let's not forget about that!
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I was surprised last week in Target to seem some cheap phonographs stacked next to the Christmas ornaments. I think that means the fad is over.
So I've got this old tube home stereo integrated amp that I sometimes use with my turntable - it has a slider switch for selecting whether to use RIAA equalization when playing a record. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization/ has more detail, but it's basically a preset EQ to playback records encoded with it to help mastering so records can play better and longer. I think this EQ contributes to the "warmth" that people find so endearing in vinyl playback.
I find it hard to stomach what the RIAA has become today, especially when they were actually trying to help at one time, by making record playback more palatable starting in the '50s.
Sony has launched a multi-million dollar effort aimed at figuring out how to put a rootkit on a vinyl record.
Is it just me, or do the people hyping up vinyl's superiority not really caring about the music?
I am a "quality-phile" in that I have to have the highest quality of which I can afford.
A) I can tell you the difference between Pandora radio and my ipod.
B) I can tell you the difference between my 128kbps mp3s and my 224kbps AAC (itunes) files.
C) I can do all of this on rather low end speaker systems (stock speakers in my Elantra).
Digital audio is far superior to anything analog that can come before it. That said, of course, there's something to be said about live music in a concert hall.
We all know people with turn tables... what jackass said they were dead? Oh, the mainstream media? Didnt they also report there were weapons of mass destruction in iraq?
Plus, the turn table is a musical instrument of sorts...
I suspect this could be correlated with a resurgence of electronic music and thus the popularity of djing. It's a welcome change from crunk rap at least.
Not long ago, some people realized that CDs were being mastered so that everything was loud and noted that instruments or tracks that should be subtle were being turned up.... all in the name of competing with other noises, I believe. Do they do the same thing with the new vinyl?
And many DVD players are DVD-A players. And most big music releases are available on one of the two formats. Why anyone still buys CDs, I'm unable to fathom.
- 22-26 minutes maximum playing time per side.
- Rumble. Especially when it came pressed into the record.
- Scratches. A click or pop was forever. Often with the very first playing.
- Warpage. This was especially a problem after 1969-1972, when records became thinner. (Thank you RCA, for that "Dynaflex" nonsense.)
- Playing a phonograph record was a fiddly business. Extracting the record from its jacket and inner bag without getting fingerprints all over it (which could lead to more clicks and rumble). Cleaning the record surface with a brush before playing. You took all those precautions because you didn't want to make things worse, but it was rather like pissing in the wind, as the saying goes. No matter how great your cartridge was or how light your tracking force, your records would inevitably wear, especially your favorites.
Obviously, I'm not in the demographic that wants vinyl today. I was never a DJ (not in the context of a dance club, anyway), and I have no nostalgia, false or otherwise, to bring me back to the medium.
But I can't help but wonder if the problems that plague CDs today parallel the problems that vinyl in its heyday had. Everything I mentioned above were the reasons I was so quick to embrace CDs. (And if you've ever heard Ry Cooder's "Bop 'Til You Drop" or Dire Straits' "Brothers In Arms," you know exactly how wonderful CDs could sound.) But, it was a reaction, and I'm wondering if things like DRM and the "loudness wars" are the reaction people who are migrating to vinyl are having.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Also, LPs are expensive! If you can find a new pressing of a single disc LP for about $20, you've done well. I've seen some listing for prices of $30 or much much more for 1 disc of some newer pressings. No wonder the industry loves it. The profit on these must be immense. An upcoming Sam Cooke re-issue of one disc on 45 RPM (yes, 45 RPM) vinyl LP is listing for $50. All prices are in US dollars.
One of these cheap USB ones, because my in-laws have a stack of old hard to find recordings on vinyl that we want to preserve.
They can have my turntables when they pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Also: vinyl is, has always been and always will be DRM free.
