It’s not surprising that they still have a market, it is surprising though that sales in the US/UK/Ireland have been going up for at least the last five years. I think it’s partly nostalgia, partly fashionable, and partly an indie/hipster reaction again or to digital ubiquity. At the end of the day people still want to acquire things and vinyl has a thinginess fans can’t get with digital downloads alone. I think international Record Store Day has helped boost vinyl sales too.
We’re in the same boat–I grew up using hand-me-down turntables and awful speakers, scratched up records, used 8-tracks, etc. People who say vinyl sounds better than digital are still thinking about the original non-mastered CDs in the mid-80s where most of them sounded like complete shit. They’re also emotionally invested in the vinyl. I definitely am not.
That being said, I’m grateful for some of those enthusiasts, especially one guy who recorded his LPs in FLAC format, and 98% of them were most certainly never released on any other format. He uploaded these funk gems onto Demonoid (RIP) and they do sound fantastic. I imagine they’d sound better with better equipment than I have, but I was never fussy with the sound equipment.
This is worth noting. Some of the hasty transfers of albums to CDs in the early days were abysmal. The first copies of Van Morrison’s His Band and the Street Choir always stood out for me as the poster boy for this treatment, particularly the suddenly muddy-sounding horns. But that really does appear to have been an artifact of the time.
I gave up my nice Music Hall turntable for good about 7 years ago and I could have done so many years earlier as often as I used it.
I’m still a dinosaur, though ;). I still haven’t started downloading music in any significant way - it’s pretty much all still physical media.
I buy vinyl from artists and independent labels (mostly) that tend offer a lot of extras in a package. For example, things like: multi-colored vinyl, bonus instrumentals, mp3 download codes and/or CD packaged with the vinyl, signed posters/artwork,etc. I realize these are things only for super fans but the music I tend to buy comes from artists with < 50,000 fans or so but a large number of fans who will buy anything they put out. In the last decade I haven’t bought more than 2 albums in a year, but when I do I will put out 50 bucks or so for a super deluxe vinyl package.
My son and daughter also have record players but they get pretty standard popular albums like those from Green Day or the Black Keys.
Thank you for the info. I had no idea that they used vinyl at all until I received those 33 1/3 discs. I thought the interviews were broadcasted… That was in the 70s. I found it interesting that there were commercials and blank spots for the locals to commercials or station info into.
Since you know alot about records. I remember my moms old 78s and how brittle they were…as well as the early 33 1/3 which were thinner. Then in the early 70s they majorly changed. I can’t remember what they called them…just that it was written on a few inner sleeves… “Dyna flex” or something. Any idea? They were thinner and bendable. I won’t even discuss the flexi-disc singles… sent with magazines …more an 80s thing, but I saw a few in the 70s. Do you remember the cardboard records on cereal boxes in the 60s and 70s?
I’m not sure what you are referring to, but pre-1950, stations were often sent “transcription discs,” 78 RPM, 16-inch (!) records of ephemeral, periodic shows like Jack Benny, etc. Since they were intended to be played once and they didn’t fit on consumer-grade players (12" was the max), they were often destroyed after broadcast. At the time, nothing was more worthless than yesterday’s jokes.
I’m not sure when this practice ended, but sending radio shows over phone lines and other network connections became much easier and cheaper, and if such shows were distributed with physical media post 1960’s, I’m pretty sure they were on tape rather than disc (less surface noise, erasable, and some radio stations used semi-automatic carousels of 8-tracks for much material.)
I’m far from an expert, but I think you are referring to Eva-Tone Soundsheets, not used for serious recordings, but as a cheap distribution medium, mostly for advertising. They were often bound in magazines. (I happen to have a small collection of them.)
I saw some records with a cardboard substrate and a thin plastic coating for the grooves, again used for promotions, not serious recordings. I think they were a competitor to Eva-Tone, but I don’t recall their name.
