Vinyl Records Outsold Digital Downloads In the UK Last Week (adweek.com) 188
Sales of vinyl outstripped those of downloaded music for the first time since the advent of digital downloads last week in the UK. From a report on AdWeek: The U.K.-based Entertainment Retailers Association, or ERA, said Monday that Britons spent 2.4 million pounds ($3.03 million) on the old-school wax last week while only doling out 2.1 million pounds ($2.65 million) for digital downloads. Vinyl Factory, a website dedicated to records, reported that those numbers represent a big change from the same week in 2015, when just 1.2 million pounds was spent on records compared with 4.4 million on digital downloads. That's a 100 percent year-over-year increase in vinyl sales and also the first time that vinyl album sales have bested digital downloads over a weeklong period in years, per Vinyl Factory. The surge in vinyl sales could be attributed to the popularity of vinyl as a Christmas gift and the growing number of retailers. You know it's a gift because, as BBC adds: But 48% of those surveyed said they did not play the vinyl they bought -- while 7% did not even own a turntable.
A perfect Christmas gift... (Score:3, Funny)
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Vinyl is the new coffee table book that people are expected to see but not read.
And thanks to the hipster Millennial, sales statistics are something we're expected to value but not understand.
Gee, look at that...Nordstrom is selling a fucking rock for $85 [nordstrom.com].
Just in time for the holidays...
Re:A perfect Christmas gift... (Score:4, Insightful)
Gee, look at that...Nordstrom is selling a fucking rock for $85 [nordstrom.com].
Just in time for the holidays...
Your local jewelry store will sell you rocks for vastly more than 85$.
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May I point out that in a population of 54 million, both GBP 2.4 and GBP 2.1 million round to zero... that's about a nickel a person. So... Brits don't spend money on vinyl or digital downloads. Seems to me the latter is the news... just how do Brits get their digital downloads?
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Nordstrom is late to the party.
The De Beers propoganda slave-labor cartel has been scamming suckers for years selling overpriced rocks [youtube.com] when in 1939 they kicked their marketing campaign in high gear. i.e. Only an idiot would pay $100 million for a De Beers Centenary Diamond [mostexpensivediamond.org]
You know what they say: A fool and his money are soon parted.
--
Region Locking IS Price Fixing
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Now that vinyl has become mainstream again, cue the inevitable backlash from the hipsters.
I was into that band way before they became popular. That makes me better than you.
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I was uncool before it was cool, dammit!
Re:A perfect Christmas gift... (Score:4, Insightful)
I really miss speakers that are made with real wood enclosures they sounded so much fuller, crisper, and bigger. Then again I have a tube stack with a 4x12 oak slant back offset classic and greenback Celestions that sounds like it's a crisp 300 watts (it's only 200) compared to the new stuff anyway.
Re:A perfect Christmas gift... (Score:5, Interesting)
Me too.
I have a pair of Klipschorns 50th anniversary speakers [klipsch.com] ....horn loaded, VERY efficient, and they are made to run with tube amps. I have a couple of older Decware SET amps (I have the long old, SE84C). [decware.com] .....sounds really nice. I'd like to some day get an old McIntosh amp, but even old 60's versions are pretty $$$$.
I'm very tempted to dig out my old turn table...I'm SO disappointed with so many of the new "remixes" they have been putting out of my artists which are classic rocksters.....they have succumbed to the compression wars and there is no fucking dynamic range anymore.
From what I understand, with the physical limitations of the vinyl format, they really can't over compress. Even though my hearing isn't what it used to be, I can still hear that my music often doesn't sound as good as it did when I was a kid. With new stuff, I quickly get ear fatigue, but with something well recorded on my system, even at pretty high volumes, I don't get ear fatigue and can listen endlessly.
I have a few gems on digital...Jethro Tull's Aqualung put out a year or so ago for a remastered anniversary edition is amazingly well done. It has plenty of dynamic range, and they've brought forth instruments that I'd never really heard before..it is great.
But like my Stones re-issues...ugh...they've killed what used to be fun recordings.
