Vinyl Record Pressing Plants Struggle To Keep Up With Demand 433
An anonymous reader writes The WSJ reports that the revival of vinyl records, a several-year trend that many figured was a passing fad, has accelerated during 2014 with an astounding 49 percent sales increase over 2013 (line chart here). Some listeners think that vinyl reproduces sound better than digital, and some youngsters like the social experience of gathering around a turntable. The records are pressed at a handful of decades-old, labor-intensive factories that can't keep up with the demand; but since the increased sales still represent only about 2 percent of US music sales, there hasn't been a rush of capital investment to open new plants. Raw vinyl must now be imported to America from countries such as Thailand, since the last US supplier closed shop years ago. Meanwhile, an industry pro offers his take on the endless debate of audio differences between analog records and digital formats; it turns out there were reasons for limiting playing time on each side back in the day, apart from bands not having enough decent material.
Not really missing vinyl (Score:5, Insightful)
I was born in the 1960s so I was brought up on vinyl, but I was bummed at all the hissing and pops and crackles even though I tried to take care of my records. The clarity of CDs was a revelation even though a certain warmth was sacrificed.
I won't ever miss the defects of vinyl, but today's common digital formats sacrifice far too much information, leaving the listener to "enjoy" the watery tones of overcompressed music.
Re:Not really missing vinyl (Score:5, Insightful)
If so, digital can emulate the older vinyl, but the reverse isn't true.
Re:Not really missing vinyl (Score:5, Informative)
No, it can't be emulated by equalization. If at all it could be emulated by special DSP effects that also add some special distortion. There are plenty such effects available (in fact, a bit too many), but it's usually a horrible idea to slap one of those over an already mastered track.
The real problem has nothing to do with the warmth of vinyl, though. The real problem is that as a result of the infamous loudness war digital CDs are nowadays mastered in a completely different way than vinyl records, a way that is so overcompressed that it completely destroys the sound quality of the music - and provably so, as you can measure the horrible effects of this mastering precisely. It's not a subjective thing at all. Vinyl records have become much louder over the past few decades, too, but they have physical limits that digital media like CDs don't have. If a vinyl record was mastered like a CD, the needle would literally jump out of the track. (With adequate mastering CDs would be superior to Vinyl in almost every respect, but the reality is different due to the way mastering engineers were and are still forced to squeeze every inch of dynamics out of productions.)
Things get much worse with modern digital formats like MP3 or AAC. These would be barely tolerable with very careful mastering, but with modern "loudness competitive" mastering they create even worse artefacts than CDs due to intersample peaks and the interplay with the lossy recording process. Mid/side processing can reveal the horrible blubbering effects that these formats produce in case you can't hear them. (Although, if you can't hear them then you're probably deaf anyway and it won't matter.)
There is great hope that once broadcast stations have adopted new loudness measurement standards like EBU R128 the problem will vanish over time. These standards level the broadcast signals not to standard amplitude levels but according to broader loudness criteria - measuring mean values and taking into account the dynamic range of the audio material using standardized procedures. With these new standards we will hopefully get some dynamics and audio quality back to digital media which are principally vastly superior to vinyl.
Re: Not really missing vinyl (Score:3)
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Probably not. Have you heard what's on most radio stations nowadays? It's 50% commercials that are mixed to sound louder than the next guy's commercials. Who's going to listen to a radio station that plays music with a high dynamic range only to have their eardrums blown out when the station switches to a five-minute long block of commercials? I've given up o
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Re:Not really missing vinyl (Score:4, Insightful)
If it were that simple, we could also completely emulate any instrument like a piano or a violin. Electric pianos can do wonders (I own one) but they can't copy the real thing (which I also own). The point is that a turntable is, in that sense, a complex transformation, like an instrument. You may like it or hate it, but it isn't that simple to emulate.
That being said,I'm sure people have mentioned the simple pleasure of actually owning stuff (instead of a virtual license to some bits on some server). Vinyl has that.
Re:Not really missing vinyl (Score:5, Informative)
All modern DACs (other than some silly audiophile freaky-fringe products) have output reconstruction filters that mean there are no stair-steps on the output.
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Yeah and the scope has a bandwidth in the megahertz, those steps aren't going to be in the output signal to the speakers, and even if they were they would be smoothed out (filtered) by the speaker crossover and the mechanical time constant of the speaker parts.
And then there's the air, those steps aren't going through the air...
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DAC smoothing was explained to me by an audiophile doctor during the first couple of years of my physics degree. This would have been around 1990-91. I think your father may have just been mistaken.
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Digital audio is NOT stairsteps. Never has been. Proof with an analog oscilloscope: http://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
Re:Not really missing vinyl (Score:5, Insightful)
"It is simply not possible to get a full-wave 20kHz signal out of a standard 44kHz sample rate,"
What the hell are you babbling about? A 44.1KHz system is band-limited to 22KHz and you can ONLY get a sine wave out with two data points!
