Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986
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It had a stylus that contained laser interferometers that could very accurately and precisely measure the distance from the stylus to the grove walls. It kept the stylus near, but not touching, the groove, getting the audio signals from the variations in the distance to the groove.
In addition to not causing any wear, I remember reading an article back then in one of the audiophile magazines that said it also made records that had already been played many times on regular turntables and were degraded sound new, because the Finial could use a part of the groove farther down than had been used by the regular stylus, and so was not worn.
It was going to be pretty expensive, around $8000 at today's prices, so was probably only going to be affordable to radio stations, archivists, and high end audiophiles. Then they got hit with the double whammy of a major recession and the rapid replacement of a large chunk of the vinyl market by CDs.
Finial was liquidated in 1989, and their patents ended up at a Japanese company. Development continued in Japan, and eventually resulted in a product [1]. They seem to be around $15000.
The Library of Congress and a couple of other places have a system that can recover the sound for vinyl records and old wax cylinders what works by photographing the grove through a confocal microscope. The thousands of photographs are then analyzed to figure out the audio signal. This is still research level stuff, I believe, not aimed toward producing a commercial product, and so would be even farther out of reach for consumers than the laser interferometer turntables are.
If you have a higher budget, check out Pro-Ject or Rega Planar
In either case I feel like it's somewhat missing the point of vinyls in this day and age, people like vinyls because they're simple and low-tech like audio tapes, VHS and Polaroids. If you really care about audio quality and preservation you'll be much better off building a good capture setup and digitize your vinyl. It's easier to protect and backup digital audio samples than a fragile physical object.
That being said what I propose with 3D-printing is almost certainly what effectively happens with vinyls these days. I doubt music labels maintain a completely separate and parallel analog workflow in order to have "pure" vinyls at the end. Why bother when you can take the digital master and dump it onto the disk and nobody will be able to tell the difference?
A fragile physical object has more charm.
We have the technology to 3d print records, though the audio-fidelity maybe isn't there (~2 years ago) for music more subtle sounds (jazz or classical). It also did not seem possible on an (affordable) FDM 3d printer and I didn't have access to an SLA 3d printer.
Keep in mind prints would take hours to do, on top of the usual delicateness of 3d printing.
Part of the joy of having a record is the rest of it, the album cover, the notes, etc. I wasn't trying to copy an existing record, so for me there was considerable effort required for those parts as well which made it harder to justify the extra effort 3d printing a record would have required.
Which brings me to my last point. There are numerous services that will accept a digital audio file and mail a physical record, in the $200-500 range (length/size dependent). Depending on your budget (esp compared to gaining access to an SLA printer and your time), that may be more effective.
I don't think the correspondence would be linear. There's probably something like cos(2 pi d / W) in there somewhere, where d is the distance to the grove and W is the wavelength of the laser. So you'd need some sort of equalization circuit on the output, but audiophiles are OK with that--they are used to RIAA equilization on vinyl already.
I assume that the variations in groove distance are much larger than the wavelength of the laser, which would mean that there are several plausible grove distances that give the same intensity output of the interferometer. I'm not quite sure how to handle that. I have a feeling an integrator would be involved, but details elude me at the moment.
But honestly, this seems like insane overkill. Vinyl has a ridiculously limited dynamic range, and digital recording at 24/48 is practically transparent even with low-end prosumer equipment. At the high end you have to work quite hard to spend more than $4k on a spectacularly clean and neutral studio-grade ADC/DAC. (You can spend more on madly expensive super-fi, but it's not going to sound any cleaner than a good Burl, Lynx, or Metric box.)
So if you spend $4000 on the turntable/arm/pickup another $4000 on studio grade converters, you can capture recordings that will be absolutely indistinguishable from the vinyl source. And your precious plastic disks can stay in their wrappers.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/m...
Now as far as speakers are concerned, yes, you’ll need to spend at least a few thousand for a stereo pair capable of doing justice to this level of precision and dynamic range.
I belived in their swansong and bought into it up until recently, then I tried "terrible" hardware and dear God it sounds so much better.
There’s no reasoning somebody out of something they weren’t reasoned into the first place, so usually this isn’t an argument worth having.
A modern laser interferometer could easily get well past the resolution that is limited by the vinyl structure itself.
Distortion here means both extreme distortion (e.g. clipping) which is what people often think of when they hear the word "distortion", or the more technical definition of any alteration of the input signal. The pre-amps, compressors, and so on will all add their own distortion to the signal. However this is desired distortion. Tape offers some of this, although I'm not familiar with what its exact characteristics are.
Clipping (when the input signal amplitude exceeds the limits of the storage medium or output device) is a type of distortion that can sound great or absolutely awful.
Digital clipping sound awful. The max amplitude is all 1's in the digital storage medium. When a signal exceeds this, for the duration of it exceeding every sample will have that same value of all 1's. The waveform will basically have the top lopped off. There will be sharp "corners" where it starts to clip, and where it stops clipping. Those corners create "pops". It makes that part of the recording unusable.
Analog clipping can be a very sought after sound though. The max amplitude on tape is when all of the poles of the magnetic material are aligned. This isn't perfect though and it's not instant, so you get a slower compression of the signal and some variation. The waveform will look like its top has been squeezed downward. This can sound amazing.
The quality on youtube is pretty bad (spotify or elsewhere is better), but this song has a great example. You can hear his voice distort in many places, but it sounds wonderful (particularly starting around 2:20 - 2:40 and 3:10). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAGS8UL9b6A
A colleague was doing this in a decade ago, I wonder if he ever got it working.
[1] https://www.cse.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.htm...
As they say, "significantly lower than the wavelength of visible light".
Lasers are cheap, tracking for them is less so. To accurately read these grooves with sufficient resolution, you need 2 lasers (LPs are stereo), both looking at 45 degree inclination from different angles, and focused at the same point. That kind of accurate spatial + temporal sync ain’t trivial to accomplish. CDs/DVDs are much easier to implement. They don’t need similar resolution because digital, and they light their laser along the normal, only need to track 2 axes.
Even if you’ll manage to accurately focus both lasers, another problem is interference between left and right channel lasers.
Would aiming the lasers at slightly different spots and putting the channels back together in software work?
The technical problem is already solved, but the product costs $15k: https://diffuser.fm/laser-turntable/ As you see from the description, they did it with 5 lasers instead of 2.
It's similar in some sense to the reasons why people go to see live concerts. The sound quality isn't better, it's just different, and feels "more real", although for concerts it is also helped by the fact that you're actually there.
I suspect you mean the latter, though with modern audio tech, well-mic'd and mastered recordings can easily sound ... if not better, then more intense, than live performances.
Though there's nothing like seeing the music being performed live.
To me a philharmonic concert sounds... very different than recorded audio. I'm confident I can double-blindly 100% tell the difference. And so can everyone else. This is one experiment I'd be happy to participate in.
And the obvious difference: live 'rock' etc. is still coming through speakers.
> To demonstrate the veracity of Lyngdorf's "Is it real, or is it Memorex" claim, Birkelund invited the trio to begin performing. After playing for what felt like, at most, 30 seconds, the musicians began to fade out as the volume of a pre-recorded track of the same music was turned up. Although the much too short demo left many in the room a gasp at how remarkably close the live trio and tuned-to-the-room system sounded, Birkelund failed to mention that the Model D system was never silent.
https://www.stereophile.com/content/steinway-lyngdorfs-elega...