No, I'd expect people would buy vinyl records and scan them
You are correct of course--brickwall mixes are not suitable for vinyl pressing--but you assume logic, reason and fairness will be implemented. In reality, there are many vinyl versions which are no better than their CD counterparts or in fact worse due to being completely unplayable. This doesn't stop companies from pressing them and selling them as if they were usable. I have bought many records direct from record labels, usually from small artists, hoping--'knowing'--that the vinyl version couldn't possibly be as bad as the digital version. I was wrong and have a handful of useless disks now. I assume many people simply buy them to put on their wall, and listen to the included MP3 download instead. I think some of the time, a remaster is impossible, because the album was recorded and mixed with pro tools or whatever digital recording suite the cool kids are using nowadays, with levels cranked every step of the way, and there is simply no way to remaster it--the only option would be a complete re-recording.
Poor Sound Engineering is why CDs do not sound good enough; source recordings should be at least 48khz minimum and they downsample to CD - if done properly, the CD should sound just fine to everybody but the fanatics with good enough hardware, software, and/or imagination to find something wrong with it. My record player didn't have more dynamic range - and it wasn't the cheapest model either.... that is, excluding the pops and scratches which did give it a larger dynamic range.
Besides, LP has many more flaws like how they lack BASS and need it reduced and then boosted on playback. It wouldn't matter if we had 96Khz 32bit sound on DVDs - sound engineers would continue try to wreak everything again. What is needed is an embedded volume code for the player's decoder / amplifier circuit to use to instantly raise or lower the volume so these sound engineers can continue to mess everything up to a ridiculous extreme without actually throwing away sound quality. This would also allow people to ignore the dynamic compression by telling the player to ignore the encoded volume/dynamic range track.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Measurably? It depends on what you're measuring. Measure and compare the brainwaves of subjects indicating activity and relaxation states while listening to digital vs. analog vs. the real live event. As far as I'm concerned that's the only relevant measurement, because after all, listening to recorded music is about recreating the pleasure and experience of listening to the real thing.
Brothers in Arms sounds amazing on vinyl as well.
If you clean your records well, use a good stylus and aren't a hack about everything, you will not have noise problems and your records will not wear out. I have listened to some of my records hundreds of times. I have two copies of Tubular Bells and in college I used the slightly worse duplicate on my turntable on REPEAT for 24+ hours days to break in my new cartridge. The only audible effect on the record was that it sounded cleaner. I have since muddled my two copies and can't detect which is the "abused" one. In practical terms, records do not wear out, and unlike tapes they can sit on a shelf for a hundred years and not slowly erase themselves. I will be a very lucky person if I live long enough to see my records wear out. I wish I had time to listen to music enough to wear them out! You are right that every listening experience is slightly different, and every play slightly wears out your record. Maybe this, along with having to get up to flip the thing, makes us listen harder.
In other words, it's not a bug, it's a feature.
The thing I haven't seen mentioned is that many releases are still vinyl only. Many songs/artists never got complete or very good CD releases of their music. That is the biggest reason I've recently bought a turntable. It's to hear music I have no other way of acquiring. But this happens with new artists as well with limited edition 7" singles with a b-side you can't find anywhere else. Much of the regional music you used to hear back 40-50 years ago never made it to CD either.
Almost every new album these days is being released in LP format side by side with their CD counterparts. You would be very hard pressed to find DVD-A of pretty much anything. At least, at walk-in stores. I can walk into my Best Buy and pick between both formats for the latest releases, yet the DVD-A is almost always absent. If you go online and look for the latest you probably wont find DVD-A available there, either.
Resurgence?? how about fulfilling a need. We cant pay our old Vinyl/slate platters on an ipod ya know lol. I'm guessing zillions of platters hiding in peoples basements and attics can now be played again and this is a good thing.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Has never made it to CD. So, the real reason that vinyl is still in use is because it's the only medium you'll find 85% of the worlds recorded music.
It does sound better, it's tactile, it's art...but the main reason is that vinyl is often the only place you'll find what you're after.
