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."
Vinyl, a proven durable format, and free of DRM (Score:1, Interesting)
I wonder if Birmingham Sound Reproducers is still around making their crappy turntables
multi-track please (Score:3, Interesting)
What I'd personally love to see (or hear) is: multi-track audio... so that songs can be remixed more easily... I mean wouldn't it be cool if it were possible to mute a say trumpet track, and replace it by something else (human voice for example), or the other way around?
Re:I can see why this is popular (Score:3, Interesting)
Its a good point but there is also the issue or touch and the physical presence that vinyl and its packaging brings. Its possible to put a decent sized poster in vinyl, to use it as wall art - to actually have a presence in a room via your collection....CD still seems like "just a bunch or plastic".
Personally though I still morn videodisc as a format, much for the same reasons but there I hold out little hope QQ
Will we see any new record presses made? (Score:3, Interesting)
I read an article in the past year or two saying the last one was manufactured in Russia around 1984.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why the ":(" ? It's a damn good thing.
Of course, a properly mastered CD will be helluva better than any vinyl, but thanks to douches involved in the loudness war [wikipedia.org], all currently sold CDs are of dog shit quality that makes it even worse than pops of vinyl.
Re:multi-track please (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean wouldn't it be cool if it were possible to mute a say trumpet track, and replace it by something else (human voice for example), or the other way around?
No. Mixing a song is a professional art, and wanting to take out of part of it is like taking out one parts of speech from a novel, or removing one color from a painting.
In the instance that someone wants to setup a "mix playground", the end-user medium is NOT the right format. A multilayer data DVD would be a far better choice, although it would be best if targeted to a specific software mixer's format.
weird part is my Records seem to last longer (Score:5, Interesting)
I have CD's that i picked up less than 15 years ago that are unplayable, I had heard of laserdisc rot but didnt know it would happen to prerecorded cd's. On the other hand, I have vinyl that belonged to my father that still sounds great. I baby my collection but in a noticeable portion of my collection it seems that simply handling with care didnt matter.
The reason is? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:3, Interesting)
And we didn't go to jail or risk losing our livelyhoods because of it, either.
Few problem (Score:4, Interesting)
The minor technical, but a real consideration, is space. Say you have a pretty simple recording, just a jazz quartet. That is a minimum of 5 tracks, one for each instrument2 for the drums (stereo track). In reality if you wanted full control like at the studio, the drums would probably be anywhere between 6 and 15 tracks. This of course only increases with larger ensembles, and with the more fine grained control you want. You could easily have a song that is 32 mono and 32 stereo tracks. That would take 450MB per minute of audio. Storing all the data in a cheap format could be a real issue.
A more major technical problem is all the processing needed. Mixes aren't just a bunch of tracks summed together. They have extensive processing done. While some of it is things done per track, and thus things that could be committed to the tracks on the medium, some of it is things done to the whole song. All of that would have to be done by the playback device. So in addition to heavy mixing hardware, it'd have to have a wide battery of effects that could be called on. OF course various musicians/producers wouldn't like it, because it would limit options. You'd have only the included effects as options and it wouldn't be upgraded.
However the most major is that the industry doesn't want it. They don't want you able to easily remix their music. Such a thing would make it so much easier for someone to use parts of existing material for new uses, and they wouldn't want that, at least not without you contacting them for permission.
Neat idea but never happen.
Re:multi-track please (Score:4, Interesting)
That's what They said about writing operating systems, and yet here I am happily compiling kernel modules for an OS developed largely by enthusiastic amateurs who learned by doing. Take my point?
Best of both worlds (Score:5, Interesting)
I buy the vast majority of my albums on vinyl, even at a 5 or 10 dollar premium mainly because I love having a permanent physical copy, but the switch to almost a vinyl-only collection was when the record companies got wise to offering a digital download with the record. With the alternative usually being to just pirate it online and get the CD later and transcode, selling a vinyl with a digital download solves all my problems and the band usually gets a great deal more with record sales than CD sales. So it's a no brainer really, along with the other swag that goes along with it.
Re:I bet "The Industry" loves it.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, until the stylus starts wearing down and the grooves start smoothing out...
An extreme example of that was the all-mechanical antique Victrola that my parents had when I was a kid (along with a big stack of 78-rpm shellac records). All the sound energy was created by the action of the grooves on the needle.
The tone arm was a hollow horn with a big diaphragm on it, and it probably put more than 100 grams of force on the record. The steel needles it used only lasted for about a dozen plays before they became visibly worn and had to be tossed. The mechanical force from playing a record often caused a bunch of white residue to slough off the surface of the disk, which couldn't have been very good for the longevity of the recording. Needless to say, we didn't operate that thing very often.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=35530 [hydrogenaudio.org]
Second, and this is by all means a serious question, are current vinyl releases any better than current CD releases? Or are they also compressed to avoid complaints about sounding quieter than the CD version?