For some bands, I'd actually disagree with that. Both what they are playing is better, and their released material is compressed to hell and back[1], which seems to be less prevalent live (though far from gone).
No doubt they _could_ do that recorded (anything you can do live you can match in a studio), but they _aren't_ doing.
There's also the non-musical elements - there's a difference between just playing some music and putting on a show.
So vinyl masters often (but not always) avoid the loudness war and have a wider dynamic range.
As I don't have thousands of dollars worth of stage speakers, amplifiers and audio equipment, there's a very noticable difference in sound quality between live shows and recorded music, depending on the venue.
You're also missing out a pretty big part of live shows, there's a difference between hearing a musician play a song live vs a recording. A recording is almost never one single take straight through and, depending on the artist, can be a fairly different rendition of the song.
An example, last concert I went to was cypress hill, they had a different DJ with them that mixed their tunes up pretty differently so the performance was.nothing like listening to one of their albums.
Normal turntables have a very simple analog signal path, with the needle moving electromagnets which emit the signal.
Best oxymoron I've seen in a while ("analog" literally means "simulating something else")
The casual and dictionary meaning of analogue today, in the context of vinyl and music technologies, is the opposite of digital (and technically that which "uses a continuous physical variable like voltage to represent data") not that which is simulating something else.
So "real analogue" just means "mechanism based on the actual use of a continuous physical variable like voltage to represent data" (as opposed to a digital version of such).
A major reason is that you can't really get away with the crappy loudness war style mastering on vinyl. Just because of that they sound way better than most digital masters.
It's actually quite ironic, I think, that compression has become such a fad only now that we have digital media with their much lower noise floor. We have more dynamic range available, but we're using less of it.
The point is that if you want to make a vinyl sound "as loud as possible", you're best off not compressing it, since you can have higher peak volume in one groove if the adjacent groove is quiet. Whereas when mastering a CD, the way to make it "as loud as possible" is just to crush everything up to 0dB.
What makes compressed music sound "loud" is that there's some sound present to the ears at full volume, or nearly so, at all times. It's not that it simply has a higher peak level. Indeed, it's the listener who controls the peak level of the sound that reaches their ears, not the recording engineer — they can always turn the volume up or down as they please. The reason compressed music sounds "loud" is that it has a higher average volume than uncompressed music of the same peak level.
I don't think that can be right - sound is a waveform so even the loudest notes will oscillate around zero. "Loudness" would usually be defined as something like root-mean-square amplitude, but if we zoom in to talk about a single note (sine wave) then the peak amplitude and the RMS amplitude are in a direct relationship with each other. On the scale of a whole piece, yes there's a difference between average and peak, but on the scale of one groove to the next - a couple of seconds - I don't think there's any practical difference.
The complaint I've heard about "loudness wars" e.g. Californication is precisely that there are no soft passages - every bar is pushed up to full volume. I'm not aware of anyone talking about the effects of compression on a smaller scope than the couple-of-seconds scale.
Sure. When I refer to "peaks and valleys" I'm talking about the envelope of the waveform. I think that's standard usage in audio engineering.
I think you should download Audacity or equivalent and look at some waveforms of both uncompressed and compressed music. I think you'll see that there are loudness variations on a much shorter timescale than you expect, and that compression reduces these considerably.
There's also the well-known effect where the process of recording and playing a vinyl creates dynamic range (as measured by various tools) where there is none. Some vinyls that are known to be from the same master as the CD still get much better scores on http://dr.loudness-war.info/
A very nice technical discussion of this myth is here: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#Myt...
But I like the rituals around it: taking the album out of the sleeve and looking at the artwork; placing the album on the table and setting it to spin; lowering the needle. I like how I have to purposefully listen to the music - you can't just set up a playlist and walk away, you have to pay attention to the songs and flip over the record once the side is finished, or put the second disc on.
If you want supreme sound quality you don’t play from a vinyl. A CD (or even FLAC file) will always “sound” better, even from first play. I, at least, don’t really care about the minor degrading my mid-range turn table does to my records. Almost all of the new records I buy come with a download code, so if, for some reason, my record becomes degraded beyond listening—however many listenings that would take—I always have the option of listening to the higher quality FLAC file.
Again :-)
It doesn't work with coloured vinyl and it's worse than regular turntables when it comes to dust since it just reads it instead of potentially moving it away
There are some videos about it on YouTube and it looks like you have to meticulously clean your vinyl before playing it.
However, one note about CD quality — it may not be as perfect as you think! A peer-reviewed meta-analysis has shown that humans can hear the difference between CD quality (44khz/16bit) and “high-res audio” recordings (e.g. 192khz/24bit)! The perceptual difference is relatively small, but measurable (assuming high quality speakers and signal chain):
https://phys.org/news/2016-06-people-difference-high-resolut...
I doubt 44khz sampling rate is a problem, but fixed point 16 bits per sample does seem fairly constraining, given how our perception of linear audio loudness corresponds to exponential increases in signal strength.
Also, if anyone tries to test it yourself, beware that it is actually quite hard to do so properly:
1. Any listening tests in a web browser will just resample to CD quality automatically anyway, because they just play into your OS’s shared audio mixing system, which mixes all audio sources before they reach your DAC, which usually resamples them all to CD quality in this process.
2. The above point applies to ANY app that doesn’t take exclusive control over your PC’s audio output capability, and even then there are many pitfalls where you can almost accidentally trigger a default CD quality resampling stage somewhere in the pipeline.
3. Be careful to ensure the audio file you’re playing wasn’t just a regular CD quality file that was simply upsampled to 192/24 or whatever high res rate it claims to be. Sadly, this happens a lot. Your audio file MUST be recorded AND mastered (edited) in the studio at every stage using high res formats.
4. Make sure your audio signal path doesn’t have any components introducing dynamic range (loudness) compression (many default to this, these days), or any other resampling, equalization, etc. stages.
5. Your DAC may not even support anything higher than 44/16 data streams, so resampling may be inevitable!
6. Make sure you played the audio samples on extremely high quality speakers (often costing many thousands of dollars, making this whole point moot/irrelevant for most people anyway). The vast majority of consumer headphones and speakers can’t render a low vs high bitrate MP3 very differently, let alone the subtle differences we’re talking about here.
The dust/scratch factor of vinyl has a much bigger impact than 16 vs 24bit or much of the signal processing issues.
To me, it would seem that in order to compare the two, you would basically need to resample the 24/192 recording, with dither, and then resample it back to 24/192; and you would need to choose a high quality resampling filter. Anything other than that I wouldn't really consider a comparison.
Furthermore, given that the measured sensitivity is more likely on the frequency front than on the dynamic range front, did they establish a distinction between 44.1kHz and 48kHz?
https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/134...
It's not just a matter of reproduction. Humans make the products different.
