Who would have thought that the last physical media for music

[edhopper]

would be the vinyl album.
Cd sales continue to decline as digital music takes over. Some automakers no longer put CD players into their new models.

Meanwhile the niche market for pressed vinyl keeps growing.

Now I am not saying that vinyl will ever be a significant portion of sales. But the compressed, small file format of digital music leaves a big opening for those who want more fidelity in their recordings.

I suppose their will eventually be a digital format that retains all the data for true listening experience. (Neal Young's Ponos format is an example). But until that is wide spread, I can see a time when the CDs are no longer produced, and vinyls still are.

(For those who aren't familiar with the difference in formats, the average downloaded MP3 file is a tenth the size of a WAV file, the format on CDs. That means there is 10 times the data on CD. Yes it isn't as simple as that, but it does diminish the music.)

[JaneyVee]

1. Compression is the next frontier of the internet.

I.e. large files being pristine preserved while shrunken to its smallest form. But nothing sounds as good as vinyl...yet.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

8. There's only so much you can do with lossless compression.

But there's probably a good deal more room for "almost pristine".

[FSogol]

2. A record store just opened near my office.

https://www.facebook.com/mobiusrecordsfairfax

Of course, in the 80s, there was a record store in almost every shopping center.

[Adrahil]

3. It's a brief burst of nostalgia....

But it won't last.

[Bosonic]

4. Thanks Hipsters!

[global1]

5. Some Automakers No Longer Put CD Players Into Their New Models.....

Can't wait until I'm able to play my vinyl in the car. (sarcasm)

My new car is equipped with a USB Port. I'm thinking the next trend is to put music on 'flash drives'.

[hunter]

21. Car record players were a status symbol in the late 'fifties.

http://www.roadkillontheweb.com/arp.html

[elias49]

6. CDs only last around 10 years before they begin to break down.

But I still play vinyl that I bought 35 years ago. So not only quality is a question, but durability as well.
Same with digital photos...I must have a few thousand pictures on my second hard drive that may disappear after a time. But I have a large plastic container with photos from when I was 20 years old (40 years ago).
Amazing to think that this great new (digital) technology, while 'compact', is also so ephemeral.

Dust to dust

[PoliticAverse]

11. I have many 25+ year old CDs that are fine, and unlike vinyl don't degrade every time I play them. nt

[elias49]

15. I'm surprised! Do you play them?

Just kidding...you're doing extremely well with your digital! I still fear for the disappearance of photos of my kids growing up, etc.
It'll be a huge task, but I'll go through my digital photos and print the cream of the crop. I'd hate not being able to pass along the high points of what I experienced in my life.

[PoliticAverse]

18. Your fears are reasonable. There are quality DVD-+R discs that should last a long time.

Store them properly (see http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.05/docs/disccare.html ) and use good DVD-R
media which cost under 40 cents a piece in 100 quantity: (see http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm )
and always have 2 copies stored in a separate area.

I much happier with my CDs that I was with all those cassettes I bought when I was a kid, they're all gone
now. I do still have some old records (including old 78s), but nothing to play them on.

[gollygee]

13. I heard this when they first came out

but I have CDs I've had since the 80s, and they still play great.

[trackfan]

41. So true.

When my CDs go bad, there's nothing I can do. If a vinyl record skips, I can just pick up the needle and move it. I have some vinyl 50+ years old that still sounds fine. If there were some disaster by which electricity became unavailable, one could still rig a way to play vinyl.

[tridim]

7. I like FLAC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC

IMO it should be the standard.

[NCTraveler]

25. Read the first paragraph.

Marking to read more later. Thanks.

[on point]

9. Actually AIFF is the format for CDs and as a digital file is an exact, uncompressed copy of the CD

[sir pball]

24. Just to be nitpicky, CDs actually use PCM encoding..

But since that format is pretty much only used on CDs, your ripping software transcodes it to a more common digital format, usually AIFF or WAV, maybe FLAC or Apple Lossless.

Regardless, the Pono (or an iDevice loaded with Apple Lossless, or a generic player with FLAC), being lossless, is identical to a CD, which is identical to the original digital master. I get a chuckle out of people buying vinyl copies of digitally recorded or processed music, by definition it's going to sound worse. You need a completely analog stream to realize the benefits, like my mint copies of 2112 and Workingman's Dead...now that's what they mean by "warmth and tonality"!


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio

[whatthehey]

10. Except people who have serious digital music collections don't use crappy dl formats

The vast majority of mine is .flac, a lossless format, with some 24bit-96k master disc flac formats too.

If you go to the file sharing sites, only hapless noobs are posting 96-128 .mp3s.

Storage is cheap if you don't expect your whole collection to fit on a throwaway Mac I-toy.

And before anyone starts posting analog vs digital wave pics, please remember that human hearing has about a 20kHz limit, so anything sampled above 40kHz (double to avoid aliasing) will be indistinguishable to analog in the ear.

Now all you have to do is have a pharma-class clean room to play your vinyl in so no particles screw up that perfect analog wave....

Flac is typically at 44.1, for this exact reason.

[bananas]

12. Have they started 3-D printing vinyl albums yet? nt

[PoliticAverse]

19. ...

http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2011/04/01/makerbot-introduces-3d-printable-vinyl-records/

[randome]

14. Most people don't care, though. MP3 is fine for the majority.

I have more than 8400 songs on my iPod, from the 60s onward. No way would I want the storage headaches of vinyl or even CDs, not to mention the environmental cost of producing plastic.

