Sony plans to make vinyl records again
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Contrast that with vinyl. The act of putting on a record indicates a desire to do more than put on music in the background. Walking across the room, thumbing through your collection, pulling the record from its sleeve, etc.--the ritual of it all changes one's frame of mind in approaching the music: it's by definition a more active involvement.
When I want to have music on, I reach for my iPhone and Apple Music. When I want to listen to music I grab a record.
I think (again, my personal experience) that reading while also having a tactile sense of where I am in the book (say ~20% of the way through) makes it easier to remember smaller details; perhaps the physical book helps my brain create a sort of "memory castle" that a little progress bar on an ebook does not.
One example: I read all but the latest Game of Thrones books in paperback (well before the HBO show was even announced). I devoured them and was able to keep track of all the families/storylines without a problem or a second thought. I tried to read the latest one as an ebook and I found I'd have forgotten details of various storylines between reading sessions. I ultimately never finished it and I'm just watching the TV show now :|
Now when I want to read a book, I buy a book - I just can't get into ebooks. Sure, it's not as convenient, but it also doesn't need to be plugged in, ever.
Maybe it'll become feasible as the price for flexible eink displays drops.
Still, the Kindle is so damn convenient. It's just that it's not the same pleasurable reading experience for me. It's not true that the Kindle "disappears" like Amazon claims -- or maybe, it actually disappears too much!
There is something to be lost in digitizing our lives, automating our activities and putting it all online. Sure, we gain time to do other things, but it seems we then fritter it away scrolling through facebook feeds, tweets and whatnot.
I have a hard time imagining just sitting down to listen to music. Not listen to music and converse or eat. Not listen to music and browse the web. Just listening to music sounds like a hard task.
However when I am at a live concert it is very easy to completely focus on the music even over a couple of hours. I can see the instruments and my other senses are involved in the experience.
The big part that is lost today is the music.
As a teenager in the 90s I started buying vinyl because it was cheap and browsing a local record store was the best way to discover music, mainly jazz and hip hop. I'd spend hours a day just listening to albums from start to finish, reading liner notes, doing nothing else. A couple decades later and I still discover most of my music the same way. Spotify's Discover Weekly often is good, but it never matches the random LP dug up that completely opens your mind to a style or form you've never run into before.
I'm no fan of Scruton or respecter of his intellectual prowess, but it does baffle me how willing old-fashioned aesthetes are to carve out exceptions to their own principles. Surely if late period Metallica has artistic value, large swathes of the music he's condemning do as well.
At the time of vinyl, the RIAA had standards on how to process the sound. Those were good standards. On the move to digital we threw them away, and nowadays some companies go into the cheapest route, some go into the best benchmarks route, and nearly no company tries to release a system that sounds good anymore.
But vinyl systems still have to follow the RIAA standards, otherwise they'll get completely distorted.
For others, here's a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
Looks like they used to develop all kinds of tech for sound record and playback.
Since you simply cannot do this on analog storage, vinyl will not have these compromises and will usually sound better.
But compared to good lossless digital storage that makes the opposite sacrifice (ie: Take up more space to retain more quality) vinyl will almost always produce a less accurate reproduction due to the physical properties (degradation) of the record itself.
Though many people seem to find these analog losses appealing or 'warmer' and actually prefer it to a more accurate reproduction of the original master.
Uncompressed digital audio is going to sound equal to or (more likely) better, and it doesn’t have the degradation problem.
Why stop there? Do you also churn your own butter, milk your own cows, shave with a straight razor?
Personally, I think it's just silly hipster bias.
Ah, but you don't know! On Beck's Odelay Deluxe Edition release, for example, there are at least two tracks that came from a lossy source.
I don't think it's something that happens often. But through some combination of factors it has happened before, and probably happens more often than people might be aware.
I consume most of my music digitally essentially in the background but if I want to have a music listening session, alone or with friends, I reach for vinyl.
I think with vinyl people are looking for more of a sense of ownership. It doesn't feel like you own an album, and don't get the feeling that it contributes to some part of you, when you click "save" in Spotify. It doesn't take any effort or any sacrifice (money) to do that, so it comes with no opportunity cost. But buying a record is more deliberate and usually means that your ownership of it comes at the expense of something else you'd instead buy with that money.
I admit it's a pretty wishy-washy argument, but for most people, the prospect of buying a vinyl record has to be rooted in something psychological because objectively speaking there aren't very many good arguments for it.
When I buy a vinyl, it's because it's a physical representation of music that I enjoy. A lot of time, there's a extra items included with the vinyl, like a small poster.
Discussions about music on vinyl is always interesting to observe.
Collecting artifacts is such a prevalent part of nerd and geek culture that it's no wonder many of us love to collect and play records.
At the same time, many of us are super focused on efficiency and specifications that listening to less than perfect reproductions where you have to physically manipulate the media makes no sense.
I had a lot of records when I was younger and was happy to move on to CDs and now mp3 and streaming. If I had more space to devote to yet another collection, I would in a heartbeat.
My deal is, that goes both ways. I've owned record players in the past, I've grown a sizeable vinyl collection, and I ended up selling it off because I'm living a much more mobile lifestyle now.
If the OP gets a more "active" experience (whatever that means to them) out of listening to a record instead of putting a CD in a cd player, great, but what bugs me is there's always an undercurrent of "it's better this way".
No, man, you just like it more. It's not "better" than listening to songs on an ipod or putting a CD on.
And all this talk about "it sounds better" or whatever, it all boils down to assigning objective measures to an experience that is, at its core, subjective. No, it's still just your preference. (Some people actually like the analogue tape sound. To them it's "better".)
Let people like what they like.
Personally I prefer records for these reasons:
- If I want to share a record with a friend, theres a greater chance they'll just let it play as opposed to a bluetooth connected speaker, where everyone decides they want to be the DJ.
- Having records often starts conversations. Its much more likely someone will see my records or ask to flip through them than say "Hey, can I peruse your Spotify library?"
I like music and it's nice to connect about it without having to force a conversation with everyone I meet.
That being said, I've often thought of living a "mobile" lifestyle like you mention, and if I do records would not be on my list of necessities.
Yeah, it can seem annoying when someone does that to what you like, but all humans do this at some level. Its same thing as when someone insists that a $7,000 bottle of wine makes you sit down and have a personal experience with the wine, makes you appreciate the weight of the wine, its powerful robust swirling texture, and its assertive character. cue: eye-rolls
>Does everything have to be about efficiency and logical superiority?
No, but I bet you don't consult tarot cards before choosing your next job.
>People enjoy the experience more and are spending money on it. How horrible.
Agreed, leave people alone, people !!
I think any hobby will have its fair share of smugness at the top.
Also comparing listening to records as consulting tarot cards is a bit extreme don't you think?
I was part of the smug audiophile brigade. Still bitter about buying those $700 headphones!
>Also comparing listening to records as consulting tarot cards is a bit extreme don't you think?
Hehe, yeah maybe a tad bit :)
One of the consequences is less compression/clipping, better dynamic range, etc. for the vinyl version. This can have a huge positive impact on sound quality.
You don't have to be a nutbar audiophile to appreciate it, either - you can even hear the difference between old rock albums and their heavily compressed re-releases.
http://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-how-does-masterin...
The manner in which the album is recorded (analog vs. digital) doesn't matter, it's the limitations of the format for which the master is intended. The physical limitation of a needle tracking a groove measured in microns places a hard limit on the amount of compression which can be applied to the dynamic range. You can't make a needle follow the kind of narrow, jagged, shallow groove that would be the result of using a "loudness wars" era master meant for the CD format.
