CD Sales Continue To Plummet, Vinyl Records Soar 431
Lucas123 writes "Over the past four years, vinyl record sales have been soaring, jumping almost 300% from 858,000 in 2006 to 2.5 million in 2009, and sales this year are on track to reach new peaks, according to Nielsen Entertainment. Meanwhile, as digital music sales are also continuing a steady rise, CD sales have been on a fast downward slope over the same period of time. In the first half of this year alone, CD album sales were down about 18% over the same period last year. David Bakula, senior vice president of analytics at Nielsen Entertainment, said it's not just audiophiles expanding their collections that is driving vinyl record sales but a whole new generation of young music aficionados who are digging the album art, liner notes and other features that records bring to the table. 'The trend sure does seem sustainable. And the record industry is really doing a lot of cool things to not only make the format come alive but to make it more exciting for consumers,' Bakula said."
Re:I bet "The Industry" loves it.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I bet "The Industry" loves it.... (Score:2, Informative)
huh? Vinyl records are lossless...
Missing from the summary... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:3, Informative)
Not "all currently sold CD's". Recordings of classical music and related genres seem just fine.
Re:I bet "The Industry" loves it.... (Score:5, Informative)
Ever hear a needle scratching a blank track on a record? All that racket you're hearing is noise, i.e., signal you don't want. That noise level is present on every track on the record as well. The music covers it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_recording_vs._digital_recording
Note that the theoretical quality max based on quantization noise achievable by a standard CD is almost 30db better than a vinyl record. Full quality is not, of course, necessarily achieved in practice, but anyone telling you a record stores a perfect signal--or even a better signal than a CD--is way off.
Re:I bet "The Industry" loves it.... (Score:3, Informative)
The real world always has noise too.
The digitizing process is lossy by the limited bit resolution per sample (even if we agree the sample rate is sufficient).
As to sample rate, most real instruments make ultrasonics and infrasonics, those are left behind by a CD, and might be important even if not registered consciously.
Re:I bet "The Industry" loves it.... (Score:5, Informative)
> Well, until the stylus starts wearing down and the grooves start smoothing out...
Uh, there ARE laser turn tables ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable [wikipedia.org]
Re:Vinyl, a proven durable format, and free of DRM (Score:1, Informative)
At one point, CBS wanted to install DRM into vinyl records. They had planned to get Congress to require their DRM plan. CBS wanted to run all the music on albums through a steep notch filter. CBS claimed the effects of the notch filter were inaudible, a laughable premise. CBS wanted Congress to require that all recording equipment would go into "pause" if music appeared within the frequencies that the notch filter suppressed.
.
Fortunately, sanity prevailed as CBS was roundly laughed at by others in the music industry.
Re:big freakin cds... (Score:3, Informative)
The later ones had digital sound, stereo, 16bit, 44.1kHz. NTSC LDs could have both analog and digital audio tracks at the same time, while PAL LDs could have analog or digital sound, but not both at the same time. A few even later LDs had Dolby AC3 sound instead of one analog track or DTS instead of both digital tracks.
Don't compare sound quality of... (Score:5, Informative)
...vinyl records to CDs - compare vinyl vs. digital downloads thru i.e. iTunes. I recently mail-ordered Wilderness Heart by Black mountain (as an aside, GREAT record), which came with an immediate digital download of the record. I couldn't wait for the vinyl to arrive because I expected it to sound superior to the high-bitrate mp3s. It does. It's noticeable even to my far-from-audiophile wife.
I'm admittedly a fetishist for packaging - double LPs with great gatefold art, colored / clear / marbled vinyl, large-format insert books, all the way to crazy triple and quadruple LPs with all of the above (i.e. Altar, by Boris and Sunn O))) ).
If I can help it I buy nothing but vinyl now. And yes, I do have a USB turntable so (admittedly quite a bit more labor than with a CD) I can make properly tagged copies for listening to on my iPhone.
the law and grandad (Score:5, Informative)
"The law" couldnt even get involved then! Apparently you weren't around back in the late 70's and early 80's when radio stations across the country were thumbing their noses at the RIAA by hosting "album parties." Always late in the evening, they would proudly boast they were playing so-and-so album "in its entirety" and would even tell listeners to "get your tape decks ready." We'd get side one without interruption, a brief interlude for the dj to switch sides (and for us to do the same) then we'd get side two.
