Return of the Vinyl Album 490
bulled writes "NPR ran a story this morning about the comeback of vinyl. It seems that sales of new vinyl records are up about 10%; sales will approach a million this year (as against half a billion for CDs). NPR mentioned the popularity of a turntable with a USB interface — they didn't specify the brand; could be this one, or this — and speculated on other possible reasons for the resurgence. They mentioned sound quality and lack of DRM as possible causes. Sound quality can and will be debated, but DRM rates a resounding 'Duh.'"
bah (Score:2, Interesting)
Digital Vinyl (Score:5, Interesting)
While you may think I'm joking I note that a 30-40Kb/sec stream is more than suficient to store audio at near CD quality in real time. You can send 30-40Kb/sec over a telephone which has a small fraction of the bandwidth of a record. Thus I can actually encode about 8 simultaneous stereo streams
since audio records last about 40 minutes, 8 streams gives me 320 minutes of near CD quality music which is longer than an audio encoded CD can provide. Next up VCD on Vinyl
Re:There's no debate (Score:2, Interesting)
With good equipment, the sound quality is way better then the chopped digital audio from the bits of the CD.
The obvious solution (Score:5, Interesting)
The last two records I bought on vinyl (the new records by Of Montreal [polyvinylrecords.com] and M. Ward [mergerecords.com]) came with a coupon for one-time download of DRM-free MP3 versions of the album tracks from the label's Web sites. So I get the big cover art and the intangible experience (they're both double albums on vinyl) but I can still play 'em on the computer without sweating over the process of digitizing vinyl.
Fact is, the vinyl version of the Of Montreal record (which is awesome) has a scratch that makes track 3 repeat the same crazy groove over and over, and it sounds intentional and much, much better than the digital version, which now seems weirdly short. And it comes with four bonus tracks, which are included in the download too but not on the CD version. Obviously some small record labels are betting big on vinyl as a way to keep people buying records, and I'm all for it.
Re:So let me get this straight... (Score:3, Interesting)
Main thing is that vinyl records released these days are likely to be engineered by people who actually care about the quality of the recording. This is like 99% of the difference.
Now at least one of the digitizers claims 24 bits at 96 khz (the m-audio one). A CD is 16 bits at 44khz and a lot of stuff is lost at that rate. Plus cheap CD players have cheap digital filters so you don't get anywhere near the nyquist limit (22khz) out of them, and what you do get is out of phase in the upper registers. Fresh vinyl can get up to 30khz and in fact old quad vinyl used a subcarrier up there for the rear channels.
Vinyl falls down on noise floor, pops/crackles, subwoofer feedback, anyone remember wow & flutter, and RIAA* equalization errors.
*the RIAA back when it was concerned about sound quality!
Re:Not surprising. (Score:3, Interesting)
From a collector's stand point, vinyls never really faded from popularity. I still have all of my old vinyls
I wouldn't exactly call myself a collector but my collection started back in the 60's when that's all there was and I bought most of them in the 70's. Some of that stuff will never be released on CD. For example, I'm a Commander Cody fan. His Country Casanova album was only released on vinyl. There are tracks on that album which appear nowhere else. So I keep my turntable.
Turntable emulator (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:There's no debate (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely right. As usual when someone posts something really smart that bucks the CW my mod points are taking a tropical vacation.
Sadly, CDs are not great either, for different reasons. Where vinyl introduces the uncontrollable variables you talk about (thermal variations, electrical noise affecting the very-low-voltage signal, never-ideal disc and needle quality, dust) CDs, because of their low sampling frequency (which should have been 96kHz from the start), mangle the waveforms at high frequencies. Still, CDs come a lot closer to delivering accurate reproduction in any form of real-world use. For starters, you just can't always keep dust away from your needle...
As for amps, it has always amazed me that people *love* the ones that introduce distortion and claim the accurate ones are "cold" and "technical." It's not the amp's job to be warm and emotional; it's the musician's. I run away from any component that advertises "warm" or "musical" sound; those are code words for distortion.
My own setup consists of various digital sources playing through a big Class D amp into speakers with poly cone woofer/midrange and planar tweeters. Everyone complains the sound is too cold. But it's dead-accurate with test signals and I can actually hear the detail in my recordings, not just "warmth" that may make me feel good but isn't there.
Re:So let me get this straight... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Flashback (Score:3, Interesting)
(software quality + amount of file sharing)*(number of users)^(experience)= music quality
The music was good then, it is great now, and is expected to be even better tomorrow.