Jesus Christ already!
What does "full wave" mean anyways? Are you one of those types that throws technical-sounding jargon around without a clue?
Re:Not really missing vinyl (Score:4, Insightful)
unless the equipment is literally "making up" parts of the curve on the fly.
In a way it is making it up, because it knows the signal is made from a combination of different sine waves between 0..22 kHz. Within that range, there is only one unique solution, and the machine knows how to find it.
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Re:Not really missing vinyl (Score:5, Insightful)
No, those steps don't exist. The digital sample is basically the minimum information needed to code the original smooth analog signal. The DAC takes that minimum digital info and can convert it back into the complete and smooth original analog signal.
You're thinking of the digital signal as discrete but continuous steps in time. It's not continuous. It's an instantaneous measurement of the analog signal at regular time intervals. The digital signal at any point in time says nothing about the signal immediately before or after that point in time. The DAC "fills in the gaps" by interpolating a smooth and analog signal. If the frequency limit is half the sampling rate, that interpolation is perfect and there is only one unique analog solution to any set of digital samples. And that unique solution is a perfect reproduction of the original analog signal (within the frequency limit).
Watch the first 10 min of this video [youtube.com]. It explains it technically, graphically, and experimentally using an oscilloscope and both analog and digital signal generators.
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Technically correct, but my hearing exceeds 15KHz - unusally good for humans - whereas the step period for digital CD is 40KHz, IIRC. And, as others have mentioned, even if all other things remained equal, the various inductive and capactive elements in the system - including the inertia of the speaker coil and membranes themselves - are likely to render the difference moot.
The true test isn't in displaying what comes off the CD, it's displaying what's actually arrriving at people's ears. Of course, to grap
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Sigh. This is the misconception that keeps millions of non-technical people mired in the stone age of audio.
When you play back digital audio, that stairstep pattern isn't sent to the speakers. A DAC (digital to audio converter) finds the unique mathematical signal which passes through all those stairsteps
Re:Not really missing vinyl (Score:4, Informative)
In the early days of CDs, delta-sigma devices were not always used. Some systems used a true analog 44.1 kHz sampling rate using high precision devices from Burr-Brown and others. These devices would indeed produce stair-step patterns, and even with severe analog filtering some 22.05 kHz and aliased nearby frequencies would appear in the output. Young people with exceptional hearing could detect it, particularly after some training.
Technology has improved, and it's no longer difficult to design a system without that problem, but there was a time when it was a problem.
Re:Not really missing vinyl (Score:5, Informative)
First I'd love to cite an extremely good video on this topic https://www.xiph.org/video/vid... [xiph.org]
I'll try to distil down the relevant portion here.
Nyquist showed us that a bandwidth limited signal sampled by a discrete time system can be reproduced perfectly using 2n samples per unit time where n is the bandwidth of the signal in hertz.
Perfectly isn't hyperbole here. That is mathematically shown.
The other half of digital audio is the accuracy of measurement of those discrete samples. “Bit depth” or bits. While we can reproduce a signal perfectly with perfect samples there is some noise that is added by imperfect sampling of a signal. This is mathematically identical to tape hiss and can be manipulated to less noticeable frequencies using a technique called dithering.
Digital audio can and does faithfully reproduce the original signal with levels of noise below human perception even at a meager 16 bit depth and 48KHz sampling rate (44.1 is also very popular but 48 allows easier low pass filter design).
The stair-steps don't come out of the audio jack, the signal is reproduced by the imaging circuit.
Fast attacks that fall “in-between” the samples are NOT delayed or lost since, again using Nyquist, the signal can be perfectly reproduced (and this is demonstrated directly in the video).
There is a lot of myth and misunderstanding when it comes to digital audio, and there is a lot of truth too. The loudness wars, as other posters have pointed out, has done more to damage the reputation of digital audio than anything else and there are plenty of examples of compressed (both kinds) audio sounding just terrible. One being too low a data rate combined with a terrible encoder, the other just using a small fraction of the overall dynamic range. Those are real issues but they aren't fundamental to signal reproduction.
Hope that explains some of it!
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However, watching a file play is much less fun than watching a tape reel or a record spin. Sure, when I am doing something else while listening to music, I can listen to a file just as well (or may still listen to an analog recording since my file collection and my analog collection have different music). Also, when listening to files, I am sometimes too tempted to just skip songs, but I can't do that on a tape (need to keep the winding even, so I refrain from fast forwarding) so I listen to the entire tape
I never understood the warmth argument (Score:3)
Warmth and Vinyl compression and more (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've ripped a few songs off of vinyl, and they still sound like vinyl when I play them on my iPod, and I'm not talking about the snap crackle pop. The highs sound too "bright" or something.