I'm hoping my vinyl experiment might give me back the sound I want to hear....and not be processed to sound like shit like so many engineers seem to aspire to create (or destroy).
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I have cheap Cort that I practice and just play around with. My regular guitar is a Godin Artisan ST not one of the cherry burst it's just plain wood finish. When I was picking it out I had played a lot of different guitars and they all sounded different even others of that model since it's made from real wood. It wasn't my first choice that was by an Italian luthier semi-hollow electric and far out of my price range but damn it sounded amazing.
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Compression is done for a variety of reasons.
To make the average sound as loud as possible, compression is used to raise the softer sections of music. This is the sort of thing that you're complaining about.
Compression is also used if the medium has a poor dynamic range and the source material has a wide dynamic range. Vinyl records have a poor dynamic range, so compression (and manual riding of gain controls) was common in mastering even 50+ years ago. Perhaps the routine use of compression wasn't as sever
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I really miss speakers that are made with real wood enclosures they sounded so much fuller, crisper, and bigger. ... like it's a crisp 300 watts
Watts sound so cold and clinical. I prefer my old 800 foot-pound-per-minute speakers. So much warmer than metric.
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Unfortunately, a lot of modern (re)releases on vinyl are also compressed to hell and back, but the warts and limitations of the LP format sort of 'hide' some of the badness.
The very best sound quality you're going to get is with mid-80s to mid-90s CD releases. This was after they figured out how to master properly for CDs, but before the Loudness War really got started.
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I really miss speakers that are made with real wood enclosures they sounded so much fuller, crisper, and bigger. Then again I have a tube stack with a 4x12 oak slant back offset classic and greenback Celestions that sounds like it's a crisp 300 watts (it's only 200) compared to the new stuff anyway.
Particle Board is MUCH better for enclosures, specfically because it doesn't have a easily-definable resonance frequency.
Rap your knuckles on a "real" wood speaker cabinet. Notice it has a sort of "ring" to it. Particle board cabinets (properly braced), not so much.
I want my speakers to sound like MUSIC, not a dining-room tabletop.
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It should be more of pop compared to a dull thud if it has a ring to it then it wasn't made right.
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I really miss speakers that are made with real wood enclosures they sounded so much fuller, crisper, and bigger. Then again I have a tube stack with a 4x12 oak slant back offset classic and greenback Celestions that sounds like it's a crisp 300 watts (it's only 200) compared to the new stuff anyway.
Sweet! Would like to see your rig! :)
Re:A perfect Christmas gift... (Score:4, Informative)
Most speakers, even high-quality ones, are medium-density fiberboard (MDF) with a wood veneer over them. Real wood has resonances, MDF much less so.
I have a pair of Tannoy SRM-12B studio monitors at my workstation and they look like wood, but they're clearly not as revealed by the places where the incredibly thin (about 0.7mm I'd say) wood finish has broken away. They still work perfectly. I am driving them with a mere 80W/ch class AB solid-state amplifier, but they can't handle more than 100W/ch anyhow. They have self-resetting breakers though, which I have seen get tripped once or twice when the amp has fed them a nasty transient. (The amp itself also has similar protection, and sometimes it's a race to see which one trips first. If it resets in seconds, the amp tripped. If it resets in minutes, the speakers tripped.)
In any case, these are hardly what you'd consider cheap crap. They are 40 years old, but are absolutely professional quality. They're 5/8 inch thick MDF.
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I've had equipment that was built similarly mostly in the 80s and early 90s and they were nice but there is a difference between quality 5/8 MDF and crap particle board, plastic, or even poorly assembled 3/8 or 3/16 mdf. There is also a different between studio monitors and a guitar stack and PA cabinets.
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If you pull the drivers or otherwise open the box and find chips in it, you have a shit box. 3/16 is insane for anything other than a portable system where weight is at an absolute premium (I'd rather have heavy magnets and light boxes than light magnets and heavy boxes), but 3/8 can be done well. As you have noted, the thinner it is, the more critical it is that everything fits perfectly because there is less edge adhesive holding everything together.