And trying to find those oldies-but-goodies on a physical medium? Forget it. I'm content.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"The whole world is a circus if you know how to look at it."
Tony Randall, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964)[/center][/font][hr]

[lumberjack_jeff]

16. I read a scientific american article 20 years ago that stuck with me

It was by a computer scientist who said that the key to data compression was shared context.

e.g. When you're at a party and your business partner stops his conversation with a prospect to wink at you... what's being communicated? Just a wink? Implicit in that wink might be huge amounts of information that are made possible because the two of you share a context of previous conversations.

How this can be applied to music, I don't know, but it seems to me that as the cost per gb of storage goes down, music services like pandora could use that space to download and cache high fidelity versions of the songs in the playlist perhaps ripped from LP. The shared context is thus a quick, simple, low bandwidth instruction from Pandora: Play Dark Side of The Moon again.

[HereSince1628]

31. I lost most of my old-timey clawhammer banjo collection on lp's, Pandora

actually has a lot of very similar stuff that for 15 years wasn't available on cd's because it didn't have sufficient following.

I can't say it's exactly the same stuff, although some of it is, but it's a connection that would be hard to make otherwise.

Also, there is a lot of synthesized old-time banjo-oid renditions of stuff .teff (sp?) format. When you're half a life time and a thousand miles from other folks who enjoy that digital is way better than nothing.

[Sivart]

17. But most recordings are now done all digitally....

What do you get when you press a vinyl copy of a tune that was recorded in digital?

I'm sure there will always be tape based studios around, but most modern recordings are created in the digital format. I don't see any logic or advantage in converting these recordings to analog and pressing to vinyl. You can't put back what was never there.

[Arugula Latte]

20. I don't get the "high quality sound" claim for vinyl.

It usually pops and scratches and skips, as I recall.

I LOVE digital music. Never goin' back!

[randome]

22. Come on, don't you want to haul out an LP to play that ONE song...

...you like so much? And then haul out another to play the next song? And the next?

Yeah, I don't get the attraction, either. Set your iPod (or whatever) to 'randomize' and sit back and relax.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"Everybody is just on their feet screaming 'Kill Kill Kill'! This is hockey Conservative values!"[/center][/font][hr]

[Arugula Latte]

23. Yeah, and you get to squint at the little black lines to figure out where your favorite song begins

Good times, good times.

[Bonx]

27. Some people have time and love to fuss and dawdle over stuff

The vinyl crowd are the same people shaving with a badger brush and an old safety razor, and making coffee in a french press.
Not for me.

[edhopper]

29. I use a badger brush

and a safety razor. It takes about the same time as using a five blade super razor, and it costs me about 25 cents a blade instead of $4 a blade.

[randome]

35. Five blades? That's crazy. Try this instead.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]If you think childhood is finished, maybe you didn't do it right the first time.
Start over.[/center][/font][hr]

[Arugula Latte]

33. Not for me, either.

I'm all: *press buttom* an old Motown favorite! *press buttom* Manchester alternative from the early 80s! *press button* my newest earworm!

[tridim]

26. I don't either, but I do like the LP format

But mostly for the album art and extras. I know it's never coming back, oh well.

Analog sounds pleasant to my ear, but not "better" or "higher quality". Anyone claiming otherwise is either justifying their crazy-expensive audio gear purchase, or they are selling something.

[GreatGazoo]

32. there is a fullness to vinyl

not as much surface noise as I remembered.

[whatthehey]

34. only when you expect there to be

http://vintageelectronicsrepair.com/digital-versus-analog-debate/

[NBachers]

28. You can't clean pot on a CD case or a thumb drive.

[HereSince1628]

30. If my ears were any good anymore, I suppose this might matter...

There was a time when I listened to music in a quiet house, and I loved my lp's but for more than 15 years the SO has demanded silence as she does her teaching prep...

The space in my life when I can I listen to music is mostly while operating machinery. The old MP3 player is really pretty convenient under ear protectors on the tractor and considering the imposition of ambient distractions I don't notice the loss in quality.

[snooper2]

36. It hasn't been a full year yet we aren't ready for the yearly (vinyl is back!) thread

[edhopper]

37. This is not a vinyl is back thread

it obviously is among a niche market.

What I am saying is it looks like vinyl might outlive the CD, I find that interesting.

[hifiguy]

38. The reason is simple.

LPs have the highest information density. The only thing that even begins to come close is SACD/DSD.

Hi rez digital is very good indeed when you use a top-quality DAC, but analog recording and vinyl still reign supreme as the best of the best.

And here is some turntable porn I posted in another thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=6391377

[OriginalGeek]

39. I stopped buying CDs a few years ago

and I re-started buying new music on vinyl and also visiting used record stores to find old music I never got around to getting. And some to replace CD's I've bought over the years.

Because:
1. I like the sound of the needle drop and the hum of anticipation as it winds through the grooves to the start of the music.
2. Larger album art/fold-outs/goodies/etc...
3. Most of the new music I buy comes with free digital downloads of the whole thing anyway so I can still listen in my car.
4. If I'm paying money for a thing I want a thing to hold. I never bought digital downloads only - I bought CD's.

I have a decent record collection from before CD times and held off buying a CD player for a long time but then they got better at mastering CDs so I finally broke down and started buying CDs. But I missed the fun of opening a new record so I just decided I would buy records from now on.

I don't currently have a high enough quality stereo to even tell if CD sounds better than vinyl but that's not really the point. I like the collecting aspect of vinyl.

My ultimate goal is to build a PC with massive storage and have it run through a future A/V sound system that includes a good turntable so I can load up a vinyl record for fun or build an easy party play-list. Best of all worlds.

I probably won't spend 10,000 dollars for some fancy cartridge with a needle made of albino porcupine butt hair but I'll shoot for something above my old Radio Shack 8-track/turntable/AM-FM radio hybrid.

[HuckleB]

40. I do love it, but the new vinyl is expensive!