It makes sense if you still have the LPs. I’m just not that into music and neither is my wife, we gave away all the vinyl decades ago. When CDs were first coming out I couldn’t really tell the difference, I don’t have a great ear and I’d just been filtering out the noise all my life. But now I can tell right off if I’m listening to a record, even a pristine record isn’t as rich as digital recordings.
I can see that it may seem somewhat cool to someone who’s never seen a record player operate before. I kind of remember it myself as a little kid, getting the needle on the track, automatic changers and replays, a little music making robot. Old mechanical jukeboxes are cool too, but there’s no special quality to the music. Us old folk can be nostalgic for it, maybe kids need some less perfect technology in their lives to appreciate what they have.
The last vinyl I bought was a box of 45 rpm records from an estate sale for $35. Most of them were jazz, some blues, some novelty (Purple People Eater and Davy Crockett come to mind), but all in pristine condition and in the original jackets. I just sold most of them at a neighbor’s garage sale for $100, minus the ones I knew had value online for $10-$25 (the latter for a Leadbelly extended play). Not a bad investment overall. Still have a bunch of LPs in the basement. Gave away a bunch to the local jazz station, sold some collectibles (Complete Blue Note and Pacific Jazz Recordings of several artists) on eBay. One guy at the garage sale gave me his number for whenever I’m done digitizing it all.
Yeah, there’s a market out there, however misguided.
I don’t understand why anyone would buy vinyl today. I would be like instead of washing clothes in your new electric washer, you take a washboard to the creek out back.
Technology has vastly improved. Why the desire to use outdated technology?
well some people like to be different. Using outdated stuff is one way of doing that. Just like some people like to drive old cars. Many guitarists like tube amps for their sound.
This local place sells tube stereo amps at high prices
I spent three years converting all my old LPs to mp3 files. It makes me happy to know that I will never suffer from any additional pops and scratches. (And I was able to use digital editing to remove quite a few pops and clicks.)
But, alas, some of my old LPs were in such bad shape – especially the ones with skips – that I had to buy CDs of the same performances. Bummer, but there you go.
A friend passed away, and I got all of his old recordings. Many were on old “clay” disks, and, alas, in the process of converting them to digital format, I dropped one and broke it. So, for those of us who are fumble-fingers, digital formating is heaven. I haven’t yet dropped an mp3 file!
The difference between a guitar amp and a home stereo setup though, is that the guitar amp is designed to colour the sound of the guitar and the type of distortion produced by tubes is desirable. The aim of a home stereo should presumably be to reproduce the sound of the original recording as faithfully as possible. You should therefore be looking for formats and amplifiers that don’t colour or distort the sound. A high resolution digital media played through a solid state stereo amplifier with lots of clean headroom should fit the bill far better than vinyl played through crappy tubes, but you can’t account for people’s tastes, the coolness factor of vintage equipment, and the pervasive belief that if something is more expensive it must be better.
I had a chuckle yesterday when I saw a cheap and nasty little turntable with built in speakers, “Enjoy the superior sound of vinyl where ever you go!” said the advertising sticker.
“and the pervasive belief that if something is more expensive it must be better.”
that is called using price as a surrogate for quality. Sometimes higher priced is better but sometimes all you get is stuff that looks better but doesn’t perform better.
Ah, vinyl. I was there, people. We fought a war to get rid of it. Here is the process we audiofiles used back in the day:
First, you take the record out of its protective sleeve (to preserve the jacket), the take the record out if its own protective sleeve (aftermarket ones, not the cheap crap the record originally came in. That can scratch the vinyl), handling it carefully by the edges, the place it carefully on the turntable. Them take the needle cleaning brush and mirror and make sure the needle is clean and perfect. Next, put the cleaning fluid on the discwasher (it hasn’t evaporated away? Good.) and carefully clean the disc. Next, hit it with the zero stat. (optional steps: light two candles and say a prayer to the record gods.) Start the turntable and check the strobe to ensure the platter is spinning properly, move the needle to the first track, then use the dampened cue arm to gently lower the tonearm, and finally now you can listen.
Then, in 20 minutes, you get to do it all over with the other side.
And you still get pops, dropouts, skips, plus the changing sound from the outside to the inside of the disc (because of the different linear speed of the needle over the vinyl). Records can still get damaged just sitting around, due to temperatures and humidity (you DO remove the shrink wrap, right? And keep them vertical?). Let alone albums such as Zep’s The Song Remains the Same, which as far as I can tell NEVER had a decent sounding pressing because of the limits of fitting 30 minutes on a side.
THIS is what people want to go back to? If you don’t follow (most) of these steps, the supposed “superior sound” of vinyl is never achieved. Might as well listen to 8-tracks.
I guess you have a turntable in your car? And at your desk at work? And really enjoy getting up every 20 minutes or so while listening to music? Or possibly your time is worth little enough that you can spend the time to digitize your existing LPs, likely ending up with a product that is inferior to even the worst mastered CD?
I’ve got plenty of vinyl records, and my sound system includes a turntable. But I’m >60, and I have a couple hundred vinyl albums from back in the day. I haven’t bought any new vinyl in 25 years, when I finally broke down and bought a CD player.
I still play the old vinyl, since I haven’t felt like paying the money to replace my record collection with CDs. If money was no object, I’d do it in a heartbeat, though. It’s a real nuisance to have to get up every 15-20 minutes to flip the record over, or put a new one on. Doubly so if I’ve got a cat in my lap, which is usually the case when I have a lap.
I was a practitioner of lo-fi; I didn’t go through most of those steps. (But, yes, I handled the disk only by the edges, stored LPs vertically, and replaced plastic inner sleeves with paper.)
To add to all you said, every time you play a record, the experience is different…because you’re degrading the damn thing with each playing. Every time you spin the disk, you add new scratches, pops, and skips. By the time you’ve played a favorite for the fiftieth time, you start to recognize where you are in the score by the most obnoxious sound flaws.
(There are some VERY nice software packages, some free, that clean up certain of these artifacts from sound files.)
Here’s to the days of vinyl and turntables: here’s also to the Spanish Inquisition, smallpox, and the divine right of kings. May hell gape for each.
Yeah, but I spent a lot of money on those LPs, so converting them to digital files, while time-consuming, is still cheaper than buying new CDs.
(Also, the full playing-time isn’t really consumed. You start the platter spinning, then go and do other things – how much time do we all waste here on the SDMB? – and then stop it at the end and go through the conversion routine, which goes pretty quickly. Of the 20 minutes playing-time, the conversion only takes five.)
I digitized some of my vinyl, mostly for albums that were never released on CD, or were changed on CD. Such as Head East Live, which is not only a horrible transfer, but is missing half the songs to boot! I used software to remove the clicks and pops, and it works pretty good. The software even gives you a “noise file” of all the removed snap crackle and pop. I guess you could use it to give your CDs that “authentic vinyl sound”!