I ran a garage sale for someone, who mentioned in their Pennysaver ad they had lots of vinyl albums. The day of the sale, before start time at 9 a.m., two guys showed up at the crack of dawn and gave me $20 for the box of old albums, without even looking through them. But now I would browse through eBay just to see if there were any overlooked treasures in that box. There is a hipster-ish record store in my city that buys and sells tons of vinyl albums, no sign of slowing down.
Somewhere buried in my memory is something that sounds like those Dyna-Flex albums. They weren’t the cheap discs that were inserts in magazines or cereal boxes but a major push from the industry. And they failed because they hissed as badly as RCA albums, which ruined all the Jefferson Airplane albums.
Let’s go the tape, I mean look it up on Wikipedia. I was close.
I guess old habits die hard,many folk can remember their first LP/Single but when it comes tae CD,they canny.
I guarantee you that every person born after 1980 remembers their first CD or cassette (Adam Sander’s “What the Hell Happened to Me?” by the way).
As regards the nostalgia and thinginess angle it’s worth repeating what someone else above noted, cassette releases are also rising in popularity. One of my own songs featured on a tape release in 2012 and at this point such releases are no longer even a novelty again. They’re just a common way of celebrating a digital release with something more tangible.
My first single was ‘White room.’ by The Cream and LP was ‘The rock machine turns you on.’
I feel old now.:mad:
You just can’t get that scrapey scratchy sound without a needle!
A respected colleague, now chief engineer at Joe Meek, designed a circuit for an electronics hobbyist magazine to do just that. His goal was to make a CD sound just like an old Dansette record player, to which end he used the nastiest amplifier chip available, mixed it down to mono, made the grounding really flabby, and a bunch of other techniques that would eat away at the fidelity. For maximum effect he recommended building it into a toaster. OK, it was for the April 1st issue, but there was a serious point buried in there somewhere, in that he was fed up having to line his CD player up with local Ley lines and pipe specially conditioned mountain air into the listening room.
In theory, CDs should have made vinyl completely obsolete, but they haven’t, as despite the drawbacks of vinyl (poor signal-to-noise ratio, poor stereo separation, poor dynamic range, a reliance on imperfect equalisation filters and so on), CDs have some major drawbacks:
- The 16-bit resolution isn’t enough. This chops the full range up into 65,536 discrete levels, which sounds like enough, but isn’t. The human ear is much more sensitive than that, and the quantization noise thus produced is noticeable, and being a digital non-harmonic, non-stochastic artefact, is much more objectionable than analogue noise and distortion.
- The 20 kHz bandwidth isn’t enough. OK, an average adult’s ears might go up to 16 kHz or so, so CD should provide full range, but it doesn’t. Vinyl is mostly bandwidth limited to 20 kHz too, but it’s a gentle rolloff, whereas CD has a “brick wall” response. There’s magic in them there ultrasonic harmonics (the effect is noticeable and reproduceable, but not yet fully explainable), hence the popularity of supertweeters.
- The 20 kHz bandwidth limit again, or more specifically the related 44.1 kHz sampling rate. Nyquist doesn’t tell the whole story, and as the signals being sampled get closer to the Nyquist frequency then phase and amplitude distortions increase. Try it for yourself - draw a sine wave on a bit of paper, then add judicious sampling points at twice the waveform’s frequency. Deduct points if you’ve timed the samples to be exactly coincident with the minima and maxima - this is unlikely to happen in the real world - and go back and draw your timing marks again, off the peaks, dammit! Brain-filter the results, and you’ll see that amplitude and phase have shifted significantly. Just for shits and giggles, try this experiment with different timing periods, you’ll be shocked at how much over the Nyquist frequency you need to sample for a decent reproduction. There’s a nice treatise of this and more here: Sampling: What Nyquist Didn’t Say, and What to Do About It
There’s no reason why digital recordings can’t be superior to existing analogue techniques, but CD falls short. SACD and DVD-Audio are a big improvement, and newer, better digital formats are inevitable.