Look at the bottom of this page:
If you were listening to music at that volume, it would generally be considered unsafe, and you would potentially have hearing loss beyond 37 minutes [1]
16 bits is plenty.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_bit_depth [1] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/noise/default.html
And 96 to 119 is huge improvement.
dB expresses the ratio of one value to another. So without knowing what the other value is, it's rather meaningless. But it is unfortunately an often-made mistake: how many times haven't you heard or read just dB as such? Anyway, this means you cannot simply compare dB dynamic range with dB used to express sound pressure level of which 'A-Weighted' is just one standard which gets used. Those are completely different things. Simply said, you can play 96dB dynamic range music at sound pressure levels which you won't even hear. Or at sound pressure levels which damage your ears nearly instantly.
First: Bits per sample just describe how many discrete amplitude values (2^bits) are possible at each sample of a recording. The waveform is quantized to these values.
To understand quantization in the context of dynamic range, imagine how many bits per sample are needed to recreate a very quiet sound without loss, and then check how many bits you need to extend that to reach very loud sounds in the same recording file.
For example: How much precision would you need to accurately record the sound of a pin dropping (10db)? 4 bits? 8 bits? 10 bits? 12 bits?
Let’s be really absurd and say we can use 4 bits — just 16 discrete values — to represent a pin dropping sound (10db) cleanly and indistinguishable from the real thing. This is so obviously impossible, given how terribly quantized the waveform would be, but let’s be generous and assume it works.
Now, for the same audio file to reach all the way up to 110db (not uncommon for bass drum hits in an orchestra for example) is an extra 100db of dynamic range, which is 100,000x the amplitude, which is a little over 16 bits in addition to the original 4. So, rounding down, we’d need 20 bits to represent 10db sounds (with quantization down to only 16 discrete amplitudes) and 110db sounds in the same recording.
I think it’s extremely obvious that even 20 bits in this example is far from sufficient. In fact, even 24 bits would be insufficient if 8 bits per sample are not good enough to record a pin dropping at 10db!
In my experience CD’s are anything but durable.
If all we’ve got is opinions, let’s go with mine:
None of the CDs I’ve ever bought still works. I’m probably not as careful with my things as you are, so there’s that.
Unfortunately, due to manufacturing defects there are discs that will or have oxidized, so the durability of CDs (or other optical media) is not always as reliable as advertised. But as the sibling post to yours points out, CDs provide error correction and along with oversampling provides means of creating effectively bit perfect copies that can be as durable as the current state of the art (redundant, solid state, geographically diverse, etc.)
There are some quasi-plausible arguments for vinyl, but arguing that durability is one of them is hilariously myopic.
E: Specifically I'm talking about the P & Q channels, but this can also include R through W which while technically unused, still contain data in some form.
more information here
Most audio CD extractors do not provide all of this channel data, as only the digital audio is extracted. When a CD is re-burned, the subchannel data is regenerated, but not a bit-for-bit copy of the original. Sounds the same (usually), but sometimes there is metadata, easter-eggs, and what-not that is omitted. Additionally, some copy protection relied on adding corrupted subchannel data which low end CD players would skip, but high end extractors would not. Having the original subchannel data can be key and necessary to determine whether a sector was infact incorrectly extracted or not.
Gracenote had 3 598 785 CDs in their database in 2005 [1], so I'll take that as a lower bound on the number of CDs ever made.
I don't know what the largest flash drive that will fit in a jeans pocket is, but the largest I was able to find is 2 TB, but SanDisk showed a 4 TB prototype at CES 2019, so I'll go with that.
Assuming lossless compression that averages reducing the size of a song by 75%, a 4 TB flash drive could hold 1 662 149.1 minutes of music.
Unless the average CD is under 27.7 seconds long, that's not even enough to hold all the CDs known to Gracenote in 2005.
Anyone want to do the math if we allow lossy compression to squeeze more in (although I wouldn't consider it a backup of the CDs if lossy)?
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=177.5+cm%5E3%2F%28%28%...
That'll fit in my pocket, so that's 240 million megabit, 160 million seconds, or 2.7 million minutes, about 1 million songs. OK not every song ever, but a good portion, and possibly every song that's been in the charts.
I did see one claim that there had been as many as 100 million songs ever recorded, which would mean the density won't be there fore another 15 years or so.
An average person can expect to live upto about 2.5 billion seconds, which requires (for stereo 44.1khz 16 bit), about 220TB - 2.7TB a year. Given the growth of storage, you could record everything you hear from now to forever, keeping it in your pocket.
edit: to be clear, a CD will have far more resolution and technical capacity available than a vinyl ever will, I'm just saying that CDs have their own issues and aren't perfect.
Vinyl sounds more like vinyl than CDs do, until a specific piece of vinyl is reduced to a shambles by time.
People who really like vinyl have a bad habit of equivocating between the above two statements, using "better" to mean either "greater fidelity" (which is wrong) or "sounds more like vinyl" (which is a tautology) without signalling which meaning they mean.
>pretty much all CD players have garbage-tier DAC implementations.
A true audiophile I see, anything consumer-grade is "garbage" in order to justify the purchase of ridiculously overpriced equipment. The truth is that it's very cheap to design a decent quality DAC or ADC these days, mainly thanks to digital processing and the fact that those chips are made in huge quantities. Digital filters are high quality these days and the use of oversampling makes it a lot easier to design good analog filters.
Audiophiles are very hard to take seriously because the hobby is 95% snake oil and 5% reasonable engineering. I'm sorry if you're part of the 5% and I overreacted but it's one of these hot buttons for me. I've spent so much time arguing with people that, no, it made to mathematical sense to want 32bit samples or 160kHz audio...
Actually I'm rather fond of the $80 SDAC and it stands tall among other, more expensive stuff I have (I'm listening to it as type this in fact). It's miles ahead of any CD player DAC. Seriously, a CD transport into a cheap DAC will sound very noticeably better. Admittedly I've only sampled about a dozen or so supposedly good players and eventually lost interest so it's not a big sample pool.
I'm with you in that I also agree that it's dumb how most amplitude-signal DACs market "32bit/768khz" despite that sample rate being effectively useless and the noise floor in DS chips being at around ~20 bits worth of resolution and that's a best case scenario.
edit: honestly when it comes to amps and dacs, in my experience, there is no spec or measurement that correlates with how good it sounds so with those I pretty much gave up on anything other than my ears.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Aud...
https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/134...
Additionally, this is purely talking about loudness dynamic range, not even including resolution or JND (just noticeable difference). I will demonstrate to you below how even 20 bits per sample is insufficient in some cases.
Imagine for a moment that you could argue that the human hearing threshold of quantization error is only 4 bits (only 16 discrete values!) at the sound level of a pin dropping (10db). Now, I think we can all agree that’s absurd; we need a lot more than just 16 discrete amplitude values to represent the sound of a pin drop indistinguishable from reality to a human ear. But for the moment, let’s be really really generous to your point and assume it’s enough!
Now, let’s suppose we want to extend the recording so sounds at 110db appear later on (say, an intense bass explosion in an action movie after a quiet scene early on). To do this without clipping, what range of discrete values do we need? 110db-10db = 100db = 100,000x greater amplitude than the pin drop. This means we need to be able to represent peak amplitude values of 1,600,000.
This exceeds the ability of 16 bits to losslessly represent the quiet 10db pin drop and 110db explosions within the same movie’s audio track! You would need at least 21 bits in this example. And I’ve been generous with my assumptions here, making the extreme assumption that even 4bits per sample is enough to record a 10db pin drop, which is clearly not enough.