That said, the number of "got to have it" albums which were caught up in the loudness war isn't enormous. The biggest victims were re-releases of classic rock albums during the 90's but the original records with the true mastering are widely available in the used market. While there are some classic albums begging for a vinyl focused remaster, there aren't too many people clamoring for Limp Bizkit's catalogue to be rereleased without all the trickery employed on the CD master. There are also a ton of garbage "vinyl remasters" out there cashing in on the trend. For example vinyl rerelease of the early Modest Mouse catalogue is just garbage. I seriously think they lied about finding the original masters and just took the CD master and added "crackle and pop" on top to mask the obvious half-assing. That or they used the worst pressing supplier on earth.
"...because of the limitations of the vinyl format, loudness and compression on a released recording were restricted to make the physical medium playable—restrictions that do not exist on digital media such as CDs—and as a result, increasing loudness levels never reached the significance that they have in the CD era."
From a purely technical perspective I'll pick a typical lossy file over vinyl every single time.
You can be every bit as "active" in the listening experience playing the music on an iPod or a CD player as you are sticking a needle on a vinyl record. And for that matter, you can be just as passive in the listening experience listening to a vinyl recording (well, OK, you might get a slight bit more exercise getting your butt off of the chair when the record is over -- if you can't get someone else to put on the next record :-D).
I do think that our culture is terribly entertainment-driven, and that much of the time music is just background noise that isn't really being paid attention to, but that has nothing to do with the medium, except that some mediums make that easier to do than others.
I Also think the culture tends to underestimate the value of peace and quiet, and that the TV or stereo doesn't have to be on 24 hours a day. Don't get me wrong, I love music, and so does my family. We have it playing regularly at our house. I'll still crank up the stereo when a song is particularly good (it's usually too loud for my kids before it's too loud for me :-D). But having some quiet in the day, so you can think without being bombarded with stuff in the background is also important -- not just for older people either -- kids and young adults need it too.
[edited to remove unintended indentation]
I believe you missed the point. He says the ritual makes the listener more involved with the music. He doesn't say different media make one more or less serious about music. It's similar with food: you can be serious about your food whether cooking it yourself or ordering it at a restaurant (or eating at a buffet.) But you're more involved with the food if you select your own raw ingredients and cook it yourself.
My point was that he was unnecessarily tying the listener's activeness/seriousness/whatever with/about the music to the medium it was on.
I totally get the point about there being different levels of interaction with music. I just don't think that listening to music on vinyl equates to you being a more active listener. For some it might help, I suppose, but I think it is far from universal. Also, the implication was (as I read it), that if you listen on vinyl you are tons more likely to be an active listener than someone who is using a more modern medium, and I just don't think that's true.
In that light, medium does somewhat equate to being an active listener - you evidence that you care about how the music was made in the first place.
There is research which says our minds react differently to the physical world than to the digital one. So from the idea it follows that using a Vinyl itself may not be better/worse than digital, but the mental state you enter into because of the higher activation cost (decide to play music + go to place where music is + select music + play music + go back to place to relax) as well as the reduced control (requires significant movement to pause/play/go back/go forward vs a digital device in close proximity) that it makes a difference in appreciating the music that is playing because of that investment of energy.
If you play something on Spotify you just aren't invested as much and aren't as likely to pay as much attention to the song as you would if you had invested that energy into playing it on vinyl.
So not so much that you can't do it with modern mediums, but that the modern mediums are not designed to inherently provide that feeling or bring you to that mental state.
As someone who considers himself a big music guy, at least once upon a time, I'm simply no longer as invested as I once was when listening to CD's or vinyl as I am now when listening to albums or singles on Spotify.
My take is that it's a matter of ritual. It's akin to the whole unboxing phenomenon on youtube. There is still something about physical tactile interaction with something before its enjoyment. The smell of CD's or vinyl and the collectability of things like limited edition covers and liner notes just make it that much more special. And then when you listen to an album on Vinyl, where it's practically impossible to skip forwards and backwards, you're de-facto an active participant in the whole endeavor. You enjoy the album as it's meant to be enjoyed, fully placing yourself at the mercy of the Artist who carefully constructed the order of songs.
I no longer hold new releases from artists I love as special as I once did when the album was released in stores for this simple fact. It used to be an event that could only happen after a few hours of anticipation.
Having all songs at your fingertips is incredible, but Stairway to Heaven is also much less special when you can skip directly to the guitar solo with minimal effort.
However, even as a kid, I'd probably only look through the album cover, liner notes, whatever maybe a few times, and then probably never looked at it again. I just wanted to put the music on so I could listen, and the album cover was just a means to an end. I would have traded that experience for "push a button and the album plays" in a heartbeat. There are some fond memories of artwork on the cover, etc -- and it is a valuable connection to the music -- because everyone remembers the Styx "Paradise Theatre" album cover, and connects it to the music that was on it.
"And then when you listen to an album on Vinyl, where it's practically impossible to skip forwards and backwards, you're de-facto an active participant in the whole endeavor. You enjoy the album as it's meant to be enjoyed, fully placing yourself at the mercy of the Artist who carefully constructed the order of songs."
^ a few things about this. First it really depended on the album/artist/producer who decided the order that the songs went in. For many albums it was not the artist. Producers often decided what was the "most commercially viable" and put those songs up front (or in whatever order fit their particular strategy). Some artists insisted on more control, but the record companies had a lot of power here, so I think those situations were more rare.
Second, dude, did you never pick up the needle and skip over a song? :D Didn't everyone either try to hit that tiny gap between songs to play your "favorite", or to pick up and skip one, or go back and repeat one? Of course, the "ultimate" solution was to record to cassette tape just the songs you wanted, and in whatever order you wanted them. Also, I personally don't find the lack of control of what plays in what order to be any value to me. If the music is good enough that I want to listen to the whole thing, it usually makes no difference to me what comes after what. The only exception to this might be, for those albums that are really that good that I listen to them over and over, I know which song is coming next when one finishes, so I can be prepared to sing along, or whatever. But I still see no need to give up control of the order of play just to experience this, I an just queue up the whole album on the electronic device of my choice and push 'play'.
Third, while it is true there were some artists that had an idea of an "experience" and wanted things laid out just so, I don't think most artists cared which order you listened to their songs in. In fact, musicians tend to be a lot more laid back than that. They don't care how you listen to their music, they are just happy if you are and that you get something out of it. It really depends on the artist, of course.
I don't prefer learning or brainstorming using pencil and paper because they did it in the twenties, I do it because it's effective and I enjoy it, same for reading real books, I just enjoy them more than a Kindle (which I tried and find subpar)
Case in point: myself.
I have never owned a record player nor any vinyl records.
I have owned a Walkman which was a hand-me-down from my older brother and I used it for a couple of years before it got accidentally broken.
Then I owned and used CD players (a mini stereo and a Discman) for about 5-8 years after that.
Ever since then I've owned mp3 players and/or streamed music onto my computer / devices.
The drop in audio quality/fidelity from switching to digital formats notwithstanding, I still very much listen to music very deliberately and very purposefully.
I actually try not to just play music as background noise while I work (I listen to podcasts instead).
Instead, I make time to experience music during my walks or at home.
I do this regardless of the medium.
To suggest that vinyl records is the only way to truly experience music is almost to suggest that people who don't own record players don't really like or care about music which is grossly untrue.
And also, collecting and curating your vinyl collection is not the only way to be active about music.
There has been a strong shift towards consumption in all forms as we've gotten better at making things.
