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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."
Nice lossy format to prevent clean ripping, too.
damn those hipsters and their love for ironic nostalgia.
Smell is the sense that is tied to memory the strongest. I remember the smells of those records as much as I remember the sounds and the artwork. :)
Easy day.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
A 12" CD could hold about a dozen regular ones. Not only could you have big album art, but the spinning patterns would complement the bong quite nicely.
I wonder if Birmingham Sound Reproducers is still around making their crappy turntables
Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continues... Aaay!
I just bought a CD the other day while on vacation. As I was walking back to my hotel all I could think was "Now how the hell am I going to listen to this..." Of course I have a CD player in my laptop but that thought didn't occur to me as a way to actually listen to the CD, just as a way to rip it into a digital format so I could listen to it in a more convenient manner. Hell the only reason I even bought the CD was because it was a regional exclusive release... [/anecdote]
I don't care what you say, all I need is my Wumpabet soup.
What I'd personally love to see (or hear) is: multi-track audio... so that songs can be remixed more easily... I mean wouldn't it be cool if it were possible to mute a say trumpet track, and replace it by something else (human voice for example), or the other way around?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
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?
I read an article in the past year or two saying the last one was manufactured in Russia around 1984.
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.
Next thing you know they'll be listening to tube equipment. Horrors!
"People start making rips from the records :("
"Start"?
Back in The Day, a reel-to-reel tape deck was a "server", and ripping to that and to cassette was the way to exchange music. Sneakernet works fine.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
If we say those numbers are for the US, and consider that the US population is on the order of 300 million, that makes for around 1 record sold for every 333 people (or 3 for every 1,000 people). They then roughly tripled these numbers, to around 1 per 110 people, or maybe 10 per 1,000 people.
That still isn't really a ton of albums. I don't really know 110 people personally, so it is not statistically likely that I know someone in this country who bought a new album on vinyl this year.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
# Must check drywall.
Not "all currently sold CD's". Recordings of classical music and related genres seem just fine.
This just further proves it's piracy as the cause. Every audiophile knows that vinyl records are far higher quality than CDs. Pirates can only make inferior digital recordings of vinyl, so they don't bother. Thus, they are forced to buy the vinyl records. Since we see many-fold increase in vinyl sales, we have a glimpse of what CD sales would be like without piracy. So, vinyl is literally a natural DRM that both protects the artists and ensures superior sound quality. Now, would you like to buy some Monster USB cables? Guaranteed to improve your typing and mouse speed.
We called it "Dubbing" instead of "making rips|ripping". We wore an onion on our belts while we did this, which was the style at the time.
Thanks for this post. I was looking for information on this topic about a week ago, but couldn't remember the term.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
How did the industery react when cassette sales started to slip and CDs soared? Or when 8-track started to slip and cassette soared? Or, or, what ever came before whatever and the older format started slipping to the new format? Oh no, the old way to buy and listen to music is being replaced by the new was to buy and listen to music. I'm sure in 10-15 years they will be complaining because online sales are slipping to, something. *Gets my tin foil hat ready.*
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.
What was that software that could extract music from a high-quality photo of a record?
And we didn't go to jail or risk losing our livelyhoods because of it, either.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
Wonderful news!
I just installed the 12-disc record changer in the trunk, which connects to the 8-track head unit!
And it's cool to wear sideburns, boot-cut jeans and long, ratty hair again! What could possibly go wrong?
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.
What's the point of buying it on vinyl for great quality and ripping it to digital? You'll certainly get better quality by directly downloading FLACs from the internet. It's astonishing how clueless record companies are. Release lossless audio on data DVDs, or for digital download if you want quality.
I think the impetus behind vinyl sales is that they're a collector's item. They come in a big envelope with big art instead of a tacky plastic jewel case, and they usually come with inserts or collectibles. Everyone has albums on CD but it commands a lot more cred to say "I have that on vinyl." Some people collect records of great music they already own, and store them (playing vinyl reduces its quality and value).
And we didn't go to jail or risk losing our livelyhoods because of it, either.
And dubbing was a one-to-one transaction not a one-to-many transaction like ripping.
And dubbing was a lossy process that limited multi-generation copying unlike ripping.
Ripping and dubbing are not really comparable. Dubbing was like a subset of ripping where one person rips a cd, puts the file on a USB drive, lets a friend copy the files, and it ends there. Ripping cases like this are not what seems to be winding up in court. What seems to be ending up in court is where someone makes the rips available on the internet. If you want to use the dubbing comparison you would have to have one person make many dubs and start providing them to many people. When people did this the record companies and the law did get involved. Now there is an important distinction for these people who made many dubs, they tended to be involved in commercial piracy and were out to make a profit unlike the person who person who runs the website (or is seeking fame or approval equivalent to seeking a profit?). Again, we have a poor comparison between dubbing and ripping. Its probably best not to compare physical and digital goods.
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.
If you're going to purchase a physical artifact, a record is far more satisfying than a CD. If you just want the music for your MP3 player, why bother ripping it yourself when you can download it (legally or illegally)?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
...vinyl records to CDs - compare vinyl vs. digital downloads thru i.e. iTunes. I recently mail-ordered Wilderness Heart by Black mountain (as an aside, GREAT record), which came with an immediate digital download of the record. I couldn't wait for the vinyl to arrive because I expected it to sound superior to the high-bitrate mp3s. It does. It's noticeable even to my far-from-audiophile wife.
I'm admittedly a fetishist for packaging - double LPs with great gatefold art, colored / clear / marbled vinyl, large-format insert books, all the way to crazy triple and quadruple LPs with all of the above (i.e. Altar, by Boris and Sunn O))) ).
If I can help it I buy nothing but vinyl now. And yes, I do have a USB turntable so (admittedly quite a bit more labor than with a CD) I can make properly tagged copies for listening to on my iPhone.
RIAA claims vinyl killing music industry!
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
It would be hipsters. Retro is "ironically cool" these days. Fixed gear bikes, fedoras, records, all that kind of shit. You will in fact find hipsters that have a large record collection but no record player. Owning the records is the cool part, they don't want to actually bother to use them.
I really doubt DRM is the reason.
Slashdot has ads?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
"The law" couldnt even get involved then! Apparently you weren't around back in the late 70's and early 80's when radio stations across the country were thumbing their noses at the RIAA by hosting "album parties." Always late in the evening, they would proudly boast they were playing so-and-so album "in its entirety" and would even tell listeners to "get your tape decks ready." We'd get side one without interruption, a brief interlude for the dj to switch sides (and for us to do the same) then we'd get side two.