If you think 110db is unrealistic for brief periods, it’s not, even for music: bass frequencies in particular can reach extreme amplitudes that might surprise you. I recently played an extremely well recorded orchestral piece at reference volume on my equipment and was so impressed by the dynamic range, I later measured the decibel levels (C-weighted). The quietest moments are around 65-70db, increases to 80-90db at times, and peaks several times momentarily to 105db when the bass drum hits (you feel it like a punch of an air wave)! It turns out this is exactly how real bass drums measure. Yet, the drum hit doesn’t sound unbearable loud (as treble would be at that decibel level), so much as tactile, because much of that energy is subsonic.
If you do much research into perceptual psychology studies, you’ll see just how surprisingly difficult it can be to completely pin down the limits of human perception on average, let alone including outliers among the human population. In that sense, it’s entirely reasonable that a durable high fidelity recording format that holds up to time should be over-engineered, so there’s at least no worry that some study will prove it’s missing something later.
That said, I don’t really agree with the parent post that most DACs are horrible, but I can’t comment on CD player DACs since I don’t use physical media. Most phone DACs are quite good. Most PC DACs are horrible not because of the DAC but because buzzing noises from system clocks and other sources always appear on my speakers (it’s very loud and noticeable), so I’m forced to use a cheap $20 external DAC, which quite frankly is nearly as good as anything else you’ll get at any price.
I bought some half decent speakers by my standards around a year ago (Creative T40s for what its worth).
As a test I tried some MP3 tracks at various bitrates sitting on my hard drive to see if I could guess the difference. Most of the time I thought the 192kbps sounded better than the 320kbps.
Not to sound condescending but those speakers you mention don't seem very decent at and probably don't warrant any conclusion towards the benefits of various compression settings or audiophile configurations in.
Turntables that trash records are usually shitty turntables that, if they're even adjustable at all, aren't adjusted properly.
Now, if instead of a relatively simple one scanning laser beam you would make an image of the record with a moving scanner head, exactly like paper scanners and then used what's today is commonly called "AI" ... that could work.
I can't find back the paper in question but I've found this which is in the same spirit: https://www.cse.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.htm...
Vinyl today is very much about the collecting of good music and taking part in the physical ness of that collection. The b-side is just as good as the A-side, even if the sound quality isn’t as perfect as the original studio recording. It doesn’t need to be, and it has its own unique sound.
What I most love about the experience of owning vinyl is that it’s annoying to pick one song. So you almost have to expect to put it on the first track and listen to the entire set. It’s listening in the moment, since you can’t skip and you have to be ready to flip the album over. I love it.
Also the experience of going to second hand stores to chat with fellow music lovers and discover new artists feels very human to me. Even if Spotify can recommend with precision, it mostly acts as background music since I don’t have to pay attention.
Not saying this is everyone’s cup of tea, but as a music nerd, I’m happy with my hobby.
It's really fun to buy .50 cent records because you like the cover. I've discovered some good music that way.
For me this is really important, When I used to collect vinyl I'd seek out 12" special editions of songs simply because of the obscure gems that the artist/label would put on the B-sides. Even now I'm sure that a lot of those B-sides still haven't made it into the digital domain.
I also loved picture discs along with great album art. Both of these things seem to now be a relic of history now that digital music is the de facto method of consumption.
Wholeheartedly agree with your comment, though. My house as a "music room" without any screens for that purpose. Some people might say that's a bit excessive, but I too enjoy my hobby. :)
Still interesting, and not really surprising based on my anecdotal experience of artists I follow. Streaming audio is good enough for most sound systems commonly in use.
Vinyl serves as a better collectible from a favorite artist for a few reasons.
- more room for cover art
- physical analog medium (superficial, but has value to some)
- requires more care than CDs (proves the owner’s dedication to maintaining the collection)
- limited production runs make it more scarce than easily copied CDsPersonally I like DRM-free digital downloads (as opposed to streaming) as they provide the best advantages of soft media while also being mine to fully control forever.
I dissagree that vinyl medium is superficial. It is different entirely. Vinyl has a unique sound. Dynamic entropy is added during the playback from imperfections, many favor this outcome, not all.
Audio sources for vinyl duplication will undergo a seperate mastering process that is taylored for the vinyl version. Even if you do not request another mastering any good vinyl shop will have some adjustments they make before duplication.
All these variables will produce another version of the audio at the end. This will change propective and therefore put a perfect digital copy above or below the other in their mind.
Streaming is "good enough." But physical media is a different experience. It's more intimate. You can touch, feel, and examine the music and the packaging. Some bands (REM is one) even put Easter Eggs in their physical media that can't be reproduced by digital.
Streaming is fine for when you want to fill your space with sound. Physical media is for when you want to really enjoy the music. Read about what you're listening to, see the artwork and photographs, and experience an album of music on the order it was meant to be heard.
As one of many examples, a streaming service can play "Home by the Sea" by Genesis. But I've never encountered one smart enough to then follow that with "Second Home by the Sea," which is how the music was made to be heard. Some services will even play "Second Home" on its own, which is jarring.
Music is one of the increasing number of areas where people are figuring out that abdicating human curation for machine selection just isn't the same thing.
Wow this is some condescending, pretentious nonsense. Also, every streaming service I've ever used is perfectly capable of playing an album in order.
So only the person who touches the album gets the full experience?
Why the mocking tone?
When CDs came out, it was so nice because it was easier to handle and care for.
I guess it is just the strange feeling of someone describing something that was just the functional way of doing something in such a romantic way.
It would be like if someone in the future invents a device that perfectly cleans your teeth in seconds, and someone describes a toothbrush as being this great thing because you can physically scrub your teeth with it.
I only used it because I had to, and was happy something easier came along.
I grew up with albums. I even played vinyl on the radio for years. I still buy vinyl now.
This reminds me of the moment where there's always one person in a group who realizes that they are the only one in the group who wipes their ass standing up.
Enjoy the pleasure's you've found in life, but recognize they're not universal. I would also argue that the experience described has to do in part with nostalgia, since my young nephews feel very passionately about music and have never owned a physical album and I wouldn't dare tell them that an album they've loved or experienced and been moved by was some inferior experience because they listened while staring at their ceilings in their beds rather than looking at a gatefold.
If my FLAC collection was on vinyl I'd have to buy it a house of its own. Moving would require a military budget and a series of strategic planning meetings.
That would rather more physical experience than I care for.
I also thought there would be more nostalgia and fun in listening to vinyl, but after 30 seconds I'm now lost in the music and there's absolutely no difference in the medium it's being played on.
Until I hit the end of side A and have to turn the disc over.
(of course I don't want to diminish anyone's enjoyment of what they like - I have the stuff I enjoy doing that others find a waste of time - your statements just come off as too absolute - it's definitely a personal preference!)
Sitting down and listening to an album is different to playing your mp3 collection on random. You're listening to a collection of songs, as intended. You're listening to songs that perhaps aren't your first choice and in other circumstances would just skip over, but those songs often turn out to be the 'best' songs. I think there's also something to be said for having the physical disc. It just makes it more deliberate.