I suppose if they were brand new records, played on one of those laser record players, there might be a difference, but that would hardly be a typical vinyl listening environment. Otherwise, it's just a form of distortion that is desirable to some people, like vacuum tube amplifiers. Also, the weakest link is still the h
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Loudness race (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not really missing vinyl (Score:5, Insightful)
I grew up in an urban, blue collar neighborhood in the 60s; we didn't have much (any) exposure to live music. But my mom had that depression era better-yourself ethic, so she amassed a fairly complete record collection of classical "standards", and bought a pretty good component stereo to play them on. But I never saw her listen to any of them. Having these meant we were cultured people to her, but she was too busy getting things done to waste time sitting around listening to music.
I on the other hand had plenty of time, and listened to everything. When I was older I saved up my paper route money and bought a high end audio-technica cartridge, then began adding to the record collection.
When I was sixteen I got a job at the hospital which paid good money; 20 hours a week at $3.75/hr which was good money back in 1977. I took my new found wealth and bought my very first opera tickets. I remember sitting in the audience and being shocked when the music just came out of nowhere, without the preliminary low hissing and popping I associated with the start of music. But that was nothing to what followed.
The music had color, depth and dimension I'd never imagined music having. Even though by then I had a pretty good sound system, what came out of it was a washed-out echo of the real thing. It was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. I can't describe it, except to say that if music coming off a vinyl record was a strong cup of coffee, then live music would be shooting cocaine directly into your veins.
That experienced killed my budding audiophile tendencies. To this day if I had a thousand dollars to spend on music, I'd spend it on performance tickets rather than upgrading my sound system.
As for CDs, they seem to be all over the place to me. Early on there were a lot of bad CDs because of bad engineering. Some were released with their vinyl oriented RIAA equalization intact, which is just plain dumb. People like to argue about technology, but I think recording engineering is an often overlooked factor in what comes out of your speakers. I have an MP3 album of the original cast recording of "Hair", and it sounds great over a good pair of earphones. It's not because of some kind of magical MP3 pixie dust, it's because the original recording was done so competently. If something is missing in the original master tapes, no amount of lossless encoding and copper-free speaker cables will conjure it back.
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To this day if I had a thousand dollars to spend on music, I'd spend it on performance tickets rather than upgrading my sound system.
The most amazing live experience is stuff like brass bands, such as Empire Brass. No recording can give justice to the physical impact of natural harmonics of perfectly tuned brass instruments. Amazing experience.
But his works for "listener" music, such as opera or jazz, but not for pop/rock concerts, where the sound quality is not there, the event is more about decibels and the social experience. Also instruments such as guitars tend to be tuned for intervals, not chords, and this minimizes the audio impac
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It's not the digital format that produces "the watery tones of overcompressed music". It's crap engineers and (IMHO, mainly) crap producers that create the atrocities that are most of today's music. I have some early CDs made back when the format was new that are a treat to listen to. I also have a few CD titles that I have two copies of: the original garbage CD release and a remastered version that the artists got re-released after being engineered by someone who knew WTF they were doing and was more conce
not lossless (Score:5, Insightful)
Vinyl is the only consumer playback format we have that's fully analog and fully lossless
The article itself gives plenty of examples why vinyl isn't lossless, and it's easy to name a few more.
Re:not lossless (Score:5, Insightful)
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Exactly! I was going to say something along these lines. I truly think it's less about sound quality and more about the experience and tangibility of the records. In this digital age tangible products have a much higher value. You can have 30k mp3s and not really feel a huge attachment to them (and they can all disappear in the blink of an eye). The album art is also actually visible (compared to CD cases). The social experience of dropping the needle and hanging out with friends is also a lot of fun.
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Right... Digital is superior in every measurable way to vinyl.
The "lossyness" of vinyl does, however, have the effect of putting a filter on the audio output. It rolls off the highs and lows, leaving you with a warm, low-mids heavy mix. Some people like that sound... great! But you can get that same effect with an EQ and still enjoy all of the benefits of digital.
That said... Digital can suck if the wrong person rips the song or over compresses it. Also, Vinyl is fun. I have a small vinyl collection myself.
Re:not lossless (Score:4, Interesting)
Vinyl is the only consumer playback format we have that's fully analog and fully lossless
The article itself gives plenty of examples why vinyl isn't lossless, and it's easy to name a few more.
This comes across as a second-hand, simplistic interpretation of something that was a fallacy to begin with. This is a fallacy that's either explicitly or implicitly used as the (flawed) basis of arguments, even on Slashdot.
The fallacy is that because "analogue" as a *purely abstract* concept can in theory have infinite precision- as opposed to digital (which by definition has a clearly-defined level of precision)- then an analogue medium like vinyl records must inherently be able to hold more detail than a digital one like (e.g.) compact discs.