One-to-many. This is exactly what the radio stations were doing. And guess what? The law could not stop them.
Except this is often made unnecessary. Many record companies provide a free download code for the album with the vinyl record.
Granted, it's more common among smaller (non-RIAA) companies.
I think we have here a case where one format does not replace another. It disrupts the time scheme LP -> tape -> CD -> mp3 -> ??
Let's face it, the LP is not exactly the most practical format around. The main advantages of tapes and CDs over LPs were mainly portability (the sound quality is a point that can be debated but I don't think it is really the point) and ease of sharing. MP3s are also portable, easy to share, and they have the further advantage of being stored in one place (the HD on my computer or portable music player.
If I play all my MP3 music library, I will have ~4 weeks of music nonstop. It's great when I don't know what to listen to, I play it in random mode, and I sometimes (re-)discover some tunes. It's also a great excuse when I have friends at home and they don't like the music. "Yes, I also have shitty music, but I didn't chose to play it now, it's this random function, you know".
But sometimes I want to listen to a particular album, and then I really appreciate that I can have it as an LP. It may be some kind of fetishism, but I appreciate to have to go to the shelves, look for the vinyl, look at the picture, take it out, put it on the turntable, play it, and after 20min getting up from the couch to turn it. It may sound strange, but because it is unpractical, it actually helps me to concentrate on the music.
FTA
many new vinyl albums come with digital download cards that have a code that customers can redeem online to get the digital version of a record at no additional cost
and btw, here are the last LPs I bought Songs from Matt Elliott
The real reason behind the spike in sales is that every man and his grandpa thinks he's a DJ.
vinyl is a more solid investment. CD's don't last as long, will deteriorate after 10 years or so (the "forever" hype was BS... maybe it's cosmic rays, maybe it's microwaves, idk, the inner foil falls apart often in less than 10 years). Vinyl, of course, will deteriorate due to friction and heat, but as it turns out, this can take 30-50 years or longer... but each time the record is played, technically, it changes slightly. But the resale value of vinyl is much higher, if you store them correctly, keep them in good condition, and if you sell at the right place to the right audiophiles. I have to say, vinyl does sound like it has more punch, but I think this is due to the HiFi system it's played on, the room it's in, and isn't exactly literally high fidelity... good components enhance music beyond it's fidelity, and for CD's consider that most commercial ADC's, while they've gotten standardized at a nice level, are still kind of cheap. A great ADC, in pro audio, like a Lavry AD, is about at least a grand, and then consider that you'd still need a great clean amplifier and good speakers to get the best sound out of it.
I myself prefer to make lossless rips from original CDs, and then back up that music library... replacing the drives every few years. Turntables are too mechanical, and I'm not mechanically oriented. Digital rips, of course, have no resale value... but if I still have all my digital rips 20 years from now, I'll be pleased.
The Admin and the Engineer
If vinyl sounds better than a digital copy, you're doing it wrong.
Fact is, if you record at a nice high 96/24 digitally, and even if you dither down to a 44/16 CD level, it sounds pretty damned accurate.
How you choose to rip into a data-compressed format is up to you.
As for vinyl, the format is reliant on analog-touch playback. It has inherent white noise, and will eventually degrade. Shitty compact discs from shitty replicators aside, digital is still "forever". But if you want to claim vinyl sounds better than 128k mp3, go ahead. You're right.
Just don't tell me that an m4a at a variable in the 300k range is anything but transparent.
If you like a little white noise with your audio, that's your flavor. Fly your freak flag. I'll take purity myself, dry as you might think that is.
God damned hipsters.
Indeed, a lot of my CDs of older music aren't so affected. It can be annoying, but the music is a lot more interesting. Personally, I would never have been able to sit through Miles Davis' classic Kinda Blue if it had been compressed all to hell. Likewise Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday would've been crap had modern engineers been responsible.
Vinyl sales are 2.27% of CD sales - a tiny part of the physical media market. The resurgence is partly because of nostalgia and partly because vinyl has a dramatically different sound - music has to be EQ'd differently to ensure the needle doesn't hop grooves, and there's a gradual rolloff of the high end after repeated playings. It's a different beast, and one that appeals to listeners who appreciate the simplicity, timelessness and elegance of old tech.
I'm a mobile jock who's getting into vinyl a bit. I still do my parties digital, but got a copy of Torq (and later Serato), and the occasional vinyl record inevitably followed.
The last couple vinyl releases I've gotten seemed to be a win-win-win situation. Last one I paid for cost $20 shipped. That includes a yellow-colored vinyl copy of the planned radio singles with instrumentals on the back, a ripped/encoded/tagged digital MP3 copy of the full album, and MP3s of every acapella and instrumental for every track on the full album. The one before that cost $35, but included all of that, plus a CD copy of the album, a T-shirt, and a pair of really nice slipmats.
Ultimately, that seems to be the best way for the record industry to get consumers to pay for things from the artists they like. I paid twice the price for the album that would be paid on iTunes, but got plenty of value for it. I try to get sets like this whenever I can. Some are just too expensive (Kaskade did a similar bundle that, while it included the full album on wax, didn't include acapellas or instrumentals, but cost $60), but if it's a sane price, vinyl + MP3 album/acapella/instrumental download is worth the retail cost of a CD to procure.
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.
Not sure of the original link, but here's a copy:
http://dribibu.xs4all.nl/dilbert20091117.html
This would reminds anyone who have prepared for GRE's analytic writing's argument part. Slashdot's really often post stories as flawed as these arguments that you need to contradict in your composition.
Vinyl records are not encoded with anti piracy encryption. Kids are getting wise with the added benefit that vinyl records sound far better than compressed digi-downloads.
That's actually quite surprising (assuming, of course, that the YouTube clip hasn't been messed with for effect) - I tend to put things like this down as the rantings of the $1000 network cable brigade but the difference was definitely noticeable to me (without the video visible, of course; I didn't want to bias myself).
I just happened to listen to that on my pretty much awful Dell Laptop speakers, and I could still hear the difference. That is truly depressing.
It seems his name is Rick Rubin, producer for Metallica's 2008 album Death Magnetic. The album came under fire for its excessive use of dynamic range compression thanks to Rubin's influence, and in fact there's a petition for a remix or a remaster of Death Magnetic without the excessive dynamic range compression.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Back in 2002, Slashdot linked to a guy who experimented with scanning a record and reconstructing the audio.
