Vinyl Gets Its Groove Back 751
theodp writes "Time reports that vinyl records are suddenly cool again. Vinyl has a warmer, more nuanced sound than CDs or MP3s; records feature large album covers with imaginative graphics, pullout photos, and liner notes. 'Bad sound on an iPod has had an impact on a lot of people going back to vinyl,' says 15-year-old David MacRunnel, who owns more than 1,000 records."
Sure, harder to rip... (Score:3, Interesting)
I am sure the fact that records wear out with repeated plays also contributed to their excitement over this trend. But hey, records are something I can't make at home. I would be more than happy to see the music industry shrink away to one that only manufactures records. At the moment they seem to manufacture mostly ill will.
This article is a bit late (Score:5, Interesting)
When I first started out, all the DJ's across Trance/House would only DJ with Vinyl and CD's were unheard of. In the past 12-18 months though that's all changed. Vinyl sales are down as DJ's and enthusiasts are all moving to CD's. CDJ's are now excellent quality and offer much more dynamic mixing abilities with better effects, beat matching and looping and sampling.
At the same time, tracks being produced are instantly available on MP3 which allows DJ's to purchase fresh hits the day the producer is happy with it, other then having to wait for tracks to be pressed to vinyl.
I believe this trend has followed Europe where they have been progressively been moving away from Vinyl in the past 2-3 years.
Vinyl is still excellent, I still love to collect it, but technology has finally caught up in the club scene where MP3 and digital music now offers much much more advantage to the DJ, especially in price. Buying 5-6 new records per week to play in clubs is expensive, when you can buy the same tracks for 3-4 dollars each online and burn them to CD.
Re:Show me the science (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:"Suddenly"? (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know if they actually sound better, but I personally just love the physical action of putting on a record.
Re:Not surprising... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's it exactly. A hot CD doesn't do justice to bands like Arcade Fire, so I'm willing to go out of my way to get the vinyl versions of certain albums even if it means I now have to worry about things like dust and needle wear. I'd prefer that the studios just digitally master these things correctly in the first place, but that's not going to happen as long as the engineers feel compelled to make their songs sound the "loudest" on the radio; and that won't stop until we can agree on a way to normalize the volume levels of CDs and other digital media.
There's a great YouTube video on this subject: "The Loudness War" [youtube.com]
Re:This article is a bit late (Score:2, Interesting)
Another popular alternative (used by a lot of 'big names' such as Coldcut, Pete Tong, Sasha, Richie Hawtin, Daft Punk etc) is mixing straight from your laptop using Ableton Live, this is more like bringing your recording studio to the nightclub and doing a live remix.
Re:"Suddenly"? (Score:3, Interesting)
I prefer accurate reproduction. Which, actually, is why I believe CD's may be the last good medium for delivering music. I might sound like a snob by saying it, but I won't ever pay for lossy compressed music, ever. Not when CD's with no compression and much higher fidelity had already been available for two decades. Sound quality is supposed to advance, not the other way around.
Vinyl is cool, and has it's place, but better than a CD? Naa.
Re:Not surprising... (Score:5, Interesting)
Anybody remember the Telarc digital recording of the 1812 Overture released on Vinyl? They used real cannons and the cannon shots were so loud, they had to dramatically increase the groove pitch in that area of the record to accommodate the waveform. It would have crossed over six grooves or so if they hadn't.
That record was literally a stereo killer. I saw phono cartridges lose the diamond tip or jump out of the groove when it hit that spot. Power amp fuses blew. Speakers were damaged etc. The only way I could capture it to tape was to play the record at 16 RPM, record the tape at 15 IPS and play it at 7.5 IPS (yes, there was a slight pitch shift but so what).
Re:"Suddenly"? (Score:5, Interesting)
And where exactly do you think the noise floor of a real LP player is?
That is after all all we are talking about, although I have doubts that that is often appreciated.
Of course, on a modern CD you are missing a lot of the harmonic distortion, random noise, and limited (yes, go look at the actual figures) high and low frequency response of a normal LP, but hey, who needs them.
