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Vinyl Record Pressing Plants Struggle To Keep Up With Demand
An anonymous reader writes The WSJ reports that the revival of vinyl records, a several-year trend that many figured was a passing fad, has accelerated during 2014 with an astounding 49 percent sales increase over 2013 (line chart here). Some listeners think that vinyl reproduces sound better than digital, and some youngsters like the social experience of gathering around a turntable. The records are pressed at a handful of decades-old, labor-intensive factories that can't keep up with the demand; but since the increased sales still represent only about 2 percent of US music sales, there hasn't been a rush of capital investment to open new plants. Raw vinyl must now be imported to America from countries such as Thailand, since the last US supplier closed shop years ago. Meanwhile, an industry pro offers his take on the endless debate of audio differences between analog records and digital formats; it turns out there were reasons for limiting playing time on each side back in the day, apart from bands not having enough decent material.
get the fuck off my internet
A place nearby Prague has some free and ready capacities for vinyl SP/LP pressing and packaging wrap printing. Lodenice Praha.
I was born in the 1960s so I was brought up on vinyl, but I was bummed at all the hissing and pops and crackles even though I tried to take care of my records. The clarity of CDs was a revelation even though a certain warmth was sacrificed.
I won't ever miss the defects of vinyl, but today's common digital formats sacrifice far too much information, leaving the listener to "enjoy" the watery tones of overcompressed music.
Vinyl is the only consumer playback format we have that's fully analog and fully lossless
The article itself gives plenty of examples why vinyl isn't lossless, and it's easy to name a few more.
I don't have a horse in either race, but I'm curious - Have any blind studies been done to determine if vinyl does indeed sound better? My audiophile father-in-law would tell you HD-CD sounds better than vinyl, but I don't have the ears to tell either way...
Hipsters.
I grew up with albums. I remember many hours spent flipping through them at the record stores... But I didn't have good equipment so never really developed that Romance with vinyl that so many people have... Rare was the time that I just sat down to listen. Listening was always something done while vacuuming, or cooking, or studying or whatever... Having to flip the record or change it every 20 minutes was just a pain in the ass.. That's why I bought my vinyl and then immediately transcoded it to streaming tape...
High school aged children of my friends are all gaga over albums... They play the stuff on mom&dad's old turntables/amps in the basement... I've asked them and near as I can divine, they're into vinyl for the novelty of it. Their friends come over and they listen to records in social fashion but not because they sound better, or are more convenient, or have music available only on vinyl... They do it because it gives them something to look at while gossiping about who kissed who's whatever at the whereever... So I can't help but feel the novelty will wear off but clearly it hasn't so <shrug>.
I often buy physical books because I like to have them on my bookshelf and the tactile experience of reading a paper book... even though from a practicality perspective, ebooks are easier to refer to and carry around. So I end up often having both a paper and ebook version. If you want to do something like that with music, then I can see the appeal of vinyl over CD as the physical format: CDs have smaller artwork and are generally less interesting as objects to own and play. So might as well get vinyl for the physical copy, and an mp3 (or ogg or flac) for a digital copy, and skip the CD.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I never heard of a vinyl record before. Thanks for sharing the article. I've heard of vinyl flooring and vinyl siding.
Someone still makes buggy whips. If an infrastructure and supply line is established to fill the current market demand, that's where it ends. There's no growth here..
The fact is that given the same source content, high quality digital copies are by far higher quality, have better SN ratios and dynamic range than vinyl is capable of delivering, with a media that doesn't degrade the minute it's used.
It's not realistic to compare a highly compressed MP3 to vinyl. Compare a lossless audio file to vinyl and you'll find it to be significantly higher quality. Even if you don't believe the math.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Audio is just a crazy world of snake oil and placebo.
Really, the argument that's supposed to convince us is this?
> That warm vinyl sound: "I think this is what people like about it: it pins very closely to the way that human beings hear music organically," Gonsalves said. "It's very mid-range-y and very warm," a sound that flatters the fuzzy guitars of rock 'n' roll.
I'm sorry but I just don't buy it. There seems to be no obvious reason why you couldn't easily hack up a digital audio filter that makes stuff "sound like a vinyl". I'd even wager that it already exists?