Nothing mixes like vinyls (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know how to describe the experience. He started a hard song on the CD player (Funker Vogt I think) then he attacked the turntable. He started with a Depeche Mode vinyls, and I hear you scream at the idea of eletro pop being mixed with Funker Vogt, but what he did was brilliant. He jumped on the EQ and isolated the good baseline so typical of Depeche Mode and gently blended it into the hard stuff, just the baseline. A moment later the vinyl was doing backflips over his head; he wanted to plug in voice sample that was on the other side. It was almost instantaneous, he waved his hand over the EQ, the voice sample played, the vinyl flipped again and we were back with the baseline. We assume that vinyls have poor seek time but, in the hand of an expert, a vinyl will seeks much faster than a CD. The DJ continued his dance, mixing in some elements of trance and goa, building an elecro industrial song out of other songs from a wide repertoire of electronic music. When he left, he was not the resident DJ after all, nothing was the same anymore.
I had discover that mixing was in fact a form of composition but it was all gone. I now pay attention to the work of the DJ. The DJ is an artist an his medium is extremely expressive. A good DJ will keep the dancefloor full but only a greet DJ will coerce people into dehydration and renal failure. When I see a DJ lifting the dusty cover of the turntable, I know that I'm in for a good show. I keep the ear open and I enjoy this rare skill that the CD almost killed.
Re:Analogue vs Digital (Score:4, Interesting)
You're being fooled by distortion. Your vinyl isn't even close to as accurate as your CDs.
Your CDs have slightly fucked up high frequencies that *may*, if you have golden ears, make the recording sound somewhat harsher than a live performance and screw up your soundstage a bit. They also have a signal-to-noise ratio of >100dB, huge dynamic range, high-voltage output (for minimal noise after the D/A conversion stage), and they don't require equalization from your components.
Your vinyl has a signal-to-noise ratio of 50dB if you're lucky, low-voltage output that virtually guarantees that some level of 60Hz hum will get into the signal, a shitload of equalization by your record player, and very low dynamic range. You only have any highs at all (and the soundstage they bring) if your needle and record are both perfect. The reason you think your vinyl sounds better is precisely because of these traits. You hear them as "mellow," "warm," and "not harsh." Maybe you like to be protected in a bubble from what your recordings actually sound like, and that's fine, but what you're hearing is not better or more accurate sound... it's precisely the opposite.
Damn kids (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate this stupid fad, and I say it as a vinyl lover an serious collector (I'm buying up over 10 records a week). These kids do this out of nonconformism, except that like most idiot wannabe nonformists, they don't know squat about anything (Disclaimer: I'm 20 years old, but I'm really an old fart in a kid's body).
They don't know how to maintain their records, they can't differentiate between high-quality records and a digital-to-analog dump (worthless). They buy modern or popular music that you can get on CDs without the disadvantage of noise floor, they don't have decent turntables, and worst of all, lack decent stylii (a bad stylus will damage the record). I buy records mostly for Jazz that's never been mastered on CD and other such rarities, and play it on a system that's worth more than $200 bucks; really, anything less than that is simply a waste.
And they raise the price and end up destroying the records and then you can't find anything decent because everything's scratched.
lets set the record straight (Score:2, Interesting)
hi-fi doesn't really exist in today's marketplace? (Score:3, Interesting)
"Getting into and out of the cockpit of this beast requires the kind of agility that almost nobody capable of affording it possesses."
Likewise, by the time you're old enough to both care about audio and afford a decent stereo, your hearing will already have deteriorated to the point where you simply can't hear much of what you're obsessing over.
A young (i.e. under 20 years old) person with both excellent and absolutely undamaged hearing might be able to hear some output about 20KHz, but not much, and not loudly. (The falloff is quite steep.) The average teenager won't. A teenager who has been listening to his iPod/stereo for most of his life won't. Somebody in their twenties almost certainly won't, let alone thirties or forties.
Now, that's hearing above 20KHz. Hearing above 22Khz is an even taller order. This is one of the reasons why CD's were designed as they are. The engineers did their homework and decided that, even with moderately crappy filters that don't fall off nearly as fast as they could, a low-pass at 22.05KHz would be inaudible. I'm sure that with the wide range of human variability there are a small number of people gifted with exceptional hearing who are able to just barely hear output above 22KHz, and perhaps even a small number of these people will retain that ability past their teens. This, of course, is all when we're talking about test sine-waves. I wish any of these gifted listeners luck in picking out >22KHz details in a musical recording!
Statistics allow me to say with near absolute confidence that you, yes you, cannot hear the effect of the "brick wall" of CD's. Your dog might. Your paperboy is a remote possibility. You can't. I would happily slap down money on the table to bet that you could not tell the difference in a blind test between music that has been low-passed at 22KHz versus 40KHz. The effects of the "brick wall" are merely psychoacoustic.
