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Sony Will Start Pressing Vinyl Records After 28-Year Hiatus (fortune.com)
Sony said this week it will begin pressing vinyl records again, ending an almost three-decade hiatus. A dramatic increase in demand for vinyl music in recent years prompted the move, the company said. From a report: After a 28-year hiatus, Sony announced this week that it plans to open a new facility in Japan dedicated to pressing vinyl records. It's a back-to-the-future announcement at a time when the true digital music revolution -- downloaded and streaming via always-on Internet connectivity -- has quickly grown to dominate listening habits. According to Japan's recording industry association, the country produced nearly 200 million records per year in the mid-1970s. That's unlikely to return. But while many of us have been content to wirelessly download our music, a surprising number of people are going to the store -- or Amazon.com, let's be honest -- and purchasing a vinyl record, sleeve and all.
Anybody know what the Japanese for hipster is?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
a sucker born every minute.
because of my snobbish music tastes but just wait until I can tell them that I now have them all on vinyl!
Vinyl is fun and all, but I am surprised it's coming back in the way it is. Guess some people just want their nostalgia.
I'm waiting for eight track tapes to make a come back. It is, after all, the 40th anniversary of "Smokey and The Bandit". I need to get my Jerry Reed on the road.
...they will manage to sneak in some copyprotection...
I passed on buying a lathe about 20 years ago at a NRC (Canada's National Research Council) auction. It was 1$ but the condition was I would have had to get it off the dock that afternoon otherwise there would have been penalties.
Even if I had been able to arrange a forklift, I had no place to put it, or use it...
This auction also had a '70s electron microscope which was more of a complete lab-in-a-desk with a vacuum pump and workstation with a CRT.
What the NRC was doing with a lathe I have no idea. But I suppose at some point the NRC must have standardized something about stereo records.
Anyways it was a large and heavy machine that required lots of power and helium to work...
Too bad.
CEO: "THEY WANT WHAT????"
FLUNKY: "Our studies show a slim minority demand their music in analog format, sir."
CEO: "AAARRRGGHHH!! OH for crying out...." *takes a deep breath* "Ok. You know what. I'm not even mad. Nope! Just do it."
FLUNKY: "Sir, it will cost the company...."
CEO: "I don't care. I don't want to hear it. Just give those idiots what they want."
How will they get the rootkit on the vinyl?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I was given a record collection and a hi-fi record player. Mostly classical, some classic rock. It's cool to show off and immensely satisfying when you put the needle onto the record, but most of the time I just fire up Pandora and be done with it. And no, the distortion doesn't sound better at all.
I have no idea if vinyl sounds any better but what I miss is the artwork, the covers, gatefolds and sleeves. Not even CDs got close.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
In the 1980s vinyl crashed. Nobody wanted it. Used records at my local book store sold for $3-$4. Compact Discs sold for $15-$18. Everybody wanted digital disc. It's 2017. New vinyl records cost $25-$30. Nobody wants compact discs. Used CDs at my local book store cost $4-$6. Collectors buy $30 records and place them in sealed vaults. I need to buy all the used CDs I can, and then find the switch on the reality inverter and throw it again.
I am not some hipster (maybe I am?) I have a cheap ass turntable and mostly I subscribe to a streaming music service. I buy Vinyl here and there, mostly as displayable, hold able music art. 20 bucks for an album is too high, but 20 bucks for a collectible, playable statue of music is pretty decent. It is just pure nostalgia, but I am not even old enough to be nostalgic about records.
I still have a few albums from when I was a teenager that never went on CD (Remember "The Secret Policeman's Balls")? My wife has a ton she wants to get onto her iPod.
And to get them onto digital I got a USB turntable. Using the Audacity software to convert the output to .mp3s.
I've just done a couple albums so far - I was pretty anal about keeping them clean and free of scratches while putting them on good quality cassettes (they've been played two to four times at most) - and I have to say I prefer the sound of CDs. The occasional pops and pickup hum that many people/hipsters find endearing, I find annoying and distracting from the music. I used to be pretty good at nailing tracks but it's not like riding a bicycle, I need to relearn it (although I'm breaking up the tracks fine using the software).