It's also true that there is a large difference between
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Stage gear often compromises on fidelity for the sake of power handling and portability.
Well yeah, unless you design your speakers properly ;-)
http://www.danleysoundlabs.com... [danleysoundlabs.com]
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MDF, particle board, and plastic are isotropic, so they tend not to develop cracks or stress joints as temperature and humidity change. Wood is anisotropic and in principle can have those problems, although they're unlikely to ever show up. Plywood is midway, but sometimes has voids that can rattle and buzz. In fact, the risk of having veneer delaminate from other materials is a concern similar to plywood.
That said, I use wood when I build speaker cabinets. Deficiencies in drivers, design, and craftmanship
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You can still buy really damn good speakers, and they don't have to be fancy bullshit audiophile designs. Look into active studio monitors, some of them will absolutely beat even the best audiophile speakers into pulp, when it comes to accuracy and detail. I would pit a set of Adam S5X-Vs against any set of audiophile speakers at any price point, any day of the week.
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I used to have a beautiful zenith console stereo from the 60s AM/FM turntable real nice wood finish I think it was walnut. It was tube and that thing sounded amazing... after it was destroyed in a flood in the early 90s I bought an expensive pioneer modular setup that just plain sucked, it would sound distorted if you added any volume to it.
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If you're not doing just a bit of EQ (preferable parametric EQ) to correct for the deficiencies in your room, you're missing out. Or you have an acoustically perfect room ;-)
I'm using a basic dbx Driverack PX DSP-based crossover and EQ for my setup (active studio monitors and active subs), and I've measured my room using Room EQ Wizard and a calibrated measurement microphone. The difference between no EQ and proper EQ is amazing.
The "kiddies" these days design and build gear that will put anything that came
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Hipsters like vinyl, 70s chopper motorcycles and skinny skateboards, all three are sucky technolog
Re:A perfect Christmas gift... (Score:4, Informative)
Argh! Such idiocy! (or ignorance).
Pops and clicks are due to scratches on the record and debris (dust, etc.) in the grooves. This is a flaw in the particular record, and will be different on each copy of the record (assuming the master or an intermediate copy is not damaged.) Some of it can be removed by post processing, even of your digital copies.
Hiss is noise that can come from many sources: microphone, 1st stage microphone amplifier, many places within the analog audiotape recorder used before digital recordings, physical limitations of vinyl, the phono cartridge, and the phono preamp, to name the most obvious.
Rumble is due to deficiencies in the playback equipment, although deficiencies in the cutter are also possible. A warped record will also cause rumble and other problems.
Wow (low frequency speed variation) is again due to deficiencies in the playback or cutting equipment, or due to the record not being centered properly.
Flutter is mostly an analog audiotape problem.
The limitations of a clean, undamaged, properly mastered and manufactured vinyl disk are dynamic range, distortion, and frequency response. Dynamic range is limited by the size of vinyl molecules compared to the size of the wiggles in the grooves that represent sound, and by the physical errors that accumulate from each generation of copy from master to the final stamped record. Dynamic range is also limited by the signal before it reaches the disk (There are records where you can hear relative silence, then hiss (probably from audiotape) as the signal is applied to the cutter.) Distortion is limited by geometry mismatches between the cutting stylus and the playback stylus, and the tendency of the material in a freshly cut groove to rebound somewhat, and other factors. Frequency response is limited by geometrical considerations of the cutting and playback stylus and the linear speed of the groove as it passes the stylus. Frequency response is also limited by the RIAA playback and recording compensation curves, which deliberately reduce response below about 50 Hz.
Digital has won out because it is more convenient, more durable, and easier and cheaper to produce excellent results. The best vinyl results require care and expensive equipment to reduce the flaws that come with sloppy vinyl use. Vinyl can be very good, just not as good as good digital.
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The other problem with modern mastering practice is that the engineers know the listening environment is likely to be really bad earbuds connected to something that plays MP3s. Switch to high-end headsets or good speakers and the mix sounds terrible, because it is.