Especially when you skip the compression and use FLACs. (But no, I'm not that kind of person who would claim to be able to distnguish 320kbps mp3 from a FLAC.)
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
Some listeners think that vinyl reproduces sound better than digital
And some people buy Gold-plated Monster cables and Macs too. It just proves there's a sucker born every minute (at least).
some youngsters like the social experience of gathering around a turntable.
That's mainly because most youngsters' "social experience" has been limited to school (see "Lord of the Flies") and texting. Actually, y'know, MEETING UP with someone is a HUGE novelty these days. The turntable's just incidental.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
People are starting to draw back from the overwhelming complexity in all things.
E Proelio Veritas.
http://www.elpj.com/
The beauty of math is that you don't have to believe in it, it will be true (if calculated/proved correctly) regardless.
Meanwhile, an industry pro WITH A VESTED INTEREST IN THE SUCCESS OF VINYL offers his take on the endless debate of audio differences between analog records and digital formats
There. Fixed that for you.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
To me , those "warmth" argument are really about psychological bias. Sound warmth is one of those term which are never really defined properly and means everything and nothing. The only really objective measure is amount of noise , and fidelity compared to the original signals. I have never met an analogue system (even a high range one) which objectively reproduced the sound as good as a digital HD one could. Not to mention you better replay your LP in vacuum , because no matter how careful you will to clean it, you will get snaps, pop cracks, dust, flutter, variation speed, etc...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The best thing about an analog format is no digital rights management. You buy it, you own it. You will always be able to listen to it, no-one will be able to revoke your license.
Digital formats and DRM have made music a transient, throw-away experience.
With vinyl, the recording has history. The vinyl you buy in middle school will be still playable in middle age.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
I listened to vinyl and cassettes growing up. My brother had a Technics turntable and watching the checkered edges (don't know if there's a name) of the turntable platter at the light (front left side) was mesmerizing. It was also mesmerizing to watch the analog VU meters bounce around on a tape deck to the beat of the music. I enjoyed looking at the artwork, photos, and print on the jacket/sleeve. I thought that the music sounded pretty good at the time with a good turntable and good speakers, with an audio preference for vinyl over cassette.
I still may get back to having a turntable and tape deck just to be mesmerized once again. That, and once I have the album I don't need to worry about 'this turntable is not authorized to play this album' type scenarios.
First, how good your digital sounds depends a lot on the digital-to-analog circuitry. Your speakers are still analog, as are your ears.
Second, all reproduction loses information. The question, as those who developed MP3 and other psycho-acoustic compression models realized, is which losses are more noticeable to human listeners. Also, our brains process information at far higher resolution than we can consciously report. As philosophers say, phenomenal consciousness is broader than access consciousness.
Third, I just got a new turntable after my 35-year-old model quit. It turns out that $250 today buys more turntable than $150 did then. I've got a high-end receiver and decent speakers, and have been spinning the old vinyl collection after ignoring it for years. Some of it - not all but some - has more presence than anything I've got on CD (and I have a very good CD deck). The instruments sound more like they're in the room; it's easier to visualize the performers there. I'm sure someone could devise a proper psychological test for this effect: Have people listen to music, test how effectively they're envisioning the performers, and don't tell them whether the source is analog or digital.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Is that "warm fuzzy popping" shit they add to music now to make it sound like an LP. Sample yourself some FLAC versions of the album of 1989 and torture yourself. Note the fake digital LP noise that's present at certain times and not during the same song. We want digital silence, and then we don't -- make up your f'ing mind. LPs sucked and always have - 12 songs of shit with maybe 2 good ones you actually wanted to hear, and were they always the first "track" as the poster mentioned to get the fastest needle speed? Nope. Usually buried two to three songs deep so you got to play needle hopping. I'll stick to my FLACs.
And it doesn't have region coding and it does not lock down the region code of your record player and it does not mess with your digital playback devices and install root kits on them. I can record it to my computer and to cassette tapes, and even if I make something like a DAT or minidisc recording, it's only the second generation digital copy which gets the total DRM lockdown (thanks Sony!).
It does not mess with my fair use in any technological way and it's less likely to smoke through my tweeters because of malicious content or device malfunctions.