Generally the vinyl is not over-compressed. But there are notable exceptions like the recent Metallica album - in that case the vinyl was exactly the same as CD because they were both mixed under the auspices of the same producer - I forget his name, but he's become ever more popular in the business and he brings the loudness war with him to every new project he takes on and this was his first metallica album. What's really interesting about the metallica case is that the guitar hero version was (apparently) mixed by the guitar hero sound engineers and they were not under the control of any of the loudness warriors. The result was that the people who really wanted the best sound quality from that album bootlegged the ripped guitar hero version.
Here's a video comparing CD mix to guitar hero mix - you don't even need headphones to tell the difference.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRyIACDCc1I [youtube.com]
Re:multi-track please (Score:3, Interesting)
There was a fellow on Usenet who posted using the nym "Mirror Spock". He took several recordings of Simon and Garfunkel's 'Sounds of Silence', including both separate tape tracks and premixed versions, and remixed from them all somehow or other. it seems that one version, Art Garfunkel was recovering from a cold and they shifted the harmony down a fifth or something like that so he could hit the notes, but like the basic release it had all of Bob Dylan's band including Glen Campbell as the studio musicians. Another version had what several industry pros thought was really the best Art Garfunkel performance, but was never released because there were some problems with the backup performers. Some other sources included bootleg live performance tapes or something like that. Word was that the original performers heard this and loved it even though the studio was annoyed about it all, although I can't prove that part's true. I'd assume this person knew pro recording techniques to get a decent mix from everything, but it sort of proves there are (rare) people who can take 'one speech from a novel' or 'one color from a painting', and put something back in its place, and actually improve it.
Re:I bet "The Industry" loves it.... (Score:3, Interesting)
"until the stylus starts wearing down and the grooves start smoothing out"
Not a problem if you'd keep Moh's hardness scale in mind.
Got old 60s vinyls that still sound great because I use a softer-than-vinyl stylus. Yea it does futz with the sound just a bit but I prefer my happy vinyls.
Re:I can see why this is popular (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to disagree completely with your thesis: there are many FM radio stations whose loss I mourn greatly.
No need to decide what to listen to; easily transported; convenient; available; don't need to take time out of your day to "listen."
Apparently then, radio was the downfall of music... interesting.
Re:Best of both worlds (Score:3, Interesting)
Woah. What's the mix like on these digital downloads? Is it the blown-out compressed-to-fuck 3dB range CD mix, or is it the still-lower-than-a-CD's-dynamic-range vinyl mix? I assume they don't offer a lossless format, but if it's a high enough bitrate MP3 and decent mixes, I might just start buying digital music that comes with free frisbees.
both can go along (Score:2, Interesting)
I think we have here a case where one format does not replace another. It disrupts the time scheme LP -> tape -> CD -> mp3 -> ??
Let's face it, the LP is not exactly the most practical format around. The main advantages of tapes and CDs over LPs were mainly portability (the sound quality is a point that can be debated but I don't think it is really the point) and ease of sharing. MP3s are also portable, easy to share, and they have the further advantage of being stored in one place (the HD on my computer or portable music player.
If I play all my MP3 music library, I will have ~4 weeks of music nonstop. It's great when I don't know what to listen to, I play it in random mode, and I sometimes (re-)discover some tunes. It's also a great excuse when I have friends at home and they don't like the music. "Yes, I also have shitty music, but I didn't chose to play it now, it's this random function, you know".
But sometimes I want to listen to a particular album, and then I really appreciate that I can have it as an LP. It may be some kind of fetishism, but I appreciate to have to go to the shelves, look for the vinyl, look at the picture, take it out, put it on the turntable, play it, and after 20min getting up from the couch to turn it. It may sound strange, but because it is unpractical, it actually helps me to concentrate on the music.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:3, Interesting)
vinyl is a more solid investment. CD's don't last as long, will deteriorate after 10 years or so (the "forever" hype was BS... maybe it's cosmic rays, maybe it's microwaves, idk, the inner foil falls apart often in less than 10 years). Vinyl, of course, will deteriorate due to friction and heat, but as it turns out, this can take 30-50 years or longer... but each time the record is played, technically, it changes slightly. But the resale value of vinyl is much higher, if you store them correctly, keep them in good condition, and if you sell at the right place to the right audiophiles. I have to say, vinyl does sound like it has more punch, but I think this is due to the HiFi system it's played on, the room it's in, and isn't exactly literally high fidelity... good components enhance music beyond it's fidelity, and for CD's consider that most commercial ADC's, while they've gotten standardized at a nice level, are still kind of cheap. A great ADC, in pro audio, like a Lavry AD, is about at least a grand, and then consider that you'd still need a great clean amplifier and good speakers to get the best sound out of it.