As a vinyl collector myself, another thing that interests me is the feeling of quality you get when you buy vinyl. I love looking through the lyric booklets in 10/12" format, beautifully printed and often a piece of art in its own right. I actually feel like I _want_ to sit there and listen through a whole album when you have all that to gaze through at the same time.
As a musician I can't "un-hear" a different method of engagement even as a listener for enjoyment. It's a different subject, but also related to the active notion you described. After all these years, sampling things from across the world time and time again, it takes quite a bit of "Ooomph" for me to really feel the hairs on my arm bristle up.
What's great in modern times though, is that I can get a real buzz every time I shop on Beatport, listen through my studio Sennheisers, and at volumes that would be considered torture if inflicted involuntarily. RAM Records and HEAVY ARTILLERY are two that I really enjoy because it's music that will scare people who even love music. Ha!
I am not sure how this is a passive activity. For me, listening to music in my car is when I am actively listening, I have time to contemplate the lyrics, listen to songs over and over again and hear the nuances, and really gain appreciation for a song. It is sad that my car has the worst audio quality, but it is far from a passive experience.
That is not even beginning to talk about the fact that on an open road (admittedly rarer and rarer each day), that music becomes an interactive experience. Be it slowing down and opening the windows to feel the wind pass by while the perfect Americana song plays, or pushing that pedal to the floor when just the right song comes on.
I'll readily agree that music at work is very passive though, I have to avoid songs that require (or encourage!) active listening.
> When I want to listen to music I grab a record.
I reach for my FLAC collection, legally ripped, and stored in the cloud.
ps: this and the album scale, art, lyrics. It felt crafted a lot more. I spent most of my life trying to generate everything perfectly and I miss the analog stuff.
That is similar to how using vinyls allows you to have some buffer before and after listening to music or a musical piece. You can't have the same high all the time. Similarly, you can't enjoy that one part of a song for 10 minutes. Similarly, you can't music playing all the time at the same level as you can enjoy some music (that you like) playing sometimes.
As much as I can appreciate vinyl, I can't force myself to go through the hassle (and expense) of trying to do that today.
Buying CD's used to be a weekly ritual for me and I missed it for years. Putting on a new album on a Saturday afternoon with a beer or glass of wine while I start cooking is a very enjoyable moment for me. Now, obviously this was for the most part because I would have access to new music. That experience has not come back as I can put on anything on my laptop. However, there is a nice sense to putting on an album and being "forced" to play it from one end to the other. With streaming, I have a tolerance of 10-20 seconds of jarring music before I lose my patience and skip the track. Which is good but also means that I miss out on some of the tracks that take more effort and are in the "acquired taste" category. And in my experience, those tend to stay pleasant whereas the hits suddenly reach a threshold after which I can't stand listening to them any more.
This was the important part for me at least. There are a lot of songs that I think I'm not into. Once I forced myself to listen to all of them all the way through I found a lot of good stuff.
Once I realized I just needed to give its recommendation engine more fuel to work with and started liking/adding things I actually wanted to listen to, it went right back to giving me cool stuff with loads of obscure artists I'd never heard before but liked a lot. (It really only took me about two weeks to right the ship).
Spotify's recommendation algos are excellent.
Edit: And it almost always is something I really love. That playlist is the killer feature on Spotify for me at the moment.
I don't like rap, hip-hop, or metal. I mostly like rock, some pop etc but that too not too loud. I don't really know how much "not loud"; that's where I thought these recommendation engines would kick in. I have found couple of artists/songs that I just love on Bandcamp (awesome place). But Spotify, Apple Music (this one has been an utter disappointment for me), and many other streaming services that I've tried in my country just didn't cut it.
What have helped me over the years are films, blogs, tweets etc. Something random playing on a bus, or a film soundtrack, a TV show theme song. Like that song A Chi that I heard while watching The Best of Youth. It was in Italian and I didn't understand a word but I just instantly connected to it. I loved it. That German song from The Night Porter - from there I discovered Marlene Dietrich's Lili Marleen. Or Many a tears from October Sky, or that song from Twelve Monkeys. And there are some like Amélie (well, every tune is fabulous in this one) where I disconvered Guilty by Al Bowlly. A friend once, out of the blue, told me to check out Imagine Dragons and later I listenred to Demons like crazy; on repeat. Or a chance hearing of a tune in an Iranian film that was composed by an Iranian artist. It's the best song of melancholy I have ever heard and it doesn't have any lyrics.
I even found some nice ones on WCD before it was burnt down. I got there late; or rather started exploring late. Its recommendations were a lot better than the streaming serives, at least for me.
What I find surprising is that I benefit from recommendation services for books, films a lot, but for music I've never been able to find recommendation service that tries to find that nerve or even something close to it that is a person's musical taste and then recommends tunes around that. Maybe unlike books just the lyrics of a song aren't enough and it's very difficult to discern how a tune would sound good or boring to a listener. I've tried a lot and after some time I gave up. Maybe I was doing soemething wrong or I should try services that just to music recommendation, and not streaming maybe.
It's a different music discovery and listening experience than streaming. Go buy some obscure music on CD/LP and listen to it over and over for a day.
Must admit, I have resisted the LP movement until now. Might check it out =)
I don't mind flipping. If I'm busy momentarily, it'll just spin with the needle in the deadwax...not a big deal.
I understand your point about listening to a whole album being preferable to singles, I feel the same way but I'd still much rather listen to a CD than an LP.
We thought vinyl was going the way of the dinosaur when the CD came, but now that they are back it feels like they are here to stay. Both vinyl and cds were bought to get the music the first time around. CD had no trouble displacing vinyl for the quality of the sound.
But this time, when it's more about the cover art and the ritual of listening, than it is about the sound, I don't see how something could display the LP. I know a lot of vinyl buyers now that buy the albums but then listen to the streamed music. Just to hold the album but have the convenience of digital.
I've been DJing various Techno genres with Vinyl for ~15 years and I've watched the scene shift towards CD and MP3 devices, yet turntables (Technics SL-1200 or thereabouts) are still almost always guaranteed to be at most dance venues (often with CD-DJs hooked up nearby). I also somehow prefer carrying my music around with me, it forces me to pick out ~50 pieces and then lug them behind me to the event, arriving all sweaty and out of breath because that shit's heavy. But it somehow gives me a sense of accomplishment even before I lay down the first record. And I know that my records will play, as long as the mixer isn't totally destroyed.
And my point was mostly that if you're DJing with them, it's hard to keep them in pristine condition.
Analog is neat. To me, at least. There's a microscopic groove cut into some plastic in which a tiny chunk of diamond connected to a cantilever is pulled through, and the motion it has gets converted to a tiny electrical signal which gets amplified. To hear this at home on speakers or headphones is cool enough; to hear it in a venue with excellent sound is really something else for me. Something so powerful coming from something so minuscule.
Maybe it's 40, 50, 60 years old, too. It's something that has a history, a past. I can listen to a record made in Brazil in 1968, that somehow found its way to Europe in my hands, or I can buy some sterile, boring CD copy of it. I can listen to my parents' very own records that they had in the 70s, that I also listened to growing up. I can even listen to classical records from before they were born. I can listen to a record from a country that doesn't exist anymore.
Not everything got released on CD (or streaming).
Plenty of reasons one might prefer vinyl over a CD.
It's a distribution issue. You can't even get some of these songs as torrents ha. You have to find the physical record or find a high bitrate download.
I download most of the music I consume from torrent communities in FLAC. For those times I am inclined to buy the physical artifact, it is far better to buy the vinyl version as it has full-sized artwork and is more suitable as decoration in my home (google "Hang Up Your Old Vinyl Records!").