MP3 is in a lot of ways a good match to vinyl, it actually tracks a lot of the same problems rather nicely.
Re:"Suddenly"? (Score:2, Interesting)
If you think it's weird... well, ok; with like, a rock band? Yeah, I don't know how much difference there is (I've never been to a rock concert). But as a classical musician myself, I can say that the live performance is so, so, so much better than a recording. My ears pick up even more depth in the sound of the instrument itself, let alone the actual music and harmonics that go on ... not harmony, but the harmonics, harmonic series, all that stuff. I don't know if the recording or the speakers are the typical culprit, but a live performance sounds amazingly better; especially when you take into account the natural acoustics of the room that you're in and everything. I'm not an audiophile in the recording-listening sense, but dude... when it comes to hearing a symphony live or recorded, live is so much better.
Interestingly, soundtracks and the like have kinda dumbed down the typical listener of classical music, those are digitally remastered to a high degree to be made to sound really full... fuller than you could get live; but the fullness takes away the clarity and the nuance in the music that I love. And the difference between a recording and a live performance is, I think, even more detectable when it's a small group... say, a string quartet. When you hear the sound of one instrument live vs. that instrument recorded, you can hear the difference. It's like looking at a picture of a sunset and actually being there; yeah, you can photoshop it all you want, there's just something not alive about a picture (a "recording") of something vs. the actual thing.
Again, I'm really not sure about contemporary music that uses electronic instruments anyways... this is strictly about classical, acoustic instruments.
Re:"Suddenly"? (Score:5, Interesting)
The enjoyment I get out of it isn't just about the audio quality (although in some cases it is much better on vinyl). It's hard to explain, but the act of digging through a crate full of records, handling the vinyl, dropping the needle, even the light crackling sound you get on old records during the silent moments, it all adds to the experience. It's much more involved than just dropping in a CD or playing a file.
And, as a great bonus, you can pick up all sorts of old music you otherwise wouldn't have heard for pennies at a pawn shop, thrift store, Goodwill, etc. I made a habit of going through the records at thrift stores, buying anything with an album cover that interested me or made me laugh. Most of it was horrible, but for anywhere from 50 cents to $1.99 each you're not out much.
Re:"Suddenly"? (Score:2, Interesting)
You say that "audiophiles that think vinyl really is better is on crack" which tells me that you've never heard a good quality audio system, be it vinyl or digital. Digital maybe cold, but perfect every time just might be an overstatement. Vinyl records have a different feel to them, yes, but most people that really want to hear every little thing want vinyl. This may be due to the fact that vinyl is almost always mastered very differently than CDs, but it doesn't change the fact that a CD is just an attempt at improving over cassette tape so that there was something portable that sounded good enough.
I, for one, pray that vinyl makes a good comeback. After all, now that we have MP3 players all over the place, we don't need CDs to be portable, so now people can take a vinyl, rip it to their iPod or whatever they have, and enjoy the music on the road. It'd be even better because there is no feasible way to DRM vinyl so everyone would be better off.
Re:The Vinyl 'user Interface' Is What's Special (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:"Suddenly"? (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, the noise floor can be pretty high depending on how much regrind is in the Vinyl stock and what kind of turntable it is. Idler drive? Belt drive? Direct Drive? One of those mag lev or fluid damped suspension turntables that weigh 400 pounds?
If you apply all the proper turntable voodoo (along with the anti-resonant tone arm putty, silver Litz wire cartridge leads and vacuum tube preamps - with the good Hungarian tubes) the noise floor can get to within a few db of a CD.
Well, since a CD doesn't really have a noise floor, the effect down there is different - extreme distortion. The antidote to that is... add noise, only call it "dither". The analog humans of old would put up with audio 6 db below the noise floor but it still wasn't distorted or gritty like the CD way down there.
ELP Laser Turntable, anybody?