And I may be biased with my 40,000 piece record collection.
New turntables and used albums have always been available locally for me. I will never buy an iPod! There are MP3 and video players out there that are better made (iPods are JUNK!) and at better prices. How Apple ever arranged for the iPod to become a status symbol for idiots remains a mystery. No intelligent person would buy one!
Sales of turntables are significantly lifted by sales of the Serato Scratch Live software package.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
I have a taste for classic jazz records. I buy them and I enjoy them. Quite simple really.
Poison Idea summed it up nicely with their album Record Collectors Are Pretentious Assholes EP.
Rising from "inconsequential" to "negligible" is hardly newsworthy.
Some people have brought up the fact that there are people who find the hiss and the imperfections soothing. Kinda reminds me of watching international sporting events in the 1980s. The commentators' voices were tinny and crackly, and you really had a sense of them being in a far away exotic land. Nowadays you can listen to the commentary of the World Cup or Tour de France and the commentators' voices (and the images) come through crystal clear as if they're in your own living room. The sense of distance, and the sense that they have gone to great lengths to get this experience to you, is gone. I find that it has kinda lost something.
Maybe there's something similar going on with music fans. I remember listening to LPs while reading the lyrics from the album cover. There was something about CDs that never quite made me want to do the same. It's like you had to take loving care of the physical media. Nowadays you just download the song, plug your iPod into your USB port, and carry on doing what you were doing (probably laundry). Music as an end in itself is gone, now it's something to keep your mind occupied while you do some mundane task.
That's my theory anyway.
Yeah, I have a lot of theories.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
My own personal theory would be that more amateur/bedroom DJs are buying mixing decks (such as the venerable Technics 1210) for use with time coded vinyl that acts as a midi controller.
The idea is you can mix your torrented MP3s with the same controls as you use with vinyl. Of course, once you have a decent mixing turntable to play vinyl on, owning the 'original' vinyl becomes 'cool' again...
Newsworthy? Turntables have been outselling guitars for a decade. Vinyl has been on the comeback supposedly since the 90s when the dance music scene really took off. In reality it's done more than comeback, it's a mature underground industry with a huge turnover. It's been the weapon of choice for a DJ since year dot, even though digital mixing has come along way.
Vinyl consumers tend to buy alot of records, I used to live with a couple of DJs who had on the order of 7000 records between them. Yes that does sounds more the numbers used to describe MP3 collections. Who buys CDs like that?
I spent a few months working in a music store, we sold turntables on a daily basis along with gazillions of dance, hip hop and old records, we sold about three guitars a month.
Vinyl taught me to love music again, taught me to listen rather than just have it in the background. It's very tactile and you can even see the patterns made by different sound in the surface. However I've found it frustrating to the point I don't put on records just for listening very often. You see, in theory vinyl offers great sound quality because of the analog format. In practice vinyl it doesn't 99% of the time, you can never get perfect reproduction without great effort (keeping the damn things clean for a start) and the records eventually wear out. Oh don't talk to me about the price of decent needles, I'll cry.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Why bother with recordingss when you can blow your reward money to hire Van Halen to play your birthday party? Thank you, Mr. Spicoli.
I bought the Them Crooked Vultures vinyl because it was $5 more than buying the MP3s - and it came with a download of 320kbps MP3s ripped from the vinyl. Out of curiosity, I downloaded CD-sourced FLACs via nefarious means, opened in SoundForge the FLACs, the 320kbps MP3s, and a copy of the vinyl I made from my own turntable running into an M-Audio ProjectMix I/O.
I then took screenshots of the waveforms of these recordings, and overlayed them in Photoshop, setting the overlay to 'difference' and it was pretty clear that the vinyl was actually compressed MORE than the CD version. The second track in the 320kbps vinyl-sourced MP3s also seems to have a big piece of dust on it in the very beginning.
