Jack White, arguably the most visible vinyl advocate in recent years, agrees: “I definitely believe the next decade is going to be streaming plus vinyl – streaming in the car and kitchen, vinyl in the living room and the den. Those will be the two formats. And I feel really good about that.”
Just have to get one of those analog/digital converters so it will work with my digital receiver/amp. Still have those great old school Acoustic Research speakers.
Now, all I have to do is find the few LPs I have left...
Another thought on obsolescence. Some of us old guys do remember that vinyl wore out, scratched, skipped, wowed, rumbled, and generally wore out the records. I would assume the current vinyl set up would be ridiculously expensive to minimize the inherent flaws of vinyl records.
What are people listening to vinyl ON? I'd love to play my old records, but I don't have a turntable -- are people buying turntables as components to fit with old stereo systems from the 90's? Are they buying small record players? Something else?
Friend was going to throw out his 1980s Technics SLD2 direct drive turntable before offering it to me. I bought a compatible phono cartridge on ebay for $20 and connected the turntable to my 1990s Denon receiver. It's my go-to turntable and gets used almost daily.
As I mentioned below, I rescued a mint condition Technics cassette deck from the same era from the trash.
Last Christmas I gave Little Contrarian a 30 year-old Technics rack system that someone was going to toss out. A little dusting and the thing sounds fantastic in his man cave.
Yard sales can yield better bargains than searching online, although Facebook Marketplace and Letgo.com occasionally have decent components for a good price.
If you are looking to spend a little more, there are plenty of people who refurbish vintage audio gear for resale.
different kinds of technology. Crosley makes little suitcase-style players with tinny, built-in speakers, for example.
Most will still have RCA outputs, and many have the phono pre-amp built-in, since modern receivers tend not to have a dedicated phono input; many have USB connections for the ability to rip LPs to MP3; many are Bluetooth-capable to connect to whole-house speaker systems; I think Yamaha even makes a WiFi enabled recordp layer.
The new tables and tonearms go a long way to prevent some of the wear on the vinyl, including the setup and balance.
Advances in carbon fibers have helped to make tonearms that are sturdy yet light.
Have a lot of that type of stuff that is technologically obsolete. I did get rid of just about all of my wet photo darkroom equipment.
described by Jack White. The original appeal of the CD was being able to use it in all listening situations, from home audio, car, portable (Discman), without having to record on cassette my vinyl records for portable use. I'd be pleased to return to vinyl as my go to, both with my original collection and new purchases going forward.
I built up a nice Best Buy Rewards balance for the express reason of buying CDs versus saving my Amazon gift card balance for the variety of items sold there, only to have Best Buy discontinue even on-line sale of CDs. Perhaps I'll jump back in with the vinyl they do sell.
They are "compact", they are more durable, they are more convenient. Done right, the quality can be good.
Sliding a Bic pen cap along the cover edge to open the shrink wrap. Ah, what a feeling. But, I had also forgotten the all-too-often experience of putting that new record on the turntable and finding my tone arm doing a dance on a warped record, or getting three songs into the first side and hearing the snap, crackle and pop of a scratched or defective record, requiring a return to Vogel's and Allwilks in Elizabeth, NJ or Just For the Record in Mishawaka, where I bought hundreds of poly liners that still protect my vinyl. CDs eliminated the crap shoot of quality control inherent in vinyl records.
Even a record I bought in the last two years, Austin's Mirror Travel's Mexico LP, originally arrived scratched. In this modern age, however, I simply sent them an e-mail and the label said to keep the defective copy and sent me a new one. I do know the label's owners, so that may have played a role.
The other good development of vinyl is the inclusion of a code in the package for a digital download, so even if you buy the vinyl you can via the computer load the album onto your portable device, as (once I'm rehabbed from knee surgery) I find I listen to more of my new music walking for exercise than at any other time.
method. Because, as HTown references below, it is now a useless relic and there is no need to keep it classified. Sort of like the Kennedy Assassination microfilm. Exactly like that actually.
All you had to do was unhook the CD at the bottom left, unfold it from bottom to top and simply peel the sticker away. Re-hook and you're golden. No picking at it until your cuticles bled. No slicing it and removing bits of sticky hell one by one.
Unhook, Unfold, Unpeel. You're welcome from 1999.
Then they went away.
If you used the groove between the case lid and it's pivot point on one side, you could slice open the plastic very easily and get it open.
Ahh, the good old days. I remember more than a few CDs were purchased at the bookstore on my student charge (along with bigger items and books) because the bookstore didn't send itemized bills home.
for was a gadget that had two guards with safety released blades. One side was for opening CDs, the other for DVDs.
Just drag the case through the correct side and voila.