Like an enormous number of vinyl purchasers, I don't even own a turntable. I'd never play the vinyl, instead I play FLACs off a Raspberry Pi media center. I imagine most young people buying vinyl these days just listen off YouTube.
- CD's scratch and then skip easily
- CD's come in horrible plastic covers that break if you look at them wrong.
- Skipping to a certain part of a song is much more difficult with CD's.
- The benefits vinyl provides (large artwork and liner notes/ lyrics, posters etc.) don't all apply to CD's and at that point there's not much/any benefit CD's have over digital.
Are you serious?
NB: I'm thinking about actual CD players here, not your CD through iTunes or something where you can click to skip on a progress bar.
Nowadays, a good professional CD player (or DJ equipment) will have something like an infinite-turn knob, which you can use to seek.
Nope; many CD players, like the first one I got in 1986, had only a two-digit led display for the track number -- there was no time display at all.
EDIT: It was a Fisher Studio Standard that looked like this, so I guess it did show an "index number" while scanning through a track.
I imagine they are not!
Why would you even play the CD? Just rip it once to your media center in a lossless format, and then put it back on the shelf and never touch it again unless you suffer a hard drive failure with no backup. On a media center, it is easy to skip to whatever part of the song you want. Plus, if you don't open the CD's jewel case again after that initial rip, then you won't have to worry about the jewel case breaking through mishandling.
Only if you mishandle and abuse them. Doing that to vinyl records is going to make them sound lousy too. Both of them are fairly delicate.
>- CD's come in horrible plastic covers that break if you look at them wrong.
Those jewel boxes are easily replaced, because most of them are standard (the exceptions are weird ones, like the double-CD ones). The plastic boxes keep the booklets and artwork in pristine condition. On vinyl records, there's no plastic, only paper/cardboard, so the more you handle it, the more worn-down and beat-up it gets. There's no way to keep it mint-looking without simply never opening or handling it. With CDs, as long as you're careful handling them, they'll stay mint-looking indefinitely (as long as they aren't those stupid "recyclable" ones that are mostly cardboard without the jewel boxes).
The only advantage LPs have is that there's physically more space for artwork/notes. But that's not a big problem; in the CDs, it's just shrunk down to 1/4 its LP size. Get some reading glasses if you have problems seeing that.
By the same reasoning, I suppose I should throw out my tablet and replace it with an iPhone and a magnifying glass.
I have a few hundred CDs in my collection which I started collecting around 1990; the large majority of them were acquired during the 90s. I have precisely one CD where there's actually any damage that causes playability problems (at one point on one track), from one of my earliest ones. All throughout the 90s, I played these CDs over and over, countless times, both at home and in my car. I never stopped in the car until I finally got an MP3-CD player for my car and started making MP3 CDs (somewhere in the late 90s), and at home when I finally ripped them all to Oggs and just started playing them on my PC or my portable MP3 player, so there's at least 10 years there in my teens and 20s where I was constantly handling these things. Somehow I managed to never cause any major damage to them, even when I was changing discs while driving. What's your problem with handling CDs?
You can back up a CD's audio tracks digitally to PCM files, with no loss. You still have the music even if the CD is completely destroyed, and your backup survives.
Vinyl records are also sensitive. They can skip even with slight vibration, because the arm which holds the needle is delicately balanced to exert only a small force to keep the needle in the groove.
Vinyl records easily warp from heat. They still play, but the warps make it easier for skipping to occur.
Fun personal fact: my grandma hard a way to make records flat again. She sandwiched them between cotton cloths, and gave them an ironing!
> Skipping to a certain part of a song is much more difficult with CD's.
Skipping to a certain part of a song is very difficult with a vinyl record. The song consists of a strip of grooves that are only a couple of centimeters wide. The resolution for navigating is not very good. Even if you could pick a specific cycle of the groove, which you won't, your precision is still limited by the rotating latency. At 33 rpm (let's round off to 30 rpm), you have one revolution every two seconds. (Sure, you could stop the rotation, and fiddle with it for five minutes to get the exact spot in a four minute song.)
With a CD-ROM drive and PC/laptop, you can script up some software to seek to a position with sub-second precision.
A decent media player lets you mark off two points, A and B, with sub-second precision, and loop them.
A bookmarking feature is plausible; there is no reason why a CD playing application wouldn't let you make bookmarks associated with CD's. Pop in a CD, and see a list of bookmarks; pick one and there you are at your favorite part of a favorite song. (If this doesn't exist, propose it ... say for VLC, or hack it yourself.)
They can also be regenerated for cheap as long as the scratches don't reach the data layer and only affect the plastic protection layer. Vinyl discs, on the other hand...
Making Vinyl sometimes better than CDs
Either it's something newer that I just really love and want the big cover art and physical "object" for collecting and appreciation. Often times I'll be at a show and buy the band's new album instead of a T-shirt as a way to support the band I like. Those often come with download codes so I can still get a high quality digital version for portability.
If it's something older I find at a Goodwill or a yard sale, I tend to buy it because it looks interesting enough to be worth the $0.50-$2.00 asking price. It's almost like buying some small novelty or other impulse purchase. It may be great. It may be awful. It may just be fun to have a bunch of old comedy records on my shelf. And if they are uninteresting, the cost is low so the risk is as well.
And occasionally I've purchased the vinyl versions of albums I copied from friends' tapes in high school or downloaded illegally years ago. As with buying the record instead of the Tshirt at a concert, it's a way to support the band I discovered for free but has since earned my payment.
I don't think that using a new technology for most things precludes having physical copies of the pieces of culture you find most important.
Much like you, I remember listening to Blood on the Tracks on Saturday mornings playing GameBoy or reading The Hobbit. We'd have Asleep at the Wheel playing during a card-game, or overlaying bad sports commentary.
Fast Forward to High School. I was hired as a retail salesperson at a Mom-And-Pop hot-topic like store at the local mall. Given my somewhat decent taste in music, the shopkeeper let me determine music choice.
So now, as I've had Groove/Zune/Spotify subscriptions going on (basically continuously) for nearly 12 years, I still try to buy at least 15 or so LPs a year. That used to be CDs, but now that I'm an adult with some space, I carved out a section for Vinyl records. They weren't purchased for the different 'warmth', no, they were purchased because I love music and vinyl is one of the purest expressions of that love. It's cumbersome and pretty stupid, but it places the art with prominence and connects your body and actions to the music moreso than any other medium (purely since you have to flip sides every fifteen minutes or so). I like to think back to my saturday's playing GameBoy, and now I gulp down coffee while reading Gaddis or Foreign Affairs as Bob Wills blasts throughthe speakers
I got rid of my CD collection 10 years ago to get rid of clutter. I had a great collection curated on grooveshark, but since that was shut down I've mainly listened to streaming radio.
I've found buying vinyl second hand in antiques stores or used record shops to be an interesting way to discover music. Often the price is cheap enough to be able to take a chance on something that looks intriguing. I probably have 100 records now, with production dates from 1932->2016, with lots of interesting albums that probably aren't even digitized (or at least readily available.)
http://www.afka.net/Articles/1987-01_BAM.htm
BAM: Working with a computerized synthesizer, do you find that vinyl is no longer the most desirable way to present your music? Will you be releasing CD-only recordings?
FZ: Well, vinyl never really was all that terrific a medium anyway. Some people cling to the belief that vinyl sounds better. I don't know. Not to my ear. I like it on digital tape myself.
BAM: There's supposed to be a warmth to vinyl.