I wonder if this would work even better using structured light, or maybe illumination with different wavelengths from different directions.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
I have a collection of about 700 CDs and about 100 vinyl records of different sizes and speeds. I honestly can't tell you the last time I put any of them in a CD player or on a turntable. I, like many, have my entire music collection digitized. If I buy a CD, it gets ripped to my computer and then it sits on a shelf. If I buy vinyl, I go online and find the MP3s and then the vinyl sits on a shelf. I still buy music (instead of just downloading it) because I think it's the right thing to do, and I still buy music on physical formats because I'd rather have an actual physical copy to collect AND audio files on my computer than just audio files on my computer (especially if the audio files I buy are going to be DRMed and won't play on all my devices anyway). So if I'm going to buy a physical copy "just to have it," and I'm not actually going to play it on anything... why not buy vinyl with bigger artwork and better packaging? I think that is the decision that a lot of people are making when they go to (what is left of) record stores.
Generally the vinyl is not over-compressed.
It certainly was back in the record era, at least for pop or rock records from the 60's-70's on, with rare exceptions. It almost had to be to sound recognizable on AM radio or in cars (since the radio stations all played the records). Only in the mid-late 70s were there many pop or rock records that were mixed for FM or home listening on quality equipment. Early 70's pop records were horrifically compressed, easily as bad as your average Britney Spears crap. Even back as far as the "Wall of Sound" where the dynamics were intentionally compressed "up front" is an example.
I would also note that most full-dynamic-range records *can't be played* on anything less that pretty expensive cartridges on perfectly-adjusted equipment. I have one Sheffield direct-to-disk "Harry James" records that I could only reliably track after extensive adjustments to the tracking force and cartridge moment of inertia and tonearm mass. Almost anything I tried, and any conventional inexpensive cart ($50) is sends the tonearm off the record 1/8". If for nothing else, it would play much better in the majority of cases if there *was* some compression applied. It HAS to be.
I have been a high-fidelity guy (not an audiophool "cable consumer") for the past 40 years. CDs and digital music has been such a tremendous advance. Compression is hardly a new idea and absurdly compressed range was common for as long as records have existed. Vinyl is no solution, it's the engineering, no matter what the delivery medium.
Brett
What's the point of buying it on vinyl for great quality and ripping it to digital? You'll certainly get better quality by directly downloading FLACs from the internet.
Vinyl is less likely to have its levels compressed to the clipping point than digital.
The majority of USB turntables come with a lousy needle that produces a signal that negates all the benefits of vinyl and can even damage your record. Also, cheaply built turntables as most USB turntables are can produce vibrations in the turntable surface that disturbs playback, preventing a clean rip even with a good needle and again, possibly damaging the record. If you really want to rip vinyl properly, you probably want a belt-driven turntable made of as little plastic as possible, about as expensive a needle/cartridge as you can find, a decent phono preamp, and a good analog capture device (a M-Audio Audiophile 192 is excellent; an ASUS Xonar DX2 would be fine; a Creative X-Fi would be minimum).
Tell that to my software discs from the 90s.
In cases of new albums, data on audio CDs is usually heavily compressed to conscript the albums into the loudness war; due to technical limitations in vinyl, this isn't really possible on that medium, so vinyl sounds like it has more punch because – guess what? – due to having a higher dynamic range, it does.
The other consideration point is that yes, people listening to vinyl have probably invested in higher-quality playback equipment than the teenager with the $30 iPod dock.
I stopped reading at 'CDs dont last as long.' Seriously? Vinyl outlasts a pressed CD? What planet are you from? ..or what universe? (jk yes I read your whole comment)
1. people buy cds to listen to music, not to save for college. 'the right places to the right audiophiles'.. You mean the emotional kind who buy into hype over technical realities?
2. in a reasonable environment, cds will outlast just about any other storage medium to date.. By 'reasonable' I mean a typical home environment under the auspices of a careful owner. I do not mean a clean room environment. There is nothing to wear out. The laser is not powerful enough to etch the polycarbonate or reflective layers. The data on it has error correction built into it. Yes, I know it's not very robust, but it's good enough to prevent gradual 'error creep' from careless use. If the cd has been abused to the point where you can hear audible errors, you'll know for sure by the screetching/popping/skipping.
3. Collecting modern vinyl is moot since most of it will be produced with the same studio mix as the CD. Collect old stuff if you want to avoid the loudness war, but this problem will not go away simply by switching formats.
4. What does 'beyond its fidelity' mean? If you mean that good equipment exposes flaws in the recording, I agree. With lossless digital formats, the weak points are the studio engineers and the consumer playback devices, not the format itself. Vinyl is a lossy format. It's just not digital, and that's what everyone raves about even though the term doesn't address its weaknesses. The anti digital crowd's argument boils down to misguided assumptions about signal purity. At sufficient resolution, a PCM approximation of an analog waveform is indistinguishable from the original by ANYONES' ear, especially once it's pumped back through an analog power amplifier and speakers. CDs 16 bit 44100hz rate is sufficient to do this for 99% of all sources. The problem lies in the policies of the recording studio.
Listeners, audiophiles or not, are far more likely to notice the lower dynamic range, rising intermod distortion, cracks/pops/skips, wow/flutter of vinyl as it wears, than they would miss the theoretical ultrasonic sampling rates (say 60Khz and up) it may offer.
More details here
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)
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.
Someone plays some rap record with a dixie cup and a thumbtack.
"will deteriorate after 10 years or so" - Have you been microwaving nachos on them or something. My oldest Cd is Master of Puppets which I go the day it hit the stores in 1986. I put it on the other day and it sounds perfect. My main source of music is still CDs. I would guess that 80% of my collection is pre-1995 and they all still sound fine. The only special care they get is I don't play them in the car. (Burned copies instead, go ahead and steal them). Seriously, what are you doing to trash them so fast?
This has nothing to do with audiofiles. I pirate all my music... but I own a record player and a lot of records. Why? Because it's fun to have a party and pull out records... or sit with my wife and listen to old comedy LPs. When I go to see a band live and they have an LP on sale, I buy it. I have no problem with supporting artists but selling me a digital copy of their song isn't going to work. Come to town, have a show, sell me a Tshirt and record. Work for my God damn money and you'll make a lot more than you ever did off the CDs. Musicians that suck live are a thing of the past.
Dj's and electronic music are the major increase of vinyl sales, there's a whole new generation with different music tastes. Nothing to do with the quality of sound, more of a generally accepted standard where DJ's come to clubs spinning records, and there's many youth that want to be the next big DJ (just as rock was back in the 60s, disco in the 70s, etc). On the other hand this article says nothing about the total quantity of vinyl/CD sold. I'm sure over all CD outsell vinyl by multiples. There's no doubt that CD is on the same path as cassettes, but the next format is digital... not records or CD.
www.newviewmedia.com
The problem with USB turntables are the crap preamps. My own transfer setup is an old Technics SL-1300 direct drive with a high end "linear contact" Audio Technica AT331LP stylus (sadly since discontinued). Recording was done with a Soundblaster AWE64 Gold and later a Soundblaster Live! The quality was pretty good for a soundcard (noise was basically undetectable). The best digitizing solution is likely something USB as its away from the RF interference typical in computer cases.