I don't think it's a limitation of streaming technology. If anything it's a limitation of physical media. Infinite, zero friction choice doesn't necessarily make us happier though.
Obviously when it comes to rare music I have to buy and rip vinyl and CDs from time to time, but I couldn't care less about the physical medium or romanticizing nostalgic rituals. I care about the music. If I want to read background information and liner notes my iPad is always close by.
...is another example.
Side note: That Genesis tune is amazing and I have not thought about it in years. I am off to have a listen.
They also support special-case DJ playlists for EDM etc: you can listen to the full track if you play it individually, but cue points and fade duration are stored in the playlist metadata such that the cross fade happens at the right point in the song so everything blends seamlessly. As far as I can tell you can’t configure this in user-created playlists though.
You seem to have confused me with yourself.
That's something digital media reduced almost to zero (I guess younger generations had the bliss of the ipod wheel).
None of these physical media are remotely comparable in terms of market-share to streaming, I expect.
It's just a thing, It won't last forever.
Good turntables are expensive and, let's face it, it's a pain in the ass to queue an LP.
There will always be fluctuating amounts of people coming and going through enjoying records and record players. It's a hobby, and not even a particularly niche one. Plenty of inner city yuppies enjoy it.
They aren't exclusively buying records, they're collecting their most cherished works on LP and specially listening to them. It's not an all or nothing thing, which makes the pain in the ass aspect an important part of the hobby.
You want to listen to a specific song? Cast to your Chromecast with spotify.
You want to do a focused album listen? Chuck on a particularly cherished album? Show off to a friend? Then you switch to the Vinyl and do it.
Blows me away every time I think about it. And we could have kept going: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc
The CED offers one hour of VHS quality per side that rapidly degenerates. I own a sizeable collection of them, and while sorta neat, it’s also sorta terrible.
The vinyl offers quality superior to most consumer tape equipment rivaled only by 11 ips reel to reel. CED had no quality advantages, decays rapidly and is non recordable. It was a non-starter.
The fact is that CED was in the works since the 50s when it may have had a short successful life, but RCA couldn’t get off their ass. In fact CED was the last consumer product ever released by RCA. (The RCA of today is just a badge on various crap after being divested by Thomson Consumer Electronics)
Also even though CED uses a stylus, the similarities end there. You can literally run your nail in a phono groove and hear the sound. It is a literal imprint of the sound wave. Video cannot be encoded in such a straightforward manner, NTSC and PAL are not trivially. Also the CED is not vibrating the stylus. Rather the stylus sits on ridges and the signal is depth encoded (therefore varying the capacitance, hence the name). It is much closer to a crappy laser disc in operation (which also encodes in analog.. not digital)
Many years ago at a ham swap meet (used to be a thing pre-E-bay) a guy was selling an old record lathe that had come out (years earlier) of one of radio network affiliate stations in SF. It was used to record the network feed so that it could be time shifted to West Coast time. It had been hooked up to a leased telephone line and the live shows from the East Coast were cut into vinyl, and later played back over the air.
Obviously, tape recording evenually obsoleted that equipment.
Luckily, I had earlier that morning burned through my ham radio budget getting a HAL ST-6000 RTTY modem and associated goodies, so I was saved from the fate of adding that particular boat anchor to my collection.
_why_, of course, is a different question
It talks about, demonstrates and measures the air quality around vinyl. Apparently the things are leaching dangerous compounds into the air constantly, especially when being played. It made his air quality measuring device give an alarm, instead of just reporting the number of particles or something.
I'm not sure, maybe it's just one of those thousands of every day life things which are technically carcinogenic, or not. It made me pause personally though, having recently lost a friend, who worked at a record store, died at a young age to cancer, had otherwise always been a strong healthy man. I'm actually more comfortable talking about this here, semi-anonymously, I don't think it'd be wise to bring this up IRL with anyone, on account of it possibly not having to do with anything. I kind of half-wish I hadn't seen the video.
So you might be right that vinyl records are dangerous, or maybe that had no impact. In my opinion it's best for one's mental health to trust scientific inquiry to tell us what's dangerous or not, and to leave everything else as an open question.
The video creator uses an air pollution meter[0] to find out that his records are causing very high PM 2.5, VOC, and formaldehyde. The vinyl records seem to only need to be taken out of their sleeves.
The results look shocking. There have to be some HN users who have the knowledge and equipment to attempt to replicate this experiment. Please do that and share!
Vinyl appeals to hipsters and dumb audiophiles (there are smart audiophiles, but they aren't buying vinyl), both communities that are prone to buying into hype. Hipsters move on as soon as something becomes mainstream, and dumb audiophiles will move on as soon as there is a more expensive option with newer/cooler buzzwords attached to it. Cassette tapes could replace vinyl someday as the hip alternative to digital music- it's retro and analog, plus they are portable and don't skip/lose track during heavy movement (which a record player would do if you could go jogging with one).
I really think there's extra value in buying vinyl apart from it being hip.
I think that the hip-value of vinyls is extremely important.
I write that as someone who had no choice but use vinyls and tapes until I got a CD player...
I disagree with the original comment parent strongly.
Like vinyl, CDs can be scratched, but they sure don't degrade gracefully: the nice pops of vinyl becomes jarring skips on a CD up to the point where the CD just becomes unplayable.
Nowadays I have all my music on my computer, as files on the drive or from a stream. But when it comes to wanting something physical, something I can hold and look at (from the cover and extra material that comes with an LP to the wonderful spinning of a record as the sound emerges), vinyl easily wins.
But maybe I'm weird, because even in the mid '90s as a teenager I thought vinyl looked cool and was fun and fascinating to interact with. I hated CDs and their cases so much I even converted all my CDs to minidisc! Happily I kept them around until I ripped them to FLAC files.
Also, the last few albums that I bought did not come as jewel cases but instead "fancy" cardboard cases.
If a CD skipped then there was nothing you could do except stick another on ASAP.
CDs are a very fragile medium. Especially so if you scratch the top printed surface.
These days you’d do it all off a laptop with no moving parts and no skipping.
Protip number 2: always run your club system in mono. You can’t hear stereo in a club and combining the L+R channels cancels out most feedback coming through the stylus. Happy days.
The best of both worlds in my opinion is a vinyl + code for a digital copy, which seems to be the direction most have gone for.
Vinyl, when stored properly, will be fine. Yes, they suffer from wear and tear when used frequently, but you would have to use it quite a lot for that to happen.
CDs, even when stored properly, never used and still wrapped, will suffer from disc rot due to quality issues. This renders them completely unplayable. Calling CDs objectively more durable ignores that there were A LOT of poorly made CDs which have a considerably shorter lifespan.
ps. The copy of “Von” by “Sigur Rós” I bought recently even came with extra CD instead of a download code.
People just want to buy mementos to support their favorite artists. It's not that hard to understand.
I'm pretty sure that if someone comes up with an album that's a flash drive + booklet in a vinyl-sized package then a lot of people would buy it. Something like that probably exists already.
I buy them, I don't listen to them. I don't even own a record player, but I have like a dozen of titles I really like to listen to. It's the same with books, I've personally never opened the physical copies of the majority of titles on my bookshelf. I've read them on an e-reader and liked them so much that I wanted a copy that I can actually lend to people.