As for vinyl, hipster audiophiles say they like the "warm" sound. Yes, it sounds "warm" because the low end is largely absent, the high end is constrained, and most of all, the dynamic range is quite compressed.
(Ex audio engineer here, though I co
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Dude, if that's what modern music sounds like to you, you need to find better music to listen to. Or maybe you just need to turn down the bass knob on your amplifier, which you probably turned up to compensate for the lack of bass on most LPs. Maybe you need to get better speakers that don't distort like crazy on actual bass content. Or maybe you need to look into room correction, if your room makes heavy bass boomy like that.
I have some tracks with crazy amounts of bass. Not overdriven or distorted, just l
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It's all down to the mastering. A well-produced CD will trounce anything else for sound quality.
Do you want to hear a secret? 99.9% of all LPs released over the last 10-15 years have used the exact same masters as the CD releases, overcompression, clipping and all.
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Obviously this is just a hippie AGW plot to sequester carbon.
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I buy vinyl for the sound quality. Each one gets played exactly once as I rip it to my computer.
Vinyl releases often sound better than the CD release these days because they are not as loud. The format simply doesn't allow the mix to be as loud as a CD does, clipped to hell and no dynamic range. What you lose in resolution and additional noise is more than made up for by the drums having some real slam and the guitars being more than just solid noise.
If they released CD versions with proper mixing I'd buy t
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Vinyl isn't better from a fidelity point of view, but it's Good Enough for most purposes. The real appeal lies in the big cover art and the whole ritual of vinyl playback. It makes it feel more special, and people are all about that these days.
I collect LPs, mostly of the albums I grew up with, listening on tape. So there's a huge nostalgia factor. I also buy the occasional stoner/doom metal/rock albums on vinyl, because I think the format fits the music, in a lo-fi kind of way.
The people who think it sound
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And how many DBX discs were ever released?
Exactly.
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And the huge artwork, don't forget that. I have a couple of albums that I bought strictly because of the covers.
I need a turntable? (Score:2)
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I ran into someone buying vinyl that didn't even realize he needed a turntable to play it.
See, the vinyl is too thin for a USB jack. So you need an adapter to play it.
Only downloads? (Score:5, Insightful)
By far the majority of digitally distributed music is streamed, not downloaded.
Downloaded music is a niche market.
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I'm not sure how niche it really is. There are a lot of people selling download music which means there must be a decent sized market. There again, cost to market is pretty low and low overhead for selling download music so who knows.
I've always though it poor fiscal decision to stream and pay for music over and over again rather than pay for music one time. There again, I have a large collection of music, in part, courtesy of BMG in the 90's, and I probably only download one or two albums a year. So wh
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By far the majority of digitally distributed music is streamed, not downloaded.
I also believed that, but RIAA report [riaa.com] linked from TFA says otherwise: 34% downloads, 34,3% streaming and 28.8% physical.
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And you believe the RIAA? ;-)
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MP3 V0 is fine. Only crazy audiophiles think otherwise.
You probably already know about Bandcamp, they offer just about every format you could wish for.
Looks like the loudness war is being fought (Score:5, Insightful)
Because of the Loudness War [wikipedia.org], Vinyl really does sound better, because it can't be abused the same way digital recordings can. There's only so much the needle will tolerate.
It's not because Vinyl is "better" -- it's because the mastering on the digital formats is appalling.
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Because of the Loudness War [wikipedia.org], Vinyl really does sound better, because it can't be abused the same way digital recordings can. There's only so much the needle will tolerate.
It's not because Vinyl is "better" -- it's because the mastering on the digital formats is appalling.
While I would be happy to find that the Loudness War is losing in some way, don't believe for a second the idiot hipster buying vinyl today is actually doing it because of shitty music quality.
We're talking about a generation who thinks ear buds and YouTube make for an amazing music experience...
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At what point did consumer generation come into play? The only data is that Vinyl is outselling digital downloads.
I certainly know my share of Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers who are also think earbuds & youtube are amazing.
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At what point did consumer generation come into play? The only data is that Vinyl is outselling digital downloads.