It's just missing the "screw you, consumer" attitude that has make me stop purchasing digital media. It's not really the fault of the digital media but it's still pervasive.
Ah, yes.... I rather vaguely remember a series of experiments I attended a couple of decades ago. My colleagues and I participated in several hours-long, herb-fueled, analysis sessions comparing cassette tape, CDs, and vinyl, with and without equalizers. We listened in sessions controlling for acoustic, heavy metal, synthesizer, etc.. I'm pretty sure the committee's conclusion was "put the money into the speakers". But I think we forgot to write it down anywhere.
Gently reply
vinyl being analog is pure music and can still be ripped to MP3s. CD's however can (and do) have built in hidden signals that allows the software police to track the origin of any ripped tracks. Vinyl being analog by limitation of the medium can't contain this tracking information. Thus when vinyl tracks are shared, it can't be proven where a specific song originated or how posted it, as opposed to the ripped CD versions that can be tracked from sharer's computer (or other device) to sharer's computer.
I love vinyl, and an argument can be made that they sound *subjectively* better than CDs in one's own opinion, but the fact is that so far, no one has demonstrated with a level-matched double-blind ABX test that *anyone*, even sound engineers or musicians, can detect the presence of a 44.1kHz/16-bit Analog -> Digital -> Analog conversion.
So that means that if you use a quality turntable and A/D converter to record a record... er, record an LP, onto 44.1kHz/16-bit lossless digital, it will capture ALL human-audible audio information from that record.
Therefore CD quality digital is a superset of LP quality. The other differences are due to differences in mastering practice (see the Loudness Wars) - that is, you're not listening to the exact same source material when comparing a commercial LP to a commercial CD.
However, even though I listen to mostly digital formats, I will not be giving up vinyl records because I just really enjoy them. I love the 12" album covers, the smell, the act of putting them on the turntable, and the sometimes-annoying-sometimes-charming artifacts of scratches and pops.
Whoever modded this down obviously didn't get the reference
Buying organic or lean beef isn't about how it tastes.
While "Hipsters" is the go-to answer to why vinyl records are all the rage, DJs are another part. Some songs are still pressed on 12" singles (most commonly EDM and hip-hop; frequently with instrumental versions as well), but the best selling vinyl pressing for quite some time now has been the Serato Timecode record. It allows DJs to use standard Technics 1200s (and newer models, like the Numark TTX and the Reloop 7000s) to still spin and scratch records, but without being limited by what's actually being pressed because it manipulates MP3 playback on a computer.
Amongst the reasons these records sell so well is because instead of having hundreds of records that get 1-2 plays a night, the same pair of records are played all night, so it's entirely realistic to go through a pair a month, depending on how much pressure is put on the needle. Serato is (or was-for-a-very-long-time depending on who's numbers you believe) the most popular DVS platform, with Traktor in second place, though it's more popular with DJs who use (MIDI) Controllers instead of vinyl. Serato and several other DJ software titles now support the vast number of controllers that have been released, so overall interest in DJing with timecode vinyl isn't quite as popular as it once was. Still, while Jack White’s Lazaretto sold over 75,000 copies this year, it pales in comparison to the number of club jocks who buy timecode records, in pairs, monthly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Some listeners think that vinyl reproduces sound better than digital,"
Do they. Then they're idiots, with 'golden ears', and deserve all the hassles and problems associated with vinyl.