1. Underground enthusiasts who enjoy digging for hidden gems that are difficult to find or don't exist on streaming/digital services
2. DJs who prefer vinyl as a medium for mixing
Also, mix tapes are still awesome at parties; it gets rid of the fight about who gets to connect their phone to the stereo.
I'm also 56 years old so I grew up with vinyl. There's nothing "hip" about me.
Also, in my favorite genre - electronic music - artists no longer put out CDs. So I pretty much don’t have a choice.
That happened a few years ago
So I'd say that this was inevitable and not a swing or sign of things in any way. Though perhaps how some formats, whilst simple, still excell. Which with analogue and digital in many area's, still seeing divides for quantifiable reasons. Photography would be another area in which has its own bastions of the film format camera's.
But vinyl has managed to carry on and not on the back of core users, it's had wave after wave and removing any single group, be them hipsters who move onto something else, won't suddenly kill off vinyl as many fashion born resurgences do.
I think enough people have commented about how obnoxious this statement is, but I'll go ahead and throw another couple of cents into the conversation
I think there is genuine value to artifacts. When you buy a record, you get:
* The record itself
* An 12" x 12" piece of art accosiated with the album
* A booklet of bonus content and anything else the artist wanted to include.
Not only is there added extra value in that (larger than a CD), but it can feel like an occasion to get.
But beyond that, there can be an interesting satisfaction in holding the literal physical interpretation of the sound you enjoy. There's a connection there for some people, and it shouldn't be discounted.
well, there is DAT ...
It's also a way to support underground artists who make art you appreciate - from the music itself to the cover art and the arrangement of the tracklist.
In hip-hop there's been a few small vinyl producers making super high quality vinyls for underground artists. They've gained a cult like following and can continuously sell out of 1500-2000 records at $60 per within an hour of release.
Those interested should check out...
Daupe https://daupe.bandcamp.com/music
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.factmag.com/2018/02/08/daup...
De Rap Winkel https://derapwinkelrecords.bandcamp.com/music
Third Man Pressing's about page also has a great video about the process: https://thirdmanpressing.com/about
I put a lot of attention and care into my audio and vinyl setup, but now that you can find albums at Walmart, the hip factor has been sucked out of it like a vacuum.
I've recently been downsizing, and this might be something that doesn't stay with me. I'll keep my signed albums, but maybe not the rest.
Also, one of my favorite vinyl albums ever was a cutout Flying Lizards record that I got for a dollar at some very un-hip store. Provenance has nothing to do with it, it's the album itself.
Heres a short list: 1) skips in the track/mastered too loudly 2) uses the CD master and not Vinyl master(anything current may just be that way because the original wasn't released on vinyl, so it sorta gets a pass) Probably the most disappointing re-issue Ive purchased was Led Zeppelin IV. sounded bloody awful, and... 3) the center hole is either a) too small b) too large 4) not so much the pressings fault but since people forget how to store and keep vinyl they usually sit horizontal in a hot warehouse so they are convex/concave depending on what side you play. Does not bode well for tracking even on nice turntables. 5) are usually released on "fancy" clear/colored vinyl which is for lack of a better word, dogshit. It wears more quickly and sounds bad.
During the oil embargo in the 1970s, US record manufacturers started to cut a lot of corners to keep their costs under control. Then when the price of oil fell, quality didn't come back very quickly.
Japanese and European imports were generally of very high quality virgin vinyl during that time and the quality in the US varied from label to label. The big labels were turning out a lot of very low quality records.
But I always had trouble with vinyl. I lived in buildings with creaky wooden floors and the needle would jump when I walked by. I welcomed CDs.
My dad, however, was more hipster than me. And so I've just inherited 1000 vinyl albums.
My daughter got a turntable and when I took her to the record store (Waterloo Records in Austin) to buy some records I felt like I had stepped out of a time machine. The experience was exactly as I remembered it when I was a kid. It's awesome.
I ended up buying some CDs then realizing I didn't have a CD player. So I bought one, hooked it up to the home theater receiver and was blown away by how good it sounded.
I ended up buying a desktop stereo system for my office and I listen to CDs as I work. The playing time is just about perfect as a reminder to get up, stretch, take a short walk, make a coffee or get some water, put on a new disc, and get back to work.
So now I'm buying CDs again and couldn't be happier. They are very inexpensive these days.
> Discogs actually says cassettes are the fastest-growing format of the big three sold on its website — the others being CDs and vinyl.
https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/music/cassettes-and-cd...
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/feb/23/cassette-tape-...
I don't think the hunt can be discounted. Part of the collector mentality is that the journey is as enjoyable (if not more so) than the destination.
Edit: downvotes over 20 minutes. Do you doubt that I'm really listening to it (I am, before I read this news)? Or that vinyl is a real experience? Or that I'm some kind of "hipster" (I have thousands of records, and an equal number of CDs, collected over 30 years). Please reply, I'm interested what you have to say.
For the doubters, here's a photo: http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/20190908_183833.jpg
Actually most practical would be a streaming service where you can enjoy the entire work of art without interruptions.
Tongue in cheek so don't get riled up.
Also for the doubters, here's a photo: http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/20190908_183833.jpg
As you can see I have CDs and a Squeezebox so I'm hardly opposed to digital :-)
The digital stream is certainly more convenient and quite obviously available in more places. I don't say this as someone who is in any way "opposed" to digital music - I own and play a lot of it myself. In units of "minutes listened" probably much more than vinyl.
Classical Archives or Idiago are probably your best options for streaming classical music.
Demographically speaking, lovingly collected vinyl collections are steadily entering the market due to the generation that bought them dying of old age. Lots of great recordings available for bargain prices.
My thought at the time was that unless they have a string orchestra in the back seat, they're not getting the full experience.
I still maintain that a string orchestra in the back seat of my car will sound better than FLAC.
And strangely enough, even with the usually great "right to repair" laws in the EU, unless you have a very specific and expensive license that takes many years to request, it is actually highly illegal to perform certain kinds of repairs on your string orchestra.
I buy the CD-format, because in theory, I can do that anonymously (cash at the store). I don't buy the vinyl, because I explicitly want the digital format (see my reply to another comment on this thread as to why).
I rip the CD, because, well, my phone doesn't have a CD-drive (wow, that would be weird...).
At this point... I'd actually throw away the CD, because I hate having stuff. I don't care about showing off my collection to anyone, nor do I care about collectibles, but having stuff is just... cumbersome. But alas, I don't throw away the CD, somewhat because of sentimentality and also because if you have a physical copy of digital data, that's not a bad thing to keep, just in case, so ok, it stays.
Considering a vinyl is analog and also more cumbersome, I think it's pretty clear why I prefer the CD.
How about a floppy drive? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT1l8Dcjb1Y
Vinyl actually has less dynamic range than CD - it's the equivalent of around 12 bit dithered PCM.
I'm not sure, but I'm guessing in modern recording techniques, it's pretty soon converted to a digital format, and from that point on, vinyl wouldn't make sense, as any analog conversion (and even worse, a following reconversion to digital) is tantamount with quality loss (if you still know photocopiers, it's like copying the copy, and then copying that copy, etc.. or in more modern terms, endlessly resaving a JPG picture, or something like that).
