Slashdot Mirror
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.