And yet with 48% of them not planning on using the vinyl they purchased, and 7% of them not even owning hardware to play it, I'm only left wondering how many of them even know what a turntable is, hence the hipster assumption to justify 3x the cost for the same music in a different format.
I certainly know my share of Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers who are also think earbuds & youtube are amazing.
This is true, but more to my point, a very small percentage of people even know why music quality is so shitty, or what the Loudness War is, and it would appear that most of the vinyl purchases were done out of artist char
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Actually there are some pretty good high end earbuds, like the Yuin PK range. And in-ear monitors can be absolutely exceptional, some of the best headphones of any type on the market in terms of sound quality. It's no wonder really, since they both cut out most external sound and only require a relatively small (and thus easy to make rigid and to control) driver to produce ample volume.
Check the Head-Fi forums, a lot of audiophiles love earbuds and monitors, and often drive them from portable devices.
YouTub
Re:Looks like the loudness war is being fought (Score:4, Insightful)
By all means, go buy an original vinyl album in good condition instead of a "Remastered anniversary edition", where, yeah, they tend to compress the mix and amplify the result. Or go buy a vinyl album because you are a DJ who actually knows how to spin vinyl. Or shit, go buy vinyl because you're nostalgic for the way things used to be, if that's what you're in to. But don't buy vinyl because you think it's gonna sound better than digital. That is, unless you group together the hiss of a low-quality hi-fi setup, and the clicks and pops from mishandling an record over time somehow improve the sound. And even if you do want that, There's an App for That.
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That's not correct. The problem isn't really the needle jumping, it's the needle wearing quickly and actually wearing down the record too. Heavily clipped tracks look like a square wave, smashing the needle back and forth.
There used to be machines that would tell you if your mix was okay for vinyl based on various standards for its manufacture. These days there are digital plug-ins.
As proof, compare these three versions of the same Santana album:
CD, terrible: http://dr.loudness-war.info/al... [loudness-war.info]
"High def" 48/2
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You can judge for yourself by looking at a database that quantifies it [loudness-war.info]
Go ahead and look up most of your albums.
An example: Adele's 25, in "High Definition" 24/192 format [loudness-war.info]
Every single track is a victim of the Loudness War.
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Ah yes, let's compare that Adele album to Vinyl [loudness-war.info]
So a DR range of 4 ("high def" digital, vs 11 on vinyl).
A DR of 11 is still pretty bad, but it's not as horrifying as you get with the "high def" audio.
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The DR rating is useless for LPs:
https://hydrogenaud.io/index.p... [hydrogenaud.io]
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It's because everything sold in digital is mastered like garbage and there's so much bass you cant hear what the singer is singing.
That's just bullshit. I have thousands of albums ripped from CDs and downloaded. None of them have overpowering bass, and most of them have decent-to-good mastering.
You either have a problem with your ears, your room, your speakers or your amplifier, if bass is completely overpowering.
Or maybe you're just listening to Bassy McBass and His All-Bass Big Bass Band XXXtra Bass Edition. In which case you should probably find something else to listen to.
A gift for the stupid and uneducated (Score:2, Informative)
Digital recorded music on vinyl is like dehydrated chicken in a home made soup mix.
You do not gain anything from going from digital to analog back and gain all of the wow, flutter, pop, hiss, etc.
Those that claim more 'warmth' are fooling themselves. Sure. Back when analog recordings were made vinyl was better. But once you lose the quality from the digitization process it is lost for good. Why is it so hard to realize that the music today is 99.99% recorded digitally and that is where the problem is.
If
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You do not gain anything from going from digital to analog back and gain all of the wow, flutter, pop, hiss, etc.
If you don't convert your digital music back to analog at some point, how are you supposed to listen to it?
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The other is Analog microphones + digital effects & synths -> digital recording -> analog recording -> conversion to voltages which are amplified -> conversion to speakers which move your ears
Honestly, as long as the digital sample rate is high enough (these days, it always is) and you listen to the record on a quality hi-fi, and you take care
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once you lose the quality from the digitization process it is lost for good.