Problem is, that argument could then be applied to any analogue medium (not just vinyl), so that e.g. a cheap, worn-out audio cassette recording made on a portable recorder in the early 70s must also be inherently superior to a CD, or even to a 24-bit, 96KHz digital master(!!!)
This makes the flaw in the argument more obvious, but it's still a flaw when applied to vinyl. The problem is that we're talking about actual, real-world examples of analogue media, not the abstract concept. In real life, no analogue medium can have infinite bandwidth, so they quite obviously *do* have inherent limits of precision and quality- just not as clearly delineated as those of digital. (*)
Of course, you might argue that we could engineer our analogue media to higher standards... but similarly, we could (theoretically) engineer a higher resolution and sampling rate into digital media, so there is no inherent argument in that either way.
Furthermore, by definition, a "perfect" analogue copy would require infinite perfection in the duplication process (clearly impossible) and the ability to verify this to infinite levels of precision (ditto). So by definition *any* analogue copy will be imperfect.
This isn't to say that CD is better than vinyl, or that digital is better than analogue. Maybe vinyl *is* better... maybe not. What it *is* saying is that the "analogue is infinite and digital is limited" argument *in itself* is flawed, and not a valid basis for drawing a conclusion either way. One can make comparisons where either is the clear winner- a good quality analogue turntable setup (and LP) will quite obviously sound better than a grungy 4-bit digital sample "bit bashed" through a C64 or Atari 800 sound chip. But the aforementioned 24-bit, 96KHz digital master will blatantly knock spots off an analogue C90 cassette recorded in 1973.
(*) One may be scientifically able to calculate the meaningful upper limit of cassette bandwidth and the noise floor by (e.g.) looking at the maximum theoretical magnetisation possible, spacing of the grains, et al... both in theory and in practice. I can't tell you what those limits are, but I can be quite confident that they'll exist, and hence dictate the maximum sound quality.
Sounds Better? (Score:2)
Re:Sounds Better? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't have a horse in either race, but I'm curious - Have any blind studies been done to determine if vinyl does indeed sound better? My audiophile father-in-law would tell you HD-CD sounds better than vinyl, but I don't have the ears to tell either way...
Yes. These are from my days of reading high-end hi-fi magazines that don't have the content online, so I don't have links, but one of the more definitive double blind studies proved that people who claimed they preferred the LP sound over CD (including both "golden ear" audiophiles and professional sound people) indeed were able to reliably identify and prefer the LP sound in controlled double blind experiments. But, when the same experiment compared with CD-R recorded from LP as source, they were not able to identify the difference at all. CD-R from LP as source was equally preferred over CD as LP.
This corresponds exactly with the science of the technical characteristics of the two technologies, signal theory and human hearing. The "warm, analogue" LP sound carried perfectly over to the CD-R, as it is distortion characteristics of LP playback that CD is perfectly able to replicate (Nyquist theorem).
HDCD is a different discussion. I was myself a HDCD supporter in my (luckily now behind me) audiophile days. But HDCD mainly sounded better because the mastering was better, not because of technical specs of the format. HDCD productions took greater care with quality of mastering, not at least avoiding the overuse of dynamic compression.
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"Sounding better" is subjective but what isn't subjective is that the "roomy and warm" sound we associate with pressed vinyl audio is the result of the frequency limitations audio must adhere to due to the nature of the physical media and the displacement of material the grooves create. There's a certain point at higher and lower frequencies in a given recording that extremes in highs and lows need to conserve both physical material and space since it is the depth and width of grooves that make vibrations
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It is well known that differences in audio quality between digital formats (CDs, MP3, FLACs, etc.) to Vinyl are due to different mastering for the respective media [hydrogenaud.io]. HA has also set up a wiki page regarding misconceptions about Vinyl mastering [hydrogenaud.io] and Vinyl as a medium [hydrogenaud.io]. Vinyl is an inherently flawed medium, with problems like wear, necessitating expensive gear and knowledge for playback, and low audio quality compared to digital media. That some people still prefer Vinyl releases shows that they either don't rea
Re:Sounds Better? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It doesn't matter how much you spend, Media conglomerates have ruined CDs, see the Loudness war [wikipedia.org]
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^
Plus they are only going to make one master, They arent going to make a less-compressed version just for the tiny percentage of vinyl purchasers
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You really want to give someone a taste test. Given them organic beef, regular lean beef, and venison. Odds are they can't name them correctly.
it is usually only hunters or family there of that can tell the difference.
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If you can't tell game from livestock then you have no tastebuds.
"Organic" when it applies to animals can be a bit trickier since it also relates to how the animals live and are treated and this can impact things other than just taste.
