I don't see the appeal of spending $5000 to slowly etch vinyl away manually. If this really is a "craze", it exemplifies to me how those watching influencers get hypnotoaded into pursuing hobbies that have huge upfront costs.
If your business happens to not grow, the capital outlay is less than $10,000.
Seems reasonable, especially if you otherwise have an affinity for vinyl or create your own music.
Before I bought one of these, I insist on being able to play the vinyl and hear it first. So that means you have to be local to me. There are way too many mastering decisions that need to be made correctly for vinyl to sound good. And no, that does not mean being able to take something from your iTunes library mastered for your shitty earbuds.
I do not trust some hobbyist to get any of that right to the point of me willing to pay $10. However, if someone with actual experience with mastering had one of these then I'd be interested, but that dubplate will be way more expensive than $10. A pricetag of $10 tells me the person doing it has no clue about anything involved and has priced themselves too cheap. A person with experience would go broke from the time involved to make any money at $10.
Also, 20 records per week? JeebusChristo that's ambitious. Your sales team would kill your margins at $10 per. Because if you're trying to sell and make the vinyl all by your lonesome, just take the money you were going to invest in getting set up and light it on fire. It'll be faster and much less heartache.
But more importantly, people working in the music industry are excited about these developments. I think you as well should be, given you're a self-professed vinyl lover. All this means more development in cutting heads (the current ones cost tens of thousands!), in lathe equipment for master cutting, and more modern equipment and capable engineers working at pressing plants, many of which have had trouble hiring younger people. It also means more development in materials engineering for vinyl, biodegradable materials being a new movement.
digital:
$1
$2
$3
...
vinyl:
-$4990
-$4980
-$4970
...
That's the most tortured version of that phrase that I've ever seen.
"If you want to make $1 million with a record label, start with $2 million" is the typical way to use the phrase.
Disregarding the hipster crowd, so many of these "fiddlers" also have such a laughably mundane and insipid taste clashing strongly with their proffered love for music that an outside viewer can't help but raise an eyebrow; I mean, when your musical world is made of Steely Dan, Diana Krall, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, etc...
It's just the man equivalent of collecting porcelain figurines, but with an ad hoc rationalization (it really sounds better!) to protect the ego. Related to Gear Acquisition Syndrome.
That might not be what most people care about, and that's fine. They have infinite streaming available for those that just need background noise. But to write vinyl off as a gear acquisition syndrome just screams to me someone doesn't really get it and wants to find a way to mock someone else
CD packaging with jewel cases was a major step down in experience because of size and also because of the inconvenience of getting the booklets out of the case; good CD packaging experiences were exceedingly rare.
Art for streaming is a different medium altogether, as it is behind a screen but potentially dynamic; it can achieve new things, but can't replicate the LP experience any more than photographs can reproduce sculptures.
I'll sound very smug, but so be it: this is a trap very easy to fall in. Are you a "proper" christian if you only are because you fear hell? Do you care about software freedom if you had to be spoonfed baby duck software that looks and feels just like Windows to switch?
I specifically said that claiming it to be a "better sound" is not what I like about vinyl.
So to be very smug, your second graph is absolutely pointless since you've missed the point of the comment you replied
Have you listened to vinyl on a good system? I have trouble believing anybody who says this has ever listened to a decent record on a decent stereo.
Not all vinyl sounds better in my system. Some really is crap. But when I directly compare, and all other things are equal (or seem to be), vinyl normally sounds better than digital.
This is more often true of more recent records, too, though some of Deutsche Grammophone's Archive Production records from even the 50s sound astonishingly good.
I understand that objectively vinyl doesn't measure as well as CD, but I'll be damned if it doesn't sound better. My partner thinks it does, too, and she has no patience for audiophile nonsense.
For what it is, i.e. a rock being dragged through a groove. But I'm very surprised to see this used as example, since orchestral music is the worst case scenario for vinyl: the reduced dynamic range makes good reproduction of those peaks simply impossible (labels like BIS would never have been able to engineer their magic such as on this CD - see the warning on the cover - https://www.discogs.com/release/16832175-Carl-Nielsen-Gothen...) and the surface noise really impacts the quieter moments.
Don't get me wrong, some CDs were brickwalled while the corresponding LP got a way saner master (e.g. Celtic Frost's Monotheist), but with similar masters, CD simply always wins as a medium. In this case, I digitize the LP while its surface wear is at its lowest.
I now see that I didn't understood your comment. Yeah, the vinyl form was interesting back then (because it was cheap) but it sounds like shit to me now. But you see this everywhere a company sees a trend and exploit it: anime figures, nostalgia, ... You can't do anything about it anyway, I gave up on that a long time ago. I draw the line where the whole music itself is disconnected from what you are trying to achieve (treating it as fast food, buying manga in Japanese without being able to read Japanese, any kind of collecting that you don't have the skills to experience...)
One last thing though. You can have better music than all the CDs in the world if you are looking for a private or concert experience. It all depends on what you seek. Woodstock guys thought they would change the world (and they did in their own way), and the Beatles got their own spiritual/mystical experience in India (which George Harrison used to add the sitar in some songs).
I go to a show. There’s maybe 50 people in a dark, dingy room. I want to support the band so I buy a shirt and a record from the merch table.
Sometimes I’m right by the record store so I stop and browse. I see an LP for an album I like, either used or new. I buy it.
Now I have a stack of records. I go home and play records. I still use Spotify.
I remember my aunt saying that she went to a Santana concert in the 70s. She only remembered that "there was a lot of smoke in the room." Did it change her forever? Maybe not, only she knows. But even single experiences can have long-lasting effects that, I'm sure, we'll never be capable of sharing fully.
I once stayed with wealthy tech CEO whose had a very expensive MacIntosh-based stereo, plus some rather expensive looking speakers. His musical library? Grateful Dead, Chicago, Neil Young.
The guy gets the enjoy what he enjoys. More power to him. I just can't imagine spending so much for, musically, so very, very little.
Why wouldn’t you want to listen to them on a nice system?
> Why wouldn’t you want to listen to them on a nice system?
They just aren't my cup of tea.
What it comes down to is that for a lot of people, operating and owning certain equipment is what gives them joy. You see this in a lot, maybe all, of hobbies and pleasure. It’s like the guy who spends $1k on a 3d printer to make trinkets that you can buy at the dollar store.