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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."
You only have to sell a couple albums more than usual to claim huge percentage increases.
But a small part of a big market is still worth having. Any idea what 1% of the entire recorded music market is worth?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Possible, but in reality most vinyl discs are a direct transfer from the digital master used for the CD, including the brick-wall mix.
Incorrect. You have to carefully master a recording before you can press it onto vinyl. Particularly bad masters sometimes won't even press, the material won't take it and it'll collapse. Not quite as bad but still worse masters will produce a groove that is unplayable. Bass-heavy records have a shorter running time due to the required groove size modifications. Certain stereo panning tricks can cause turntables to skip, so they have to be removed or reduced on vinyl masters.
There's probably some vinyl discs mastered that are just a DAT shoved through to a presser, but they're not common.
You touched on the actual reason why vinyl has a market, and that reason is here to stay: Vinyl is complicated. You can't just waltz into a store and buy the perfect turntable. A turntable is never perfect. You can always one-up "the competition". Then you have to add all sorts of fancy dampening widgets to your setup and let's not forget the rituals that surround playing a vinyl record: What you consider an annoying hassle is an audiophile's fetish and an opportunity to distinguish himself from his lesser peers.
But a small part of a big market is still worth having. Any idea what 1% of the entire recorded music market is worth?
Vinyl didn't account for 1% of the entire recorded music market. It was 1% of full album sales, which have been dropping precipitously.
The only cogent post so far. Having grown up with vinyl, it's just about the worst format for daily use (except for 8-track tape). Each play causes deterioration, not matter how expensive the turntable/cartridge. At the time, it was thought that the acceleration force of the needle often exceeded the elasticity of the vinyl. When CD came out in 1983 or so, I welcomed it with open arms. Although many of the early CD's sounded pretty bad, at least they sounded the same after each play.
- 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.
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