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.

Comments

Nah...

[fyngyrz]

...what makes Vinyl the perfect DRM is that it starts out degraded. Far less open dynamic range (not to mention a dynamic range that depends on the amount of data you're trying to pack onto the surface), concomitant shorter playing times, lower signal to noise ratio, poorer channel separation, less resistant to injury and corruption by everything from dust to hair to poor tracking angle, improper tracking force, wow, flutter, warping, groove wear, non-linearities in the stylus coil assemblies, inherent vulnerability to acoustic feedback, and in almost every case, low frequency limits you *can* sense, and soon-to-be-work-off high frequency capacities that you can't sense, but which won't matter if you simply play it a few times in a row, as you'll destroy the fine detail as the tiny, steep modulations in the vinyl haven't had time to recover (spring back into place and recover their elasticity) from the last time the stylus slammed into it, so they will instead, erode.

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. :)