Re:"Suddenly"? (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed. Vinyl is so great that you'll only listen to yours once. That's awesome. It can remain in mint condition on the shelf, and as long as you can simply retain the memory of having listened to that great recording decades ago, it'll be wonderful.
It must be great to live in a fool's paradise. How's the weather there?
IAAAP (I am an audiophile) (Score:4, Interesting)
Put one some music, preferably recorded live. Something with a single instrument--like guitar, violin, or sax. Make sure its something without amplification. Play it at a volume that gives you the illusion that the instrument is in the room. On a decent system and a good recording this shouldn't be too hard.
Now here is the test. Step into the adjacent room. Ask yourself if the illusion still exists. Does it sound like there is someone playing the guitar in the next room? Or does it sound like it's coming from a box?
Most setups fail this test. They will sound "boxy" somehow. My setup passes this test with flying colors. It wasn't that expensive put together. I don't have tube amps (distortion), turntable (more distortion), nor $5000 cables (useless). What I do have is a faithful reproduction of sound that was recorded. When listening to CD's, most distortions I notice these days are poor mixing, poor miking, poor eq, dynamic compression, and other terrible things done during production. And my speakers faithfully reproduces these without "warming" them or "soothing" them or something.
Oh, and vinyls sound like crap on my system.
Re:echo....echo....echo (Score:1, Interesting)
Here's a test: would you rather have an image from a 10 bit color camera which is expanded to 24 bit color then some nice algorithm "guesses" the colors in between the new values, or would you rather have something shot actually at 24 bit?
Sure, they'll both have the same amount of colors, and the smoothed 10 bit image sure will look gentle and warm with all the fuzz the smoothing creates... but which will be a more accurate reproduction of the original subject? Saying that analog is mysteriously "better" becomes nothing but an argument of personal preference. This whole issue is getting so fucking old. Can we just have a beatingadeadhorse tag on every one of these stupid "VINYL IS AWESOMER THAN CD OMG" articles?
Just acknowledge that every vinyl fan has an entirely subjective personal preference, and quit trying to justify your own preferences to the rest of us to make yourself feel better. Goddamn.
Re:"Suddenly"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oy vey (Score:2, Interesting)
In some cases I actually did get used to them. The intro of "More of that Jazz" on my recording of Queen's "Jazz" album (tape of a ropey LP)- for example- skipped the first couple of beats on the drum intro and the song started in the middle of the phrase. I actually find this more interesting and familiar than the undamaged version; I think this is partly because I got used to it, but I also like the interesting effect on the timing.
Other minor defects become part of the experience of listening to an album, just like listening to a cassette you got used to the silent preamble at the start of the tape- even down to the quiet leader giving way to the background hiss on the "proper" tape before the music came in.
In general though, if you'd never grown up with- and got used to- these defects, they'd just strike you as annoying, and I don't want to romanticise vinyl damage (I was always a cassette boy anyway!... not that I'd want to go back to them, even though I think they got a bad rap from music snobs).
I'm glad you mentioned the good quality headphones because- from what I'm aware of- the mediocre quality headphones and/or speakers that many people listen to music through can cover up many of the defects of MP3s.
Although there probably are legitimate criticisms of MP3s, I also think that they're the audio cassettes of the 21st century- music snobs hate them, everyone uses them, and although they're probably not the highest-quality format, the problems are overstated. Yes, I've heard some 112/128mbps MP3s with obvious (and annoying) artifacts, but I suspect that this is down to either transcoding or simply a poor-quality encoder in the first place. I've got many MP3s that I ripped using NotLame at 128mbps, and they're actually okay. I'd use 192 or 256 nowadays, but the point is that you can't damn the format solely on the basis of a poor encoder alone.
Ah, the things "audiophiles" claim... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, the kinds of things that "audiophiles" claim...
Probably the funniest was one on the HardwareCentral forum, which insisted that MP3's sound differently off different hard drives, and of course his superior ear can easily tell the difference between a Maxtor and a Seagate. He actually went into a funny (in a village idiot kind of way) theory about how it's recorded magnetically like on cassettes, and we all know how different magnetic coatings (e.g., iron oxide vs chromium oxide) in cassettes behaved differently in different frequency ranges. So it stood to (his warped lack of) reason that the same would happen to hard drives. Some would have better bass, some would have a greater dynamic range, etc.