Lose what quality? 44.1KHz/16bit (CD quality) is way beyond what LP, reel-to-reel or even the much-vaunted master tapes can manage.
It sounds to me like you don't understand digital audio at all. You should watch this video: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.sh... [xiph.org]
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Steven Wilson's remasters of Jethro Tull's albums are absolutely amazingly good. He also managed to salvage the sound on Opeth's "Damnation" album, where they had some issues with drum mics during the recordings, AFAIK they simply didn't have anything from the overhead mics.
Compared to the original compromised release, his remaster is a revelation.
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some actually take advantage of that wonderful 96 dBm of dynamic range (and even (much) more with 24 bit DVD-A/SACD recordings).
No music takes full advantage of 96dB of dynamic range, it would simply be way too dynamic to even listen to. 96dB is like the difference between an extremely quiet room (20-30dB) and a chainsaw at full tilt at 1m distance. Most rooms have somewhere between 30-40dB background noise, so to actually use all of that dynamic range, the peaks would have to hit over 130dB, which is louder than a rock concert.
24-bit has 144dB of theoretically possible dynamic range, which is even more ridiculous. To use that fully
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Bob Katz did a great talk about what happened to digital mastering, some years ago.
Back in the old days, you were advised to shoot for -20dBFS average sound level when recording/mastering digitally, and let the peaks fall where they may. Having a solid 20dB of headroom was a massive step forward and let artists record with basically all the dynamic range and headroom they could ever want.
Now, everything is either normalized right up to 0dBFS for the peaks with some compression (which is not ideal, but OK),
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I recall watching a documentary on this very subject once. They have a series of professional sound engineers listen to the same recording in both digital (but done right, without any compression or any of the other idiocy) and analog (as in, recorded analog, not digital then converted), and the professional sound engineers couldn't tell the difference.
The tables and cartridges audiophiles uses eliminate almost all of that and yes they cost a fortune.
So do the Monster cables that cost thousands of dollars, that audiophiles can't tell apart from wire coat hanger. [gizmodo.com]
Audiophiles, like wine aficionados, experien
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Indeed. It can bring the sound quality up to where it's equal to a properly recorded digital recording.
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You can absolutely have good digital. 44.1k/16 is not it though.
Yes, it is enough. In fact, it's more than enough.
Despite a large number of controlled listening tests, and decades of audiophile bullshit about the subject, no one has been able to show an actual audible difference between 44.1KHz/16-bit and so-called "hi-res" audio for normal musical content. Never. Not even once.
Hi-res audio is a scam.
7%? (Score:2)
>while 7% did not even own a turntable.
It's like Humble Bundles and steam sales, turned into real life.
HOWEVER, it should be noted. People buy plenty of stuff for various reasons other than the media itself. Many people never open their "collectors edition" stuff. It's about owning something, not necessarily playing it.
I own Demolition Man on LaserDisk, as well as Sega CD. I love that movie. I've didn't have the Laser Disk player when I bought it. And I still haven't watched it on LaserDisk. It's not abo
I will not buy this record (Score:3)
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You think that's bad? You haven't seen the state of your hovercraft lately.
God bless hipsters (Score:2)
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Buy a laser pickup turntable. There's no physical contact with the grooves, so no degradation just from playing your record.
Also, some of them come with optical scratch recognition and correction, so even pre-existing damage (within limits) doesn't affect the sound.
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Buy a laser pickup turntable. There's no physical contact with the grooves, so no degradation just from playing your record.
Last I heard, they don't work on coloured vinyl because it's translucent. Which is a bit unfortunate, since a lot of the 'Now for the first time on vinyl!' reissues are doing just that.
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It's crap.
Unlike a normal turntable, where the stylus helps push aside dust, the laser turntable plays back EVERYTHING, which necessitates ridiculously heavy-handed click and noise reduction, which murders the sound quality.
You're much better off with an ordinary setup of decent turntable and a decent cartridge. My SL-1210 Mk2 and a good Ortofon cartridge cost me $360, and will beat the laser turntable for sound quality any day of the week.
