After having been left for dead in the late 80s, vinyl (both new and used) has had a surprising revival in sales the last few years. For people who grew up when vinyl was the dominant format, when did you stop buying vinyl? Did you buy only records, or did you mix it up with tapes and CDs? And have you started buying records again these days?
What music I did buy was on CD as soon as it was available. Tapes were for the car until a CD player became the standard. I didn’t really appreciate the difference at the time, but I do now. Vinyl sounds awful.
Quit buying vinyl and reel-to-reel tapes when cassettes came out in the 70s, passing on the 8-track phase. Then went to CDs in the 80s.
Not buying vinyl these days, but rather trying to sell what I have. I dumped a box full of 45s at a garage sale last summer.
I dropped vinyl when CD prices dropped to about par. CDs, at first, were too damn expensive, but once that changed, LPs have no further reason to exist.
It took me a couple years, but I managed to transfer all my vinyl to .mp3 files. Audacity made it fun and easy, and even let me edit out the worst pops and scratches. A USB turntable is one of the coolest things ever.
Maybe someday I’ll find a collector who’ll give me some $$$ for my LP library (around 500 albums, mostly classical/baroque.)
The last LP I bought was in 1989 (it was the soundtrack to the third Indiana Jones movie, so I can determine the year). I had been buying a mixture of LPs and cassettes for a while at that point, and I continued buying cassettes for a few more years before going to CDs exclusively. I might have continued buying LPs for a while, but they disappeared from record stores pretty much overnight. I got rid of the last of my collection in 2012.
The current vinyl revival baffles me. I don’t miss LPs at all. People talk nostalgically about all the rituals associated with them (cleaning them, organizing them, fiddling with tonearm pressure, shopping for replacement needles, etc.) but to me all that stuff was a pain in the ass.
It also amuses me that young people are into LPs now. I worked in a university library in the 1990s, and college students at that time thought that LPs were the dumbest thing in the world. New students would actually burst out laughing when they saw our shelves of LPs for the first time.
Only vinyl if available. If not then MP3. I will not buy CDs.
I resisted cds as long as possible out of some sort of now half-forgotten conspiracy theory that they were being forced upon the public. I know I was buying vinyl as late as 1987, possibly later, and I know I didn’t have a cd player until around 1993. I grudgingly bought a few cassette tapes in the meantime, but I didn’t have a lot of disposable income during that time period so it probably wouldn’t have mattered if vinyl was available. I had skipped 8 Tracks even though I felt vaguely uncool doing so. I know there are people who say they had the best sound (the closest to the original recording) available at that time, but I could never get past the mid-song track switching, the extended silence at the end, having to listen to a song I didn’t like to get to one I did, and so on.
Now I like cds just fine, but I do still miss album cover art. And yeah, I still have a nostalgia for some of the aspects of vinyl, particularly 45s: choosing what order to stack 6 singles (you could stack lps, too, but it tended to distort the sound); getting a new 45 and putting the repeat bar over so listen to it a dozen times in a row; the sound of the record player switching off; those little red or yellow discs that went in the center…
Anyway, to answer your question, late 80s.
I never stopped. Some percentage of what I wanted to buy has only been available on vinyl, even in the heyday of the CD.
Late eighties is when I stopped buy predominantly LPs and switched to predominantly CDs. But I still occasionally buy a blues album on LP, either because that’s the only way I can find it, or it just seems more fitting.
Also, and I know this is probably silly and possibly self-delusional, but I do think there is a subjective quality to LPs that CDs lack. I have Derek and the Domino’s Layla album on both CD and LP. I believe that the LP sounds better, warmer, more genuine somehow. Probably self-delusional nostalgia befuddling my brain, but nonetheless, I enjoy it more that way.
ETA - and yes, you can’t beat the liner notes experience on LPs.
I haven’t bought vinyl in years. But I kept what I had, LP’s. Today I arranged to take home my mother record player/radio/cassette player. She can’t use the record player anymore because her hand tremors prevent her from putting a needle down neatly. I’m looking forward to listening to some vinyl again.
Me too, and I’m an asshole who drives cars that are 40 years old with rotten Recaro seats that were $1400 new because I think it looks cool. And they are a blast to drive.
A fucking new Subaru will wax me.
But music on vinyl? That’s just kooky.
Being an audiophile I dreamt of something, anything, better than dragging an industrial diamond rock across a piece of flexible plastic to reproduce audio waves for almost as long as I can remember. The last vinyl record I bought must have been the mid-eighties. I didn’t even own a CD player yet, but as soon as my brother bought one I never even considered buying vinyl again. Recorded them onto Type IV Metal cassettes until I got my own CD player (and eventually a car CD player around '93 or so).
Even though I switched to using my iPhone for my music a couple years ago I still usually buy CDs. Not much new stuff interests me, so if it’s just a single I’ll buy the MP3 (from Amazon) but whole albums I still buy a physical CD because they are often less expensive than buying them online. The last CD I bought was Def Leppard’s live *Mirrorball *triple album (two CDs and a bonus DVD). It was only $17 at Best Buy and iTunes wanted $19 for it (without the bonus DVD). I’ve been ripping CDs as long as it’s been possible.
I will never tire of laughing at* ‘the warmth of vinyl’* lunatics. I refuse to watch Blu-rays, I prefer the *warmth *of VHS… 
I miss the album art a bit but the fact is there is far more information on any given album available on line (Wikipedia, band websites etc) than was ever in liner notes.