As for the high-end audio market... What city do you live in? I live in a Canadian city of about a million people. (Calgary) This is not exactly LA, but we have at least half a dozen audio stores where you can sit down and listen to $30K+ systems. (Some that cost *much* more.) Everything from high end B&W to local-grown goodies like Totem acoustic. Yes, the audiophile market is not a high-volume one these days, but it never was. Also, the best sounding rigs I've heard have not been analogue. Some audiophiles really like the sound of vinyl playing through the grandiose euphonic distortion of a SET tube amp. My tastes tend towards something more... neutral. If I really wanted to add that much "color" to my music I'd feed it through an audio editor and apply some filters. I suggest you take a listen to a well recorded SACD or DVD-A album. (i.e. Not yet another #$@%ing remaster of a 30-year old Eagles album.) It's a shame neither format is doing very well because both formats can sound superb.
Anyways, whatever gets your rocks off, I wish you plenty of aural pleasure.
Re:Digital Vinyl (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, that's been done [wikipedia.org] twenty five years ago.
Re:Digital Vinyl (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, make that eighty [wikipedia.org].
(Okay, that's arguably analog rather than digital.)
Re:Copyright (Score:3, Interesting)
The cost of copyright is that those good works which are created are not distributed to the population as widely as they might be.
The goal is to have an educated, enlightened society which has been exposed to a great deal of culture and knowledge, that they might be better peers and neighbours.
When 90% of the society is too dog tired from working in the fields to even think about doing something so frivolous as writing...
When only the few and the rich can afford recording gear and instruments...
When the cost to respect the copyright and maintain an artist is a pittance next to the massive costs of the manufacturing and distribution network...
In such a civilization, copyright is a defensible mechanism.
This is not such a world.
In this world, it is trivial to distribute information.
It is trivial to get your hands on the tools to create.
It is trivial to find the idle time to set your hand to it.
And with 6 billion of us and growing, if you don't want to do it without getting paid, go to hell. Someone else will do it, you're not special.
In this world, it is a trivial enterprise to make vast libraries of culture and knowledge accessible to peasants in the jungle.
Soon, it will be trivial to provide a copy of every creative work ever made to every man, woman and child on earth.
At which point, the only thing holding us back from doing so will be small-minded dickheads harping about their "rights".
If you're a creator, stop thinking about copyright.
Brainstorm for other ideas on how you might get subsidized by our society without it being necessary to keep people isolated from what you've created, and throw your weight behind getting them into place.
The writing is on the wall. Copyright is done. Find another way.
Digital Vinyl data capacity blows CDs out of water (Score:5, Interesting)
When you said near CD-quality, you weren't thinking of 8 track tapes were you?
Let's try the math again. First many digital radio stations use ABBAcast or something like it for near-CD quality at 33 to 40Kbs. Even if it's not CD quality it's certainly higher quality that anything that came off the vinyl in the first place. But let's ignore that and incorrectly assume we need 128kb/sec and see how the math comes out.
Audio modems don't actually use the full spectrum of the phone. last I looked they used about 3Khz. Now a vinyl record has a lot of bandwidth. the main limit on the bandwidth is the needles voltage/amplitude response falls off. That's why you equalize them. (which is why your stereo has a different input jack for phono than for tapes) You can only equalize then so far and get a decent sounding thing but you could push this much further if you went to a an analog coding scheme other than amplitude modulation. (hey that's what modems do! how about that).
So just to have some numbers lets make some up that are not completely crazy. Lets say we could push audio signal recovery out to 30Khz. So that gives us ten 3khz wide modem channels. And since the record is stereo that gives 20 total channels.
20*56kb/sec = 1060 kb/sec
1060kb/sec
Hey! that's what I claimed to begin with. I claimed I could fit about 8 cd quality channels (and here we mean 128Kb/sec) on a Vinyl record.
But wait! that's actually a gross underestimate. What determines the bits per second on a modem. it's a combination of two things, bandwidth and signal to noise. A vinyl record has enormously better signal to noise than a telephone. So the number of bits pers second my vinyl can support is vastly higher than the phone.
the shannon capacity scales as:
Bandwidth * log_2 (1 + SNR)
(where SNR is the singal to noise ratio in power)
to if I had 128 times better SNR on a record then that's about 8 times more bits per second.
So you see my Digital Vinyl smokes your CD.