I myself prefer to make lossless rips from original CDs, and then back up that music library... replacing the drives every few years. Turntables are too mechanical, and I'm not mechanically oriented. Digital rips, of course, have no resale value... but if I still have all my digital rips 20 years from now, I'll be pleased.
Re:Don't compare sound quality of... (Score:2, Interesting)
However, you don't need a special turntable to record vinyl, and it annoys me that people think that you do or that it's even a good idea. All you need to record vinyl is a regular turntable and a soundcard with a "line-in". I've ripped dozens of records with my utterly normal soundcard, the "tape out" from my stereo, a RCA-to-3.5mm adapter and Audacity. I've never seen a decent USB turntable anyway. It's cool to be able to hear the needle-drop sounds at the beginning of records and due to microphonics, I can even hear the turntable cover shutting, and sometimes hear conversation in the room when I was making the recording.
I think it's cool that you can edit dust pops by just deleting that section of waveform; you will never notice the missing milliseconds due to psychoacoustics.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably not (Score:5, Interesting)
Infrasonics a digital format can handle much better. Digital can go straight down to DC if you want it to. Most of the time you high pass the signal for various reasons (so you don't record things like A/C vibrations and such) but digital can handle it. Movies sometimes have infrasonics, bass down to the 10Hz region. I can generate sinewaves that are 0.01Hz for a CD if you like. Records can't handle that. Lows are a big weak point because of how they work. You aren't going to get a solid 20Hz signal like you do out of CD or DVD.
Ultrasonics, well, not so much. First off, instruments really don't produce much up there. I've looked at spectra plots of high frequency recordings, there is just not much up there other than noise. You can see a chart that gives you a good idea of the range of instruments (http://www.independentrecording.net/irn/resources/freqchart/main_display.htm).
Then you have to prove that we can perceive it. I've never seen any valid study that shows it.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:2, Interesting)
I stopped reading at 'CDs dont last as long.' Seriously? Vinyl outlasts a pressed CD? What planet are you from? ..or what universe? (jk yes I read your whole comment)
1. people buy cds to listen to music, not to save for college. 'the right places to the right audiophiles'.. You mean the emotional kind who buy into hype over technical realities?
2. in a reasonable environment, cds will outlast just about any other storage medium to date.. By 'reasonable' I mean a typical home environment under the auspices of a careful owner. I do not mean a clean room environment. There is nothing to wear out. The laser is not powerful enough to etch the polycarbonate or reflective layers. The data on it has error correction built into it. Yes, I know it's not very robust, but it's good enough to prevent gradual 'error creep' from careless use. If the cd has been abused to the point where you can hear audible errors, you'll know for sure by the screetching/popping/skipping.
3. Collecting modern vinyl is moot since most of it will be produced with the same studio mix as the CD. Collect old stuff if you want to avoid the loudness war, but this problem will not go away simply by switching formats.
4. What does 'beyond its fidelity' mean? If you mean that good equipment exposes flaws in the recording, I agree. With lossless digital formats, the weak points are the studio engineers and the consumer playback devices, not the format itself. Vinyl is a lossy format. It's just not digital, and that's what everyone raves about even though the term doesn't address its weaknesses. The anti digital crowd's argument boils down to misguided assumptions about signal purity. At sufficient resolution, a PCM approximation of an analog waveform is indistinguishable from the original by ANYONES' ear, especially once it's pumped back through an analog power amplifier and speakers. CDs 16 bit 44100hz rate is sufficient to do this for 99% of all sources. The problem lies in the policies of the recording studio.
Listeners, audiophiles or not, are far more likely to notice the lower dynamic range, rising intermod distortion, cracks/pops/skips, wow/flutter of vinyl as it wears, than they would miss the theoretical ultrasonic sampling rates (say 60Khz and up) it may offer.
More details here
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl) [hydrogenaudio.org]
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't do *this* with a CD!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone plays some rap record with a dixie cup and a thumbtack.
Re:the law and grandad (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow, you just totally made up a buncha stuff then set fire to it...