At the risk of sounding polemic: There's a lot of ...sound from analog audio equipment on vinyl, that's non-existent on a digital format.
It's quite ironic, humans abandoned analog formats in video, where that is a definite loss (DS9 and VOY, anyone?), since we can always add more pixel density in playback devices, but embrace it in audio, which is... well, at least in my opinion, a subjective loss, too, and unless we can consciously slow down time-perception, 44.1 kHz sampling will forever suffice.
Besides, all too often your digital sound recording isn't making use of 16-bits of dynamic range, what with the loudness war peaking during the CD era. Oftentimes the vinyl versions of albums are mastered a lot more conservatively since brickwalling the recording with compressors and limiters will cause the record needle to skip.
The new report states that vinyl records earned $224.1 million (from 8.6 million units) in the first half of 2019. This figure is impressively close to the CD numbers ($247.9 million, 18.6 million units).
In past it was some labels that put out badly mastered CDs, these days artists that once produced excellent albums now seems to accept a final result that tries to win the loudness war.
The market for new cars still exists because some people don't like teleportation. Some people worry that teleportation recreates you imperfectly on the other side and thus prefer a new car. But that demographic is shrinking. Teleportation is simply so convienent that the overwhelming majority of consumers think the price worth paying.
Teleportation could recreate me perfectly, imperfectly, or better than perfectly - the issue is what happens to the original me. Rumor has it that after scanning your body the origin portal drops you into a trash compactor.
We can see this pretty clearly looking at consumer reports[1], where you'll find that vinyls, compared to CDs, are actually being propped up largely by generations (18-44) that never properly experienced them. CD usage, on the other hand, is generally supported by older generations that are slower to adapt to modern streaming. Vinyl is almost vicarious nostalgia- most vinyl users I know (generally from the same age bracket) enjoy it as a deprecated technology that feels exotic. CDs aren't necessary for us anymore, and since we grew up with them, they aren't as enchanting and romanticized as vinyl.
[1] http://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/MusicWatch-Co...
You can buy Pet Sounds, a classic album recorded in 1966, on vinyl:
- Distribution: you can buy it from Amazon, the same distribution channel as more modern media
- Price: for $18 (very small premium over digital media in absolute terms)
- Condition: in perfect, newly manufactured condition
- Substitutability: a functionally perfect substitute good for the artifact manufactured in 1966 (even available in original mono!)
- Supply: from a growing supply of records (record company always reissuing classics!)
- Maintenance: with the same maintenance requirements as an LP of a 2019 album
Consider the equivalent for a classic car, say a 1966 Corvette:
I want a 1966 Corvette. "Old Corvettes have a soul that new Corvettes lack, there's just some ineffable quality I prefer, y'know?", yadda yadda yadda
- Distribution: Can I walk into a Chevy dealership and buy a 1966 Corvette? Nope!
- Price: Can I buy a mint condition 1966 Corvette for substantially the same price as a 2019 Corvette? Nope! DDG says perfect 1966 Corvette value would be $82k, 2019 Corvette would be $55k and I suspect the difference would be even greater tbh. $30k+ price difference!
- Condition: Can I buy a newly manufactured 1966 Corvette at all? Nope!
- Substitutability: the 1966 Corvette is substantially different from the 2019 Corvette
- Supply: the number of well-maintained 1966 Corvettes is constrained. They aren't making any more!
- Maintenance: Entirely different beasts. No common parts.
So if I want a conversation piece in my living room, I can buy a $100 record player and spend $8 more for the LP
It's a case of worse is better.
I think LPs are bad for our environment compared to digital. I don't need tens of kilograms of plastic to enjoy music even if I would enjoy the process more than digital music players.
What brand of computer, MP3 player, or phone are you using that isn't made of plastic and filled with minerals that come from strip mines and processed with chemicals like cyanide?
Digitally the price per song of is offset by the sheer number of albums you can have. I have 1,926 albums and I can overwrite them with new artists on the same storage and I can add 10x more to the same storage. Or I can reuse the storage for something else. This versatility is called "re-use" and it's a pillar of environmental sustainability.
If it wasn't a malleable plastic, and I've read of metals being used, then perhaps it would be different. But even then density and permanence and shipping still make it incredibly inefficient to distribute data in this fashion - an LP only holds about 200 - 300 megabytes of write-once data.
Steaming music continues environmental damage for as long as the server is on.
Most (new) physical records I buy come with a download code to get high quality drm-free recordings. It's like getting the physical book and the e-reader copy.
It's not about technology, of course, it's about fun. Like analog photography.
I look after my vinyl with a properly calibrated turntable.
I will degrade faster than my records!
There's a lot to be said about the imperfections in vinyl playback combined with the analog output.
Have a good friend to share the experience with?
Recommended.
You can see some of that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Additionally, bands will typically get better margins on vinyl (although that's starting to disappear).
You mention that "it's getting worse", but it's unlikely that you'd be able to find a release mastered/remastered with noticable digital clipping within the last decade.
As one example of how basic a concern this is for digital mastering, Apple's "Apple Digital Masters" (formerly "Mastered for iTunes") program strictly limits it, recommendeds testing for the existence of clipping both pre- and post-encode, and provides tools (afclip, AURoundTripAAC Audio Unit) for helping to do that.
Generally, "loudness wars" refers primarily to dynamic range compression, which can easily destroy a track (in the musical sense) even if there is zero clipping.
24-bit doesn't tend to matter, because somewhere in the mastering pipeline will inevitably be 16-bit nine times out of ten.
And the compression they use in 16-bit to try and have their cake and eat it too has more noticeable than the issues with vinyl IMO. Yes, there's technically plenty of room in there for the signal without compression or clipping, but like I showed above there's systemic reasons why they don't use the bandwidth effectively.
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/29-does-vinyl-really-sound-be...
There is no resurgence, perhaps a Renaissance in vinyl, but what you're really seeing is just the fall of CD down to vinyl's levels.
Including both and just looking without inflation, it’s above 1989 levels and could hit 1988 levels eventually. It’s 5x higher than mid 90s through late 00s. Almost 4x since 2010.
Take out vinyl singles and the increase is absurd. It’s 9x to 40x+ increase from any year between 1991 and 2007. 8x from 2008. Almost 2x from 2013.
And this is all for 2018 figures. 2019 will bump things up even more. Though the pace has slowed a lot.
Even if you add inflation, the resurgence is still there. IE for LP/EP, 2019 will beat out 1989. After a low of nearly 25x less in 93 and 05-06.
I'm having trouble viewing those graphs on mobile but it looks like in 1989 vinyl only had >4% market share and 34.6 million units, where as in 2018 it had >3% with 16.7 million units.
It's not nothing and it's not a large part of the overall market. It appears to be smaller than 30 years ago when it was considered a dead format.
Unit share doesn’t seem to make sense as a comparison point to me. A single or ringtone shouldn’t be given equal respect to a full collection of songs. Downloaded singles are 75% of the unit market share but only 5% of the revenue market share in 2018. 2018 will be the last year downloaded singles have a greater revenue share than vinyl.