FZ: Well, let's analyze what the word warmth is. Does warmth mean a lack of top end, or an extra bunch of frequency bulge at 300 cycles. What the fuck is warmth? How do you quantify that in audio terms?
BAM: Critics don't have to quantify in audio terms. We use words like warmth.
FZ: Yeah, well, you know, you can demonstrate pseudo-warmth in a technical way in the studio by using a broad-band equalizer and boosting things around 300 cycles, you know. It just gets pudgier. And you roll off the top end a little bit, and things start to sound, you know, warm! – if that's the kind of sound that you like. I don't particularly care for that sound.
--
Mix Magazine [1983]:
http://www.afka.net/Articles/1983-06_Mix.htm
Mix: The complaint has been that the digital tape sounds great, but when you transfer it to an analog medium you get a whole different sound.
FZ: You do get different stuff, and the reason you do is that the dynamic range of the digital tape is 90 dB and the dynamic range of a record is about 45 to 50 dB. So you can't let all the peaks go where they would normally go – you have to compress it. But if you're going to plan for the future, I think ultimately records are going to be released on compact discs, little laser discs, and they've got 90 dB. There's a way to do it. I'll compensate to get it on a piece of vinyl and still have the right thing digitally.
Digital is a superior format. But I still buy vinyl because a good half of vinyl recordings out there aren't completely fucked by applying a compressor that destroys the dynamic range.
It wasn't that Vinyl is better, but the MIXES were better. They didn't compress the crap out of everything.
I think that before digital, recording engineers treated the headroom as that: headroom: it was there to "have" not to abuse all the time. With analog, you don't exactly know where the red line is, either. Plus there is the effect of a gradual onset of distortion which is interpreted by the ear as loudness.
With digital, you can level the loudness with an algorithm to use the full headroom. It can be done with analog tools, too, but digital ones are just more "surgically precise"; the algorithm can look at the track globally, not just with an infinite impulse response circuit that whose output is only based on its prior input, and which cannot anticipate transients.
There is also pre and post equalization applied:
Wikipedia info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
The bass has the shit rolled down out of it, and is boosted back on playback.
If you image search for "RIAA circuit", you get lots of hits for phonograph cartridge pre-amp circuits that implement the playback EQ.
By the way, another Zappa article, on this topic, about record cutting!
http://www.afka.net/Articles/1980-01_Musicians_Only.htm
> The album was cut at half speed, a lengthier process, obviously, but resulting in far better definition and dynamics. At normal speed, deep flanging like that used on JOE'S GARAGE can play havoc with the record cutting head. When the two sides of the stereo are out of phase, the groove almost vanishes and your stylus will leap clear and scythe a path across the rest of the vinyl. One of the advances he's looking forward to is the improvement in cutting techniques so the head's relationship to the disc can be updated many more times during a cut, boosting the fidelity.
Good grief ... the vinyl issues! Flanging was used and the head skips due to the channels being out of phase, gotta cut at half speed.
Modern digital recordings are often ran through a compressor to the point where there's zero headroom left. Hell, there are albums where things outright clip even on the lossless version on the CD. Plenty of others have so little wiggle room that you'll see clipping on any compressed format.
Certainly, there are plenty of albums out there that use the same shitty masters as the CD. But plenty of others don't.
One of my favorite albums from the past few years, The Flesh Prevails by Fallujah, for example, has a completely different master for the vinyl. The dynamic range is great. The CD master, to me, has several songs that are nearly un-listenable due to the mastering on the CD.
I'd love if I could just pay for the good master in a digital format. But as someone who is primarily a metalhead, masters are shitty far too often.
So I have to wait to find out if the vinyl releases are better, and then buy and then rip them if so. Then spend 5 or 6 hours per side manually removing crackles and pops and other noises...
I don't like it. But it is what it is!
People who spend thousands of hours on stage tend to blow their ears out, then they THINK something has no highs and boost high frequencies too much to compensate.
The ironic part of all this is that FZ records are a case for getting into LP records. For example the original version of the Hot Rats album (1969) has the original released audio, while the CD version (1987) has a totally different remix, with different instruments in the mix, different edits of the solos, etc. Like a different album.
The "You are what you is" LP (1981) shows excellent sound quality while the CD (1987?) is one of the CDs with most atrociuous sound quality ever made, this is widely acknowledge. Not due to the digital medium, but due to wrongly applied compression.
The "Shut up and play your guitar" album has tracks recorded in 24-track analog tape versus 24-track digital tape on the same CD. It is curious, but the analog tracks sound remarkably better than the digital tracks. I know, this is a digital CD, but the quality difference is there.
EDIT:
> FZ: You do get different stuff, and the reason you do is that the dynamic range of the digital tape is 90 dB and the dynamic range of a record is about 45 to 50 dB.
The signal-to-noise ratio of a LP is about 66dB if you consider the low frequency spectrum, which includes rumble. Regarding dynamic range, uf you consider only the high frequencies (>1KHz), dynamic range approaches 100dB on the higher end of the spectrum. This is thanks to the RIAA equalization curve.
In the 21st century my 'CD player' (Spotify) is tracking everything I listen to so they can sell the data to a company who will build a comprehensive psychological profile about me and try to influence where I spend my money (or worse, which way I vote).
This tweet specifically was bare-faced about it and appeared to be saying "our users are fine with this".
https://twitter.com/SpotifyBrands/status/875795928438931456
I can't blame people for wanting to go back to analogue, where the appliance you got to do a job did only that job.
Notwithstanding the fact that I wasn't arguing that there's no middle ground, I fear it won't last long. Lots of people prefer streaming services (myself for one) and this will accelerate the depletion of the digital purchase market (delivered by CD, DVD or network). Soon we won't have a choice.
In any case, of "things which are tracked" Spotify learning about my music preferences is something I'm OK with. It results in me discovering new music through their playlist/radio recommendations, something that I really like about Spotify.
But I am very worried to hear what is being done, unchecked, with personal activity data. I'm not making a connection between Spotify and Cambridge Analytica, but this style of control already has legs.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great...
If they do, I'm having a hard time figuring out where I'd see it. There are no ads on Apple Music, at all, AFAICT. So to answer your question directly, I'm going with "no".
Here's my unsolicited theory on why vinyl was preferred (by some) to CDs in the 90s and 00s. It wasn't the form factor, it was the dynamic range of the masters. I don't know if it was caused by the advent of digital recording, but the loudness war [1] certainly got going around the time that CDs were becoming popular. So comparing a classic vinyl record did sound better than a newly mastered CD, but not because of the digital recording, simply because the dynamic range of the music was better.
Now that doesn't explain the recent renaissance of vinyl, which appears to have more to do with the ease of spinning, and the presentation of a coherent larger work of art (as opposed to singles on Spotify).
When you say non-harmonic distortion, are you talking about clipping? Isn't that directly related to the loudness war?
One interesting bit is that compression to 128kbps MP3 had a large influence in an entire generation's perception of quality. He cites a study that found typical listeners, when given an ABX test of 128 vs CD, the listeners overwhelmingly preferred 120 kbps MP3.
[0]https://www.dukeupress.edu/MP3/
To your comment, though: the perception of sound quality is highly influenced by things like ritual, genre, equipment, environment, age... as well as technical limitations that impose a particular sound on an entire generation of listeners.
Yeah, I guess my comments are driven by a desire for an objective concept of "better". Perceived quality is clearly also an important consideration.
Book ordered, thanks! (Real books are clearly better than eBooks).
With the exception of wealthy purists (read: just Radiohead), that vinyl you're listening to is actually the digital recording pressed onto vinyl, not an analog recording pressed to vinyl.
