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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."
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. :)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
God damned hipsters.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.