Hey, WORLD - record players and vinyl STILL EXIST, ok?

This isn’t really an angry rant as much as a genuinely confused and slightly irritated one.

I’m a music lover who has a ton of music; about 5,000 CD’s and and two 120 gig hard drives full of mp3’s. Though I’m only 25, I also have a turntable and (i’d estimate) about 10,000 vinyl records and 7"/45’s.

It seems that the entire world has decided that turntables and vinyl records are not just no longer made, but have somehow ceased to exist; when I was recently moving into my new place (and lugging box after box of records up the steps), one of my new neighbors reacted as though I were bringing Dinosaur fossils into the apartment. “Oh, my god! Are those vinyl records? Where did you get them? I didn’t think I’d ever even see a record again!”

I’ve noticed similar ideas in threads on the SDMB, like the recent Blather thread that begins with
“Now that LP’s are extinct…” Extinct? I just bought 10 brand new records the other day, and they were more expensive than CD’s! I’m not pitting the guy who made the comment at all - who can blame him, when it seems that the entire world has decided that records “no longer exist?”

The real shocker was my turntable; one of my wife’s friends had a similar reaction to it, as though I had a Pteranodon skeleton mounted on my desk. “Is that a record player? Where could you have possibly FOUND one?” Well, I just bought it brand new last year, and it was about $600. The cartridge set me back another $150. In fact, if you hop over to any given music equipment site, there’s seven fucking pages worth of new turntables and cartridges for sale. It’s not like the things are extinct, you twit!

Wake up, world! Though I can’t find any actual citation for it, an oft-repeated anecdote proclaims that for the past several years, new turntables have been outselling guitars in Japan, and I’ve heard similar rumblings (at least respective to the teenaged age group) regarding America. Turntables exist! Vinyl records are still being made!

Unless you’re a record scratcher person (is there a proper name for that?) or an audiophile they may as well not exist.

I got a really cool turntable on craigslist for super cheap… it’s made to look like an old console radio, but it also had AM/FM, cd player and a tape deck. When I have a few extra dollars I sometimes get old classical records for $1-3 at the used bookstore. I like listening to them while I’m painting…something about the cracking and popping that lends it a lot of atmosphere. Anyway, they also have lots of new shrink-wrapped vinyl from modern bands. LPs are certainly not extinct.

If anything’s dying, it’s the little audio cassette. They don’t have the DJ or audiophile appeal of vinyl and they don’t offer anything special over CDs. Fastforward/rewind sucks. I can play any song I want on a record just by putting the needle in the right spot. Even the used bookstore that carries tons of CDs and LPs has barely a cassette to be found. I think VHS is going to have a similar fate.

Or somebody who wants particular recordings which have never been released on CD (thankyou, eBay :wink: )

I was tutoring a student the other day who was having a lot of difficulty with the paragraph he was reading because it dealt with this ancient technology.

I felt old.

Eh, the one thing cassettes have over CDs is that they can bounce around unprotected in my car for months on end and still function perfectly when I put 'em in the player.

This is the part I don’t understand: why does any old music need to be ‘released’ on CD anymore? By now, the record companies should simply have all their old catalog digitized, and you go to their website, enter in what you want (and payment info), and a machine somewhere burns a disc for you, drops it into a mailer, and sends it to you.

I still have a turntable, from back in the days when turntables and cassette decks were the only choices. And about 300 record albums, and a few old 45s. One of these days, I’ve got to start digitizing the ones I play the most.

I just bought a turntable (thanks to advice given to me by a fellow Doper todd33rpm) so I could transfer my massive LP collection to CD. The turntable has “issues” (I’ll have to get it fixed or replaced), but I’ve found a temporary workaround for the “issue” through Apple’s Garagaband. So tonight (well, this morning) I transferred the glorious soundtrack to Marco Polo by Ennio Morricone. I haven’t heard this music for ages because I didn’t have a functioning turntable. I’ve missed listening to it all these years.

It’s so wonderful to have access to this music again. I have my own collection, and the thousands of Classical LPs my dad left us. And it’s true—the sound from LPs is a little richer.

I should say, I transferred the Marco Polo soundtrack over to CD.

I have the turntable, sure, but my question is thus: what place in the world does my 8-track player fall into? It ate my Grease 8-track earlier this year (alas), but I still have enough Barry Manilow and Neil Diamond tapes to feed it. Will you ever make a comeback, Little 8?