Post processing (de-noise and de-click) is done with software called Diamond Cut ( http://www.diamondcut.com/ ). Its propose built audio restoration software, not a bunch of plug-ins for some random sound editing program. Highly recommended and comes with an excellent user's manual (covers all kinds of audio restoration techniques).
For a while, records were basically gone. Then some canny people started marketing them again, creating displays for them, and so on. So record sales just went from pretty close to zero, because you had to go to special places to buy them, to not-zero. And whaddya know! RECORD-BREAKING GROWTH! This just in, one of my friends had twins, their family is growing ONE HUNDRED PERCENT PER YEAR!!!
It's almost never useful to look at percentage growth on things like this, because the famously rapid growth of small things is, in general, not particularly sustainable.
In this particular case, it's easy to see an initial market for records, but frankly, I switched to CDs because they were better, and nothing has changed since.
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one of the local coffee shops has one of the main walls covered in a grid of LP cases. Some random albums, but also some goodstuff such as Abbey Road and Houses of the Holy.
one of the local music clubs has a smaller-scale version of this concept at work: a few of them, and plaques bearing reproductions of the case art rather than the case itself.
The array looks really cool.
My version of music wall art, however, consists of various musicians' logos built as a LEGO mosaic.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I rip my CDs (to FLAC) as soon as I get them, so they aren't worn out by use before they get put on the computer. And with the convenient stockpile of music on the computer, I don't play the physical discs often, keeping them safer that way.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I get the Disco Stu quote, but here's what a classic American humorist (Mark Twain) had to say about absurd extrapolation:
“In the space of one hundred and seventy six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over a mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-pole. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo [Illinois] and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I'd like stem tracks (hell, even just a cappella / instrumental splits) more readily available, but a standard audio CD isn't the way to do it due to space concerns.
Data CDs with the stems in FLAC form, maybe. Stems seem to compress somewhat better than whole tracks do, evne though the sum of stems takes up more space overall.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
whether professionally released or amateur, yes, some remixes seem to add nothing to the song besides random sound effects.
while few make me think "omg! better than the original", many take the song in an interesting new direction.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I think the impetus behind vinyl sales is that they're a collector's item.
There's your key bit of information right there. They are collectors items often produced by enthusiasts. Record companies these days don't view vinyl as a killer medium to out-do the competition, so they don't push stupid unrealistic expectations on the people who master the stuff, which may I add also usually needs to be mastered separately. You often end up with a case where the digital releases are dynamically compressed to all buggery. I mean what's the point of having 96dB of dynamic range if you only ever use the top 5 and then horrendously clip the peaks in an attempt to make the records sound loud?
Take for instance this quote from wikipedia's entry of Stadium Arcadium by the Red Hot Chili Peppers: "A problem often pointed out by audiophiles is Vlado Meller's mastering for the CD release. It can be regarded as a product of the loudness war, with heavy use of dynamic range compression, and suffering of frequent clipping.[14] In contrast, Steve Hoffman's mastering for the vinyl release was praised for its quality."
The quality inherent in vinyl is about attitude of the producers.
You can record overcompressed sound to vinyl too. Vinyl, like magnetic tape or CD, has a maximum level that can be recorded (for tape it's saturation level, for CD it's 0dBFS and for vinyl it's when the playing needle jumps out of the groove), but it does not require the recorded signal to have some minimum dynamic range. I could record a pure 1kHz sine wave and it would be played back correctly. Nothing prevents record companies from recording vinyl from the butchered CD master (and a few records were made that way).
However, the people that buy records usually care about sound quality and dynamic range. If the record is badly mastered they won't buy it. Also, these people usually use high quality equipment (amplifiers, speakers, record player) that can correctly reproduce the dynamic range (ever tried listening to a recording with wide dynamic range on laptop speakers?). This is the main reason why record companies make better masters for records. The CD crowd does not care about sound quality enough to not buy the CD if it sounds bad.
Even if the turntable were fitted with a decent cartridge, needle and tone arm, there's no way that USB can be made into a good connection. You don't have to (and shouldn't, unless you enjoy being gullible) pay hundreds of dollars for your cables, but even the crappy lamp cables you get from Radio Shack would be better.
It's perfectly possible to get quite a good setup at a pretty much budget price. My setup is a Pro-Ject Debut III with a Nad PP-2 pre-amp plugged into the back of an Audigy 2 ZS soundcard. If you shop around, you could probably get this for about $300 all up. I didn't pay much more, and I went to a bricks-and-mortar shop. Obviously, there are lots of ways to improve on this outfit, but the usual law of diminishing returns applies.
Also, a note for those unused to vinyl: because it's essentially a mechanical component, a new cartridge will give a somewhat thin sound, as it needs "running in" for some time to develop its full responsiveness.
Yes! To add to this, vinyl often required compression for entirely different reasons too. The louder is better attitude by idiots who don't know what a volume control does has always existed, however with vinyl there wasn't a hard 0dB limit, but rather a limit to how suddenly you can make the record needle change direction without launching out of the track, and also how big the tracks can get before they hit the next track over. If you're trying to cram as much content as possible onto a record then the tracks need to be closer together and thus quieter so they don't end up touching each other.
While this may not apply to every record out there, and often flat out goes against some sales:
CD: Cold Play - Viva la Vida $29AU Includes a booklet with micro sized font that makes lyrics very hard to read.
Vinyl: Cold Play - Viva la Vida $35AU Includes a large easily readable booklet, centrefold art, a separate book of artwork, AND THE FRIGGING CD!
I know people who don't have a turntable who still bought this one on vinyl.
Personally, I would never have been able to sit through Miles Davis' classic Kinda [sic] Blue if it had been compressed all to hell.
That is one of my "go-to" albums for testing out stereo systems. Although recorded over 50 years ago, it is so incredibly well recorded (quite apart from being fucking good music), it exposes the slightest defect in any sound system.
so vinyl sounds like it has more punch because - guess what? - due to having a higher dynamic range, it does.
Actually, although I'm a big fan of vinyl, it can be argued that it actually has less dynamic range than digital; nearly all (with the rare exception of the Full Dynamic Range discs) vinyl recordings are pre-processed with an "RIAA" compression in order to compensate for the difficulty of keeping the needle in its groove in the noisy bits. Decompression on playback is (usually) handled by the pre-amp. That's why some amplifiers have a separate phono input from the line-level inputs.