Having been around mastering engineers and lathes "back in the day", and during the change over from tape to digital, I can contribute a couple of points: 1 -tubes - for a long time lathes, and mastering consoles used tubes which naturally warm up sound. Tubes handle even harmonics differently from solid state. Mastering consoles also used stepped EQ's - that is, instead of a continuously variable resistor, they used a gang of military spec resistors on a rotary switch, and some mastering engineers swore the stepped mastering consoles sound better. 2 - LPs come compressed- way back it was discovered that the needle couldn't track lows and highs well - the needle would skip and bounce, so the RIAA came up with this compression / restoration scheme that rolls off the top and bottom during the cutting process, and restores it in the amplification process. That is why you LPs will sound thin if they are not plugged in to "phono in". That input has the RIAA curve circuitry built in, while the other inputs are "flat". With the development of laser beams in place of a needle, tracking is more accurate, but, because of the cutter. the RIAA curve is still needed. 3 - and one other thing and that is tape. Almost all LPs are made from recordings made on magnetic tape, and tape saturation will warm up a track. The signal alteration during the recording process - from microphone to console (desk) and through signal processors, to multi track tape machine to 2 track mix down, then over to the mastering lab to be mastered and made ready for the cutting lathe - a master cut onto acetate, then metal copies of that are made for the pressers, which use injection molded vinyl to create the finished product, is way different. Today, it's microphone into a digital recorder of sorts - Pro Tools, Cubase, even Garage Band, etc., then completely produced and mastered and outputted in digital. The only issue is file format degradation if the end product winds up as an MP3 or 4.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
CDs were mastered without too much level compression until roughly the advent of the Discman and other portable CD players. The cheap op amps used these players couldn't drive headphones at a volume that overcomes outdoor background noise. So labels started using level compression to master their albums hotter. Pushing everything up to full scale meant kick drums no longer had any punch to them. By the time of Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ricky Martin's debut album, levels had become so hot that they were audibly clipping.
Ditto.
There is a heck of a lot of variability in the material as well. When I have blind-tested rock or pop tracks, I do a statistically accurate (~50%) job of picking the 24bit vs. 16bit or FLAC vs 256/320k mp3. I.e., I can't tell the difference.
On well-produced classical, jazz, and small-group acoustic, the difference can be night and day. 24 bits gives you a larger dynamic range *that those types of recordings can actually take advantage of* and you also get a lower (often invisible) noise floor. (Fwiw, I have degrees in electrical and computer engineering and have done a goodly bit of study on audio, even if that's not my day job. I love arguing with clueless people, especially about some of the counter-intuitive concepts, such as injecting white-noise into a recording to *reduce* the overall noise through the magic of stochastic random processes.)
I can see why people would like the sound of vinyl, especially with a lot of the hugely compressed and clipped audio produced for the mass market, but digital is the obviously superior format when it is done correctly.
No other format offers the canvas that an LP cover does. Some of the best albums I own were selected because I liked the art, even if I did not know the band. Of course there were duds, but I did get introduced to some great music I might have missed otherwise.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I always hate these kinds of discussions when there are too many engineers in the room. Of course, digital is better. You can prove it with Nyquist's theorem. In the long run, digital will win.
That said, there are numerous implicit signal-changing steps which tend to happen with analog equipment that people often find pleasing and which are not/haven't been sucessfully emulated in most digital audio equipment.
Take guitar amps. I've got a couple of decent Roland digital amps. They do an OK job of modelling a few different old tube amps. Do they sound like my friend's old blackface quad reverb? Oh god no. There is some magic going on there that the digital guys haven't figured out how to reproduce. Even vs. odd harmonics? Yeah I think we get that now, but there's more in there and we're not successfully modelling it. I can enumerate a lot of factors we're probably missing(power supply brownout at high volume, capacitive and inductive feedback loops, tube nonlinearities, transformer nonlinearities, temperature fluctuations, microphonic components... etc etc etc) but there are still more we haven't really considered yet.
That said, there are still people who prefer solid-state guitar and HiFi sound to analog colored sound. A lot of it is what you're used to. People hear different things, sometimes due to culture, sometimes due to physiology... it's complicated.
Back to vinyl records - they do have a nicer sound in many cases, clicks and pops aside. It's probably a result of the RIAA EQ and the physics of a needle riding over vinyl, but I don't really know. One thing I do think has value is the act of listening to a complete record. Not only are you appreciating the artists' complete work as they intended it, the ritual of listening to a record often entails setting aside time and space to solely enjoy that record. You can't compare listening to, say, Dark Side of the Moon, while lying on your couch in a dark room to listening to a few out-of-context songs on your headphones while riding a bus.
Whatever... we aren't going to solve this battle on /.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
this++
"Some listeners think that vinyl reproduces sound better than digital,"
No, it's just that this generation has got hearing damage from the free, crappy, white iPod/iPhone earbuds and MP3s rely on a normal hearing capability.
So this sounds different for them.
Not to mention how the hell are we gonna clean weed on CD covers or iPods?
