Vinyl records making a comeback?

[LadyLuck]

While it is true that any digital file - even the best quality with the best mastering - will always be a sample there were significant sonic compromises that had (have) to be made to transfer a live recording to an analog vinyl record album. We trade one thing for another. It just depends what your thing is.

[billybunter]

Originally Posted by LadyLuck

Or to appreciate how wonderful it is to be shed of it. I dumped my huge vinyl collection a year and a half ago on Craigslist for a pittance. I had been collecting albums from 1972 to about the mid 1980s.Worked for a record company for 18 years. We're are talking about a massive collection. Don't miss it one bit. I did like some of the album covers enough to cull them out for their artwork value (after tossing the vinyl inside).

You are not a serious music fan. To dismiss vinyl in such a flippant way makes me wonder.

[Festerplink]

From a purely "romantic" ( for lack of a better word) stance, I miss vinyl for a couple of reasons: It made for a more personal connection between you and the artist. You had something large you held in your hand, and could read about them, lyrics, the other musicians on the album- this all made for a better connection with the artist and gave them longer shelf-life in your mind. The albums were recorded so that they told a story from beginning to end, as the order of song placement was vital.
Also, there was a much more concerted effort to get music before. One would have to deliberately commute to your local record shop, fan thru albums, find the act you were interested in, pay for it, go back home, crank up the sound system, slit open the plastic wrap, carefully remove the sleeve, gently place it on the platter, actuate the tone-arm. You see, you made a long commitment to that act before you even got to listen to them. Some might say, this is waste of time, but I disagree, the more convenient you make something the less you appreciate it. Music is very important to me and I enjoy the commitment to my journey of exploring it. I end up listening to it more intensely, so my bond with it becomes that much stronger. Music today is disposable. Its mostly free- so it has been devalued. Point and click to download to a crappy MPEG player with those flimsy headphones is, by comparison, no journey at all. After decades of this people become numb to that and it becomes commonplace, never remembering the magic of discovering music. They simply jump around from artist-to-artist without giving it much thought or allegiance.

On the technical side:
Vinyl is a horrible medium for music. It has many inherent problems in both consumer copies as it does in the mastering process. They are fragile and prone to scratches, and they wear out quickly- faster with inferior needles.
Most who espouse that vinyl sounds better are USUALLY the same one who say things to come off sounding hip. Only the tiniest of percentage of the buying public ever even got close to owning an audiophile system, which is what you need to play vinyl on. Good turntables starting at 25K and complete systems starting at 50K.
So at a realistic consumer-level, CD's are vastly better than vinyl, as CD players have a much narrower margin of differences between them as to how they reproduce sound. The quality then becomes an issue of amplification and speakers.
This doesn't mean I love CD's, I don't. CD's are 30 year old technology. We still dont use 1 megapixels cameras do we? The issue is resolution. DVD audio had emerged briefly but there were too many formats that the companies couldn't agree on, while they were debating, Napster came along and set into motion the destruction of audio quality.
I can hardly take any medium seriously that attempts to faithfully reproduce audio which employs an obsolete compression algorithm. Its ironic to me that the film industry gets its right but the recording industry gets it so wrong. Consumer-grade video keeps getting better and better, and properly priced.When VHS emerged- sales boomed, when DVDs emerged- sales boomed again, when blurays emerged, sales boomed again. Redray is on the horizon. CDs kept getting more and more expensive up until a few years ago despite their growing obsolescence and the public disapproval of them. Audio quality for consumer music has gone backwards.

[mastrofell]

Vinyl is a piece of art, something you have to take care of like a girl, treat it gently.
I love vinyl records

[Doodlebugged]

Originally Posted by Festerplink

From a purely "romantic" ( for lack of a better word) stance, I miss vinyl for a couple of reasons: It made for a more personal connection between you and the artist. You had something large you held in your hand, and could read about them, lyrics, the other musicians on the album- this all made for a better connection with the artist and gave them longer shelf-life in your mind. The albums were recorded so that they told a story from beginning to end, as the order of song placement was vital.
Also, there was a much more concerted effort to get music before. One would have to deliberately commute to your local record shop, fan thru albums, find the act you were interested in, pay for it, go back home, crank up the sound system, slit open the plastic wrap, carefully remove the sleeve, gently place it on the platter, actuate the tone-arm. You see, you made a long commitment to that act before you even got to listen to them. Some might say, this is waste of time, but I disagree, the more convenient you make something the less you appreciate it. Music is very important to me and I enjoy the commitment to my journey of exploring it. I end up listening to it more intensely, so my bond with it becomes that much stronger. Music today is disposable. Its mostly free- so it has been devalued. Point and click to download to a crappy MPEG player with those flimsy headphones is, by comparison, no journey at all. After decades of this people become numb to that and it becomes commonplace, never remembering the magic of discovering music. They simply jump around from artist-to-artist without giving it much thought or allegiance.