Vinyl is often characterised as giving a "warmer" sound reproduction, which I guess probably reflects a comparatively low degree of responsiveness at higher frequencies.
I stopped reading at 'CDs dont last as long.'
I didn't, but the simplest aspect of this is that with a CD it's simple to make a backup that is 100% identical to the original. This was never possible with vinyl - lots of us went to considerable lengths to copy LPs as well as we could, but unless you had a first-rate reel-to-reel machine it just wasn't possible to make a really good copy.
CD's don't last as long, will deteriorate after 10 years or so (the "forever" hype was BS... maybe it's cosmic rays, maybe it's microwaves, idk, the inner foil falls apart often in less than 10 years).
Call me surprised. I have a good number of audio CDs which are at least 20 years old, and I have yet to see this effect. Maybe you just stumbled upon a batch that were not manufactured properly ?
"You have to halve the Nyquist limit because that limit only barely renders the sound FREQUENCY. It doesn't mean you can get the sound AMPLITUDE right."
Huh? WTF are you talking about? Go, take a lesson in signal processing.
Some record companies have already responded to the evil threat of USB turntables by introducing technology that effectively eliminates ripping of their vinyl albums!:
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2007/05/digiwax
Nope. The CDJ series has changed the musical scene for most of the house, trance, dance progressive and minimal genre. But outside of these specific styles, the DJs (Hip-Hop, Techno, Breakbeat, Nu-dance, etc..) mostly prefer to use vinyl based solutions, plus some AKAI sampler. Such setup is still more pratical and gives more freedom for on-the-fly mixing. Or they jump directly to Ableton Live or, in some cases, even Apple Logic.
Even if the turntable were fitted with a decent cartridge, needle and tone arm, there's no way that USB can be made into a good connection
Uh, what? USB means that the ADC is outside the computer, which means that you get less possibility of EM noise from the electronics in the case interfering with the analogue signal. Once it's digital, USB 1 gives 11Mb/s for transferring it to the computer, which is just under ten times the data rate of an audio CD. A USB connection has more enough bandwidth to transfer audio from vinyl.
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I have a few CDs from the '80s, and none have deteriorated. At least, I don't think they have - I ripped them all years ago and they've been in the attic since then. Making a bit-for-bit copy of vinyl is a lit harder. In contrast, vinyl is played by scraping a needle across the surface. It degrades slightly with every play (much faster with a poorly balanced turntable). If they get slightly warm (e.g. direct sunlight) when stored, the medium softens and any pressure from the sides can damage them. If you store them in a pile, the ones at the bottom get crushed and degrade. They are much less durable than 78s, although 78s have the problem that they sound crap to start with.
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The WWW has ads?
Post processing (de-noise and de-click) is done with software called Diamond Cut ( http://www.diamondcut.com/ ).
I don't suppose you know of any similar software that runs on a Mac?
The loudness war didn't start cranking up until about 1990, so most CDs pressed before then don't suffer from it. (This is why so many "digital remaster" CD releases sound crummy compared with the earlier CD release!) Those early CDs often sound better than the LP version.
The CD format is really fantastic when it's used properly and not abused. It was billed as a technological wonder when it was introduced, and it mostly lived up to the billing. The only things I would change are the fragile little jewel boxes and setting some kind of mastering standard to reverse sonic havoc wreaked by the Loudness War.
Yes, music has to be compressed to go on vinyl. . . Playing time is also a big factor. Highest sound quality can be achieved from a 12-inch 45 RPM single, such as some promo discs that were sent to radio stations. At the opposite extreme, some hyper-compressed, sonically crushed CDs published today are also being fed right into the record cutter for the LP release, with results that are practically unlistenable.
Vinyl is no solution, but it does provide a benchmark of sorts. When today's CDs are so sonically crushed that even full-length LPs from the 1980s sound dramatically better, that just proves something has gone badly wrong in the industry.
In cases of new albums, data on audio CDs is usually heavily compressed to conscript the albums into the loudness war; due to technical limitations in vinyl, this isn't really possible on that medium...
If only that were true! I recently got a copy of Quest for Fire's Lights From Paradise on LP, and it came with a MP3 download coupon. The MP3s were brick-walled with compression and clipping. So then I put the LP on the turntable and. . . Waaah! It sounds even worse! Not only is it compressed to Hell, but the recording level is low -- it isn't even loud. It's weak and muffled and pretty much unlistenable.
or just buy the mp3 and ignore the foolish idea that you get better quality from a non digital format. Notice that sound quality was NOT one of the drivers noted in the article
I have thought for a while now that they should just sell vinyls and if you own the vinyl then you should be entitled to download the music. CDs are a waste of time.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
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.
Look past the Vinyl vs. CD quality debate and think about the music. The upswing in vinyl sales has much to do with back catalog. Older folks are probably more likely to look for a Hendrix LP re-issue than many of the newer artists. The indie scene's attraction to vinyl is another thing. Great music with great packaging. I imagine the new pop music coming out is less attractive than it once was, which is why the poor CD sales (for pop music). Back catalog (Black Sabbath, Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin) is great music which is really attractive with deluxe LP packaging.
Uh, what? USB means that the ADC is outside the computer, which means that you get less possibility of EM noise from the electronics in the case interfering with the analogue signal.
In theory, maybe, but in practice I get noticeable EM noise from USB.
I have a USB-powered speaker (uses a normal 3.5 mm jack for audio) for my computer which also has an earphone port on the side, which is handy. It used to be part of a HP LCD monitor (L1740 if you must know), which had a USB port for plugging the speaker into for power. Why you would design the speakers to get their power off a monitor they were specially designed to be an accessory for with USB I do not know -- surely a normal DC plug would have done the job. But I digress.
Anyway, I no longer use that monitor, but kept the USB speakers. To power them, I now plug them directly into my desktop PC's USB port for the power. Now when I plug my earphones into the side of the speaker bar, there is a noticeable hum that is directly correlated with the CPU usage. Normally it's like "bzzt zzt zzt". But if I drag a window around or compile something, it goes like "BZZT THH ZZT THH ZZT TTH ZZT".quite loudly.
It does that with two separate motherboards with two separate PSUs. However, it does not do that if I plug the USB power into my Eee PC (laptop) instead.
So there you have it. USB does suffer from EM noise. If you have a solution, I'd like to know -- it drives me batty some days.
I can't imagine a $99 plastic turntable will do them any justice.