I just finally got a working turntable again - one of my boss’s relatives brought it in to the consignment store over the summer, and after fiddling around with it for ages, we finally got it to start working. So I grabbed up all my decent vinyl, started scouting the thrift stores for more, and brought it all to the store with me. The response has been similar to that described in the OP - “I didn’t even know records existed!” What surprises me more is that I’ve also had people (generally male, usually about my age) come in and flip through the records, looking to buy them. It’s not the fact that they’re ignoring the sign I have up explaining that the records aren’t for sale - no one ever reads signs - it’s the fact that there are record geeks up here at all. I thought I was the only one!

It’s not just “kids today,” either. The other day, I had to convince my mom that yes, I really did want my dad’s record collection and turntable. She couldn’t believe I wanted it. She pointed out that my dad had transferred all of his favorites onto cassettes, and why didn’t I just take those. :smack: I mean, I’ll take the cassettes, too, if she doesn’t want them, but sheesh!

Hey, what about those little turntables of the sort I had when I was a kid, that came with a little plastic record that had little bumps in it, and the player arm had a little pad of fine needles that would play the record like a music box? What happened to those? Huh? huh? I never see those in record stores!

Seriously though, I know what you mean. Me and Mr. AFG still have a turntable and a few records. Vinyl has a certain charm that, if you were to transfer some albums to CD, they would lose that sort of charm.

Damn! I didn’t know my brother was posting here! Seriously, that’s him, too. Right down to the lugging boxes up the stairs. And he lives in Chicago. He’s 30 years old, though.

He’s got so many records that he has multiple copies of some (4 copies of Led Zepplin 4). He’s got a great turntable, but he’s not a DJ. He just loves music.

Nice idea. But I think you’re underestimating just how much non-rereleased stuff there is out there. And in many cases, you’re talking about record companies that no longer exist, so there’s the problems of tracking down the current copyright holders, licencing, etc. None of this is any different, whether it’s for a CD or for online sales.

In my experience, turntables aren’t any more common in Japan than they are in the US. The only people I knew that had them were DJs.

Mantovani? They play Mantovani to insomniacs who don’t respond to strong drugs.

:slight_smile:

Let’s give the humble audio-cassette a little respect, shall we? :slight_smile: The format’s been around for more than 40 years, which makes it second only to the LP in terms of longevity and popularity. Granted, searching for a specific song that didn’t happen to be at the beginning of the tape was a major pain. What’s more, pre-recorded cassettes generally had pretty lousy sound (very flat if not downright muddy) and much inferior to the LP versions of the same title. Classical cassettes were often of genuine quality, although even they could be a bit chancy.

But cassettes offered advantages that the LPs, 8-track and open reel didn’t. Cassettes didn’t degrade nearly as quickly or as easily as LPs. All too exasperatingly often I’d find scratches and pops on LPs that I knew had been stored and handled with meticulous care. Not long after getting my first cassette deck I got into the habit of immediately taping new LPs, “archiving” the LP, and using the cassette for everyday listening. I could play cassettes in my car or in a boom box at work. (This is why many of my tapes survived an apartment fire that wiped out my LP collection.) I also made dozens of mix tapes of specific songs that I knew I’d want to hear often, which allowed me to listen to them without sorting through and handling my ever-so-awkwardly-fragile LPs. Cassettes weren’t nearly as bulky as the other three formats, and were simply a lot more convenient. After most of my music collection got wiped out in the aforementioned fire, I pretty much went all cassette, building a new music collection by taping LPs (and later on, CDs) borrowed from friends, family and the library. For about 15 years I owned several hundred cassettes but almost no LPs or CDs.

I fully expect that the cassette format will be around for at least another decade. By that, I mean that blank cassettes and possibly even new cassette players and recorders will still be in production and on sale. (You might have to look awful hard for 'em, though!)

The idea also ignores the fact that decent CDs aren’t just created by digitizing the master – they need to be digitally remastered. I suppose a crappy copy on CD is better than no copy at all, but since the records and the palyers are still out there… ::shrug::

We have a turntable that we picked up at a consignment store. Whenever I get nostalgic I pull out the records and pop them in to listen. I wish I had the equipment to transfer the stuff on them to CD, or hell, even cassette! I have at least one record that I cannot find on CD or tape that I would LOVE to have and be able to listen to more often.