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Vinyl's Revival Is Now a Phenomenon On Both Sides of the Atlantic
New submitter journovampire sends this report about the resurgence of vinyl:
Vinyl album sales smashed records on both sides of the Atlantic in 2014, as a format that recently seemed on its last legs hit astonishing new heights. ...n the UK in 2014, vinyl album sales totaled of 1.3m – six times bigger than its tally just five years earlier (2009). In fact, 2014 represented the most vinyl albums sales in the UK since 1995 – nearly 20 years ago. In the U.S., vinyl sales have quadrupled in the past five years, narrowly missing out on a 10m sales milestone in 2014. Amazingly, the year’s 9.2m vinyl sales haul is the biggest since Nielsen Soundscan records began in 1993 – by some distance.
I think we're also at a point in society where many things have become just a bit too easy. I can carry around one thousand albums and play them back on a device the size of a pack of gum. Vinyl forces you to store and manage a bulky item. You can't take it on the go, you put on one album and you listen to it (or even only half of it). It's a listening ritual.
Similarly, people who don't find themselves doing enough real work do things like running marathons. Food preparation these days, especially for dinner parties, is often about showcasing how much time you have to devote to the process. In a world where you can have anything you want delivered the next day from Amazon, people are starting to want things that require a bit more effort.
A lot of middle-class homes used to have a piano for that purpose, no lie. Once upon a time, music sales didn't mean recordings--it meant sheet music, so people could play the songs at home.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
peace out...
How does watermarking a vinyl record identify who bought it, when they find the MP3 all over the Internet, again?
This is like the idiots who wantGPS in everything, not understand that GPS only allows the *thing* to *know where it is*; it does nothing for allow *you* to *know where the thing is*, unless it gets on a communications networks and *tells you*.
Good luck finding whoever ripped that MP3 from the vinyl record, and then sent it to his cousin in New Jersey, where it ends up in a used record store.
It's debatable in the same way as the audio quality of regular speaker cable compared with gold-plated oxygen-free copper cable is debatable. It's not a long debate.
If you look at the equipment the analogue-faddists are using, it is for the most part not the high-end audio equipment of a previous generation, but retro-reproductions of the portable record players teenagers used to have in their bedrooms, record players that sounded terrible then and sound just as bad now. The only thing that's changed is that there were a lot of genuinely hi-fi systems around in those days for comparison. These days tiny speakers with wildly exaggerated bass are the norm on pretty much everything you buy from mobile phones to TV sound bars; it's hardly surprising that the sound from a Dansette record player sounds better by comparison.
I still have the speakers I used with my pre-CD sound system and I don't regret ditching a turntable for the first model of CD player that was available - the sound quality is superior in every respect (noise, frequency response, dynamic range). Vinyl records are the audio equivalent of Instagram - washed out, artifically-coloured facsimiles of the original that have become a passing fashion.
Of course you do have room for better album art and liner detail/notes, and you just can't knock what came with Cheech and Chong's Big Bambu, truly a watermark event in consumer relations.
And don't even get me started on the tube mythologies.
What this boils down to in the audio sense, in all cases except for two exceptions -- when you're playing vinyl you simply don't have a digital source for or when the digital source has been compressed and the vinyl hasn't -- is that consumers have been duped by Audiophile mythology. Badly duped.
There's every reason to have a turntable in your system, as high-performance as your budget can stand, so you can manage those two exceptions. No point in depriving yourself of something just because there's no adequate digital version. But barring those use cases, if your ears are actually working, you want a CD or better.
signed (Musician, music lover, engineer, recording engineer), me.
PS: You want to hear what a CD is actually capable of (and so also learn what crappy recording techniques and mastering houses have been cheating you out of), go get yourself a few CDs from TELARC, and listen on a good system. No vinyl on the planet can even come close -- and that's just how it should be. Why don't all CDs (and up) sound like that? The vast majority of it can be attributed to bad recording practice and far too much compression (but I repeat myself.) Google "Loudness wars" and learn the ins and outs. It's both fascinating and sad.
PPS: Not associated with TELARC, except they've gotten a lot of my money already, and are going to get more. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Because of the low quality, getting even worse over time, and large size. This is why rational people transitioned to better media, leaving just the hipsters with this now-totally-inadequate technology.
Finding that vinyl makes for a (subjectively) qualitative better listening experience than CDs; does not, and never will qualify anyone as insane.
Except it's never couched that way by an audiophile. They make wild claims about the math, the curves, compression, and then talk about their blind A-B tests where they swear they can tell the difference between one bajilion kHz and fifteen sisquintillion kHz. They hear the pops and hiss and say, "Oh, oh! This one sounds warmer."
It's a load of rubbish.