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Vinyl Records Outsold Digital Downloads In the UK Last Week (adweek.com)
Sales of vinyl outstripped those of downloaded music for the first time since the advent of digital downloads last week in the UK. From a report on AdWeek: The U.K.-based Entertainment Retailers Association, or ERA, said Monday that Britons spent 2.4 million pounds ($3.03 million) on the old-school wax last week while only doling out 2.1 million pounds ($2.65 million) for digital downloads. Vinyl Factory, a website dedicated to records, reported that those numbers represent a big change from the same week in 2015, when just 1.2 million pounds was spent on records compared with 4.4 million on digital downloads. That's a 100 percent year-over-year increase in vinyl sales and also the first time that vinyl album sales have bested digital downloads over a weeklong period in years, per Vinyl Factory. The surge in vinyl sales could be attributed to the popularity of vinyl as a Christmas gift and the growing number of retailers. You know it's a gift because, as BBC adds: But 48% of those surveyed said they did not play the vinyl they bought -- while 7% did not even own a turntable.
Digital recorded music on vinyl is like dehydrated chicken in a home made soup mix.
You do not gain anything from going from digital to analog back and gain all of the wow, flutter, pop, hiss, etc.
Those that claim more 'warmth' are fooling themselves. Sure. Back when analog recordings were made vinyl was better. But once you lose the quality from the digitization process it is lost for good. Why is it so hard to realize that the music today is 99.99% recorded digitally and that is where the problem is.
If you still believe in converting your digital recordings to analog I have LOTS of swamp land as well as land on Mars I'd like to sell you.
Most speakers, even high-quality ones, are medium-density fiberboard (MDF) with a wood veneer over them. Real wood has resonances, MDF much less so.
I have a pair of Tannoy SRM-12B studio monitors at my workstation and they look like wood, but they're clearly not as revealed by the places where the incredibly thin (about 0.7mm I'd say) wood finish has broken away. They still work perfectly. I am driving them with a mere 80W/ch class AB solid-state amplifier, but they can't handle more than 100W/ch anyhow. They have self-resetting breakers though, which I have seen get tripped once or twice when the amp has fed them a nasty transient. (The amp itself also has similar protection, and sometimes it's a race to see which one trips first. If it resets in seconds, the amp tripped. If it resets in minutes, the speakers tripped.)
In any case, these are hardly what you'd consider cheap crap. They are 40 years old, but are absolutely professional quality. They're 5/8 inch thick MDF.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Argh! Such idiocy! (or ignorance).
Pops and clicks are due to scratches on the record and debris (dust, etc.) in the grooves. This is a flaw in the particular record, and will be different on each copy of the record (assuming the master or an intermediate copy is not damaged.) Some of it can be removed by post processing, even of your digital copies.
Hiss is noise that can come from many sources: microphone, 1st stage microphone amplifier, many places within the analog audiotape recorder used before digital recordings, physical limitations of vinyl, the phono cartridge, and the phono preamp, to name the most obvious.
Rumble is due to deficiencies in the playback equipment, although deficiencies in the cutter are also possible. A warped record will also cause rumble and other problems.
Wow (low frequency speed variation) is again due to deficiencies in the playback or cutting equipment, or due to the record not being centered properly.
Flutter is mostly an analog audiotape problem.
The limitations of a clean, undamaged, properly mastered and manufactured vinyl disk are dynamic range, distortion, and frequency response. Dynamic range is limited by the size of vinyl molecules compared to the size of the wiggles in the grooves that represent sound, and by the physical errors that accumulate from each generation of copy from master to the final stamped record. Dynamic range is also limited by the signal before it reaches the disk (There are records where you can hear relative silence, then hiss (probably from audiotape) as the signal is applied to the cutter.) Distortion is limited by geometry mismatches between the cutting stylus and the playback stylus, and the tendency of the material in a freshly cut groove to rebound somewhat, and other factors. Frequency response is limited by geometrical considerations of the cutting and playback stylus and the linear speed of the groove as it passes the stylus. Frequency response is also limited by the RIAA playback and recording compensation curves, which deliberately reduce response below about 50 Hz.
Digital has won out because it is more convenient, more durable, and easier and cheaper to produce excellent results. The best vinyl results require care and expensive equipment to reduce the flaws that come with sloppy vinyl use. Vinyl can be very good, just not as good as good digital.
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