I’m not sure if new music will sound right on vinyl. The days of multi-track tape are long gone. Everything the studio does is digital. Taking that and converting to analog signal for vinyl is going to sound different. They still have to physically cut & etch a metal master to stamp out the copies.
Posters above already mentioned the different mixing techniques needed for vinyl.
I’m curious to see what “new records” sound like.
One of the things that really bothered me in the LP era was the disc noise. I tried every low and hi-tech method of cleaning the discs, but never could get rid of clicks and pops (and the “click & pop” electronic removers operated by modifying the music, so that didn’t appeal to a purist). I had the best sound system, turntables, pickups, speakers, amps, but the surface noise was always there in quiet passages or between cuts.
So when CDs came out and I realized they eliminated that problem, I was sold. Now all we had to do was get rid of tape hiss…and in time, tape was also eliminated from the recording process stream, and that made CDs ever better. I’d never want to go back.
And CDs also eliminated the deterioration from repeated playings, pitch changes from warped records and even off-center holes (yes, some commercial pressings weren’t all that accurate!).
Sure, I would never part with my LP & 45 collection, some of them rare collector’s items, partly because of the art work, but anything I want to listen to again has already been transferred to digital and I rarely have to go back.
aceplace, why the quotation marks around “new records?” As others have mentioned, production of vinyl records has not ceased. Walk into a record store and listen to a new record if you’re curious.
While strictly analogue studios are indeed scarce, the expertise at the controls has more to do with the sound than whether or not the recording engineer or mastering engineer uses digital or analogue tools to get the sound right.
I wasn’t knocking the idea of releasing more material on vinyl. I hated seeing records disappear. I bought a lot of records for my collection from cut out bins. One time I found the first 5 CCR albums in a cut out bin. The store was dumping stock for CD’s.
By “new records” I meant new material/artists. There’s very little new stuff out these days that I can stand. Bob Seger’s new cd is pretty good, and a few other older artists still release material. EmmyLou Harris is a must buy for me. I still play my records once in awhile and they are wearing out. Eventually I need to buy new copies. I’m hoping they’ll be available some day.
I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be a radio DJ nowadays. I was a college DJ in the 70s, and we slip-cued records so that they would start at the precise spot in the music that you wanted, at the instant you wanted. (Slip-cuing is taking the turntable out of gear, putting the needle on the record, and rocking it back and forth to get to the desired starting point.) I guess with CDs, you just pre-listen, note the elapsed time at the desired starting point, then go back and hit “pause” at that time. Probably easier, but it doesn’t seem as fun… kind of like driving an automatic instead of a standard.
Radio DJ’s haven’t used CDs for years. All audio is on computer files, and cueing is automatic. For that matter, many radio DJs don’t even choose the music to play or when to play it. It is just presented to them by a computer, in sequence, and they fill in the gaps or read the suggested text.
The LPs don’t have to be in near perfect condition, but it helps if you don’t want to be sitting there for an hour or more fixing skips and deleting pops and such. Maybe there’s a super-sophisticated system out there that creates unearthly sound quality when converting LPs to digital files, but the $100 USB turntable and readily available software I use get great results for me and I doubt I’d be able to detect the difference supposedly available from a high-end setup.
I like handling and recording record albums to digital media, but have no interest at this point in playing them on the original equipment for the alleged “warm” sound or whatever. I don’t think vinyl will ever represent more than a tiny niche in the nostalgia/audiphile segment of the buying public.
Note to cjepson: I also fondly remember manually cueing records to play on the air and mixing songs to get an effect. Another lost art…
Wanna bet? Those big discs on top are jog wheels for scratching. That’s standard on the CD players club DJs use.
Why are early CDs considered to be really bad ? Compared to what ? I understand that the music could have been remastered for CD (and in fact some remastered CDs from the 90’s are considered to be better than the original vinyl). I also understand that some people consider that current mastering techniques are pushing the dynamic range so much that new CDs sound worse than modern vinyl. Having said all that, I want to compare vinyl releases to the mid-80s (first generation) CDs. From what I understand, those CDs were mastered from the same master tapes as the vinyl releases, so the CDs should have been at least as good as the mid-80s vinyl - is that true ?
There is a hidden assumption here, one that is the crux of the problem. One thing to understand is the purpose of a “master” tape. In principle it is the final artifact that is used for reproduction of the recording. You send the master tape to the pressing plant and they use it to directly cut the “master” disk. (The master disk is a playable thing - although being cut in wax it is easily damaged. The master is plated and a “mother” is created which is used for actually pressing the records.)