To me this looks like a resurgence because of how its revenue share has been. Its collapse of market and revenue share from ~83 to ~92 and being dead by 89 (with 3.3% revenue share, less than the past 5 years if including 2019). Having a revenue share of 0.1% from 93 to 07. Yeah, for 25 years it’s revenue share was 0.1%. Then ~1.5% for the next 5-6 years and ~4.5% for the past couple of years.
It’s not a crazy resurgence, but compared to 93 to ~2012, a 25 year span, it’s many multiples higher and not looking to let up for now.
Now it’s on a tear compared to 93 to 07 and beyond.
There’s active communities online and in real life of people who like vinyl and are buying it. Though there were always enthusiasts. The buying part wasn’t happening from 93 to 07. If you can run a successful business off something that isn’t trending down, without the biz being too crazy, then the thing isn’t really dead. It’s niche sure. But dead wouldn’t make sense. Cassettes are dead. Paying for ringtones are dead. Those two aren’t close to vinyl.
I have at least 30 albums that simply do not exist as downloads, streaming, or any other digital medium. And there are people today who are still putting out new music in analog formats that will never get a digital release.
And I'm not even much of a music buff. If I have 30 "lost" albums, there must be tens of thousands more out there that simply do not exist to people who restrict themselves to digital formats.
I really don't understand why some people choose to limit themselves to digital. That's like deciding to only eat tacos for the rest of your life.
I can't afford the physical space for physical goods and the expense involved with moving them.
There is only one thing digital delivery can't do: satisfy the collector's itch. There's no rarity or difficulty. You can't keep it on a shelf and take pride in your collection. You can't trade or barter. You can't get it signed by the band or buy it at a show. You can't browse it in a shop. You can't pass it on to your children. There's no romanticism about it, and it doesn't engage any other senses.
It turns out however, that vinyl is great at all those things. It seems evident that its resurgence is because everyone who wants to collect music is consolidating on vinyl as a format, while those who just want to listen to music stick with streaming services. It's highlighting the fact that music consumption is actually highly bimodal, and delivering a product optimized for each modality.
Additionally, most vinyl releases these days come with a high-quality FLAC audio download, so I get the digital music as well.
> Analysis suggests that the loudness trend may have peaked around 2005 and subsequently reduced, with a pronounced increase in overall and minimum album DR for albums since 2005.
It also hints how we may continue to move away from it:
> With music sales moving towards file-based playback and streaming and away from CDs, there is a possibility that the loudness war will be blunted by normalization technology such as ReplayGain and Apple's Sound Check. Most cloud-based music services perform loudness normalization by default and may reduce the market pressure to overcompress material.
CD quality could be better, but thanks to abuse (Loudness wars), it is way worse from the music quality point of view.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
So in practice most vinyl records surpass CDs in dynamic range, because loudness in vinyl means your disc is able to hold less music.
So if you want to listen music with good speakers, you better do with vinyl.
Using vinyl has been a way to shortcut the music producers destruction of its music.
Study of co2 emissions from streaming vs analogue music "The research shows GHGs of 140 million kilograms in 1977, 136 million kilograms in 1988, and 157 million in 2000. But by 2016 the generation of GHGs by storing and transmitting digital files for those listening to music online is estimated to be between 200 million kilograms and over 350 million kilograms in the US alone." source: https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_643297_en.html
The quote and article you linked doesn't say or support that. It is more likely that there are just far more people listening to music now than there were before. I don't think that switching from streaming to records would result in fewer GHGs. The article you linked doesn't specify.
But if you’re going to get something physical, you want it to look cool, and Vinyl beats CDs by a mile.
Or for a longer answer. Bands don't need to release vinyl. Fans appreciate the physicality, and will pay for it. But tiny bands probably don't have the resources for a vinyl pressing. I was also making reference to back in the day when your options were vinyl/cd or tape. If you wanted to release an album, tape was your only choice unless you were likely to sell at least X hundred units. And as I said, tapes are cool :)
But I'd say it's mostly because CDs have all but disappeared from mass sales channels. E.g. this chart says a lot: https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/
Turntables these days are expensive, but worth it for the vinyl experience.
If it does happen, it’ll be the first time that vinyl has generated more revenue than CDs since 1986.
If I had to guess, I would have said CD beats vinyl in early 90s. Or maybe I'm just not taking cassettes into account.
No idea where to find it again, but I'm sure processes have improved considerably.
Maybe when it comes to something like music, that's not the most important thing. In fact, most music listeners would say it's not really important at all.
Vinyls have great UX. The LP format encourages you to listen to an uninterrupted, un-shuffled 23 or 46 minutes of music. Album artwork and lyrics are presented at a scale where it doesn't hurt the eyes to look at them.
Your statement reminds me of whiskey drinkers who only drink out of one type of glass which is olfactorily optimal. It totally misses the fact that our senses are so easily tricked into enjoying things more if we enjoy the hints that surround the experience. Music is better on vinyl because you spent that much longer picking out the record and placing the needle. Whiskey is better in rocks glasses because it looks cinematic. It has next to nothing to do with being "objectively inferior" or superior.
You can do this on a CD with superior audio quality.
> Album artwork and lyrics are presented at a scale where it doesn't hurt the eyes to look at them.
There's nothing stopping someone from celling a CD in a vinyl-sized case.
> Maybe when it comes to something like music, that's not the most important thing. In fact, most music listeners would say it's not really important at all.
I'm pretty sure almost every single fan of vinyl will tell you it 'sounds better.' What they really mean is they like the typical mix of a vinyl recording, but CDs can be mixed to sound exactly like vinyl. If you want the same sound as live music, vinyl cannot compete.
And with your closing comment, I don't think you're describing as great a percentage of vinyl fans as you think you are. Sure, if you read audiophile forums you'll find such individuals. And if you encounter such an individual, they'll likely be extremely vocal about their opinions. But we're talking about vinyl outselling CDs here. That's a lot of people. If you asked most of them which format had higher fidelity, they'd certainly reply, "the one that doesn't pop and scratch."
I see what you're saying, but I don't buy it. Nobody has a record player just laying around unless you're 'into' vinyl. It's like saying it's more fun to watch videos on VHS because the tapes look cooler. It's just nonsense.
> A hi end turntable playing vinyl that is clean and well cared for is surprisingly difficult to tell apart from digital audio. It doesn't snap crackle pop if its clean and cared for.
I agree, and I'm sure if someone spends the same amount on a loss-less audio setup (or even a CD), they could achieve even better sound.
> So maybe hipsters jumped in for a good ol chunk of nostalgia. So?
I don't think it's so much nostalgia as it is a desire to create some kind of in-club. Wine-snobs, whisky-snobs, craft-beer snobs, film-snobs, food-snobs. Vinyl is just another form of self-important hipster snobbery.
I'm absolutely baffled how people (the same trendy hipsters who in my experience are disgusted by capitalism and luxury consumerism) shell out for vinyl when they'd be better off spending more money on something that's usually much more important and will make a significant, audible difference: nice speakers.
In life we get to have different tastes, having a record collection is one of the ways to celebrate that.
I don't appreciate being talked down to about my personal choices or how I derive enjoyment in my own time. I'm also not impressed by your straw man argument against these "hipsters", why are they so bad anyway? Is it because you perceive hypocrisy in how some hypothetical person lives their life?