Just slide it along the edge where the jewel case opens, and much easier to open. But I still hate those plastic jewel cases that have the sticky label sealing them closed inside the shrink wrap. Unless the CD is brand new, the label with the artist and title sealing the case closed always leaves a glue residue. For that, I use Goo Gone, which works great to remove that residue from the jewel case.
My grandmother and I used to ride the bus to Broad St. Elizabeth in the 80s when the stores were still open. I think it was Vogel's that had the top 40 singles for that week on display on the wall.
By the 80s, those stores specialized in rap and dance 12" records.
Lots of other decent record stores in the area back then: Sound-A-Rama in Rahway, Scotti's in Summit (still going strong), Music Staff in Westfield, and I can probably name a few more.
Send me a email if you want...family is from Elizabeth and I am there now as I type this.
Vintage Vinyl in Fords and Princeton Record Exchange were both great spots, but living in Union and Roselle Park, I didn't make it down to either of them too often. Google reveals both have survived and operate today.
...you can actually put quite a lot of music on one CD; I don't know how many people do this, but you can burn CDs the way people used to make mix tapes. Even if you're buying the typically prerecorded product, the complete works of whoever your favorite artists are can fit on a lot less shelf space.
You can pry the physical copy of an album from my cold, dead hand.
It's even now called a "Draper Media Console". It was all the rage among 60's Madison Avenue execs.
But let’s say something messed with the internet for a few days. No music for a lot of people.
A couple years back the pressing companies had a substantial backlog. They apparently solved the issue according to this article
Https://pitchfork.com/features/article/is-vinyls-comeback-here-to-stay/
The linked site is a great site for new as is recordsbymail.com
Of a lot of high quality turntables including entry level stuff (you get what you pay for but it’s still better than digital) to the high end with Rega, Thales, Lin, etc are in the market today, and the technology has improved immensely since the last heyday of turntables
Is audiogon, I purchased a pair B&W CM10 that were 2 years old at 1/2 price. People spend incredible amounts of money on audio equipment but it depreciated fast.
I got rid of my turntable when I had kids and figures the equipment would die a swift and certain death.
But I was at the home of a college friend recently with serious audiophile equipment, including a very expensive turntable and a very expensive set of amplifiers, and holy hell is the sound so clearly superior, even to someone who hears only in mono.
My brother once displayed this by queuing up the same song on Spotify and on a new vinyl pressing. He began the digital version and cut to the vinyl about a minute in, and it was like going from black-and-white TV to color.
I read that he said, “Listening to digital music is like taking a shower with ice cubes.”
sound. Digital recording methods provide more technically accurate sound reproduction with greater tonal depth. Digital audio playback, in essence, can perfectly reproduce this without any degradation or loss of fidelity.
The problem with digital, is that it is often highly compressed. To wit, the songs you hear on Spotify or even iTunes downloads are highly compressed from their original recordings to make the files smaller. Even CDs are compressed somewhat (though far less than mp3/aac files). For example, most digital recordings are done at 192 khz and 24 bit depth. CDs max out at 44.1 khz and 16 bits. MP3s/AAC/are far below this, with streaming even further below.
Usually, when people say that analog vinyl produces "richer" or "fuller" sound, what people are hearing is actually analog noise that "thickens" the sound but is further from the original sound source (similar to how pumping the bass can make a song sound "better" but is not necessarily accurate).
They sound much better than Spotify and are immensely more practical than vinyl.
have "the ear" to discern great sound over very good sound, doesn't it still come down to quality of your sound system?
Listening to music on cheap ear buds is probably just as bad as an old rusty turntable.
Just as you can get excellent turntables, I suppose you can get very fine CD or MP3 equipment. I wouldn't know either way.
The practicality of CDs is quite true.
...inherent; the technology exists to digitally reproduce sound in far, far higher quality than what we get on even the best vinyl recordings.
The difference is largely based on choice made in the engineering. Back in the days of vinyl, "high fidelity" was a goal often met because the producers wanted to provide their audiences with a great sound experience. The best productions were traditionally in the classical repertory, but things also got much better through the 60s and into the 70s for jazz and pop music. Some of my favorite sonic memories of the late 70s and early 80s are listening to quadraphonic recordings on Columbia Records of, for example, Pierre Boulez conducting the New York Philharmonic in Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra over at the apartment of a friend who had super high-end equipment (preamp, amp, speakers, and of course turntable/stylus); listening to it this way probably just about maximized the expectations of the producers and engineers of that recording.
The producers and engineers for Spotify know that much of their music is being heard over tiny, low-to-medium quality ear buds or at best (for the most part) decent but still not super high-end speakers made by companies such as Bose (which I have here in my office, for example). Thus they match the production to the lowered expectations of most of their listeners.
