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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."
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.
Umm yeah fad...they've been saying that for the past 20 years!
Your whole argument is, it's too hard to play vinyl, because:
1. They scratch.
2. They take up too much space.
3. It's too hard to flip a record.
Good god, what a whiny little boy. Go play with your iPod little boy and stop pestering the adults.
I just got myself a pair of Numark TTX turntables and a copy of Torq (M-Audio's response to FinalScratch and Serato) earlier this year. Nearly every timecoded vinyl system supports both absolute mode and relative mode; the former mapping playback of a song to exact positions on the record, while the latter only uses velocity and direction. In absolute mode, it's easier to do needle drops and jump to specific parts of a song, while relative mode gives you cue points, so jumping to a particular downbeat or scratch sample can be done instantly with a keyboard shortcut or MIDI pad. It's much easier to DJ using relative mode and cue points since the needle's position doesn't matter, but whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is the DJ scene's version of the vi vs. emacs debate.
The GP's comment about working with vinyl vs. DAT is correct - it's MUCH easier to jump to a specific point on a track with a needle drop than it is with linear media like tape (although apparently it can be done). Beat Juggling for more than a measure (MAYBE two) is just about impossible to do with linear media like tape.
Finally, the lack of a wide dynamic range has its advantages, too. When I DJ weddings, many couples want to hear Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin during dinner, and I'm happy to oblige. Specifically Sinatra's tracks are a bit annoying because they change volume very suddenly. Inevitably this leads to grandpa (who invariably gets seated right next to the speakers) complaining about how loud it is when the brass section blasts it out, while the bride and groom who are in the back are complaining because they can't hear anything *but* the horn blasts. During dancing segments, it's also jarring to go from one song that's at -6db and go to one at -2db. I appreciate it when songs are fairly normalized and are fairly consistent (a few measures of the drums cutting out during the bridge is one thing, having to constantly ride the gain control on my mixer is a royal pain when I have to cue up the next track). Wide dynamic ranges are wonderful from an artistic perspective and I can appreciate them in "listening music" (classical, jazz, opera, even some rock), but less in dance music (although it can be done properly there, too [this song def sounds better on vinyl than on youtube, btw]).
How can you create electronic music, digitally, on computers etc and then claim that putting them on vinyl somehow magically improves the quality?
You can't. LPs are only superior when they're cut from an analog master. If you're recording electronica with no real sounds being sampled, and everything produced electronically, digital would be better.
But an orchestra or a bluegrass band? An LP from an analog master will in fact sound more like a real orchestra or a real bluegrass band than a CD will.
Free Martian Whores!
My record player didn't have more dynamic range
No, it didn't, but your records did. That's not the fault of digital technology, that's the fault of digital technicians (sound engineers) who don't want dynamic range, they want LOUD. They don't want fidelity, they want "sounds good" (to them). CD's dynamic range is superior to vinyl's, but its superiority is rarely used.
Besides, LP has many more flaws like how they lack BASS and need it reduced and then boosted on playback.
They don't "lack" bass; bass must be attenuated to make the record longer, but when enhansed on playback it's back. The frequency response of LPs goes all the way down. Attenuating the bass doesn't cut any frequencies out, it simply makes the bass notes not as loud, and they're turned back up on playback.
It wouldn't matter if we had 96Khz 32bit sound on DVDs - sound engineers would continue try to wreak everything again.
That's true, and I doubt 96 kHz sampling would come close to LPs. Make it 440 kHz and digital would blow analog away. But you're right, the "engineers" would screw it up.
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.
I don't see how this could work. Take how they've removed the dynamic range from Boston's first album, or Santana's Abraxis. How would the playback mechanism determine when the sound should be attenuated?
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It perpetuates the modern myth that you can't pan or have discrete channels in an LP.
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Fallacies:
virgin vs. recycled vinyl
So laughable it doesn't need rebuttal. Vinyl is vinyl.
worn stylus
You're going to wear a diamond out by scratching it across vinyl?
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
Your stylus is NOT going to melt your records. The half gram of force the stylus of a good turntable exerts on the vinyl will not degrade it.
Then, after I tell them this, their reasoning changes--they like records because the hiss and pops are warm and soothing.
Only an idiot would think dirt and scratches are "warm and soothing".
The question of quality aside, records are a pain to deal with! You have to handle them carefully,
No more carefully than a CD. Handle a CD and LP equally roughly, and you'll find that the LP sounds like shit, but the CD won't even play.
clean them often with specific supplies
Dish soap and a soft cloth.
After a couple of songs have played, you have to stop what you're doing and flip the record over
~25 minutes per side, CD =78 minutes per CD. With a changer this is no problem with either medium.
Free Martian Whores!
45s and MP3s are records, albums are collections of records (like your photo album); LPs and CDs are albums.
I wish you kids would stop redefining common words just to fit your particular views of the world. If you want to know what a word means, look it up in a dictionary. Don't call your dog a "cat" just because you don't know the difference between a cat and a dog.
And just because a thing sells well doesn't mean it's good, and just because it doesn't sell well doesn't mean it's bad. Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting in his life, and that was to his brother. You couldn't get twenty bucks today for any of the dreck that was in the art galeries in Van Gogh's time. Take an art history class and you'll see how abysmal the art that sold well was.
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and the 6-disc changer (and, god help us, the random button) don't exist.
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You wrote that here in 2004: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/10/8/134958/152. ... the current release of Zep's "Presence" is digitally mastered
Yes, from the analog source. There wasn't any digital recording when Zeppelin was out, digital didn't start until the very late 1970s.
Someone else mentioned that Nirvana was digitally mastered; I'm not always correct. I didn't have an analog copy of that album, but the statement was illustrational -- an analog product from a digital master will be inferior to a digital product from a digital master. You still get the advantages of theither and the disadvantages of both.
If you get ANY LP demonstrating better bass than the corresponding CD, you have a CD made by someone who didn't have a frickin' clue about mastering audio for a CD.
I wouldn't argue with that. Bass should be a CD's strong point; the deeper the tone, the less aliasing there is.
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You could repair an 8-track, but it was such a chore it wasn't worth it unless the 8-track was somehow irreplaceable.
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No shit? In the nineties? I dodn't know professional studios still had analog equipment then.
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