You could de-seed a whole oz. in 5 minutes on a good double album and a card back in the day.
But then, the weed today isn't half seeds like it used to be, either...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Fail.
lucm, indeed.
Seeds?
You're doing it wrong.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
In other news, the last surviving makers of wax cylinders and shellac 78s are probably doing quite well from their own perspective. I'm sure that camera film will continue to be available for enthusiasts and specialist purposes for many years - just not in a high street near you. Since people still ride horses, I assume that there are still a few blacksmiths going strong. Then, a couple of years back, those people build a brand new steam locomotive... That doesn't mean that film cameras, Edison phonographs, horses or steam trains are coming back, or are better than their modern replacements.
I'd be quite unsurprised if "new" vinyl LPs end up being more widely available than "new" Audio CDs. Not because they're better, but they're more iconic and the machines that make them will be easier to keep running without huge economies of scale.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Some listeners think that vinyl reproduces sound better than digital
It doesn't. The RIAA equalization curve guarantees that. This is just audiophools throwing money on a passion based on nothing but blind faith.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Vinyl can't be made artificially "loud," by killing the dynamic range of the volume, because that procedure causes the record to jump. CDs can be made "loud." Thus, in today's "loud" age, it doesn't surprise me that brand new vinyl sounds better on good speakers.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
And in 1...2...3...
Cue all the math junkies who claim that there is "proof" you can't hear the difference between 44.1/16 bit audio streams and higher quality rates like 192/24 or analogue. Because the math "prooves" that thousands upon thousands of people who claim to hear a difference are "delusional liars."
I am neither delusional nor a liar. I hear the difference. It's clear as night and day.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I bet vinyl heads drink bottled water, too.
Some people people just love the distortions that vinyl produces. Low resolution, poor phase linearity, low frequency summed to mono, large amount of equalization for pre-emphasis and post-emphasis (40dB). Multi-band compression. High level of crosstalk between channels. It is close to a miracle the format works at all. It takes huge amounts of effort to get a respectable master cut. In the peak of vinyl production during the early 80's the efforts engineers put into getting good sounding vinyl was insane. Nobody is doing it to that level anymore.
Maybe modern hi def digital audio formats exceed anything that can be practically extracted from vinyl. But, we could do things with equally modern analog technology that would blow digital out of the water. Imagine a physical family photo that you can hang on the wall, but also high resolution enough to make 100x magnified reprints with simple optical equipment. Now add a reasonable assurance that a photo will be still viewable after 100 years for your grand-grandchildren. Magnification may degrade, but whatever is left can be accessed with hardware made based on simple instructions. How do you like the chances of preserving and especially being able to read and display a JPEG over that timeframe?
Different technologies have different characteristics, and I guess one has to use one's personal weighting function. I had a pretty good system (AR turntable, top-of-the-line Shure cartridge, electrostatic earphones) and I love digital audio and honestly don't know how anyone can stand vinyl.
I used a dust bug, I used a DiscWasher, I treated my records very carefully, but there always came the dreaded moment when I would hear: "tick." And at that point, I'd always tense up, and only relax 1.8 seconds later if I didn't hear a second "tick." Three consecutive "ticks" 1.8 seconds apart would seriously interfere with my enjoyment of the sound. My success rate on removing them by cleaning was very low--more often then not, the cleaning attempt (even with the best D4 fluid etc.) would simply add a very delicate, light background crackle.
And I am not even talking about tape hiss, surface noise, warp wow, rumble, and a little trace of 60 Hz hum that I never could quite get rid of. And ugh, getting to the end of a symphony and having the big loud glorious coda come up in the inner groove (vinyl was pretty good at the outer edge, but no-kidding-obvious-problems in the slower-moving inner grooves).
And taking the occasional bad pressing back to the record store and arguing with the store clerk about exchanging it.
And changing the darn record every 20-30 minutes... and feeling guilty if I left it unattended and came back later to find it had been playing the end-groove for hours.
Even with a good tonearm and lightweight cartridge, vinyl does not sound as good on the tenth playing as it did on the first.