I was surprised at how the quality of the turntables don't seem to match the quality of 35 years ago. My previous turntable was a direct drive Technics that was built from solid aluminum castings; Shure cartridge and I can't remember who made the needle. I bought a highly rated Audio-Technica which is more than serviceable and produces nice sound, but I definitely prefer what comes straight from a CD, iTunes or Amazon.
I know my son will be scandalized at this post but I grew up in the age of (great) LPs and despite not having the same album artwork, I don't miss LPs at all.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
You have to compromise the mix to keep the needle in the groove. So, yeah, perhaps 8-track would give you a more accurate representation of what's on the master tape. I'll take CD over vinyl any day, provided they didn't just get lazy and put the lp master on the CD.
LASERS Day One!
So are the master tapes digitally recorded and digitally mixed?
...rootkits?
I grew up with vinyl and was happy to see it go. Same for film photography. I have digital now for both and see no reason to look back. There are tons of physical drawbacks and limitations to both that I never want to have to deal with again. That being said, both have their artistic uses for those that want to deal with it, much like painting instead of taking photos. I have photographer friends that deal with film and they enjoy it and it has certain benefits over digital I just don't care about. Vinyl does also with DJs of which there are probably enough of to maintain production, especially when including all the people who are wanna be DJs. There are digital alternatives but DJing has certain artistic qualities that requires records. I also have some audiophile friends that swear by vinyl (and not a little towards cover artwork also) and like all audiophile discussions, I'll leave them to those that care.
legalization of weed.
What, are you going to like, separate the seeds and stems in a CD box? I think not...
No "rutkits" - grooves are lined with a harmful magnetized metal strip that damage your pickup / cartridge
I hear the MPAA is perfecting this https://dai.ly/xt4rax
crazy dynamite monkey
As an on-the-outskirts "hipster," I understand this as a glimpse into the future, where we've learned from the mistakes of the digital age. Though digital's "always-on," "always-streaming" (as private electronic storage of music has become passé) form is good for those who want a "quick hit" of a Top 40 "quick hit," we've lost the listening experience of the "art of the album" -- not to mention actual "album art," which represents a hold-in-one's-hands physical artefact: a manifestation of music, made real. It means more to buy a physical album. Some of us have found this to be true with dead-trees-type books, already.
https://www.facebook.com/rhinoclaremont/
Not even sony can deliver malware on a vinyl record.
I grew up during the record era. As the era of CDs approached, vinyl was replaced with plastic and the quality of record presses went to HELL. I remember too many times when I had to return a record 3-4 times before I got one that didn't skip.
I embraced CDs emphatically and I will never go back to records, plastic or vinyl.
I do not miss the needle noise, premature wear, groove distortion, wow & flutter, or compromised frequency response.
National Semiconductor used to print the Audio Design Book which provided a detailed description of how record playback works, and it is an engineering kludge with its compromises. It is far from a perfect playback system.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
That's where it's at!
Sony Music never made vinyl records. It's only been around since 1991. Sony's predecessors (Columbia, RCA, and Epic) did.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
No longer will your turntable be envious of the rootkits available to your other equipment!
Requiem for the American Dream
I wouldn't give up my dSLR for anything, but, I wish I had the "instant" feedback of digital, on film. I grew up with film. From my dad working as a newspaper photographer in the early 60s, "helping" him by rocking the developer & stop baths back and forth, to my own film days up to the early 2000's and my first dSLR in 2010. The warmth you get from good old Kodachrome just can't really be duplicated by digital. Same with audio. No amount of oversampling can get you the warmth of an analog album played on a tube type amplifier.
There's your problem right there. Of course the CDs don't play on your record player, you need a CD PLAYER.
Do you remember the 8 track limitations on track size/length ? It is hard to think of a more disruptive thing than the change of track in the middles of a song. I had and used 4 track reel to reel players for a long time, but 8 track really sucked all around. Cassettes were much better...
Vinyl is 'ok' but what I find amusing is most if not all vinyl is produced from a digital master so the basic 'warmth' or 'tone' argument is sort of silly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
How would the same company make a knockoff???