Zigackly. I worked on the design of early DVD recorders (and a little on Blu-Ray) with Philips back in the day, and it took huge teams of geniuses* to bring these products together, and that was all built on concepts based on CD. These formats will soon be obsolete, and as the old and increasingly unrepairable disc players die one by one the few discs that haven’t corrupted will be coaster fodder. My vinyl collection will outlive me; my CD collection needs an audit right now to find and replace the discs that have corrupted just sitting on the shelf. CDs are incredibly complex - so much so that the knowledge required to properly understand them couldn’t be accumulated by just one person - but to me getting a nice sound from a needle in a spiral scratch is just so clever.
- Sadly a category that doesn’t include me.
I have a turntable and such and do, in fact, listen to a good number of LPs, and I find I do enjoy them. But I think it may be psychological more than musical. With records there is an involvement. There is not that distance that is created separating man and his music. You take the LP from its album cover, carry it to the player, put the little hole on the spindle (sexual? Maybe). Then carefully place the needle on the record waiting for it to find the groove and slide into it (sexual again? Maybe).
Then you stand and watch it move towards the center in an every shrinking spiral. The watching for a couple of minutes really does involve you with the record, somehow. I don’t know why, but it does. Maybe that spiral has some sort of hypnotic effect like the hyno-wheels they used to sell in the back of comic books? I don’t know, but I do know that I can relax with a record better than any other recorded music. But we’re in the world of IMHO again, aren’t we. Well, so be it.
I tried recapturing the spirit of the 1950s, so I contracted polio and spent a month in an iron lung.
Do your CDs and cassettes magically teleport into their sexualized niches?
I’m not interested in reading a 27 page pdf when my ears can’t tell the difference. I’d love to see a blind (deaf?) study on this. 99.9% of the population wouldn’t be able to hear any difference at all. The human ear is not that calibrated. Hell it might be 100%.
Except, when actually tested in double-blind circumstances, it’s not. In the link, they took the output of a SACD, split it, ran one side to one input of an A/B/X comparator, ran the other side through a CD recorder and to the other input of the comparator and had people try to identify which was which. From the article:
[QUOTE=Leaffan]
I’m not interested in reading a 27 page pdf when my ears can’t tell the difference. I’d love to see a blind (deaf?) study on this. 99.9% of the population wouldn’t be able to hear any difference at all. The human ear is not that calibrated. Hell it might be 100%.
[/QUOTE]
Supplied.
I am about to reveal some personal anecdotes that relate to this thread, and Fridgemagnet’s post. I am well aware that what I am going to say isn’t universal, and isn’t applicable to all music, but it is applicable to some, and it suports gaffa’s posts.
16-bits may be 256 times too great.
I was part of the development team for the first drum machine Alesis produced under the leadership of Keith Barr (now deceased). Since ROM memory of all kinds was expensive and limited by today’s standards, and our product was intended to sell for a low price, we used some tricks to save costs.
One of those tricks was to convert the real percussion samples, sampled at 16 bits, into 8 bits while minimizing data loss, saving half the cost of the ROM that stored them (or getting twice as many sounds). We did this by dropping the least significant 8 bits out of 16, and since most percussion sounds start loud and diminish, I wrote an algorithm that stored the most significant 8, no matter how loud or soft the sound. It was like a sliding window; as the sound diminished, the 8 bits preserved slid along the samples. That means that only 256 levels were really sampled.
Obviously, when reconstituted, when the 8 bits was made into 16 before going to the D/A converter, there were a lot of bits missing, and we substituted zeros.
*But we couldn’t find anyone who could tell the difference! * The drum machine was marketed as a 16-bit unit, and no one complained. In fact, it was an enormous seller, and made Alesis filthy rich. And it only had 256 discrete levels, not 65K. 65K was way more than we needed.
Another anecdote from my drum machine experience. After the D1 unit had been selling for many months, someone analyzed the sound output and discovered that there was a 3db rolloff per octave starting at about 2Khz. Looking at the circuit, someone else discovered a flaw in the design, and corrected it, but no one could tell the difference. The machine was favorably reviewed as one that was faithful to the honest-to-god real (not synthesized) samples.
The moral of the story? The human ear doesn’t work in real life like it is supposed to do in the lab.