No sig today...
Huh? USB is just how the data arrives at the PC. All the conversion will be done by the gizmo.
No sig today...
I'd like to know how much of that declining CD sales is the crappy major label stuff, and how much is indie. It seems to me that doing GOOD CDs would still work for indie music, if you made it an appealing package- I like the jacket/sleeve type, like a miniature record rather than a plastic case. If you can do replication runs the per-disc cost is not super high at this point, and it's as 'permanent' as CDs ever were, and can be made to sound pretty much as good as records.
Case in point: if you record a record to the computer, and burn a CD out of it using decent practices like dithering to 16 bit etc, it still sounds like the record. It IS possible to make CDs sound good, people just DON'T for the most part because it's not obvious.
How are you supposed to know if a record is well mastered or not without buying it? Record companies don't seem to give a hoot about quality.
eg. My bought-in-the-1980s CD of Equinoxe got scratched and I bought another copy. It was clipped all to hell, unlistenable. I spent big $$$ on a rare MFSL super-remastered gold-anniversary-edition from eBay, it had been low pass filtered and all the treble was gone. Not just a little bit ... completely missing (see here).
A load of money later I downloaded a flac from The Pirate Bay and it was perfect (or at least, 'not totally destroyed by an idiot sound engineer'). Next time TPB will be my first option, not a last resort.
(And guess what, if the RIAA gets its way I could soon have my Internet disconnected for doing that)
Vote Pirate, you know it's the right thing to do.
No sig today...
...except that it doesn't.
The buyer gets a normal vinyl album, made somewhat heavier than usual for durability, but still a normal, ordinary LP. Included "with" the record is a code, probably printed on card stock to make it look important, that allows the owner to go online and download an MP3 of the contents of the LP.
Best case, it eliminates most of the need to rip those particular albums, but it does not eliminate the *ability* to do so if the owner does find a reason.
I can think of a few reasons why someone might want to rip the album even with the MP3s being available:
* The owner wants different equalization settings than the MP3 ripper used, perhaps to avoid the same over-done mastering that CDs often get these days.
* The MP3s will probably be cleaned of all clicks, pops, crackles, etc., and the owner may want to preserve these sounds for whatever reason.
* The owner wants to do something unusual with the LP that are either poor quality or just not as easily done with MP3s, such as beatmixing, scratching, and other effects that are common to the market these records are aimed at.
* Maybe the owner wants a lossless format like FLAC, or wants to avoid MP3 for whatever reason. Transcoding from one to another would be pointless.
I'm sure other people can think of more reasons.
The closest I can find is iZotope RX. http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/rx/ The basic tools are the same, they are kinda vague on the extended feature set. The price seems higher too. Diamond Cut could be run on a VM or Boot Camp if needed otherwise.
I have the advantage of still having albums from before CDs, and I can't wait till I can afford a good ripping setup. The reason? I have albums that have never been released on CD, and likely won't be. And to hell with the MP3s, those are for my car stereo, for home I'll listen to lossless compressed audio rips. Heh.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
No the TheRaven64 is correct, no thoery about it, the noise you are hearing probably has more to do with the fact you are powering your speakers threw the USB port and have a grounding issue or something. Its 2010 and the fact you still have to explain to people how a digital connection works is getting old.
Unless you want to argu that digital conenctions like a USB connection typicaly drop 1's and 0's all the time, then there really is no theory to argu about here.
I wouldn't say vinyl albums "soar." While they can reach great heights when flung, they basically slice the wind. However, lacking the brim that a frisbee has prevents them from soaring very well.
Its 2010 and the fact you still have to explain to people how a digital connection works is getting old.
Yes, the data going through the USB may be digital, but as I have shown, the USB power, not data can cause interference.
For a vinyl ripper, the USB power has the ability to interfere with the audio while it's still analogue, before its conversion to digital prior to being sent over USB.
One would hope a vinyl ripper would use an external source of power and shield the USB well.
I've had two USB soundcards go like that now - an Edirol UA-5 that I converted to act as a standalone ADC (has its own power supply, I use an optical S/PDIF connection to the PC). The other one is bus-powered and I simply don't use it. One of these days I'll try recapping the thing.
consider a 22KHz sine wave going from -1 to 1, being sampled at 44KHz. suppose your first sample of amplitude is 0.5. what is values of all samples after that?
How are you supposed to know if a record is well mastered or not without buying it?
Read reviews online, participate in forums where people buy records and comment on them. Also, some record stores can play the record for you before you buy it (useful not only for finding out about compression, but also if I never saw this band and want to find out if I'll like their music).
Well, someone still has to buy the record, but then he can tell to everyone else to stay away from it.
found in many audio programs.
You zoom in to where the pop is, then draw in your approximation of what the wave would look like without the pop.
You will be close enough to get many of the frequencies right, and that preserves the time component. Arguably it's small, but it's still there.
Blogging because I can...
But, what about the cost of producing the music? The engineers, the studio, the artists? How about the artwork? That's not free. The mechanical royalties legislated by Congress are over 80 cents - almost as much as the cost of the CD. What about the musicians? The producer? The distributor, retailer and shipping companies? Should we advertise this music? How does that get paid for?
If you're thinking a CD should cost maybe $1 plus a dime or so of profit, you totally have your head up your ass.
Well, you lose.
Technically, digital is better. In terms of "sounds better", that's arguable, and completely dependent on the tastes of the listener.
There is often a nice distortion that happens on vinyl, and people crave it. Sounds better to them, and where music is concerned, perception is reality.
Blogging because I can...
the tinny, hissy, screechy format known as factory cassette
As opposed to the poppy, cracking, scratchy format known as the LP? No, CDs are pretty great.
Qxe4
Personal taste is too variable for this. How do you know you can trust people not to have cloth ears or just be blinkered because they think such-and-such a band is the best band evah and can do no wrong?
The MFSL version of Equinoxe must have sounded good to the engineer who made it and he's a professional audio engineer working at a prestigious company.
On the other hand he's very obviously not a Jarre fan...
No sig today...
Well, anything is better than spending money on a (probably expensive) record just to find out that it sounds exactly the same as the cheaper CD. If the store accepts returns then you can buy the record, listen to it and return if it sounds exactly like the CD.
While what you are saying is probably true, the amount of abuse they have heaped upon CDs lately frankly borders on criminal, as in fraud for selling an unusable product. Listen to the first run of Nirvana Nevermind and then listen to the one in stores now, the one currently for sale is worthless, as the entire recording sounds like it has been run through a cheapo $30 compressor to the point it sounds like someone is playing the CD over a long distance phone line.