Digital audio may have its faults and if people enjoy the characteristics of vinyl, there can be no dispute about tastes. But to me the positives outweigh the negatives--by about a factor of ten.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Everyone rushes to the explanation of the DAC, skipping right past the analog signal converter found in every sound system. The speakers themselves. Sure the DAC rounds it all out, but then anything left (if any) is then pushed through a magnet and cone that then turns the recording into sound waves. Sound WAVES not sound STEPS.
I'm just "this guy", you know?
If you want high fi, don't go with that modern "unbreakable" "shatterproof" garbage. Go 78 rpm, you hipsters. Back from the time when static was static and you didn't just smoke hemp! Yeah!
Seriously.
Maybe to a mundane person, but anyone with at least the curiosity of a mollusc might try to understand something beyond the level of the UI.
or maybe their curiosity is focused elsewhere, on subjects in which the geek shows no interest in pursuing.
one size does not fit all.
All the classical , especially Bach, on organs... Now that's heavenly. I went into a lot of cathedral (notre dame in paris, and the one from saitn denis among others) just for the music.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I have a 64G SD card that holds 8000 songs that are about 4 minutes each at 250KBPS MP3. This SD card is the size of my toenail. It costs about $15. The same amount of recorded sound on vinyl records would take up about 140 cubic feet of space.
Did I forget to mention that I can plug my 8000 song music collection into your computer and a few hours later, my music collection is my any your music collection and it costs you $15, should you decide to store said collection on a medium the size of a toenail. An 800 album vinyl music collection would cost about $12000.
There are idiots out there who would argue that the nearly in-perceivable audio difference between a 250KBPS MP3 music collection and a vinyl collection is worth $12000. They are trustafarians with young perfect ears who don't have to worry about paying rent, food, and childcare on a $40000 salary.
Unless you actually are one of them, you should never take anything that these people say seriously.
When I became old enough to afford my own music it was just before CDs became available. By then, plastic had replaced vinyl as the medium for records. I owned very few records because the plastic ones were bad out of the package. I once had to return a defective record multiple times, by the fourth time it still was defective and I refused to buy any more.
I have a National Semiconductor application manual on audio circuits that describe the operation of the needle on a record. I can't believe how primitive and vulnerable to damage that technology is.
Never have and never will be a customer of records again. When CDs came along, I embraced them. All my original CDs back to 1985 still work. The few records I owned got lost in my divorce and I do not miss them.
Frankly, all playback media has their thorns. I see no compelling reason to go back to vinyl records. CDs sound good enough to me, and I am into pro audio (not audiophile, there is a difference).
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Actually, he spent a lot of time explaining why some things don't sound right, can't be properly reproduced, on vinyl.
The best thing about vinyl is the campfire effect. It comes built in. :)
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
This guy replied to a FP and made a reply which has NOTHING to do with it. This is in order to make Mister Transistor (259842) more visible. Nice try. Mod parent accordingly!
I've got two records of Elgar himself conducting Elgar's two symphonies. Elgar, for heaven's sake. I was offered 10 cents each for them. I still have them.
You find me someone who will actually pay the $$$ that the journalists say vinyl is worth, and I'll flick on my 100 or so records. In the meantime, they're in boxes waiting for my daughter to sort out when I end up six foot under.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
I admit my timeline of the first Discman's introduction was somewhat incorrect. Yes, Brothers in Arms is one of the quietest popular CDs I own. Let me correct myself: the rise in popularity of portable CD players. But the volume of a Discman through anything but headphones depends on the external amplifier.
On a CD cover, same fucking way we did it in the 80s and 90s. Open the fucking thing up. It's at minimum a folded insert, and there's enough room tehre to break down a quarter easily.
And yea, you needed to deal with a whole ounce because back then weed was garbage. I've got some of those original genetics in seed form thanks to a bunch of old heads. WEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAK.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
SelectaVision CED anyone?
Hands down. Just ask anyone whose ever tried to break up bud on a CD cover.