One-to-many. This is exactly what the radio stations were doing. And guess what? The law could not stop them.
Re:weird part is my Records seem to last longer (Score:3, Informative)
Most LPs spin at 33 1/3 RPM, so "a few dozen" isn't too far off. However, a CD spins at most 500 RPM [wikipedia.org], well shy of "a few thousand".
Re:multi-track please (Score:1, Informative)
no, really. the mix is very much a part of the art, it is in no way analogous to operating systems
Re:The reason is? (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry:
Links:
http://www.vinylcollective.com/2007/10/31/response-to-wireds-vinyl-maybe-be-final-nail-in-cds-coffin/#more-345 [vinylcollective.com]
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/commentary/listeningpost/2007/10/listeningpost_1029 [wired.com]
Re:I bet "The Industry" loves it.... (Score:3, Informative)
...which start at about 15 grand. At that point, buy the DVD-A.
No, they start at $12K: http://www.elpj.com/purchase/index.html [elpj.com]
Or you can pick one up on ebay for $10K: http://cgi.ebay.com/ELP-Laser-Turntable-Play-records-w-laser-Last-one-left-/170538526748?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item27b4e3681c [ebay.com]
Re:weird part is my Records seem to last longer (Score:4, Informative)
That's very odd. I have CDs from the "early adopter" era (25ish years ago) that still play perfectly, and I have hardly been gentle with them, and some of them spent a lot of time in hot black cars in the warm California sun.
Records, on the other hand, go noticeably over the hill after about 10 plays, and after about 2 plays if you don't wait 30 mins-hour between plays. I have seen data (actual real waveform and waterfall plots) showing that the high frequencies can disappear after the first play. And they have to be treated with extreme care or they can easily be ruined by someone just touching them wrong.
Brett
Re:I bet "The Industry" loves it.... (Score:4, Informative)
And the vinyl is limited by the fact that a record player is made with real physical bits that can only vibrate so fast and such.
Yes, and a $80 to $200 stylus [needledoctor.com] can be had that is capable of exceeding 22kHz You can easily hit 25kHz in that price range. At around $250 you can get a stylus that will go up to 50kHz. [needledoctor.com] Here's a Grado [needledoctor.com]that has a frequency response of 10 Hz to 60 kHz.
I'm not saying that Vinyl is better in all aspects compared to a CD, because it's not. But there are cases where vinyl does sound better.
Record of Loudness War (Score:4, Informative)
What's the point of buying it on vinyl for great quality and ripping it to digital? You'll certainly get better quality by directly downloading FLACs from the internet.
Vinyl is less likely to have its levels compressed to the clipping point [tvtropes.org] than digital.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:5, Informative)
The majority of USB turntables come with a lousy needle that produces a signal that negates all the benefits of vinyl and can even damage your record. Also, cheaply built turntables as most USB turntables are can produce vibrations in the turntable surface that disturbs playback, preventing a clean rip even with a good needle and again, possibly damaging the record. If you really want to rip vinyl properly, you probably want a belt-driven turntable made of as little plastic as possible, about as expensive a needle/cartridge as you can find, a decent phono preamp, and a good analog capture device (a M-Audio Audiophile 192 is excellent; an ASUS Xonar DX2 would be fine; a Creative X-Fi would be minimum).
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with USB turntables are the crap preamps. My own transfer setup is an old Technics SL-1300 direct drive with a high end "linear contact" Audio Technica AT331LP stylus (sadly since discontinued). Recording was done with a Soundblaster AWE64 Gold and later a Soundblaster Live! The quality was pretty good for a soundcard (noise was basically undetectable). The best digitizing solution is likely something USB as its away from the RF interference typical in computer cases.