That is why I tell friends if it is an album they really care about search places like Craigslist for either an early LP or CD, because frankly thanks to the loudness war just about everything offered today is worthless. As a musician the amount of destruction these shitty engineers have wrought is just disgusting, and I'm proud to say the local musicians have all been listening to me and refusing to compress their records. compression is for us bass players to even out string response NOT for the entire fricking recording!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
As a musician the amount of destruction these shitty engineers have wrought is just disgusting, and I'm proud to say the local musicians have all been listening to me and refusing to compress their records.
While the engineers are the ones doing the compression, it may be that they don't want to, but are ordered to by their boss. "Make it louder than this example CD or you're fired" can be a good motivator to compress even if the result sounds awful to you.
I once tried to record (I don't remember which) a CD to a tape (to test my new-to-me reel to reel tape deck) and saw that the level meter needles were standing almost still.
Crimeny! See the above post about treating LPS as consumables. Using a tracking force of 3 grams reminds me of what you sometimes did with one of those crap portable turntables with the built-in speakers that were popular in the '60s: place a dime or a penny on top of the tonearm so your scuffed up 45s would play.
Nowadays I use either 1.0 or 1.25 grams and have no problems. The stylus might not track very well at that weight on a badly worn record but that description doesn't fit with the vast majority of my collection.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I'm a fairly regular purchaser of both vinyl and compact disc, and I can testify that's it's been more records lately than CDs. Part of this really is the album art and cetera that you get with vinyl. If I buy a CD, I rip it and put it away, and will probably never touch it again. My record collection I turn to again and again, partially for the tactile enjoyment that I derive from it. It's kinda like smoking cigarettes, it's as much the ritual of doing the thing as it is the thing itself.
For the record, I am under 30. When I was really young it was cassette tapes, by the time I was old enough to have my own money it was CDs. I have no personal nostalgia for "the good ol' days of vinyl" or anything like that. I just like them better, I feel like I get more for my money.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
I've been listening to vocal jazz records from that era; it seems to me that recording quality was practically perfected in the 50s, all those Newman condenser mics giving such an intimate warm sound. The archetypal 60s studio sound you hear on LPs by the Beatles et al is almost bizarre by comparison - still fantastic music of course, but why the fixation on omnipresent semi-distorted reverb? Fun fact: "She Loves You" is composed of 18 different takes spliced together.
Actually, I would love to have digital copies of my vinyl. But I don't want my digitizations made from my merely excellent Rega turntable and Sumiko Blue Point Special cartridge. I want a digital copy made by someone with a $400,000 half-ton fetishistic engineering turntable bolted to a 5-ton marble slab in an underground vault with a cartridge handmade by the nearly blind Japanese master, running through the discontinued $25,000 Boulder phono pre-amp and then to the latest hand-built by a cranky ex-recording engineer professional ADC converted and stored in some future-proof format like DSD or DXD. And after a team of vestal virgins has lovingly cleaned the record using a record cleaner that costs more than my turntable.
I'm serious, all this stuff exists. I read a review of a $75,000 Sirius System III turntable and the reviewer said the CD-R copies he made from it sounded better than playing the same vinyl on a mere $9,000 Simon Yorke turntable. I'd rather get his digitizations than make my own.
Which raises (not begs) the question, why don't the record companies do this and sell me their even-better digitizations from the original master tapes? There is a small market for better-than-CD digital files, but it requires broad consensus that "This is the closest to the original gold master there will ever be", unlike the f***ed -up debacle that was SACD and DVD-Audio.
=S
Well after seeing one of our fellow bands made up of good friends end up having to break up and never work together thanks to the truly ass raping standard contract record labels push off onto new artists these days most of us refuse to even talk to any of the A&R guys and are strictly staying DIY. So WE get to decide how our music sounds, and after showing them the results of the loudness war every artist I've talked to have agreed to leave compression for us bass players.
That is why I truly love being a tech nerd. The equipment we can get today for little money is just staggering. For the album I'm working on instead of paying $35 an hour to the local studio my guitarist just went out and bought a Fostex MR16HD. This thing records 16 tracks four at a time, has an EXTREMELY clean sound when run through a decent board, and the thing only cost $350. So we are gonna record our tracks with it, run it through Cubase for effects and amp sims, then finally try mastering ourselves and if that don't work take it to the local studio. But one thing we will NOT do is go for the loudness war crap. The only compression on our tracks is on my 4 and 5 string basses to even out string response. Better to let the listener just turn it up than to ruin the tone with heavy compression.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
CDs are great compared to the factory recorded cassette tape.
But so are LPs...
They set it up to be an easy battle.
There's no way the 2.5 watts from the USB is going to drive a turntable, so an external power source is a given. Hopefully, nothing else in the turntable is using the USB power though - some devices will get the 5V they need off of the USB rather than use a DC-DC converter off of the usually higher voltage external power supply, as it's cheaper to do things that way.
As for your speakers, I would suggest a powered USB hub. Or one of those USB chargers like what Apple has for the iPod. Or if you have a spare 5V wallwart, just splice it into the power wire for your speakers.
Either that, or he's refering to cheap CD-R's, many of which are unreadable after several years.
Though in theory, assuming you never actually played it, I would expect a vinyl record to last longer than a CD in ideal storage conditions.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33158682@N06/4993236927/
you had me at #!
This is the only cable you should ever use to cable your ethernet-enabled turntable to your McIntosh amp...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
USB turntables are crap - period. Plastic, low mass, poorly sprung turntables are what killed the media in the first place, because the ordinary person thought that this was all the technology was capable of. Wrong. Coupled with lightweight vinyl, poor pressings, poor recordings, and non virgin vinyl, and no wonder people thought the medium sounded shyte.
If you take the time to invest in a decent turntable, and a decent amp/preamp that has a decent phono stage, you can do far far better with digitising your vinyl collection onto your computer. But - why bother? Analogue has a completely different, more natural sound than anything digital produces imho.
Dave
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. --Martin Luther King Jr.
Not quite correct. The styli (and cantilever design, including suspension) all are important. fine line styli etc do the least amount of damage to the vinyl track walls, as well as retrieve the most data. They aren't cheap. Then there's to consider ceramic, MM (moving magnet) or MC (moving coil) cartridge designs. MC designs undoubtedly sound better, but are usually far more expensive, and most preamps/amps will not drive them well. Then there's the tonearm, and tonearm resonance, as well as effective mass matching to the actual cartridge used (it *does* make a difference). There's a growing trend to unipivot designs (I'm personally not a fan), and also to 12" arms (they track much better on inner tracks than the standard 9" arms).