The issue is, that LPs do not play distortion free. They have a range of distortion artifacts and restrictions on what can usefully be recorded on them. A trivial example is that you can’t record out of phase low frequencies with much amplitude. Doing so will simply bounce the stylus out of the groove. Luckily most people don’t want to do this, but it one reason the kick drum is mixed dead center. But there are many other issues. Mainly the LP is far from linear. Every part of the process introduces distortion and anomolies. The wax the master disk is made from has plastic flows and hysterisis that cause compression and various distortion issues. On playback the vinyl itself has some level of flexiblity, and the frequency response of even slightly worn vinyl is rolled off.
The LP process makes high frequencies very hard to record successfully as they have a very very tiny amplitude wiggle in the groove, and bass frequencies have an absolutly huge wiggle, so there is a standard compensation applied which reduces the amplitude of the bass and increases the amplitude of the high frequencies during the cutting process, and your playback system applies the inverse, in order to get the correct freqeuncy response back. (This is the RIAA equalisation.) By itself the RIAA equalisation is benign, but in combination with the other distortion mechanisms it may become less accurate and hard to control.
The upshot is that the LP process doesn’t get you back the same sound as you put in. If you compare the real master tape with what the LP plays back, they sound different. So engineers mixed down to the master in a manner that experience told them would compensate for these issues. Indeed, more than compensate for, one might argue that the addional warmth inherent in some of the distortion products became part of the desired sound. The result is that the master tape may be mixed to sound slightly cold, clinical, and a bit strident. The LP process providing just the right amount of high frequency droop and warming up of the sound to sound right.
So now you get to play back your CD which is a distortion free, flat frequency response version. And you complain that it sounds cold, clinical and strident. 
Another issue was that many CDs were taken from second or third generation masters (the actual real master always being far to precious to let out of the studio) and whilst they were OK for LP cutting, limitations in their reproduction may have become more obvious on CD.
Mastering has changed over the years. In the age of the LP the master was what the recording engineer created. Now it isn’t. There is a seperate mastering step, usually (and prefereably) done by a diffferent engineer, who takes the mixdown and applies what amounts to sonic tweaks to make it sound good. These are done to the stereo tracks, and are usually careful tweaks to frequency balance and careful use of compression and levelling. The sad thing is that often the use of compression is anything but careful. The idea (if not the practice) is that the recording engineer creates a perfect a HiFi sounding track as he can, one to be listened to on the $20,000 studio monitors in a perfect listening room, and the mastering engineer creates the version that is best suited to the reproduction chain. Sadly, often the reproduction chain is defined to include a car stereo or a cheap radio, and the mastering engineer does what he is told, not what is best.
Yeah, most local bands here I know have at least one vinyl release usually a 7", sometimes an album. I only got a record player in Nov for my birthday, I can finally listen to over a decade’s accumulated local releases. 
Recently read an article in AARP about vinyl making a comeback, but it didn’t convince me. Just basically said that the pops and scratches and skips make it all worthwhile to buy vinyl again.
That and once you place the needle on the record, it begins to deteriorate
The only thing the article was positive about was that many, many vinyls never made it to cd.
And that sucks to a guy who (in the late 70’s) used to actually (after hours) listen to all the 45’s sent to my radio station in cheap padded envelopes with letters included to please give them a try?
I wonder how many “Beatles” I may have missed?
Q
Perhaps a nitpick, and perhaps you are using the word “wax” as slang, but true wax hasn’t been used since Edison’s experimental days. The master is cut on an acetate-coated aluminim disc.
From Mastering For Vinyl
Does this all mean that the box of original and pristine jazz 45s I bought at a garage sale some years ago are finally worth something?
Are they by Kenny A, Kenny B, Kenny C, Kenny D, Kenny E, and Kenny F? Then probably not.
I can’t imagine going back to scratches and pops and clicks.
Don’t forget stuck records - loads of fun.
Hasn’t that been true for decades? I thought many albums in the 70s were also mastered to sound good in a car (where they’d be heard over the radio), resulting in a lot of treble.
I managed to hold on to most of my old records from high school. My record player finally gave up the ghost after years of repair shop maintaince. But then the repair shops themselves disappeared so I was out of luck.
Still held on to my records, mostly out of sentimental attachment, not an easy task as I am violently opposed to clutter (if you haven’t used it, throw it away!) and moved back and forth across the country several times since high school.
Lst year, i found the Crosley Rochester. Wow, now I can play all my old records and the fact that I don’t have anything but basic sound (no bass or treble controls) doesn’t bother me a bit.
