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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."
Why the ":(" ? It's a damn good thing.
Of course, a properly mastered CD will be helluva better than any vinyl, but thanks to douches involved in the loudness war, all currently sold CDs are of dog shit quality that makes it even worse than pops of vinyl.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I have CD's that i picked up less than 15 years ago that are unplayable, I had heard of laserdisc rot but didnt know it would happen to prerecorded cd's. On the other hand, I have vinyl that belonged to my father that still sounds great. I baby my collection but in a noticeable portion of my collection it seems that simply handling with care didnt matter.
The reasons are many for this. One reason is that though the CD cost of production has fallen the cost to the consumer has stayed the same or even risen. I for one refuse to pay that much for a CD when the majority of it goes to the record company and not the artist. Considering that DVDs are going for around $5-10 US and the cost of producing a movie is orders of magnitude greater I find the difference in prices hard to fathom. A second reason, Vinyl just plain sounds better most of the time. Save your technical BS for those that have not listened to the same track on both using good equipment. This is fact. SHUT IT! Third, downloaded digital music is fine but the quality sucks and the cost is even higher than that for the CD if you want the whole album/CD. Add in that some DL sites are using DRM and the smart people don't buy. DRM is a pain in the ass and only hurts the larger segment of the populace that just wants to listen to the music they have legally purchased. Very few share with others. Hay assholes, did you ever think that if you were not trying to RAPE the customer at every turn of their heads and sell the content at a reasonable price that more would be willing to pay for it? When the cost is less than the effort to steal the content then you will have a license to print money wholesale. Until then, people will work hard to circumvent any mechanisms you put in place if for nothing more than pure spite.
The minor technical, but a real consideration, is space. Say you have a pretty simple recording, just a jazz quartet. That is a minimum of 5 tracks, one for each instrument2 for the drums (stereo track). In reality if you wanted full control like at the studio, the drums would probably be anywhere between 6 and 15 tracks. This of course only increases with larger ensembles, and with the more fine grained control you want. You could easily have a song that is 32 mono and 32 stereo tracks. That would take 450MB per minute of audio. Storing all the data in a cheap format could be a real issue.
A more major technical problem is all the processing needed. Mixes aren't just a bunch of tracks summed together. They have extensive processing done. While some of it is things done per track, and thus things that could be committed to the tracks on the medium, some of it is things done to the whole song. All of that would have to be done by the playback device. So in addition to heavy mixing hardware, it'd have to have a wide battery of effects that could be called on. OF course various musicians/producers wouldn't like it, because it would limit options. You'd have only the included effects as options and it wouldn't be upgraded.
However the most major is that the industry doesn't want it. They don't want you able to easily remix their music. Such a thing would make it so much easier for someone to use parts of existing material for new uses, and they wouldn't want that, at least not without you contacting them for permission.
Neat idea but never happen.
That's what They said about writing operating systems, and yet here I am happily compiling kernel modules for an OS developed largely by enthusiastic amateurs who learned by doing. Take my point?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I buy the vast majority of my albums on vinyl, even at a 5 or 10 dollar premium mainly because I love having a permanent physical copy, but the switch to almost a vinyl-only collection was when the record companies got wise to offering a digital download with the record. With the alternative usually being to just pirate it online and get the CD later and transcode, selling a vinyl with a digital download solves all my problems and the band usually gets a great deal more with record sales than CD sales. So it's a no brainer really, along with the other swag that goes along with it.
Well, until the stylus starts wearing down and the grooves start smoothing out...
An extreme example of that was the all-mechanical antique Victrola that my parents had when I was a kid (along with a big stack of 78-rpm shellac records). All the sound energy was created by the action of the grooves on the needle.
The tone arm was a hollow horn with a big diaphragm on it, and it probably put more than 100 grams of force on the record. The steel needles it used only lasted for about a dozen plays before they became visibly worn and had to be tossed. The mechanical force from playing a record often caused a bunch of white residue to slough off the surface of the disk, which couldn't have been very good for the longevity of the recording. Needless to say, we didn't operate that thing very often.
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=35530
Second, and this is by all means a serious question, are current vinyl releases any better than current CD releases? Or are they also compressed to avoid complaints about sounding quieter than the CD version?
Generally the vinyl is not over-compressed. But there are notable exceptions like the recent Metallica album - in that case the vinyl was exactly the same as CD because they were both mixed under the auspices of the same producer - I forget his name, but he's become ever more popular in the business and he brings the loudness war with him to every new project he takes on and this was his first metallica album. What's really interesting about the metallica case is that the guitar hero version was (apparently) mixed by the guitar hero sound engineers and they were not under the control of any of the loudness warriors. The result was that the people who really wanted the best sound quality from that album bootlegged the ripped guitar hero version.
Here's a video comparing CD mix to guitar hero mix - you don't even need headphones to tell the difference.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRyIACDCc1I
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Infrasonics a digital format can handle much better. Digital can go straight down to DC if you want it to. Most of the time you high pass the signal for various reasons (so you don't record things like A/C vibrations and such) but digital can handle it. Movies sometimes have infrasonics, bass down to the 10Hz region. I can generate sinewaves that are 0.01Hz for a CD if you like. Records can't handle that. Lows are a big weak point because of how they work. You aren't going to get a solid 20Hz signal like you do out of CD or DVD.
Ultrasonics, well, not so much. First off, instruments really don't produce much up there. I've looked at spectra plots of high frequency recordings, there is just not much up there other than noise. You can see a chart that gives you a good idea of the range of instruments (http://www.independentrecording.net/irn/resources/freqchart/main_display.htm).
Then you have to prove that we can perceive it. I've never seen any valid study that shows it.
Actually there is a DAMNED GOOD reason to rip your vinyl to MP3, as I can attest to because I helped an old friend with a great 60s-70s collection do it. You see, those vinyl records? Not affected by the loudness war because they can't take that "compressed all to shit, pushed to the edge of overdrive" sound because the medium simply won't accept it. You listen to an MP3 at 320k of Axis:Bold As Love, or Pieces of Eight from the original vinyl? TOTALLY different sound than what you get from today's CDs, and IMHO 1000% better. People look at me funny when I play my vinyl ripped MP3s, that is until I play them the same song from a CD, then they can see the suck the loudness war has wrought.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
No, records were not mastered as hard in the 60's and 70's and 80's.
They did not have the kind of signal processing we have now. There were no fast look ahead multiband peak limiters like TC finaliser, Waves L3 etc. These are the things that give the hyper loud square waved sound that is so offensive on some CDs. Use of multiband compression was also rare, starting only really in the 80's. They would have mostly used full band compressors/limiters, and the kind of peak limiting you get by driving the master tape a little, but that is a world away from a modern CD master.
It is also physically impossible to cut records with the squared off peaks you get from abusing the digital process. What you hear when you play those CDs back is the sound of the reconstruction filter trying to turn 'impossible' waveforms into a voltage. If you try this with vinyl then the coils in the cutting head melt as they try to slam from one side to another in zero amount of time. If I have to cut a record from a slammed digital master than I have to *reduce* the level to allow for overshoot, and filter the high end to remove the out of band stuff caused by the clipping causing aliasing in the D/As, and you end up with a *quieter* record than a gentler mastering process would have resulted in. This results in a shitty sounding record.
But really, it's only from 1998ish onwards that anyone has tried to cut records with the same kind of mastering you would do on a 'loud' CD. Even now, it's generally only done when people were mixing with the look ahead peak limiter on their master bus, so it's the only final version, and it is not possible, or there is no budget to get a proper master done.