Sad to say, no amount of explaining that a 1 is a 1 is a 1 on a hard drive and the MP3 read will be identical on any brand, made any difference. He was sure that that's nonsense, the magnetic coating of a HDD platter has no reason to behave differently than that of a cassette, and most importantly he had convinced himself that he can hear the differences. (Without a double-blind test, though. Funny how many "audiophiles" resent those three words.)
Also in the funny stupidity category, I submit to you such gems as:
- $1000+ power cables, and people swearing that their music sounds better with one,
- specially-tuned wooden volume knobs (no, seriously), and people swearing that their music sounds better with one,
- audiophile motherboards with one vacuum tube at the end of an otherwise 100% digital chain, and again people swearing that their MP3's sound closer to the original with that (never mind that it's really just adding the tube's own soft-clipping kind and harmonics, to those that the digital chain already introduced),
Etc, etc, etc.
It's just the emperor's new clothes story. Except the original story got it wrong. If you tell someone that only some kind of superior beings can see those clothes, or hear the subtle sound differences, they'll actually convince themselves that they really see or hear that. They won't fake it, they'll actually be convinced that if they squint just right, they kinda see the fabulous clothes on the emperor.
And a kid shouting "the emperor is naked", actually won't make any difference. That's actually what they want to hear. Being better is relative. You have to be better than _someone_. For you to be better, someone else has to be worse. So once they got it into their head that they must be one of the geniuses that see the clothes, other people shouting "The emperor is naked!" just provides ample "proof" that yup, others aren't that good.
In fact, here's an even more depressing parting thought: the more blatantly absurd and provably wrong something is, the more vehemently its advocates will defend it.
Re:Not surprising... (Score:2, Interesting)
I ran it on a Rega Planar 3 turntable with a Decca cartridge (cranked up to 2.5 grams) into a Radford amp and (at the time), some JBL 55 speakers that I borrowed from the local hi-fi shop for a free "in home demo".
I took the covers off the JBL's, pointed them in my direction, sat on a bean bag about 8ft away, warmed the tubes and dropped the arm gently about 3 mins before the cannons.
BOOM! I felt the puffs of air from the enclosure ports about a sec after the sound -
BOOM! More puffs of air..
HISS CRACK BOOOM! The woofers were really trying to loose their cones on that one!
I took them back and bought some Warfdales instead. Nice speakers while they lasted.
Yeah, once (Score:4, Interesting)
The only thing that's making vinyl sound good to 15-year-old kids is that modern producers are by and large shite button-monkeys who compress the fuck out of everything so it'll sound good when ripped to mp3 and/or played through tiny earphones or club sound systems.
The sort of engineers and producers who would care enought to produce a vinyl LP these days would probably also make damn good CDs.
TWW
By the time you're 20! (Score:5, Interesting)
He turned down the frequency generator to about 10Khz (when we realized it was super loud) and then the volume and told everyone to raise their hand and then lower it when they could no longer hear anything. 90% of the class had their hand down when the frequency generator hit about 19Khz, and the ones left were all girls and nobody lasted to 22Khz.
The other one is high fidelity in cars -- even the nicest "riding" car I've ever been in (Jaguar) still has an audible road noise floor which makes fidelity in the car pointless, especially if you're a wanker in a Honda like me.
True in a way (Score:4, Interesting)
These days, people are far too eager to jump into the debugger, or to just try running something to see if it works. This culture leads to a lot of obscure, since the program isn't designed to be correct, and examined critically in an attempt to say with reasonable confidence that it really is correct but is simply run by the developer. The whole "works for me" syndrome.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oy vey (Score:2, Interesting)
Sounds sort of like my friend's "Pink Floyd - Meddle" album. She had found, and it had a cigarette burn on side on, creating a sort of bubble on side two, which contains the epic "Echoes" track. The song would play as normal until it got to the bubble. This was during the part in the song with the woman screaming. The bubble created a heartbeat effect, which actually went with the beat of the song. It elevated the song to a whole other level. Made the track even more epic.