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This isn't true for me. I really don't give a rat's ass about "toxins" (that's WAY overblown) - but I generally buy organic. Why? Quality. I'm not directly talking about "taste" (although grass-fed beef _does_ taste different from corn fed... but both are good!). I'm talking about average _quality_ of the food: i.e. how fresh it is, how well it is packaged, how it has been processed (or not), etc.
Yes, if you have two cows that are both high quality and you raise one organically and one non-organically
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And then there is the psycho-acoustics effect of the big, beautiful record covers. ;)
Especially the folding ones for double albums. Preferably with a bit of embossing or matte finish on the inside cover. Tales From Topographic Oceans was a favourite of mine.
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Hell, I was done with vinyl when it was still the in thing originally. It's a terribly inconvenient format. I was happy to have an alternative (tape).
Having avoided it in the past I am fascinated to see people fawn all over it now as if it's the hot new thing.
Although the format was better for cover art...
One word: (Score:5, Insightful)
Hipsters.
Also, DJs (Score:4, Interesting)
While "Hipsters" is the go-to answer to why vinyl records are all the rage, DJs are another part. Some songs are still pressed [discogs.com] on 12" singles (most commonly EDM and hip-hop; frequently with instrumental versions as well), but the best selling vinyl pressing for quite some time now has been the Serato Timecode record. It allows DJs to use standard Technics 1200s (and newer models, like the Numark TTX and the Reloop 7000s) to still spin and scratch records, but without being limited by what's actually being pressed because it manipulates MP3 playback on a computer.
Amongst the reasons these records sell so well is because instead of having hundreds of records that get 1-2 plays a night, the same pair of records are played all night, so it's entirely realistic to go through a pair a month, depending on how much pressure is put on the needle. Serato is (or was-for-a-very-long-time depending on who's numbers you believe) the most popular DVS platform, with Traktor in second place, though it's more popular with DJs who use (MIDI) Controllers instead of vinyl. Serato and several other DJ software titles now support the vast number of controllers that have been released, so overall interest in DJing with timecode vinyl isn't quite as popular as it once was. Still, while Jack White’s Lazaretto sold over 75,000 copies this year, it pales in comparison to the number of club jocks who buy timecode records, in pairs, monthly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Sorry for the self-reply, but this is a better DMC routine video; there are hundreds and hundreds of them on youtube...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Its also greatly waning in the house/trance/etc genres. Most of them at this point just carry usb sticks since the club standard players all have usb ports. Less to lose, less to carry, easier to keep backups
I don't really get it either. (Score:2)
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Or it could be that human beings haven't changed much and seeing a physical object directly picking up a squiggle wave and turning it into an electric wave that makes a speaker cone wobble is instinctively more "human" than a cheap chinese piece of plastic with 5 cents of silicon running more software than a team of PhDs can understand in a year.
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Man, I don't know what reel to reel is "dramatically" less than a digital source. My TEAC X3 and Pioneer RT-909 sound just fine.
I can sort of see the appeal (Score:2)
I often buy physical books because I like to have them on my bookshelf and the tactile experience of reading a paper book... even though from a practicality perspective, ebooks are easier to refer to and carry around. So I end up often having both a paper and ebook version. If you want to do something like that with music, then I can see the appeal of vinyl over CD as the physical format: CDs have smaller artwork and are generally less interesting as objects to own and play. So might as well get vinyl for t
Nitche Market (Score:3)
Someone still makes buggy whips. If an infrastructure and supply line is established to fill the current market demand, that's where it ends. There's no growth here..
The fact is that given the same source content, high quality digital copies are by far higher quality, have better SN ratios and dynamic range than vinyl is capable of delivering, with a media that doesn't degrade the minute it's used.
It's not realistic to compare a highly compressed MP3 to vinyl. Compare a lossless audio file to vinyl and you'll find it to be significantly higher quality. Even if you don't believe the math.
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Yeah but unless you have the speakers and room and amplifier to go with that dynamic range (on what music? Today's music is so compressed a Fisher Price cassette deck is hi-fi), it's wasted information.
Oh and it's "niche".
And why does everything need to have "growth"? Only cancer has continuous growth. What if there's enough demand to keep some local technical people gainfully employed in the West?
Sure it's not the same kind of jobs our parents had, with job security, health insurance, benefits, and a retir
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The loudness wars started long before CDs.
It's prevalence has more to do with how music is produced than with the format it's recorded on - i.e. it's easier today to over compress something than it used to be.
If vinyl was still successful, there would be just as many over compressed piece of shit vinyl records as there are over compressed piece of shit CDs.
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"And why does everything need to have "growth"?"
Because without growth, there's no investment. Sometime look at the security pricing data after the most stable, profitable company reports flat earnings. Investors will keep a security of a company that reports huge losses but shows growth. Fear and greed drives the market.
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That's just a social model, a human convention. We will have to do away with "growth" as the "#1 model over all else" mentality we have. It works now and then, but it basically ignores all the productivity gains and technology we have.