But it is not really a case of better or worse. It is just different and highly subjective.
The link has a very good description from a technical standpoint.
...The superiority of an analog mode, vinyl, to a digital mode, Spotify, cited upwards in this thread is not based on analog being inherently better than digital, because that's not the case.
I suppose "better or worse" could be supported, but it would have to be on some quantitative basis: which system can better replicate the sound you hear live?
One thing that the writer, who has presented a nice basic explanation of recorded sound, does not get into is the difference between lossless and lossy compression, which is right at the heart of digital sound quality. See link for one brief discussion.
EDIT: After posting this I read Duke Camaro's post, which is exactly on point.
are so many variables.
My comments are based on discussions with my father you was a sound engineer early in his career which are confirmed in the article I attached . Digital chops analog and averages. However he felt the best format was tape but there are conditions there as well. A 1/4 < 2" tape etc. Recording speed is important as well higher speed recording and playback > lower speed.
In the end there are so many factors such as equipment quality both recording and playback, even playback environment. There are concert halls for a reason.
I have enjoyed the conversation
.
...I went back and re-read the math PhD's article. I wasn't a math major, so beware of the following! The digital approach is indeed a sampling, so kind of an average, but the phenomenon is more like integration, where the number of divisions is made smaller and smaller to approximate the smooth curve of whatever function you're dealing with.
There are graphic comparisons of analog to digital that could be quite misleading, like this one:
One sine-wave period corresponds to the stated frequency; if we're talking about A 440 (the note A on a piano above middle C), then one period of the sinusoidal wave form is considered to represent 440 hertz. The highest note on a conventional acoustic piano, C8, has a frequency of about 4200 Hz (in equal temperament).
So going back to that image above, if one period is for A 440, the period last for 1/440 of a second. The graphic image shows about a dozen divisions, so about 440 x 12 = 5,280 components per second. But sampling rates are commonly over 50,000 Hz, meaning 50,000 components per second. So imagine those 12 boxes in the image each sliced into about 10 narrower pieces.
Current digital technology samples the sound data at rates far above the ability of the human ear to hear (about 20,000 Hz). In live music, the sounds combine pure tones into a complex tangle with harmonics reaching well above what our ears can hear. It would be interesting to take recordings done on wide-track tape recorded and played back at high speed to digital recordings at, say 96,000 Hz and ask people with experienced ears to compare. Not to mention--digital recording still often uses analog components; e.g., "digital" microphones with diaphragms, etc.
Sound reproduction is a fascinating field. A few years ago I valued the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, Chicago, and was given a mini-lecture on and demonstration of their outdoor sound system, which serves people seated up front and then sitting on a lawn that extends several hundred feet back and away from the stage. They fashioned a system with delayed sound reinforcement using LARES technology, so that the sound from the speakers, wherever they are placed, arrives at the auditor close to the same time as the actual sound from the stage. See link for a little story about that.
I'm no audiophile, but I've heard that a lot of the new pressings are pretty low quality. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but contemporary music is being recorded in digital format, not analog. As a result, the true analog sound of old vinyl can't be replicated in the source is digital. What am I missing?
As an aside, I have all of the original Queen studio albums made while Freddie was alive on vinyl. They are not first pressings, but the quality is good and not remastered. A friend recently got into Queen after seeing the movie and played some of the remastered songs over Spotify for me. Many of them sounded very different from the LP versions. Why do record labels feel the need to constantly "remaster" as opposed to letting the original piece of art stand on its own?
Digitally which defeats the purpose. Others particularly Jazz and Classical
Still use tape. Most remastered from the 60s and 70s indicate if they were made from the original tapes.
I am sure the quality varies on repressing which is why getting original albums are popular. But if it is repressed on 180 or 200 gram vinyl they tend yo be better. The main problem with 40-50 year old vinyl is the dirt and scratches but there are great cleaners that work wonders.
vinyls from pre 1990. And I'll be ready when CDs and cassettes come back again too.
There is already a rebellion against the obscene cost of new vinyl.
Link is below.
I found a beautiful 35 year-old Technics cassette deck in the trash back in the spring and it plays perfectly. I was able to listen to some of my old 1990s radio shows on WVFI and WFMU.
An almost DIY mantra label circa 1979 with some great artists from NYC no wave, punk and thrash.
cassette subsidiary called Wiener Records, where any band can send in their audio and Wiener will press it to cassette - similar DIY ethic.
Although I'm not sure how many are still on cassette.
and my handle is named after one of them. Tons of reggae and dub on there. Surprised I was completely unfamiliar... thank you, sir.