The RIAA compensation curve is inserted at the lathe, and is not on the master tape itself. Actually what it usually was, was Dolby NR un - decoded tapes. Dolby encoding was usually done at the end of the final mix to two track. But a lot of times, Dolby was applied at the first stage of the mix down to two track - IOW in say a 24T, there would be 24 individual Dolby units encoding each track. The 2 track, and the multi track tape boxes and track sheets were noted "with Dolby" (and which flavor, usually A or C), so whoever pulled them knew to fire up the Dolby rack. But in the rush to convert from tape to CD, as you say, a lot were converted with the Dolby encoding "un-Dolbyed" . And a lot were transferred without even taking the time to properly bias, or even align the the playback machine, so there would be this mis alignment / mis bias smearing, best heard at the top end, in the CDs. When CDs came out, record companies saw a goldmine, and they rushed transfers, often hiring people with not even a passing knowledge of audio engineering, to do they jobs-they hired the cheapest, and got cheap results. They would put these untrained people in a room with a 2 track and a CD recorder, and a stack of tapes. The idiots would clean the tape heads, open the box drop the tape on, set the levels, and hit play and record, then read a book for maybe 20 to 40 minutes, then pull out the CD ,label it, hit rewind on the tape machine, rebox the tape and go to the next one. And quite a few didn't even bother to set the levels, either. The Engineers and Producers that spent long hours getting the sound they wanted on the master tapes, saw their work ruined, and they were quite pissed when they heard what happened to their mixes.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
I heard that UO is the largest retailer of vinyl records.
It's about the whole experience. While with CDs you play a file you previously ripped off it, for records you actually pull out a large disk carefully onto the turntable.
It's almost like you offer it to the turntable gods, it's a ritual and there is reason why records are so popular. It adds a whole new level of experience to music.
I'm not going to bother touching on the ongoing debate of which sounds better or which format is generally better. I personally believe the difference of vinyl and other audio formats is the process involved with vinyl and the a lack of a better word the intimacy people have with it.
I always tell friends who ask about my collection that vinyl is to digital media what home cooked meals are to microwave dinners. Some people don't like cooking and choose easy and fact meals they can just eat so they are no longer hungry. While other people enjoy the process of cooking for hours to make a meal they are proud of and enjoy. Is the home cooked meal better? To the person who cooked it yes it most likely is because of their involvement.
These days with digital media you simply browse a site/app click a few buttons and the song or album is lost into your collection. It becomes background noise after listing to it a few times and has no real relevance to the person. With vinyl (specifically hard to find albums) a person can spend years searching for the album. They might go to stores weekly talking with employees and building friendships so they can get items held for them or called when a big collection just comes in, or spend hours walking around the city searching all the stores. Nearly all my records have stories like this.
There is also the process of playing the albums vs simply hitting shuffle on your computer. You have to search your collection deciding what you want to listen to, start up your equipment, maybe you have to clean the record before hand. You also have a tangible object you need to interact with. There is involvement.
So like I said; some people want quick and easy music that requires no involvement. Some of us do. I love the process and thinking about what I went though to get an album I'm listening to, or who I talked to when they suggested something or the show I picked the album up at. Personally I could care less if one or the other sounds better and I still personally listen to streaming music/mp3's when I simply want background noise, but when I want to listen to music I turn to my vinyl.
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Steve Hoffman compares masterings of cd, vinyl, sacd, open reel to reel to the original master tape.
http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/...
The fact is that Vinyl and CD don't have the same source content. Different mastering is applied to each. The mastering used on one does not work well on the other.
There's a whole underground piracy market online where people buy vinyls and rip them to FLACs then torrent away a digital file which sounds much better than the original CD master.