There’s all this discussion about “the kids” who are “reviving vinyl” but I’m yet to see any convincing figures. I think the reality is that a few hipsters are doing it to be cool, and they get written about because journalists have got to write about something. In the meantime, 99.99 etc% of people are obtaining their music via digital file formats.
If only this were true. Just the other day, I was listening to James Taylor’s “In The Pocket,” and noticing the awesome backing tuba on “Everybody Has The Blues.” Since I was sitting at my computer, I googled to see if it truly was a tuba, and who was playing it. Couldn’t find anything online. I had to go downstairs to my shelf and pull out the LP to see that it was Red Callender playing that particular instrument on that particular track.
(To be fair, Wikipedia DID list Red C. as playing tuba on that album, but I couldn’t find any online sources listing him as playing on that track. Which the LP liner notes did list.)
I HATED the “ritual” of vinyl. Too much work to get the best sound, and knowing that every time you played the record, you were degrading it. I used to make very high quality cassette tapes (Yamaha K1020 with add-on Dbx noise reduction) to try to stem the data loss, but as soon as digital came out, I switched and never looked back.
Digital music, especially with managing systems (such as iTunes) is the future I always dreamed about. I have instant access to everything in my library, in any order, and no degradation of quality.
However, I musty say mp3s are the equivalent of an 8-track. Why are people deliberately degrading their music? Maybe 192 bitrate can be acceptable, especially to older ears, but I’ve seen people encode their music at 128, even 92! AM radio has better sound! I don’t get it. All my music is AIFF encoded. Full quality only! It probably helps that I protected my hearing when I was younger.
Yes, the three current delivery systems: poor, worse, and great.
That’s the real heartbreak of vinyl. You’re listening to something you love…and hear a new scratch, click, or pop…and you know it’s there forever now.
That’s me: old enough that .mp3 is indistinguishable from vinyl or CD. I converted all my old LPs to mp3 (but…I did keep the full Audacity .aud and data files, so I haven’t thrown away the extra fidelity; I just don’t listen to it as a normal matter of course.)
Question: how do I know what the sampling rate is of an .mp3 file? My Audacity settings are “44100 Hz.” Is that the same thing as “192 bitrate?”
ETA: I’ve also got “effects enables” – LADSPA, Nyquist, VAMP, and VST. Wha’?
This.
Even though I was born in the twilight if the vinyl years, and it was pretty much dead by the time I got into music, I’ve always purchased music on both vinyl and CD. A lot of them I have on both formats. I still have yet to ever purchase a new vinyl album. I usually search thrift shops and used record stores.
It may be your imagination, but it is likely that it isn’t. The mastering process can be different for CDs and vinyl, even today. I’m not sure about the Layla CD you have, but the process is even more varied when re-mastering an old recording for re-release on CD.
A lot of earlier or less expensive re-issues didn’t re-master at all. Due to it originally being mixed to the older equipment’s foibles, the EQ often sounds completely wrong when transferred to digital media. I have several recordings that originally came out only as singles or EPs that were later collected on CD (without re-mastering) with other recordings that I missed from the same period. Where I have duplicates, I compare them. Some recordings transfer well without re-mastering, but some sound atrocious. In the bad cases, the original master had too much treble, but vinyl distorted this or attenuated this to a pleasant level. The CD lets the harshness of the original master through.
So, to try to make the CD releases sound more like the original vinyl or to take advantage of the greater dynamic range of CD, things started regularly getting re-mastered. People shooting for the former can usually get a good reproduction of the original. If they’re shooting for the latter, they’re almost certain to get a recording that sounds subtly different. Either method usually involves a re-EQ, if nothing else. Sometimes the original recording is actually re-mixed from the original tracks, but that’s not necessary for transfer to CD.
Now, since the advent of the CD and digital media, it’s the target of the original mix. Unless the CD is compressed crazily, there’s not much difference in the sound unless you mistreat the media.
Bitrate is a separate setting from frequency. If you’re ripping from an audio CD, 44100 Hz is all you need for frequency as that’s what CD recordings are manufactured at, but there will be an option somewhere in ‘Recording Settings’ to choose a bitrate (the default setting will probably be 160 kbits/second). Put simply, bitrate is the level of compression you choose when encoding an MP3 audio file. A higher bitrate gives better sound quality but also a larger file size. From Wikipedia:
**
The MP3 audio format lossy data compression. Audio quality improves with increasing bitrate:
[ul][li]32 kbit/s – generally acceptable only for speech[/li][li]96 kbit/s – generally used for speech or low-quality streaming[/li][li]128 or 160 kbit/s – mid-range bitrate quality[/li][li]192 kbit/s – a commonly used high-quality bitrate[/li][li]320 kbit/s – highest level supported by the MP3 standard[/li][/ul]**
File size increases directly proportional to the increase in bitrate. IOW doubling the bitrate from 160 kbits/s to 320 will double the MP3 file’s size (say from 8MB to 16MB and so on). There is also a ‘variable’ bitrate setting. With this the bitrate fluctuates up & down depending on the complexity of the sound (more compression for quieter, simple sounding sections and less compression for more complex ones). All this was really only important back when memory and hard disk storage were limited. Nowadays there’s little reason to not sample all music at 192 minimum.
Our 16 year old daughter is infatuated with 1960s rock music (Beatles, Doors, Who, Zep, etc.), and the only format she wants is vinyl. My pet theory is that she likes to swoon over the cover art. 