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Vinyl Record Production Gets a Much-Needed Tech Upgrade (engadget.com)
Ever wondered why you sometimes have to wait months after an album's launch to get the music on vinyl? It's not necessarily because the label hates vinyl -- in many cases, it's because the decades-old manufacturing process can't keep up with the format's resurgence. From a report on Engadget: Relief may be in sight for turntable fans, though. Viryl Technologies is producing a pressing machine system, WarmTone, that should drag vinyl production into the modern era. Much of WarmTone's improvement rests in its use of modern engineering. It's more reliable when producing the "pucks" that become records, makes it easier to switch out stampers (the negatives that press records) and sports a trimming/stacking system that can better handle large-scale production. Also, there's a raft of sensors -- the machine checks everything from pressure to temperature to timing, so companies will immediately know if something goes wrong.
Vinyl had a tech update decades ago. It's called "CDs".
This obsession with obsolete and empirically inferior technology is baffling. Yes, I know it started as a backlash over bad MP3 compression, but that obsession killed superior technologies, the tech upgrades to CDs - SACD, DVD-A and pure DTS albums. All you vinyl obsessed people are making things worse, not better.
What's next? Let's all go back to watching movies on VHS and old CRTs! It's how the director wanted it to be seen, right? How about analogue cellphones and leaded gasoline?
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
That.
What really should have happened, when the loudness war started to rise in the mid 90s, was for manufacturers to replace volume knobs with loudness knobs, with some (dynamics) compressor attached to it. Keep the volume knob, but make it something special common people wouldn't need to touch. That way people could turn up the loudness, which in effect would not just increase the amplitude but also compress dynamics.
Because altering [i]loudness[/i] is what people actually want. If they are on a train or in a loud environment they want to amplify the amplitude AND compress the signal to be able to hear the full recording. At home at a party you'd want to be able to hear all parts of the music properly and have high volume by just cranking up the knob to 11. In a quiet environment you'd want to be able to experience the full dynamics. For knowledgeable people we'd still have volume knobs to really alter the volume. In the end you could have tuned every well-recorded record to the environment you're in. There would have been zero benefit and need for the insane levels of compression we're seeing today.
Matter o'fact RIAA equalisation is different from just generalised compression. At the start of the LP era each record producer had its own equalisation scheme so what sounded good on your TT/AMP might sound awful on your neighbour's. So the Recording Industries Association of America (RIAA) tried, and mostly succeeded, in getting folks to use the equalisation scheme that they had so carefully decided on.
The idea was not so much to "make the mix sound good on vinyl" but to permit greater recording times (by decreasing the mean width of each groove), to improve sound quality, and to reduce the groove damage that would otherwise arise during playback.
The power cutting-head could probably have coped, but the recorded track would have been wider (so less tracks would fit on the record) and you would have needed a highly compliant stylus, and much higher tracking weight to keep it in the groove (and so muc faster wear).
The RIAA equalisation curve (NOT compression) was a very neat answer to a difficult problem.
And sorry, but my carefully cared-for LPs have quite a different sound from CDs/DVDs - not necessarily better but different - somehow warmer and more immediate.
'Ol Fart Cutterman