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Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

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Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#191

Post by squarefoot »

cptskippy wrote: post #35
big_chungus wrote: post #2

Would some one please enlighten me as to what on God's green earth is going on with vinyl? It's less dense, lower-quality, degrades with use, and is more expensive. It's probably less environmentally-friendly, too (though I'm not sure what it's target demographic is, so I don't know if that means much). Why is vinyl popular, all of a sudden? I had to rip all my grandmother's vinyl records, once, and it was a pain in…

You are looking at this as a CD vs Vinyl battle. Vinyl found a niche and never died entirely. Now CDs are dying because of downloads and streaming and you're saying "why the resurgence vinyl?" 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.

Vinyl didn't die entirely because it was the latest development in mass produced analog media for music (tape was impractical and too costly outside of control rooms or rich people living rooms, and cassettes were too inferior), therefore it defined an era. The CD is dying because it's not the latest development in mass produced digital media for music, and it's just being substituted by other means of doing the same thing, so that it's not going to hit the same memories. Panta Rei and history repeats, so one day we might experience a new paradigm shift, for example if we'll record our music -plus the induced feelings of it- on implantable organic neural networks, so that someone will say "hah, those kids and their inferior analog implant... I'll rather go get some old compact discs to feel how it sounded the real thing!".

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#192

Post by mruts »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #172
Aaronmacaron wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your conception of vinyl buyers is very negative. I think there's another category of people that buy vinyl. If you really love an album and want to support the artist you can purchase the vinyl version of the album. Apart from supporting the artist you often get additional treats like a nice booklet with the lyrics or additional art/imagery. I really think there's extra value in buying vinyl apart from it being hip.

You can also support artists by going to concerts and buying merch. If you're buying a lower quality audio option that degrades with usage, then you are buying into the hype at least a little bit.

There’s no evidence that vinyls are of lower quality than CDs. Moreover, vinyl masters are often far superior to thst of CDs. Comparing old classic rock vinyls to the new masters, the olds ones sound so much better because of the loudness war.

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#193

Post by ratww »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #172
Aaronmacaron wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your conception of vinyl buyers is very negative. I think there's another category of people that buy vinyl. If you really love an album and want to support the artist you can purchase the vinyl version of the album. Apart from supporting the artist you often get additional treats like a nice booklet with the lyrics or additional art/imagery. I really think there's extra value in buying vinyl apart from it being hip.

You can also support artists by going to concerts and buying merch. If you're buying a lower quality audio option that degrades with usage, then you are buying into the hype at least a little bit.

It's just a matter of what's available to buy.

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.

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#194

Post by filmor »

aibara wrote: post #183
mytailorisrich wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to buy a physical medium then CDs are the obvious option because objectively they are superior to vinyls in every aspects and they can also come with nice booklets. 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...

CDs are just... awful. Nice booklets? You mean small booklets with tiny pictures and even tinier text. And they come in what I consider one of the most horrible containers of all time: the ugly and easily-broken jewel case. 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…

Unless you happen to have scratched your CD really deeply to actually damage the data layer (which requires grooves of 1mm in depth), it's fixable though, a scratch in a vinyl is not.

Also, the last few albums that I bought did not come as jewel cases but instead "fancy" cardboard cases.

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#195

Post by klingonopera »

tomc1985 wrote: post #70
klingonopera wrote: post #44

A CD, and a FLAC-rip for me, please. I'd pick it over vinyl or any digital stream any day.

How about a FLAC rip of the first playing of a vinyl disc?

...would only make sense if everything was recorded and processed analog from studio to press, and then immediately converted to digital on that first play (...and then I'd also be hearing a lot of analog audio equipment, some like this, I hate it, clarity, cohesion and reproducibility float my boat).

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.

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#196

Post by linuxftw »

S_A_P wrote: post #174
linuxftw wrote: post #58

Vinyl is for hipsters. Objectively inferior capability to reproduce sounds.

Alternate viewpoint. Vinyl is for people born before CDs or digital music was a thing. So maybe hipsters jumped in for a good ol chunk of nostalgia. So? Broad stroke statements like "vinyl" sounds better are just as incorrect as "digital sounds better". 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…

"Objectively inferior ability to reproduce sounds" is my statement. CD's are an objectively superior way to encode sound in every measurable way.

> 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.

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#197

Post by fortran77 »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #151

CDs are dying, but they are mostly being killed by streaming services, not by vinyl. Digital music formats are still the king by far. The vast majority of people don't even care that their streamed music is lossy and they lose out on high frequencies that their ears can't hear and their headphones can't reproduce. Vinyl appeals to hipsters and dumb audiophiles (there are smart audiophiles, but they aren't buying viny…

I'm a smart audiophile. I listen to digital sources. But I like vinyl because I like the aesthetics of it. It doesn't sound better.

I'm also 56 years old so I grew up with vinyl. There's nothing "hip" about me.

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#198

Post by jamesbowman »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #138
tzs wrote: post #71

Is anyone working on a reasonably priced turntable to play vinyl discs without degrading them? In the mid '80s, Finial Technology announced such a turntable, and had a working unit at CES in 1986. 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…

The vinyl groove is about 25-100 micrometer, and feature sizes on it go down to about 22.5 micrometer [1]. Lasers are extremely cheap today compared to what they were back in the day, and doing laser interferometry to detect features this small is not that difficult. I imagine a hobbyist with the right skill set could hack together a reader for a few hundred bucks at most. [1] http://www.gzvinyl.com/About-vinyl.aspx

As I read that summary, feature sizes start at 22.5 µm and go down to 75 nm.

As they say, "significantly lower than the wavelength of visible light".

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#199

Post by [deleted] »

cortesoft wrote: post #120
tomc1985 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite so literally, but yes. Placing the record on the player, admiring/flipping through the album art, passing it around amongst friends, actually caring/worrying about the state of the record player, all sorts of things. Why the mocking tone?

I wasn't trying to be mocking, just more incredulous. I grew up with albums as our primary source of music, but it was always just put the record on and listen. It was purely functional, being the best way we had to listen to music. 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…

[deleted]

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#200

Post by rcoveson »

linuxftw wrote: post #141
rcoveson wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Objectively inferior capability to reproduce sounds. 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…

> The LP format encourages you to listen to an uninterrupted, un-shuffled 23 or 46 minutes of music 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,…

I don't think you're understanding the gist of what I'm saying. Of course it's _possible_ to recreate the exact _audio_ experience of vinyl with a higher fidelity medium like a CD. But it's not about just the audio. It's the tactile, visual, and cultural experience around the audio. Just like food isn't just about the flavor.

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."

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