Re:Not surprising... (Score:2, Interesting)
This conversion is necessary because a one revolution digital delay line is used so the variable groove width spacing can be calculated in advance while the record is being cut.
It has been common to use digital delays for this since the first decent lexicon ones appeared some time in the early '80s. Before that, they would use a tape delay. Yikes!
Re:Audiophile nonsense (Score:3, Interesting)
No I don't "LIKE" music, I LOVE music. Blues, classical, pop, yes even country, jazz, swing, all of it. Etta James, Erikah Badu, James Brown, Sam & Dave, the Bangles, Beatles, Mozart, Strauss, Zappa, damn!!! all of it.
What I don't like is LPs. I'm in my 40s now, and I remember LPs in their prime. I had LOTS of LPs. They sound distorted, with hiss and pop, yuck. I bought a CD player when my friend played Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon on it. Pure music, I was floored. It was as best as can be reproduced in my room with my speakers and amp, while considerable at the time, not a sound studio.
No, sorry, CDs were a restoration of music, they we better than LPs. Much like the restoration of the Sistine Chapel, it opened up a lot more color, and a lot of people didn't like it, but that didn't mean the pre-restoration was better.
The trick to getting seriously good audio (Score:4, Interesting)
Stop paying $10000 for a 'sound system' and wanking endlessly on Slashdot about specs and which recording sounds better. Get yourself a $100 electric guitar and a simple but good headphone amp. A $1 LM386 audio amp IC and a couple of resistors/capacitors from a trashed stereo works fine.
Download some tab files of your favorite songs (the ones that you were going to use to judge the quality of your $10000 stereo system) and some MIDI files of the same songs (if you can find them still on the web).
Learn to play them on your guitar.
It takes a little time, sure. But the results are often feel better than endlessly listening to the same recording on a $10000 system (even with Monster cables).
And I assure you that you will be hearing parts and intricacies of the music that you didn't notice before learning to play the songs yourself on your own instrument. Even if you're listening on a $5 garage sale cassette Walkman.
Music is subjective. It is what you make it to be. 20-year-old Eddie Cochran, John Lennon, Eddie Van Halen, or Carlos Santana didn't need $10000 sound systems to make incredible music. Neither do you.
Re:Oy vey (Score:5, Interesting)
This point needs to be driven home. For people looking for high quality qudio, you only need to rewind back to when CDs were released - they were considered an audiophile's medium.
Has it really been ten years since a well-mastered CD was released? I know otherwise. However, my parents came to me shopping for new audio gear. I suggested they bring 20 CDs they knew well to a sit-down listening of what new loudspeakers were available, hoping that one of them would be a "good" recording. Their recordings include a lot of easy listening, jazz, and otherwise off-the-beaten-path music, so I had hope.
Not one of them weren't compressed and limited to the very extreme. Afterwards, looking through their collection of about 200 CDs, there were exactly *two* that respected good mastering - The Soundtrack to the Lion King, and Enya "The Memory of Trees". Two. From the 90's.
Even re-released recordings of *oldies* on CD (my parents being their 70's) were compressed to completely numbing levels.
Anyone thinking they can go to a record store and buy a high-quality product of anything "hip" or "popular" on CD are sorely mistaken.
It's a damn shame.
Re:Oy vey (Score:1, Interesting)
The dynamic range that CD's are capable of are not used, they compress the piss out of ALL of them today.
There are SOME CD's that are not bad, but the best you can get are the indie artists that master their own, they go for quality not loudness.
Many Indie CD's are far better than the best RIAA CD master out there.
analog lasers (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, if it were me doing a laser record player, I'd go the A-D route unless the cost of doing it "all analog" were made up by profits from suck^H^H^H^Hcustomers who pay extra for an "all analog" sticker on the box.