If you did two simultaneous recordings of a performance -- one a modern digital and the other a modern analog -- what would be the appreciable difference between the two once pressed to vinyl?
I just reflexively assume that there wouldn't be much difference at that point. Unless you're thinking of the loudness-war compression that's done to digital, but that doesn't happen to the recording until you're making the CD or something else for digital distribution.
The sample-rate of a CD exceeds the effective resolution of even the best vinyl pressing. Furthermore, the Nyquist limit guarantees that it is impossible to perceive the sample rate of a CD, and even with a bit-depth of 16, you have 50% more dynamic range than vinyl is capable of.
Add to that the fact that a master is generally 96Khz, 24-bit.
For frequencies from about 2Khz to the limit, the dynamic range of the LP is over 100dB. The quoted 60-66dB dynamic range is only because takes into account low frequency rumble.
CDs are mastered with 44KHz sampling rate which is now generally accepted as too low for high quality audio. Yes according to Nyquist, you could capture up to 22KHz with no problem with such sampling rate, but in real life you run into all sorts of problems related to filtering on both the ADC and the DAC. It is too low for implementing a good DAC and ADC.
As for the LP record, they can extend beyond 20KHz easily, in fact i have records with info up to 50KHz which can be then played back correctly -- CD4 quadraphonic records.
CD- quality audio, in real life use, introduces non linear, non-musical distortions that detract from the sound, while vinyl records mostly have the typical 2nd harmonic distortion and in controlled levels.
Furthermore, LP record distortion diminishes with program level (softer sounds are less distorted), while PCM DACs, by nature, do the opposite. This isn't nice to the ear.
With all due respect, there is nothing remotely practical about the theoretical ability of any medium to record frequencies above 22Khz. Do you play your CD4 quadrophonic records to your pets? On what? Ribbon tweeters?
Furthermore, the ability to perceive dynamic range attenuates with frequency. So once again, you are back at the limits of human hearing, even if I accept what you say about the theoretical DR of vinyl. And what if what you say is true? Can you show me any recording with a dynamic range exceeding, say, 70dB?
It is also relevant that the dynamic range of vinyl is a function of the circumference of a track, and decreases as the record plays. It also decreases every time you play a record.
And what you say about DACs has not been true for many years. These days, even run-of-the-mill DACs employ oversampling.
Oversampling does not solve the issue i have commented, which is that 44KHz is too low. Read about filtering at the ADC and DAC stages. Read about the pros/cons of using FIR-digital, IIR-digital, brickwall-analog filters at them. Oversampling with a FIR filter was already used on the second CD player on the market, the Marantz CD63 aka Philips CD-100 of 1980. All through the eighties all kinds of DAC+filter combinations have been used and now in 2017, despite any combination you use, higher-resolution (say, 96Khz sampling rate) audio sounds better. 44KHz isn't enough.
You see, what happens is as you approach the 22KHz limit, all sorts of nasty stuff will happen with the audio. No matter what filter you use, the upper octave (say 10-20KHz) will have any of the following ills:
- ringing - rippled frequency response - wild phase shifts. - pre-echo or post-echo
So, again, let me repeat: 44KHz isn't high enough. Using a higher sampling rate like 96KHz or more, allows to move such problems away from the audible range.
> With all due respect, there is nothing remotely practical about the theoretical ability of any medium to record frequencies above 22Khz. Do you play your CD4 quadrophonic records to your pets? On what? Ribbon tweeters?
Yes there is. What this means is that a system that can resolve up to 50KHz will have clearer reproduction of the 10-20KHz range, which is so important to add definition to the sound. "Clearer" as in "less artifacts and distortions."
> It is also relevant that the dynamic range of vinyl is a function of the circumference of a track, and decreases as the record plays. It also decreases every time you play a record.
What decreases on the inner grooves is the ability to record higher levels for the high frequency ranges (>14Khz). And even this is a limitation that is self-imposed by record cutting engineers to make the record easily playable on the cheapest kind of stylus, the 0.7mil spherical stylus.
Advanced stylus shapes (line-contact, shibata, hyperelliptical, Fritz Gyger FG70, JICO SAS) wouldn't have any problem with this.
Seriously, you’re just spouting audiophile mumbo-jumbo and confusing issues encountered during mastering with limitations of the final recorded media.
I’m done here. Arguing with audiophiles is pointless.
According to who?
I'm not even sure Radiohead do AAA. Even the new OKNOTOK is supposedly sourced and remastered from digital. Not that there's a thing wrong with it, supposing it's done well.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Icky_Thump#/section_Promotion_an...
I've always seen my generations attraction to vinyl as a response to the ephemeral nature of digital music. Vinyl is orders of magnitude less convenient, but it is concrete. When I spend my $5-30 dollars, I own a physical good that I can manipulate. I think this also answers the question "Why vinyl?" - it is the most physical of all music mediums.
I think that is a strong psychological component for humans. This has only grown with subscription services, where I spend $10 every month, and don't even have a library to browse.
I've never really cared about vinyl's sound, and actually listen mostly to digital records. But as far as giving a sense of ownership and intimacy, vinyl wins.
This. I've been a record collector for 20 years, mostly focused on rare Brazilian music - https://www.novedos.com.
I don't DJ anymore so it's primarily a collector thing for me. Aside from the master tapes, an original vinyl copy is as close as you can get to the original recording, which is special. I'm far from an audiophile, so it's not about the sound, it's about the feels.
* Big artwork and liner notes. I have shelves on my wall to display my current favorite albums and change them out over time.
* Conversation piece. Friends can actually browse a collection and talk about common interests. It's fun to hang out and listen to records with people.
* Vinyl requires some heavier duty stereo equipment. Regardless of how you think the vinyl itself sounds, it's a great way to get into building an actual hifi system, and that will make any format sound better. The stereo equipment becomes a hobby and collection in itself.
To me it's not a competition. Different formats can happily coexist. I own many albums on several formats (Vinyl for the living room, CD for the car, etc.) I use streaming too, especially for discovery and portable use.
And then there's the whole debate between lossy and lossless compression :)
P.S. For those who are interested in vinyl but annoyed by the prospect flipping records every few songs check out an auto loading turntable. These can stack several records and automatically play them one after another.
Without optimum room design, even half-decent earbuds are better than pretty high-quality speaker systems, if you don't need multiple simultaneously listeners.
And I don't think it's that most people don't care, I think it's just that most people have a utility function where the additional utility of high-quality sound gear is far too low to ever be justified by the cost of the gear (and the necessary environmental improvements to make sure that the effect of the gear isn't wasted.)
Things really aren't made the way they used to be (for better or worse) and I think that nostalgia is definitely part of vinyl's appeal.
I remember when I bought my first pair of IEMs. They were pretty cheap, but still better than whatever earbuds came with my iPod at the time. After listening to the new IEMs for a while I was unable to go back to the Apple ones because they sounded so much worse. If you asked me a few days prior, I would have told you the earbuds sounded fine.
Then I got a real pair of headphones...
Also for artists, the profit margins are higher selling an LP (or even better a cassette) then releasing it to a small fanbase on Spotify. It's a better way to connect with a band you like than just streaming a track on your iPhone. You get the artwork to look at, and it's fun to read the production notes.
I can't remember the last time I bought an album on iTunes or even beatport. If I really want the digital copy I'll look for it on bandcamp.
I might be in a bubble living in Brooklyn, but I'm seeing more record bags than thumb drives these days.
Sites like themixtapeshop.com and turntablelab.com are putting out great stuff every week so it's easy to build a set. You don't need to go digging through dusty bins to get records these days.