What's wrong with a leisure society and guaranteed minimum livable conditions for all? And for the people with weird wiring who absolutely must have an owner or must dominate others or must have a bigger car, let's put them in a reserve and watch them fight over artificially s
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What's wrong with a leisure society and guaranteed minimum livable conditions for all?
Sounds good. Who will oversee the global culling program to bring the world population to sustainable numbers ?
The beauty of math (Score:2)
The beauty of math is that you don't have to believe in it, it will be true (if calculated/proved correctly) regardless.
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Exactly, and if I made 5000$/hour and worked 40 hour weeks, I'd make 200000$ a week, you don't have to believe it, the math just works.
That's the beauty of maths!
Oh, it has no meaning in the real world and there are no jobs that pay 5000$ an hour for the vast majority of the human race?
But the math works!!!!
My point is that math is just a concept, sound is real and how you perceive it is all the evidence you should need.
It's like food, I'm sure you can measure every spice down to the genetic level but I sti
Not convincing at all (Score:4, Insightful)
Audio is just a crazy world of snake oil and placebo.
Really, the argument that's supposed to convince us is this?
> That warm vinyl sound: "I think this is what people like about it: it pins very closely to the way that human beings hear music organically," Gonsalves said. "It's very mid-range-y and very warm," a sound that flatters the fuzzy guitars of rock 'n' roll.
I'm sorry but I just don't buy it. There seems to be no obvious reason why you couldn't easily hack up a digital audio filter that makes stuff "sound like a vinyl". I'd even wager that it already exists?
Especially when you skip the compression and use FLACs. (But no, I'm not that kind of person who would claim to be able to distnguish 320kbps mp3 from a FLAC.)
Re: Not convincing at all (Score:2)
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Re: Not convincing at all (Score:2)
Some (Score:5, Insightful)
Some listeners think that vinyl reproduces sound better than digital
And some people buy Gold-plated Monster cables and Macs too. It just proves there's a sucker born every minute (at least).
some youngsters like the social experience of gathering around a turntable.
That's mainly because most youngsters' "social experience" has been limited to school (see "Lord of the Flies") and texting. Actually, y'know, MEETING UP with someone is a HUGE novelty these days. The turntable's just incidental.
Just part of the complexity collapse (Score:4, Interesting)
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People are starting to draw back from the overwhelming complexity in all things.
Huh??? Using a record player is way more complicated than using digital media. Plus there's virtually no care or preparation for digital media, unlike vinyl.
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Can you explain how a record works? You can see the squiggle and even play it back with a sharp piece of plastic and you can hear the sound.
Now explain every bit in a MP3 and how the processor works.
You're confusing convenience with complexity.
Re:Just part of the complexity collapse (Score:4)
Maybe to a mundane person, but anyone with at least the curiosity of a mollusc might try to understand something beyond the level of the UI.
Guy making mint on vinyl says vinyl better! WOW! (Score:4, Insightful)
Meanwhile, an industry pro WITH A VESTED INTEREST IN THE SUCCESS OF VINYL offers his take on the endless debate of audio differences between analog records and digital formats
There. Fixed that for you.
NO DRM! (Score:5, Insightful)
The best thing about an analog format is no digital rights management. You buy it, you own it. You will always be able to listen to it, no-one will be able to revoke your license.
Digital formats and DRM have made music a transient, throw-away experience.
With vinyl, the recording has history. The vinyl you buy in middle school will be still playable in middle age.
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The vinyl you buy in middle school will be still playable in middle age
Except for the fact that it will be worn down.
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So will you, and that's the human aspect of it.
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Everything else has DRM.
The only way you can think that "DRM has disappeared" is if you are still living in 1998 and think that music is the only kind of media file under consideration.
Also, "services" contain DRM. They're specifically engineered to disallow copying. They are kind of nothing but DRM and they seem to be the current wave of the future in music.
Mesmerizing (Score:2)
I listened to vinyl and cassettes growing up. My brother had a Technics turntable and watching the checkered edges (don't know if there's a name) of the turntable platter at the light (front left side) was mesmerizing. It was also mesmerizing to watch the analog VU meters bounce around on a tape deck to the beat of the music. I enjoyed looking at the artwork, photos, and print on the jacket/sleeve. I thought that the music sounded pretty good at the time with a good turntable and good speakers, with an
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Stroboscope. Or, stroboscopic rings. The intervals were set so a 60 Hz flash of a neon lamp would, at the right speed, stand still. There was a set of 2-4 rings, one for each speed the turntable would do.
Pink Floyd and Yes covers FTW. Hipgnosis and Roger Dean were gods!
Both sides (Score:2)
First, how good your digital sounds depends a lot on the digital-to-analog circuitry. Your speakers are still analog, as are your ears.