On the technical side:
Vinyl is a horrible medium for music. It has many inherent problems in both consumer copies as it does in the mastering process. They are fragile and prone to scratches, and they wear out quickly- faster with inferior needles.
Most who espouse that vinyl sounds better are USUALLY the same one who say things to come off sounding hip. Only the tiniest of percentage of the buying public ever even got close to owning an audiophile system, which is what you need to play vinyl on. Good turntables starting at 25K and complete systems starting at 50K.
So at a realistic consumer-level, CD's are vastly better than vinyl, as CD players have a much narrower margin of differences between them as to how they reproduce sound. The quality then becomes an issue of amplification and speakers.
This doesn't mean I love CD's, I don't. CD's are 30 year old technology. We still dont use 1 megapixels cameras do we? The issue is resolution. DVD audio had emerged briefly but there were too many formats that the companies couldn't agree on, while they were debating, Napster came along and set into motion the destruction of audio quality.
I can hardly take any medium seriously that attempts to faithfully reproduce audio which employs an obsolete compression algorithm. Its ironic to me that the film industry gets its right but the recording industry gets it so wrong. Consumer-grade video keeps getting better and better, and properly priced.When VHS emerged- sales boomed, when DVDs emerged- sales boomed again, when blurays emerged, sales boomed again. Redray is on the horizon. CDs kept getting more and more expensive up until a few years ago despite their growing obsolescence and the public disapproval of them. Audio quality for consumer music has gone backwards.

People can get pretty decent audio through buying separates to suit their budget. It's like anything. The more informed you are about audio systems by listening to music in dedicated hi-fi retailers and hearing the rich detail you can get from vinyl, whichever type of music is the main point.

Vinyl sales are now at the same point they were in 1997. Data compression was a result of the limitations of of data storage on Mp3 devices and available bandwidth and storage on your home devices. This is not the case now in 2013.

Most people do not hear music through equipment that costs upwards of 25 grand. They either hear it via radio or live.

Being sensible about audio equipment is just as important as the music you are listening to. Shit in = Shit out. :-)

[Doodlebugged]

I grew up in an age when Electro music was coming to the fore in the USA as hip-hop and breakable music as well as Kraftwerk and Gary Nyman. Each style went in different directions, but there was an analogue warmth to the sound on vinyl. CD'S skip as much as vinyl if you don't take care of your vinyl.

[abababubu]

Originally Posted by Alvin Lucifer

One advantage of vinyl is it's harder to rip copies for your friends. Artists like that.

And record companies even more... at least what's left of them. That's why they are promoting the vinyl as the new big thing.

Everyone's ear is different. I couldn't stand the vinyl distortion, for example, and the CD advent was a blessing for me. Still, I reckon there are some records that sound more "natural" on vinyl... but just because they were recorded and mixed for that support.

Sometimes it's only a matter of taste. I heard people praising the "warmth" of a record that sounded terribly "muffled" to me

[blondifan]

Steve Hoffman's been involved with some interesting remasters/reissues as have Rhino records.
Thanks to the latter I've been able to upgrade and replace three of the five Alice Cooper Group records *(with faithfully reproduced artwork and limited edition coloured vinyl)... records I treasured when younger.

"School's Out" remains elusive, although I did buy the SHM-CD and a Russian bootleg CD. Twice I 'missed out' at the last second (I kid you not) on an auction site, for original pressings of the vinyl album, which in some instances demands crazy money. I was tempted by a sealed copy from 1972 recently.

I never 'got into' the first two ACG records, although they were also reissued by Rhino also as a limited release coloured vinyl deal. There was a huge mix-up with initial copies of 'Easy Action' and 'Killer' both going out with the wrong packaging initially.

[CallMeMaybe]

Interesting thread. I remember the time I said "isn't music just music" to my man and his friends in his recording studio. The room fell silent lol.

Fast forward and I have mid 7 figures worth of analog gear in my storage, in the room right next to over 30,000 records. It was all left to me. The upgraded digital studio I sold last year.

You may as well speak Greek to most people when describing how sound works but maybe this will help the odd person.

A digital recording takes snapshots of the analog signal at a certain rate (for CDs it is 44,100 times per second) and measures each snapshot with a certain accuracy (for CDs it is 16-bit, which means the value must be one of 65,536 possible values).

This means that, by definition, a digital recording is not capturing the complete sound wave. It is approximating it with a series of steps. Some sounds that have very quick transitions, such as a drum beat or a trumpet's tone, will be distorted because they change too quickly for the sample rate.

In your home stereo the CD or DVD player takes this digital recording and converts it to an analog signal, which is fed to your*amplifier. The amplifier then raises the voltage of the signal to a level powerful enough to drive your speaker.

A vinyl record has a groove carved into it that mirrors the original sound's waveform. This means that no information is lost. The output of a record player is analog. It can be fed directly to your amplifier with no conversion.

This means that the waveforms from a vinyl recording can be much more accurate, and that can be heard in the richness of the sound. But there is a downside, any specks of dust or damage to the disc can be heard as*noise*or static. During quiet spots in songs this noise may be heard over the music. Digital recordings don't degrade over time, and if the digital recording contains silence, then there will be no noise.

[Schwenck]

I don't think this is a Black & White issue. Both LPs and CDs can give good listening experiences.

I never threw out my Vinyl records, and have a good quality record deck, which provides very satisfactory sounds.

The first time I heard a CD, it was playing Paul Simon's Graceland, and it was terrible. I stuck with LPs. (I have since read that Graceland was an especially bad CD release)

My wife bought me a CD player (uninvited). So, as they were more convenient, and playable in the car, I started to buy CDs, rather than LPs. But for a long time, I would not buy an album on CD that I had on LP, which I still played.

On the whole, I thought that LPs, on my deck, sounded better than CDs. Then my Cambridge CD player failed, and I replaced it with a fairly expensive Cyrus one. I was surprised by the difference in sound quality. I do not think there is much difference in sound quality from CDs in the Cyrus and LPs on my deck.

While we play CDs most of the time (and we have many more CDs than vinyl), we do have vinyl evenings with friends and have no intention of getting rid of our vinyl.