Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986 • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by chx » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 5:23 AM UTC

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…

A needle would easily push tiny dust particles away while lasers have a problem with that. Also, a scratch might be a much bigger problem.

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.

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

#332

Post by emcq » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 5:24 AM UTC

electrograv wrote: post #272

cosmotic wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there were a durable music format that had absolute perfect quality, didn't need special handling, no DRM, no compression artifacts, was stereo, and handled frequencies all the way down and all the way up to where humans can hear. Oh, the CD!

I agree that if we’re pursuing sheer audio fidelity, CD quality is objectively superior to vinyl in every way. However (as others mention), many vinyl listeners are not after objective sound fidelity perfection: For them, the flaws are part of their “retro” charm. 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 bet…

16 bits per sample can provide 96dB dynamic range [0].

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

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

#333

Post by chx » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 5:26 AM UTC

thinkmassive wrote: post #15

By revenue, not by units sold. 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 de…

May I recommend Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior from Geoffrey Miller? Having a vinyl collection tells something about you...

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

#334

Post by lmm » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 5:31 AM UTC

ScottBurson wrote: post #298

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought vinyls needed to be specially mastered to prevent the needle from basically being pushed to the adjacent grove by an amplitude that's too high on the track.

Yes, but that's no barrier to compression , which reduces the dynamic range. Compressed material is all at about the same level. The reason people speak of the "loudness wars" is that after compression, even the parts of the music that would have been quieter are now almost as loud as the peaks. It's actually quite ironic, I think, that compression has become such a fad only now that we have digital media with their…

> Yes, but that's no barrier to compression, which reduces the dynamic range. Compressed material is all at about the same level. The reason people speak of the "loudness wars" is that after compression, even the parts of the music that would have been quieter are now almost as loud as the peaks.

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.

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

#335

Post by mikorym » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 5:39 AM UTC

Not really on topic here, but I've been trying this for a while and maybe someone can point me in the right direction. What are the preferred synthesisers / synth emulators that one can (or should) install on Linux? My quest is also one of audio fidelity; I am looking for specific sounds on proprietary DAWs that I can reverse engineer from first principles.

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

#336

Post by TheSpiceIsLife » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 5:49 AM UTC

alanbernstein wrote: post #317

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> durable ... Oh, the CD! In my experience CD’s are anything but durable.

I think "durable" here means "can be read without physically damaging the media".

Ah, right, yeah, good point, that I can agree with.

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

#337

Post by rangibaby » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 5:55 AM UTC

Const-me wrote: post #250

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not sure about hobbyists, and the price point. 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 simila…

> 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?

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

#338

Post by srean » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 6:08 AM UTC

rangibaby wrote: post #337

Const-me wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about hobbyists, and the price point. 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 simila…

> 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?

Would polarization angle have enough signal to be useful ?

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

#339

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 6:17 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #326

Godel_unicode wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also make an infinite number of perfect replicas of your CDs. You can carry backups of every CD ever made on a flashdrive that fits in your jeans pocket, then recreate any of them at any time with no degradation in quality. There are some quasi-plausible arguments for vinyl, but arguing that durability is one of them is hilariously myopic.

> You can carry backups of every CD ever made on a flashdrive that fits in your jeans pocket 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…

Storage capacity has been increasing much faster than new CD volume is being created (relatively speaking), so if it isn't true today it soon will be.

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

#340

Post by ahje » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 6:32 AM UTC

iikoolpp wrote: post #187

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…

As it happens, I own several freshly printed cassette tapes from the last year or two.

Ditto. I found two of them at a local flea market, indicating that there's at least one more hipster out here on the countryside where I live.

Also, mix tapes are still awesome at parties; it gets rid of the fight about who gets to connect their phone to the stereo.