Which makes sense, because techno has always been at the forefront of digital adoption compared to other genres of dance music.
On the flip side, in order to build a play back device for MP3 or CD from scratch you'll need electricity, massive amounts of highly specialised knowledge and realistically a chip fab.
This has no real practical relevance in the modern world, unless you're stranded on an island with nothing but a bunch of Vinyl, but I still like the thought.
Don't do this with any vinyl you care about. It will destroy it pretty good. Microgroove records since the 50s were made for a fine tipped stylus, not a needle.
(What does "enlightenment stage" mean?)
The vinyl is like an original numbered print, while the download is like a glossy poster print.
Not to mention they can go from the stovetop into the oven, which most other pans (pure stainless steel excepted) can not.
I suppose the same could be said of many things: communication (people still use irc or even send cards), music (people own vinyl but listen to digital), books (people often read both physical and ebooks), and so on.
Tangentially, someone on Hacker News mentioned Cathode (http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/), a terminal program that emulates old analog monitors. Screen glow, burn-in, noise, even occasional sync hiccups, can all be tuned to the nth degree, which I have, and now I'm hooked. I think it's also the sounds that can be added, but that's another psychological topic.
I don't own a record player and usually aim for consolidation, digitization, and the annihilation of clutter. But you can only go so far before it gets too cold. Even Google's Material Design and similar UI fashion is too sterile. There is evidence that the constantly circulating, subtle film grain in movies used to pleasantly tickle the retina, and I think vinyl background noise is similar.
That's like the classic of saying "no offense" after you realise it was actually a obviously offensive thing to say. It doesn't change anything and is a semantically meaningless statement, and you still were offensive.
I dislike how HN'ers attach meaningless disclaimers like these at the end of every sentence they make because they're so afraid of getting downvoted. It just goes to show how much damage over-moderation, echo-chambers, and such things make to honest and legitimate discourse.
If you want to make a statement at least own it.
I dislike how people project into comments they read. For example YOU have projected that I am not confident in the comments I make because of how I suffix them. That's distasteful and if you want to experience the wrath of my will then you're more than welcome to a personal meet up. So, case in point: If I don't add disclaimers at the end people read their own meanings into what I say and people get mad at me even though I never meant what they thought I meant.
Disclaimers are a product of the universal effect of the internet where the reader could be almost anyone in the world. If I'm talking to people I can see the facial expressions of I do not add these disclaimers.
I grew up with CD's. The vinyl primarily just feels like a collectible to me--something I can look at, turn over, read the liner notes while listening to the music, etc. I don't even really listen to the vinyl's I have, I use the digital rips instead.
If it comes with a free download then vinyl is pretty much the perfect box to sell downloads at a brick and mortor. Thin but wide so you can't steal it easy. Lots of room for pretty artwork and extras. And nostalgia, something the cd/cassette anti-theft box didn't have. Well, The extra large cd boxes did at first but then they quit making those.
Given the high price of most brand new vinyl I'd be highly surprised if this was true. I do think you're on to something though. I will listen to the digital/streaming version of a record I have much, much more often than the vinyl copy. Usually if it's a new release I'll buy the vinyl, sit down and enjoy it start to finish, and then the only time I'll play it after that is the odd evening/weekend when I want to sit down and do nothing but listen to some music. It's kind of something you'll put aside time for (like watching a movie) but at the same time you'll still be streaming in the background all day at work.
Huh...I don't perceive things that way, but this is probably due to my social biases and the fact that i buy and listen to vinyl all the time.
There seems to have been an explosion in cheap, toy-grade turntables of various brands coming out of a couple factories (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=crosley&t=h_&iar=images&dbexp=a&ia...).
Much more of pain than just playing a spotify playlist, but I understand why people still get into it!
Definitively not. When I first encountered them I found them a nice historical curiosity, like wax tablets, nothing more.
Some people, sure, but it's far from an universal experience.
Audiophile bickering aside, the vinyl version may very well be cut from a different master. That's a very real difference (of course it could also be worse/the same).
Opening the sleeve?
Reading the jacket?
Hearing the mechanical sounds of the turntable moving, the arm lifting, the hissing and popping?
Maybe people don't just want music? Maybe there's more to it than just the sounds of the musicians? Physical book sales are up as well compared to ebooks. I get it. I love my bookshelf. I never read an ebook these days (except for reference).
Mind you - my personal view. I had some nice kit (e.g. Rega Planar 3) and loads of LPs but the convenience and consistent quality of digital completely won me over.
I don't use floppies for storage anymore either even though I found my first use of a 5.25" floppy in an Apple 2 quite exciting at the time.
This seems suspect...
According to this figure (going back to 1973 only) vinyl still far outpaced cassette sales until the mid-80s.
http://blog.thecurrent.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/9/files/2014...
It was not the norm before nor after, just an outlier, but one that brought billions of dollars in. No wonder they fought so hard against downloading (both legal and illegal).
Curiously, during cassette tape dominance in the early 90s album length was 12.5 tracks. This increased to 15.8 in 2003, as CDs dominated. It has declined again to 14.2 tracks.
They state,
"With subscription pricing and the ability to easily skip among artists (as opposed to per-album or per-song charges, which were the norm), streaming pushes users to listen to explore new artists. This has the potential to reduce the concentration of the very top artists and albums, while also helping music lovers find what economists refer to as the “long tail” of the industry."
// totally unrelated complaint: searching Google for the above chart was super frustrating, giving almost exclusively "what sounds best" results when I was trying to find sales figures. Searching for the HBR article I linked above (which I had read previously but forgotten details of) was equally fruitless on Google "average album length" and variations kept returning "what's the best length for an album" results. Had to switch to DDG to find the HBR article, and with the same search term it was the third result. WTF google?! I keep noticing less helpful results.
Kids were taping songs from the radio and sharing "mix tapes" in the 1970s. Boom boxes had dual-well cassette decks for easy tape-to-tape dubbing. Cars quickly migrated from 8-track to cassette tapes. (Obviously, a fragile needle & groove playback mechanism isn't going to work a well in a moving vehicle: https://www.google.com/search?q=vinyl+record+player+in+car&s...)
The article says, "Thanks to its compactness, portability and sound quality, it quickly began to surpass the vinyl record in popularity."
People aren't making vinyl records at home, so to compare them to tapes-as-a-medium is somewhat apples to oranges. At least that's how I interpret their wording.
But pretty please? I don't want to resort to an archaic medium with 10 bit effective dynamic range if I can have 16 bit on a CD. I don't want your petty streaming services. I don't want to download music amateurishly encoded in a lossy format (almost) older than me.²
I know. I'm probably the weirdest of all, longing for this sterile, lossless sound of digital awesomeness. But can I please, for once in ages, buy a CD that has been decently mastered, that I can copy onto my computer and listen to with my headphones and enjoy?
I think I'm now going to put on “Dark Side of the Moon” from 1973 and cry myself to sleep, weeping, because something so old can sound so good, whereas decades of modern music, decades of culture and art have been sacrificed to the capitalist gods of the loudness war.
¹ Both in the dynamic range and audio codec sense. ² MPEG-1 Audio Layer III.
He can hear the difference between 0.1% THD and 1% THD, but can't tell Mozart from Beethoven, or Kenny G from Coltrane.
When people claim about how they are emotionally moved by certain speakers, but not others, chances are the music is shit.
When the music is good, I'm still moved by a 64 kb/s encoding using 8 bit uLaw, played through laptop speakers.