Second, all reproduction loses information. The question, as those who developed MP3 and other psycho-acoustic compression models realized, is which losses are more noticeable to human listeners. Also, our brains process information at far higher resolution than we can consciously report. As philosophers say, phenomenal consciousness is broader than access consciousness.
Thir
Put your money into speakers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Put your money into speakers (Score:4, Insightful)
As a youngster growing up in the 1980's, countless dozens of hours were spent both in my own basement and the basement of my childhood (well, still) best friend's parents house listening to vinyl, cassettes, and analog FM radio. I later became a smalltime audiophile, I don't buy Monster Cable or equipment that costs more than 4 figures, but I still enjoy a good audio listening experience.
About 5 years ago, my friend's parents finally retired and I was around to help them move out west. While the old Pioneer receiver we used to jam out on had long since died or been retired to the local landfill, the off-name floor speakers were still there. I believe one had the same old lamp sitting on it that it always did, and the other one was just sitting there in the corner. They told me to put them out to the street.
Of course, they went in the trunk of my car, where I promptly took them home and stored them in my garage. This summer, as the garage had now collected enough surplus computer and electronic equipment to need it's twice a decade cleaning, I found the old "Utah" speakers and decided to hook them up to my receiver and see if they were dead or alive. I flicked on the local "oldies" station (meaning 70's and 80's music now) and I was immediately transported back in time. Radio still sounded today like it sounded back in 1986. The speakers provided all the "warmth" and "fullness" that people are always chasing after.
This may sound like a no-brainer, but speakers determine what you hear. Those speakers are now a permanent fixture out in my garage/man-cave. No, they don't sound like any of the big-name equipment I run in the home theater. But they are immersive with only 2 channels in a way a 9.2 surround system can never match. And when I sit outside on the weekend, enjoying a few beers and some (sometimes herb-fueled) tinkering with Linux boxes and electronics, to me at least, it's like going backwards to a time when things were still exciting, the guy on the radio was someone everyone knew, and you had the whole world in the palm of your hand.
I do apologize for waxing nostalgic on a public forum, and I do love my new technology, but damnit sometimes it's nice to just sit back and enjoy something simple that you love. I can understand the value to youngsters of sitting around listening to a piece of tangible vinyl that you can hold in your hand, look at the album art, read the lyrics (all without a LAN connection or Wi-Fi AP being involved) rather than some logical arrangement of bits on a chip or spinning platter. So yes, of course, put your money into speakers (or vinyl, or whatever makes you happy)! I recommend garage sales, swap meets, and flea markets!
Cover Art! (Score:2)
No other format offers the canvas that an LP cover does. Some of the best albums I own were selected because I liked the art, even if I did not know the band. Of course there were duds, but I did get introduced to some great music I might have missed otherwise.
both subjective and objective... (Score:3)
I always hate these kinds of discussions when there are too many engineers in the room. Of course, digital is better. You can prove it with Nyquist's theorem. In the long run, digital will win.
That said, there are numerous implicit signal-changing steps which tend to happen with analog equipment that people often find pleasing and which are not/haven't been sucessfully emulated in most digital audio equipment.
Take guitar amps. I've got a couple of decent Roland digital amps. They do an OK job of modelling a few different old tube amps. Do they sound like my friend's old blackface quad reverb? Oh god no. There is some magic going on there that the digital guys haven't figured out how to reproduce. Even vs. odd harmonics? Yeah I think we get that now, but there's more in there and we're not successfully modelling it. I can enumerate a lot of factors we're probably missing(power supply brownout at high volume, capacitive and inductive feedback loops, tube nonlinearities, transformer nonlinearities, temperature fluctuations, microphonic components... etc etc etc) but there are still more we haven't really considered yet.
That said, there are still people who prefer solid-state guitar and HiFi sound to analog colored sound. A lot of it is what you're used to. People hear different things, sometimes due to culture, sometimes due to physiology... it's complicated.
Back to vinyl records - they do have a nicer sound in many cases, clicks and pops aside. It's probably a result of the RIAA EQ and the physics of a needle riding over vinyl, but I don't really know. One thing I do think has value is the act of listening to a complete record. Not only are you appreciating the artists' complete work as they intended it, the ritual of listening to a record often entails setting aside time and space to solely enjoy that record. You can't compare listening to, say, Dark Side of the Moon, while lying on your couch in a dark room to listening to a few out-of-context songs on your headphones while riding a bus.
Whatever... we aren't going to solve this battle on /.
Hearing evolution in action (Score:3)
"Some listeners think that vinyl reproduces sound better than digital,"
No, it's just that this generation has got hearing damage from the free, crappy, white iPod/iPhone earbuds and MP3s rely on a normal hearing capability.
So this sounds different for them.