I didnt live in NY or LA at the time, but I can assure you the Detroit market was not like you describe. WRIF and WABX both played first run albums. Mike Halleren, while at WDET, often played albums just released that week on his weekly late night alternative show. So now I guess you get to say "those didnt matter either because they weren't mainstream artists" but who is getting sued today? It aint just Madonna and Britney fans getting prosecuted. And the record companies pitched a complete fit over this and lobbied for YEARS for legislation to stop it, so apparently it's not so trivial to many as you imagine it.
An FM radio dub, made to a good quality cassette deck at the time, had FAR higher quality sound than a dub made from those stupid two bay decks (which came much later than the time I am talking about). Factory tapes always sounded like shit, and a dupe made from one on a high copy two bay deck was just a high quality copy of shit. FM radio can have exemplary sound with S/N and frequency response that beat the specs of even the highest quality cassette decks of the day.
Rip it first? (Score:3, Interesting)
I rip my CDs (to FLAC) as soon as I get them, so they aren't worn out by use before they get put on the computer. And with the convenient stockpile of music on the computer, I don't play the physical discs often, keeping them safer that way.
Mark Twain on extrapolation (Score:3, Interesting)
I get the Disco Stu quote, but here's what a classic American humorist (Mark Twain) had to say about absurd extrapolation:
“In the space of one hundred and seventy six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over a mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-pole. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo [Illinois] and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
Far more value out of vinyl! (Score:3, Interesting)
CD: Cold Play - Viva la Vida $29AU Includes a booklet with micro sized font that makes lyrics very hard to read.
Vinyl: Cold Play - Viva la Vida $35AU Includes a large easily readable booklet, centrefold art, a separate book of artwork, AND THE FRIGGING CD!
I know people who don't have a turntable who still bought this one on vinyl.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:3, Interesting)
In cases of new albums, data on audio CDs is usually heavily compressed to conscript the albums into the loudness war [wikipedia.org]; due to technical limitations in vinyl, this isn't really possible on that medium...
If only that were true! I recently got a copy of Quest for Fire's Lights From Paradise on LP, and it came with a MP3 download coupon. The MP3s were brick-walled with compression and clipping. So then I put the LP on the turntable and. . . Waaah! It sounds even worse! Not only is it compressed to Hell, but the recording level is low -- it isn't even loud. It's weak and muffled and pretty much unlistenable.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, records were not mastered as hard in the 60's and 70's and 80's.
They did not have the kind of signal processing we have now. There were no fast look ahead multiband peak limiters like TC finaliser, Waves L3 etc. These are the things that give the hyper loud square waved sound that is so offensive on some CDs. Use of multiband compression was also rare, starting only really in the 80's. They would have mostly used full band compressors/limiters, and the kind of peak limiting you get by driving the master tape a little, but that is a world away from a modern CD master.
It is also physically impossible to cut records with the squared off peaks you get from abusing the digital process. What you hear when you play those CDs back is the sound of the reconstruction filter trying to turn 'impossible' waveforms into a voltage. If you try this with vinyl then the coils in the cutting head melt as they try to slam from one side to another in zero amount of time. If I have to cut a record from a slammed digital master than I have to *reduce* the level to allow for overshoot, and filter the high end to remove the out of band stuff caused by the clipping causing aliasing in the D/As, and you end up with a *quieter* record than a gentler mastering process would have resulted in. This results in a shitty sounding record.
But really, it's only from 1998ish onwards that anyone has tried to cut records with the same kind of mastering you would do on a 'loud' CD. Even now, it's generally only done when people were mixing with the look ahead peak limiter on their master bus, so it's the only final version, and it is not possible, or there is no budget to get a proper master done.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:3, Interesting)
How are you supposed to know if a record is well mastered or not without buying it? Record companies don't seem to give a hoot about quality.
eg. My bought-in-the-1980s CD of Equinoxe got scratched and I bought another copy. It was clipped all to hell, unlistenable. I spent big $$$ on a rare MFSL super-remastered gold-anniversary-edition from eBay, it had been low pass filtered and all the treble was gone. Not just a little bit ... completely missing (see here [artlum.com]).
A load of money later I downloaded a flac from The Pirate Bay and it was perfect (or at least, 'not totally destroyed by an idiot sound engineer'). Next time TPB will be my first option, not a last resort.
(And guess what, if the RIAA gets its way I could soon have my Internet disconnected for doing that)
Vote Pirate, you know it's the right thing to do.
Re:weird part is my Records seem to last longer (Score:3, Interesting)
I have CD's that i picked up less than 15 years ago that are unplayable,
This is not common. I have CDs that are about 24 years old that still play fine. Anyway, not sure what your CDs are, but it might be worth pointing out that there was a known problem on some pressings from 1988 to 1993 made by the PDO plant in the UK. This mostly effected classical CDs.