I'm not an audiophile, but I disagree with your assertion. I did love going to concerts in the 90's and early 00's. In February of 1993, I saw Stone Temple Pilots opening for Megadeth at the Fargo Civic Memorial Auditorium (not the Fargo Dome, think bigger high school gym). I liked their album, but was pretty much there to see Megadeth.
When I heard STP in concert (an frankly its not the best venue particularly in ND in Feb) including the megaphone in Crackerman, it blew me away. You can feel the range, and I loved their music ever since. I will say that the CD and mp4 are loved because of a memory more than how they sound.
It would be cool if there was a service where one can "burn" (or press) a vinyl record from a bunch of mp3/wav files, and print a nice sleeve.
There's a bunch of lathe services available: http://carverycuts.com/home/dubplates-order.html http://www.audiogeography.com/records/ http://vinylcarvers.com/ https://www.cutadub.com/
The ones that have kept records alive to this day (that is independent labels) are already suffering under the load major labels are pushing releases in, especially on record store days. Want your record pressed? Fine, but just after we press 20k copies of this Saturday Night Live OST LP, that's previously only been available in every flea market, record store and garbage can in the world.
When you cater for the crowd that flocked in during the trend are already switching to the next hip thing, soon all we are left with is tons of useless releases filling the bins.
Some DJ use vinyl records which contain nothing but a time code track. This feeds a system which plays out the proper audio segment from downloaded data.[1]
[1] http://djtechtools.com/2014/03/20/building-a-dvs-timecode-dj...
One side disc, large format, laser pickup, analog recording.
Bring together the good parts from both LP and CD / DVD.
It requires the audio to be modulated (using FM) and thus this introduces serious barriers to the sound quality.
On the LP, the audio is baseband. It isn't modulated at all.
If I had a load of Track 1's in iTunes, I wouldn't have a clue!
Do people actually know what you mean by "warm"? Are you sure it's not just a way of saying "the things you like about vinyl (varying per person)"? Because a definition like that would be a perfect example of something that's an association-based preference rather than a attribute-based preference. Which like hashkb said is perfectly fine to have, but makes the term pretty meaningless.
All of that has a very real impact on the end result and lots of old albums were recorded, mixed, and mastered for a fully analog playback medium.
If we're talking about music made in a fully digital studio and then pressed to vinyl at the end, then yeah, there really isn't a difference. Maybe it even sounds worse. But if your musicians and engineers are thinking about an entirely analog end result, then I do think it sounds different (and in my opinion better).
Without getting into the merits or detriments of loudness and DRC, the physical medium of vinyl enforced a constraint on the sound.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
[2] https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/compression-is-killing-your-mus...
But it's possible to like vinyl's imperfections and coloring of the sound purely for personal preference reasons. Nothing wrong with that.
Now play the CD. You have exactly that "pleasing" sound.
I could even argue it's something akin to the reason people use Vim or Emacs over JetBrains or Atom ha
In reality, it could be that a randomly selected record sounds nicer than a randomly selected CD track, even though it really has little to do with the media itself.
This sort of thing happens all the time, just look at the culture that has developed around windows software development compared to the equivalent with GNU/Linux. It's not really a technical thing, there's very little that each OS isn't capable of. But the way the average piece of software for both platforms is designed, documented, and marketed is totally different.
Compare vinyl to CD editions of some tunes.
There are real differences and it's not about how perfect the reproduction actually is. It is about how the music was mastered, the art of it.
Those vinyl limits bring out some really great art.
That is a lot of where "better" comes from in these discussions.
A similar thing happened when AM radio was a music medium. It's all about the production values. Some 70s era music just feels great!
Of course one can put that all on a CD, or digital track and enjoy it.
Honestly, more producers should be exploring these things. Perfection isn't what most people crave.
I see this trend toward vinyl as a value add to music. With the return of more if the art also comes more value.
We nailed audio reproduction long ago. All but the most crappy gear can perform better than humans can.
It's just not about that, and this trend seems to resonate with what people like, not what is technically superior.
This does not mean that CDs are worthless, however.
(Perhaps you have to be of a certain age to get this...)
Let me give you my take on this, as unbiased as possible:
Records do not automatically sound better than CDs. However, there are many, many cases in which the LP sounds better than the same CD.
First let me dispel some myths of vinyl playing:
- "Records wear": Assuming your turntable is a good one (no cheap Crosley record players), and your stylus is not worn, and your stylus pressure is below 3.0 grams (as it would be the case in ANY half-good tonearm and pickup), and your record is clean, and the pickup is correctly aligned, then record wear is a non-issue. Under those conditions records were found to last 1000 plays with no significant sound degradation on an AES (Audio Engineering Society) paper. And this with 1965-67 pickup technology. Modern pickups and styli are still gentler.
Of course, if any of the above conditions is not met, the record will wear!
- "Records sound with pops and crackles": This does not happen with a good turntable and well cared records. Record reproduction is mostly free from such noises. Note that lower quality turntables do emphasize noises caused by dirt, as well.
- "Any turntable gives you high quality sound, better than a CD": This is a favorite one of the hipsters. There are many turntables out there that are bad, poor, or mediocre. You need a good turntable to enjoy the sound. Fortunately due to the big used-TT market, you can get turntables that were pretty expensive when new, for little money.
Now, WHY should one play/buy records instead of CDs (or MP3/etc)?
As a music lover, it is very important to be able to play LPs. The main reasons are:
1. There is a huge amount of music that isn't available on CD nor MP3. For example records from record labels that went bankrupt. Or music that simply is not popular/mainstream. Sometimes you can find MP3 transcriptions of such records on the internet, but often those are done with poor care giving really bad audio, compared to having the record played by you on a good system.
2. There are cases in which the LP record is much, much better mastered than the comparable CD or MP3. Example: Frank Zappa's You are What you is. The CD was done using really exaggerated, wrong compression which truly destroys the sound, and you don't need to have any kind of high-end system or "golden ears" to notice the difference. It is that striking.
Another example? AC-DC's "back in black". The modern (2000s) remaster has heavy, dynamics-destroying compression compared to the original (1981) release. Which you can enjoy buying the LP record.
3. There are cases in which the LP record gives you the truly original release of the album. That is, before the producer (or artist) subsequently decided to alter the mix, do overdubs on it, etc. Example: Frank Zappa "Hot Rats" record; the 1969 original release is radically different from the CD release due to all sorts of edits and remixes done.
4. Music done on the LP era (1948-late 80s) was intended to be released on LP, so there is a convention that albums follow:
- Sides: A versus B. Sometimes the album will have a different concept in side A versus B, for example A dedicated to more danceable music, B dedicated to ballads, etc.
- Hit tracks are expected to be located at the beginning on each side. You see the track that is a beginning of each side and you can bet this was an important track for the artist.
- The last track of the side is usually a softer, mellower track.
These conventions are interesting and are preserved when you buy the LP.
5. Artwork. The difference in picture area between a CD and the LP is striking. Gatefold records (there are many of them) give you about 64x32cm (25x13") picture area, which is a lot. If the gatefold is triple (like in Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique"), this is an area of 96x32cm (38x13"), which is huge.
6. Printed lyrics & Bonus material: Since the sleeves are so big, many kinds of different 'extras' can be included with each record, and sometimes they do add a lot of value to the experience. For example:
- "Captain Fantastic" (Elton John) includes a whole comic book inside.
- Stevie Wonder's "Innervisions" (1976) includes a nice booklet with all the printed lyrics in lavish style.
- Many records came with stickers or posters.
- Devo's "Duty now for the future" cover art can be pried apart for framing.
- etc.
Basically, the LP record adds much more to the "experience" of listening to the album. At least for a music lover.