A lot of this argument IMO hinges on when you grew up/got into music. I'm quite happy to accept (as an old git) that high resolution digital audio beats an album on vinyl hands down in terms of true fidelity. However, to *my* ears, because I grew up with vinyl, I find that sound more appealing and enjoyable. I have albums on everything from cassette, vinyl, CDs, MP3s to FLAC. Even some 24bit high res files. Yes, there's some incredible detail in there with modern formats. However, for whatever reason, I just don't enjoy listening to it as much. In many cases it's because they're mastered too hot and have stupid waveforms with almost no dynamic range, although the high res formats are better in that respect. I find vinyl just more enjoyable and relaxing to listen to. Plus of course there's the well worn stuff about the cover, reading the lyric sheet without a magnifying glass etc. As far as crackles/pops/wear and tear goes, I've got records that are nearly 40 years old but still more enjoyable to my ears/brain. It beats me how people's records get so beaten up, are they tracking too heavy? Pouring grit down the sleeve? Maybe 5% of mine from 30+ years ago have anything more than a little surface noise when the stylus hits the lead in groove. After that, no pops or crackles.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Have a virtual mod point. That is very interesting and quite surprising. Still working through the comments.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
AFAIK all 3D printers use cartesian coordinates, to 3D print records we'd need radial coordinates like this - a flat disc platter which sits on a turntable. The turntable rotates and the printing head starts at the middle and moves outwards, printing the record in reverse onto the platter. Simples
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
I've always been more into songs than fidelity, so even though I was a serious record collector through the 80s and 90s, I didn't really resist "going digital" and now have a large digital library. For the last few years my music consumption happened almost exclusively via MP3. But after hooking up my old stereo again and spinning a few records that hadn't felt a needle in their grooves for many years... well I was just floored. The first album I played was "Black Sea" by XTC, a very-well written and recorded Rock album to be sure. From the very get-go of "Generals and Majors" I was hearing sounds that just got buried (or completely lost) in the Mp3. It just sounded so much deeper, richer, better. Almost sounded like a different recording, but really I was just hearing the songs as they were intended.
Picture my joy when I was flipping through the new arrivals at my local record store and came across a copy of Atom Heart Mother.
Now, double that joy when I opened up the spread to find a quarter oz of Columbian still lurking inside.
Vinyl definitely had its upsides...
If you are cutting vinyl you are either an audiophile or a dumbass at this point. It's not fair to compare a format that (should) mainly consist of people that really care about 'sound' to a format that is largely used just to get the song out. In the article he's comparing professional quality vinyl to radio compressed garbage. How about compare the best vinyl tracks to the best digital ones and see who comes out on top instead of comparing apples and oranges?
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What is really remarkable to me is that some people insist that vinyl sounds better - even when the original recording was made digitally. It is possible but unlikely that digital audio has artifacts that some people can perceive, but if the music was recorded and mixed digitally, whatever damage the format might cause has already been done and will simply be reproduced on the vinyl.
If you like records because they are cool objects or because you get a full size album jacket, fine. Just don't make impossible claims about the sound.
The RIAA are circle-jerking idiots. They could be making bank on vinyl right now, but instead they're blowing their wad on trying to chop off the Pirate Bay hydra's head, sending their army of lawyers and hackers-for-hire after the parents of children who copy their files. It's the "money for nothing, chicks for free" attitude that causes them to obsess over commodifying something that can be reproduced infinitely at no cost, blinding them to the fact that they're sitting on a goldmine.
Hey look fellas! Vinyl records are an ACTUAL commodity. Analog audio techniques and technology have been steadily improving for over a century and a half. Vinyl sounds like vinyl, and a lot of people agree that it just sounds awesome. Even the cracks and pops of an old, well-loved record sound good to some people, and they will pay hundreds of dollars for an original 1930's pressing of Louis Armstrong or Memphis Minnie even if the noise to signal ratio is worse than that copy of a copy of the mp3 you downloaded from Napster 15 years ago.
Your daughter isn't listening to vinyl because it has better or warmer sound. She's listening to them because she's a douchetastic hipster. You listen to CDs & MP3s and you're an old fuck so whatever the old fucks are doing, the younguns aren't. The truth hurts, sorry.
Vinyl is making a comeback because an analog LP is an attractive object in its own right. A CD isn't.
Analogue amplifiers (and I regret I can't remember which way round it goes) amplify even harmonics whilst digital amplification amplifies even harmonics. Odd harmonics (well, whatever analogue amplifiers do) are much more acceptable to your hearing, since all natural sound productions produce odd harmonics, nothing produces naturally even harmonics.
You can get around that by producing power in twice as many harmonic modes in even harmonics but that increases power for the same loudness about eightfold.
Add to that the "loudness wars" meaning that a CD may be 16 bit 44kHz recording, but it's compressed to less than 11bit resolution, and a good quality LP system can produce better than that.
Re: Nyquist limit, it only pertains to frequency, not power (for example), so unless you want to guess at the loudness of that step or guess at the timing or phase, then you're wanting a higher sampling rate.