I don't have them online (and I'm at work right now and can't get them) but you can see that I did a similar process here when Nine Inch Nails released a remastered version of The Downward Spiral
The mix on Them Crooked Vultures vinyl is definitely different than the CD - in that if there were a loudness war on, the vinyl would win that battle. If you had made that point with a record I didn't have, I wouldn't really be able to refute your point, but in this specific case, your loudness wars argument does not hold up. CDs have immensely better dynamic range and frequency response than vinyl, and most of the time, vinyl is pressed from CDs anyway.
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...from earlier in the thread, where I directly compare a modern vinyl release to it's CD equivalent, and the vinyl is actually MORE compressed than the CD. Here's the post. The funny bit is that the vinyl came with a digital download of 320kbps MP3s that were sourced from a vinyl copy of the album. That's a fidelity double whammy, isn't it? Lower dynamic range from vinyl, compressed to MP3? (If you don't end up reading my other post, I bought the vinyl because it was $5 more than the digital download)
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Sure, I've still got all my old vinyl - but I record them onto ten and a half inch open reel tape. Pure unadulterated analog, at 15ips.
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I hear teletype terminals and paper tape are making a come back.
The real pretentious ones are the graphicophiles.
This people spend thousands of pounds over the years to get the latest Nvidia or ATI card, even though it's a tiny improvement in frame rate than only 1% of the population would notice. And they have gold plated HDI connectors, pure copper heatsinks, and stuff like that.
It's a complete waste of money when you could use a cheap graphics card and still surf the web perfectly well.
The cassette was in fact Dutch Stupidity (Philips)
You never catch me alive
Another reason to like vinyl is that a lot of new records come with coupons for a high quality MP3 download of the tracks on the album. Contrast this to CDs, increasingly plastered with anti-piracy warnings and new DRM measures (with rootkits thrown in for good measure), and I know which format I would rather support, to say nothing of the archival quality.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
Many labels that are releasing vinyl records these days provide a download code for you to get an mp3 version of the album for free from their website. This is far better than digitizing the record yourself, obviously, and honors fair use. If they don't provide this to you, it's easy enough to just look on pirate bay for it, especially for new releases - and the kind of music hipsters like is usually very easy to find that way.
The only really useful thing that a turntable that connects to your computer provides (which of course you could do with any turntable via line-in anyway...) is digitizing obscure stuff that's out of print and unavailable on CD or on the internet. In this case, the record company shouldn't care - if they can't be bothered to have the music available for purchase, they really can't complain about people making digital recordings of old records for personal use. Especially since many of them have demonstrated that they understand fair use and respect the consumers by offering free digital versions of their vinyl releases.
Of course, there is a financial/piracy prevention logic to it as well - even the hippest hipster has an mp3 player, and is going to look for a digital copy of anything they buy on vinyl. If they get it for free from the record company, they won't have to look on piratebay, which means the demand on piratebay is (ever so slightly) diminished.
Dad's turntable and records are still in great shape, so that setup is still quite operational in its own corner of the living room. When in action it sounds quite good, but I figure that's in large part because of large floor speakers rather than small computer-desk speakers.
It's fun to look through the cases, and it's interesting to see the vinyl versions of some classic albums (Beatles, Zeppelin, etc.). What's really cool though, is looking through all the offbeat stuff that never made the format conversion - I wish that DIY digital conversion wasn't such a pain.
But when it comes to the main purpose of a music recording:
The procedure of playing vinyl records just seems like too much of a pain in the ass compared to popping in a CD or firing up your favorite media-player software.
If the music is really good to begin with, it doesn't need to have a 1337kbps bitrate to sound good.
A lot of my music collection was built before I really started caring about this stuff - sure, I'll rip newly acquired CDs to FLAC or something, but it's not a big enough issue to me that I'm going to dig out and re-rip all the others.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I'd love to know whether the self-proclaimed 'true audiophiles' would still recognize the 'better' medium.
Yes, the cassette was dutch, and there was nothing stupid about it. The stupidity was the eight track.
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