Post processing (de-noise and de-click) is done with software called Diamond Cut ( http://www.diamondcut.com/ [diamondcut.com] ). Its propose built audio restoration software, not a bunch of plug-ins for some random sound editing program. Highly recommended and comes with an excellent user's manual (covers all kinds of audio restoration techniques).
Re:If I were to guess (Score:4, Informative)
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:4, Informative)
You can record overcompressed sound to vinyl too. Vinyl, like magnetic tape or CD, has a maximum level that can be recorded (for tape it's saturation level, for CD it's 0dBFS and for vinyl it's when the playing needle jumps out of the groove), but it does not require the recorded signal to have some minimum dynamic range. I could record a pure 1kHz sine wave and it would be played back correctly. Nothing prevents record companies from recording vinyl from the butchered CD master (and a few records were made that way).
However, the people that buy records usually care about sound quality and dynamic range. If the record is badly mastered they won't buy it. Also, these people usually use high quality equipment (amplifiers, speakers, record player) that can correctly reproduce the dynamic range (ever tried listening to a recording with wide dynamic range on laptop speakers?). This is the main reason why record companies make better masters for records. The CD crowd does not care about sound quality enough to not buy the CD if it sounds bad.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:1, Informative)
It's perfectly possible to get quite a good setup at a pretty much budget price. My setup is a Pro-Ject Debut III [project-audio.com] with a Nad PP-2 pre-amp [nadelectronics.com] plugged into the back of an Audigy 2 ZS soundcard. If you shop around, you could probably get this for about $300 all up. I didn't pay much more, and I went to a bricks-and-mortar shop. Obviously, there are lots of ways to improve on this outfit, but the usual law of diminishing returns applies.
Also, a note for those unused to vinyl: because it's essentially a mechanical component, a new cartridge will give a somewhat thin sound, as it needs "running in" for some time to develop its full responsiveness.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I bet "The Industry" loves it.... (Score:5, Informative)
At around $250 you can get a stylus that will go up to 50kHz.
Which is completely useless, as there isn't the slightest bit of evidence humans can hear ultrasonics. Even if they could, most speakers can't reproduce them (and certainly not with any accuracy), assuming they weren't deliberately filtered out somewhere during the recording and mastering process, as they almost certainly would have been. Any ultrasonic signal loud enough to even potentially be audible could cause all sorts of problems with a host of electronic circuits, tape decks and other devices in the recording / mixing / mastering loop.
Not to mention the fact most of the ultrasonics picked up by any stylus are probably harmonics and noise - all of it pure distortion - much of it caused by the needle ringing like a little bell as it's struck by the walls of the groove. Or they're harmonics and distortion and noise coming from the microphones, preamps, mixing decks, tape decks, equalizers, compressors or the mastering equipment itself. In other words, a bunch of power-robbing crap that only serves to distort the signal below 20kHz that actually is audible to humans.
There are no cases where vinyl "sounds better" due to any properties of the format. The vinyl master may have been better equalized or better compressed, but the format itself is pure unadulterated junk, and has been for 50 years. Vinyl was obsolete by the 1960's, and should have and probably would have been replaced by something better if the American electronics firms of the time weren't being run by halfwits and incompetents. I've always been surprised RCA didn't attempt to roll out their capacitance disk as an audio format first before trying to deploy it as a video format, but it was stuck in development hell for well over a decade and I suppose it's a miracle it ever made it to market at all with that bunch of clowns running the place.
The Dutch and Japanese finally got around to doing something about it by the late 1970's. Well, somebody had to. Vinyl sucks.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:3, Informative)
Some record companies have already responded to the evil threat of USB turntables by introducing technology that effectively eliminates ripping of their vinyl albums!:
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2007/05/digiwax [wired.com]
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:5, Informative)
Even if the turntable were fitted with a decent cartridge, needle and tone arm, there's no way that USB can be made into a good connection
Uh, what? USB means that the ADC is outside the computer, which means that you get less possibility of EM noise from the electronics in the case interfering with the analogue signal. Once it's digital, USB 1 gives 11Mb/s for transferring it to the computer, which is just under ten times the data rate of an audio CD. A USB connection has more enough bandwidth to transfer audio from vinyl.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:3, Informative)