Re:There's no debate (Score:3, Interesting)
Class D amps have a long way to go. THD is meaningless, as the blind test studies by GedLee that were presented at the Audio Engineering Society convention a few years ago show, THD doesn't correlate with the distortion detectability, since the type of distortion is far more important. Crossover distortion from class B and AB stages, and effects of jitter, are audible in the parts per million. There's another type of distortion that doesn't affect THD measures at all, but is perceptually significant: thermal memory distortion. There's a good description of it and ways to decrease it here: http://peufeu.free.fr/audio/memory/ [peufeu.free.fr] (there's also an AES paper linked there that describes how to measure it in real amps). Of course, tubes don't exhibit such distortion, and is my guess as to one of the reasons some people prefer them despite higher THD than typical solid state amps (however, this higher THD is simply due to most tube amps being simple; a tube with constant current load is more linear than any single solid state device; you can easily make a tube amp as linear as a solid state one if you use as many tubes as you would transistors).
Re:You just know... (Score:3, Interesting)
Later on, they realized that the custom format wouldn't work and opened up to the standard 45. The 1960 version could allow you to stack up to 12 records in it.
Here is an article from Chrysler about it. http://www.uaw-daimlerchryslerntc.org/images/news
Bill
Re:USB? (Score:2, Interesting)
Once I had a decent dedicated CD player the sound quality is just fine, too. I still like my vinyl, but it's just for when I feel like faffing around.
You're just figuring this out? (Score:3, Interesting)
As for my few hundred pre-recorded reel-to-reel analog tapes - sonic nirvana.
Side note - I started my audiophile life as a digital fan. I was contemplating a career in music as a bassoonist and had lots of experience sitting with real instruments being played in real space by real artists. 8-tracks, LPs (on the crappy turntables I had access to), cassette tapes - they all sounded like garbage. I was used to the real thing and nothing provided it. So I didn't buy music at all. Then the CD came out and Phillips advertised it as "Perfect Sound Forever". All the magazines said it was the Second Coming. I swallowed the hype hook, line and sinker. I bought Vivaldi's Four Seasons on Telarc (a supposedly wonderful demo disc) and started shopping. The problem was, everything sounded like crap. Everything. I annoyed the guys at Pacific and any other place I could find and all the demos sounded awful. Finally, I heard about a "high-end" audio shop in Houston called Audio ProPhiles. I went in and the nice saleslady (it was a weekday afternoon and the place was deserted or else she wouldn't have spent any time at all with a poor college student like me) put my CD in the Phase Linear CD player (a Carver subsidiary, originally sourced from Kyocera, iirc) connected to the Krell electronics driving the original Martin Logan planar speakers. This setup, which cost more than a decent car, would surely show me the glory that was CD.
The sound came on and in less than two bars after the violins started I had shoved my fingers in my ears and was literally screaming at the saleslady to turn it off! Somebody had shoved a running dental drill into my ear canals; I was sure of it. I asked her what the hell was wrong with her demo system. She simply replied that "That's what digital sounds like." Then she sat me down at the Goldmund Reference turntable (supposedly the only one in the country at the time, having been bought off the show floor at CES), showed me how to use it, and let me spend an afternoon playing those beautiful, wonderful LPs. Lesson learned.
I've posted about this before and I won't go into details here. The short story is: Digital sucked in the beginning and continued to suck for many years. Then the players and production processes got better. Now, it's far more convenient than vinyl and, arguably, CDs sound about as good if a bit different. On the top end, it's possible to argue that vinyl is still better, but the top end requires more money than I'll ever have.
The bottom line is still the same as it's always been: If you want good sound at a reasonable price buy a subscription to your local symphony. Arguments beyond that I don't care to wage.
Re:Not surprising-Art for spaces sake. (Score:1, Interesting)
Whereas CD jewel cases are an awkward size for rolling a joint, they're ideal for four nice fat sociable lines of coke. Hence, the rise of CDs didn't just parallel Thatcherism and the market economy, but the number of complete arseholes - almost all of whom were less able and much better paid than "we" were. Then in the 90s it was new hallucinogens, and we got vapid manufactured pop that makes the Monkees look like Mozart, post modern politicians who were really good at PR (spin) and being corrupt hypocritical bastards in reality. And lots of flourescent coloured visual design, and those annoying Designer Republic-type / Digital Miffy typography/design, bleurgghhh.... this would parallel lame attempts to foist first generation personal digital media like those crappy Sony digital tape formats and proprietary memory sticks and so on. Now we're in the 21-nothings, and I'm listening to Ogg Vorbis audio on my laptop, in the car and at work, and scarcely watching an hour of TV a week... and I, at least, am virtually sober apart from the after-work G&T.
I wonder what DRM will or won't bring (if it wins or loses... EMI dropping DRM is the first chink of light in, what, 8 or 9 years in that respect. (Yes, I was there in the deCSS / DVD wars of '99 ;) )
What happens next, I wonder? Tune in next week to find out!