The old saying, garbage in, garbage out, really applies here. If you're not getting the maximum data out of the vinyl record, then no matter how good the software used, you're missing out. You can't restore missing data. Get the source and preamp right, the rest on the computer side is relatively easy.
Dave
PS vinyl isn't the only thing making a "comeback" - Class A SET valve amps (single ended triode) are becoming cheaper and popular. Usually using 300B valves, but some are using more esoteric valves such as 211 or 845 (more power, sweeter midrange).
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. --Martin Luther King Jr.
Yes, but analogue overloads gently, digital has a hard overload (witness compact cassette vs DAT).
The CD crowd has been brainwashed for many years into thinking that it represents great sound quality. And now, we're hearing the same BS with MP3 players etc. I'm not saying all CDs are horrible, clearly they are not. The format has good potential if everything is done right. I still maintain that ultimately, LPs sound better - digital just sounds well, grating to my ears for a combination of reasons.
Dave
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. --Martin Luther King Jr.
3.5 million LP's is less than some single artist's numbers 30 years ago. So not really new peaks for vinyl. And it's less than a month's worth of iPods.
Going forward, expect there to be only one physical media version of everything for collecting. So we will likely see hard cover books and even leather bound books as well as LP's for collecting, but people will read the digital book on an iPad or listen to the digital music on an iPod most of the time.
Yes, this is partly true. But - most re-pressings are going to sound crap. There's only so many mothers that can be stamped from the original master tape. I've got a hi fi mag somewhere that talks about this whole process, I should scan it. It's very interesting reading.
Dave
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. --Martin Luther King Jr.
I have my vinyl collection from the 60-70's giving away my age here, and my fathers 78's from the 40's and 50's (the nat king cole set he gave my mom as a wedding gift) All of the albums still play well on $100 turntable, some have more pops than others but overall the albums play well 50-60 yrs later and one could argue the pops and crackles add character and history to the songs. What's old becomes new again. I like this trend. I always loved the art on the vinyl records and liner notes, missed them when they went away and glad they are coming back
while vinyl may be better for older stuff, don't any and all auditory benefits become null once any part of the process (recording, mixing, mastering) is digitized? even with the best DA converters, the digital jaggies will never really become the true analog roundness that everyone fawns over, right? i'll also ponder that the obverse is true.
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The cartridge I have is moving magnet. At the time I bought the linear contact stylus, moving coil was very expensive. Typical MC carts require a "pre-preamp" to bring the output levels up to what a standard moving magnet cart would output.
As for the turntable, its basically an SL-1200 with automatic tone arm controls. Same "S" shaped tone arm and direct drive platter, although there is no quartz lock (older model). A linear tracking turntable is in theory the best tone arm setup as it places the stylus parallel to the groves of the record and reads both sides equally. Many folks really can't hear the difference between a linear tracking turntable and a traditional one with properly adjusted anti skate, but audiophiles have been known to be picky ;)
Moving coil is still usually expensive. There are high output MCs (they work with a MM stage) and low output MCs (they need a pre-preamp, step up transformer or whatever you want to call it!).
The SL-1200 is not the best table out there, there are far better (I'm not trying to sound like a snobby audiophile here). Nor is the tonearm in question.
Linear tracking arms are generally quite pricey, which is why only the top end hi end tables offer them. The cheapest one I know of is around US 3k or so, and that's considered cheap for a linear tracking arm. 12" standard arms are generally regarded as provided very good quality and excellent tracking. They are (thankfully) becoming more common.
Turntables all sound different, and you don't have to have golden ears to hear the differences either - that's just what snooty nosed audiophiles would like you to believe, cos it makes them sound uber cool.
I use a SystemDek IIX/900/Rega RB300/Lyra Clavis cartridge, with a Lentek step up amp and Yaqin MS-12B valve preamp. It's not a bad table, but is entry level (apart from the cartridge, which is high end) and 2011 should see it replaced by a far better turntable and arm. If I have enough funds, the preamp will be replaced too, not sure with what yet.
My primary concern is replacing my speakers (Sonus Faber Electa Amators) as my Opera Consonance Cyber 845 SETs (single ended triodes) monoblocs aren't too happy with driving the Sonus Fabers. I'm thinking high efficiency horns. :-)
Cheers,
Dave
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. --Martin Luther King Jr.
In some cases promotional copies of 45s were EQ'ed and compressed for AM radio in a way that the 45 you bought in the store wasn't.
In the later '70s and '80s promo 45s had a mono side for AM play and a non-screwed with as much stereo side for FM--same song on both sides, no "flip side" to de-rail the marketing efforts with a different song on the air from the one the label was pushing at that moment.
I poured a lot of money into jukeboxes back in the day playing flip sides. I used to be able to program a jukebox almost as well as my air show.
Hey, you kids! Get off of my lawn! There's a cloud I need to be yelling at!
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Yes, music has to be compressed to go on vinyl. . .
Well, not exactly. The bass is lowered so that the stylus excursion isn't as violent, and the treble is boosted. Then the pre-amp applies the RIAA equalization curves that boost the bass back up and bring the treble back down. When you bring the treble back down you bring the higher frequency noise down with it.
That's not really the same as dynamic range compression.
Although it's true that vinyl doesn't offer unlimited dynamic range (about 80 dB, as opposed to about 96 dB for CDs), it's enough for a lot of stuff, and it doesn't matter that the CD has more range if the master is so compressed that the needles on the meter just hover around a single point.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
That's not RIAA "compression, it's RIAA equalization, not really the same thing. The bass is lowered and the treble boosted when the master for the vinyl is cut, and then the phono pre-amp applies the same in reverse, bringing the bass back up and the treble (and noise in the same frequency range) back down.
As far as I know, CD players weren't designed from the get-go with dynamic range expanders built in to reverse a standardized dynamic range compression applied to all CD masters.
"Warmth" doesn't come from rolling of the highs as much as it does from the harmonic distortion being even-order (i.e., "in tune"), like you get with vacuum tubes, rather than odd-order, which is more associated with solid-state circuitry.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Is it possible that this is just to say the cd sales have plummeted so much due to digital format over the internet (whether legal or not) that now the cd sales have gone down so low, that it is below the die hard vinyl fans that are out there and will never relinquish their vinyl playing ways? Not to say the vinyl sales have gone up, but more so the cd sales have gone way down....
I can't remember the last time I actually bought a cd, yet I am current with all releases of all artists out now.
Vinyl players like the vinyl sound and feel, and would never be able to download from internet vinyl....sort a not really
a big deal when you think of it.
"Piracy is driving people to vinyl," industry experts concluded.