Time for modern analog formats (Score:3)
Maybe modern hi def digital audio formats exceed anything that can be practically extracted from vinyl. But, we could do things with equally modern analog technology that would blow digital out of the water. Imagine a physical family photo that you can hang on the wall, but also high resolution enough to make 100x magnified reprints with simple optical equipment. Now add a reasonable assurance that a photo will be still viewable after 100 years for your grand-grandchildren. Magnification may degrade, but whatever is left can be accessed with hardware made based on simple instructions. How do you like the chances of preserving and especially being able to read and display a JPEG over that timeframe?
Tick (1.8 sec), TICK (1.8 sec), tick (1.8 sec) (Score:5, Insightful)
Different technologies have different characteristics, and I guess one has to use one's personal weighting function. I had a pretty good system (AR turntable, top-of-the-line Shure cartridge, electrostatic earphones) and I love digital audio and honestly don't know how anyone can stand vinyl.
I used a dust bug, I used a DiscWasher, I treated my records very carefully, but there always came the dreaded moment when I would hear: "tick." And at that point, I'd always tense up, and only relax 1.8 seconds later if I didn't hear a second "tick." Three consecutive "ticks" 1.8 seconds apart would seriously interfere with my enjoyment of the sound. My success rate on removing them by cleaning was very low--more often then not, the cleaning attempt (even with the best D4 fluid etc.) would simply add a very delicate, light background crackle.
And I am not even talking about tape hiss, surface noise, warp wow, rumble, and a little trace of 60 Hz hum that I never could quite get rid of. And ugh, getting to the end of a symphony and having the big loud glorious coda come up in the inner groove (vinyl was pretty good at the outer edge, but no-kidding-obvious-problems in the slower-moving inner grooves).
And taking the occasional bad pressing back to the record store and arguing with the store clerk about exchanging it.
And changing the darn record every 20-30 minutes... and feeling guilty if I left it unattended and came back later to find it had been playing the end-groove for hours.
Even with a good tonearm and lightweight cartridge, vinyl does not sound as good on the tenth playing as it did on the first.
Digital audio may have its faults and if people enjoy the characteristics of vinyl, there can be no dispute about tastes. But to me the positives outweigh the negatives--by about a factor of ten.
The difference is the process involved. (Score:3)
I always tell friends who ask about my collection that vinyl is to digital media what home cooked meals are to microwave dinners. Some people don't like cooking and choose easy and fact meals they can just eat so they are no longer hungry. While other people enjoy the process of cooking for hours to make a meal they are proud of and enjoy. Is the home cooked meal better? To the person who cooked it yes it most likely is because of their involvement.
These days with digital media you simply browse a site/app click a few buttons and the song or album is lost into your collection. It becomes background noise after listing to it a few times and has no real relevance to the person. With vinyl (specifically hard to find albums) a person can spend years searching for the album. They might go to stores weekly talking with employees and building friendships so they can get items held for them or called when a big collection just comes in, or spend hours walking around the city searching all the stores. Nearly all my records have stories like this.
There is also the process of playing the albums vs simply hitting shuffle on your computer. You have to search your collection deciding what you want to listen to, start up your equipment, maybe you have to clean the record before hand. You also have a tangible object you need to interact with. There is involvement.
So like I said; some people want quick and easy music that requires no involvement. Some of us do. I love the process and thinking about what I went though to get an album I'm listening to, or who I talked to when they suggested something or the show I picked the album up at. Personally I could care less if one or the other sounds better and I still personally listen to streaming music/mp3's when I simply want background noise, but when I want to listen to music I turn to my vinyl.
When did you get into music? (Score:3)
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You'll pardon me if I get my wading boots on before you continue.
TL;DR: [citation needed]
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CD's however can (and do) have built in hidden signals that allows the software police to track the origin of any ripped tracks.
Feel free to prove me wrong, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that they can't (and don't). CDs are mass produced from glass masters. How could they have "hidden signals"?
Once ripped and compressed, sure, you're going to see differences between files of the same track (unless the same software was used with the same settings, and the rip was error free).
Not sure how practical any "tracking" would be, either - at best, finding the same rip on two computers tells you... well, it tells you that it's th
Re:I like my men in vinyl whilst having the homose (Score:4, Informative)
Not to mention how the hell are we gonna clean weed on CD covers or iPods?
You could de-seed a whole oz. in 5 minutes on a good double album and a card back in the day.
But then, the weed today isn't half seeds like it used to be, either...
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Many young people can hear frequencies higher than the 22.05 kHz maximum of 44.1 kHz sampling. I could hear up to about 27 kHz at 30 years old; both I and a friend of mine found places with so-called ultrasonic alarms painful.
Similarly, 16 bit audio is good for no more than 98 dB, but it's well established that the human audio dynamic range is at least 120 dB.
If the tests are set up to make the differences between 44.1/16 and 192/24 easy to detect, many people can detect the difference. If the tests are set