It's probably not the same company. Either the original company goes bust or it's parent company shuts it down and then the brand name is sold off to someone else who makes cheap knockoffs for a fraction of the price. This gives them a window to sell their cheap knockoff for far more than it is worth but for far less than the original brand cost before everyone realizes what has happened and stops buying the product. Technically it's not a knockoff because they actually own the soon-to-be-worthless brand but in all the ways that really matter to us consumers, it is a cheap knockoff.
Up to the 1970's, the big music market was teenagers with limited disposable income buying 45 RPM records for approximately $1. They were only interested in the "A side" (the heavily promoted song) and "B side" took on a derrogatory meaning. Since the focus was on 1 song on the record, it was also known as a "single". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So teenagers were buying one song for approximately $1 (does that sound familiar?). Then the music industry went over to CDs. A kid with limited allowance from his/her parents could no longer buy the latest hit for $1. He or she had to pay $20 or $25 for the entire CD, just to get one or two "hits". Parents did not instantly increase kids' allowances by a factor of 20, so music purchases plummetted. Well... like... dohhhh. Of course the MPAA blamed it on piracy.
It was only when Apple used its power to drag the music industry, kicking and screaming, back to single-song sales for $1 (digital format this time), that music sales recovered.
There is a lesson for cable TV here. Give people a-la-carte, i.e. an option to pay a reasonable price for just the channels that they want, and they'll pay for it. If you insist on selling only "the-500-channel-universe" for an arm and a leg, sales will plummet.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
...Of the Vinyl oficianado that gets me
Going on about fast attacks not being captured by digital (btw Nyquist says your a lier if you believe that), ultrasonics being important, double blind experiments don't work for audio etc etc
About the only reason for vinyl are to avoid the loudness wars, enjoy the experience and the better artwork. Fair enough but don't give us this it sounds better without any measurable evidence.
Still waiting for the VHS hipster....
The vinyl master is made from a master tape recording. So the vinyl will never better than the tape master. Yeah you can cut directly a live performance, but very few people do that nowadays.
Remember cassettes? Well there was no way to get cassette singles either. You could only buy the whole album on cassette. I don't hear you bringing them up.
P.S. There were actually cassette and CD singles, but they weren't widespread and almost no one bought them.
Back in the 70's when vinyl albums were the norm before more convenient digital media album jackets provided some art , could be used as a table convenient for cleaning herbs etc... Doubt Japan will bring back this past time hobby aspect.
Hmmm... I wonder if there is anything available that will create a playable vinyl record without pressing. Think inscribing a vinyl blank according to a job based on an MP3 file or other format. Such a device would make possible the conversion of one's collection for playback with the record player experience in place of buying new albums. Obvious, many of these people have an old collection and/or built one by buying used records.
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Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
There is a laser tracking turntable. It was developed in the late 80s. It is now this: http://elpj.com/
Original denim jeans used but in wearable condition can fetch much more than new. They will offer uniqueness like a antique some in the $10,000 range but many in $200 - $500 range. Amazing consumers but niche small audience. I don't get the mentality but some folks have plenty of disposable income so disposing. A high quality often expensive analog system can sound amazing but price performance kind of like a mechanical watch (e.g. Swiss) vs electronic both tell Time about the same but prestige and craftsmanship differ. Audio equip has a long long tail of diminishing returns on price vs performance. Mid tier stuff for most sounds good enough and affordable. Depends on type of music too. Live offers a different experience for instance. I prefer mid price tickets to an occasional symphony vs a home audio system which I could not afford to dedicate a custom room to even remotely approach quality/experience. Pop music does not seem to warrant a high quality playback system, I am fine with a nice pair of head phones. Sony trying to prop up the market like their hi-Rez marketing. They will garner a niche audience and sell more low to mid and a tiny bit of high end gear along the way. How long the fad lasts probably not to long but seems not a huge investment in equipment , guessing with the marketing buzz much more spent on the marketing aspects. Hook , line and sinker .
Not aware of hipster Japanese term, except the sort of direct conversion to katakana "hippusutaa" ãf'ãffãf--ãããf¼. ãã£ã"ãã (Kakkoii) close used for cool , though hipsters are more ããã (otaku) variants.
Real progressive hipsters with money to burn use optical turntables now :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...