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CD Sales Continue To Plummet, Vinyl Records Soar
Lucas123 writes "Over the past four years, vinyl record sales have been soaring, jumping almost 300% from 858,000 in 2006 to 2.5 million in 2009, and sales this year are on track to reach new peaks, according to Nielsen Entertainment. Meanwhile, as digital music sales are also continuing a steady rise, CD sales have been on a fast downward slope over the same period of time. In the first half of this year alone, CD album sales were down about 18% over the same period last year. David Bakula, senior vice president of analytics at Nielsen Entertainment, said it's not just audiophiles expanding their collections that is driving vinyl record sales but a whole new generation of young music aficionados who are digging the album art, liner notes and other features that records bring to the table. 'The trend sure does seem sustainable. And the record industry is really doing a lot of cool things to not only make the format come alive but to make it more exciting for consumers,' Bakula said."
CD sales are still roughly 100 times vinyl album sales; 110 million units for the first half of 2010.
Have you read my blog lately?
Ever hear a needle scratching a blank track on a record? All that racket you're hearing is noise, i.e., signal you don't want. That noise level is present on every track on the record as well. The music covers it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_recording_vs._digital_recording
Note that the theoretical quality max based on quantization noise achievable by a standard CD is almost 30db better than a vinyl record. Full quality is not, of course, necessarily achieved in practice, but anyone telling you a record stores a perfect signal--or even a better signal than a CD--is way off.
At around $250 you can get a stylus that will go up to 50kHz.
Which is completely useless, as there isn't the slightest bit of evidence humans can hear ultrasonics. Even if they could, most speakers can't reproduce them (and certainly not with any accuracy), assuming they weren't deliberately filtered out somewhere during the recording and mastering process, as they almost certainly would have been. Any ultrasonic signal loud enough to even potentially be audible could cause all sorts of problems with a host of electronic circuits, tape decks and other devices in the recording / mixing / mastering loop.
Not to mention the fact most of the ultrasonics picked up by any stylus are probably harmonics and noise - all of it pure distortion - much of it caused by the needle ringing like a little bell as it's struck by the walls of the groove. Or they're harmonics and distortion and noise coming from the microphones, preamps, mixing decks, tape decks, equalizers, compressors or the mastering equipment itself. In other words, a bunch of power-robbing crap that only serves to distort the signal below 20kHz that actually is audible to humans.
There are no cases where vinyl "sounds better" due to any properties of the format. The vinyl master may have been better equalized or better compressed, but the format itself is pure unadulterated junk, and has been for 50 years. Vinyl was obsolete by the 1960's, and should have and probably would have been replaced by something better if the American electronics firms of the time weren't being run by halfwits and incompetents. I've always been surprised RCA didn't attempt to roll out their capacitance disk as an audio format first before trying to deploy it as a video format, but it was stuck in development hell for well over a decade and I suppose it's a miracle it ever made it to market at all with that bunch of clowns running the place.
The Dutch and Japanese finally got around to doing something about it by the late 1970's. Well, somebody had to. Vinyl sucks.