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As far as I know there is one guy in Japan still making those. Are there any other laser turntable manufacturers out there these days?
Personally I just rip to 24/44.1 on the first play, normalize the volume level and export as 16/44.1 FLAC. Record gets played once, baring any screw ups.
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Wrong evaluation (Score:2)
2nd. An LP can costs more of the sum of the single digital songs.
3rd. Digital songs have a larger market, thus lower prices.
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Peak Hipster (Score:5, Funny)
Have we just reached peak hipster?
It's not the vinyl, it's the subscriptions (Score:5, Interesting)
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This trend has more to do with the fact that "man bites dog" stories are always good for hits.
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There is another aspect to this that I have not seen mentioned yet too. When you buy a vinyl album you will often get either download codes or FLAC files or in the case of a retailer like Amazon they add the digital version right into your amazon music library.
So you don't actually have to play the vinyl if you don't want to -- but you still have music that you can hold in your f*cking hand and know that you own it.
Classical Records (Score:2)
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I mostly buy LPs so I can have the albums I grew up with on tape, in their original intended format. Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Procol Harum, all of that stuff.
I have some newer albums on LP as well, but I've stopped buying those, since they don't really make much sense. I would much rather have the exact same master as a digital file instead. I do make exceptions for tour singles that are only released on vinyl, autographed albums and a small selection of stoner/doom metal/rock bands, where I think the for
Higher dollars isn't more purchaes (Score:3)
Given how close the amounts are, and that vinyl costs quite a bit more per album, it's pretty clear this is still far fewer purchases. In fact, given that vinyl is more a fad (with half of them never being played), this could easily be accounted for by the same number of sales at twice the price each.
In other words, this isn't particularly meaningful data, except that audiophiles haven't gotten any less gullible in the last year.
This is about turnover (Score:3)
that Britons spent 2.4 million pounds ($3.03 million) on the old-school wax last week while only doling out 2.1 million pounds ($2.65 million) for digital downloads.
So, its about turnover rather than numbers of sales. Lets have a look on Amazon...
Thought so:
Dark side of the moon vinyl: £18.98
Dark side of the moon digital download: £7.99
...or stream for £0 if you already have Amazon Prime
...or rip the CD you bought in 1988 for £0
...or screw over those poor, penniless artists and torrent for £0.
So, yeah, you can see why the turnover on vinyl is tasty.
Got to hand it to the music industry: after getting everybody to replace all their vinyl with CDs in the 80s, it must have been so frustrating when the next big format let you convert all your CDs for free, but now they've gone back to the drawing board, applied themselves and found a wheeze to get everybody to replace all of their MP3s with vinyl again... so it looks like vinyl may even outlive the CD.
Remember guys - store all your CDs carefully for the grandkids so they're ready for the big 16-bit revival in 2050...
I have a vinyl collection but no record player (Score:2)
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Pen and paper can give writers and designers a direct means of sketching out their ideas without the complicating biases of software, while whiteboards can bring engineers "out from behind their screens" and entice them "to take risks and share ideas with others."
Terrible analogy. The actual art in the performance is whatever the performer wants to present, whether that's with a classical orchestra or synthesizers. Analogue/digital distribution is way down the line.
Of course this is nothing new. I've been saying analog is better than digital for a very long time despite being modded down every time I say it.
Because it's bollocks. A good digital recording of the signal from a turntable will be indistinguishable from direct analogue playback. Done right, digital will outperform analogue. It isn't always done right, especially these days thanks to the loudness war, but that isn't an inherent problem with digita
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What a load of absolute twaddle and bullshit.
Comparing pen and paper to vinyl records is disingenuous at best, the purposes, end results and methods are completely different. Pen and paper should be compared to a musical instrument, something which is used to create art.
But LPs are meant to reproduce the already-recorded art, and they do a middling-to-poor job at it, compared to digital audio, which is simply more accurate to the recording in every way possible.
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Quality goes to the LP? The format with severe problems for bass reproduction, limited frequency response, linearity problems, wow+flutter and countless other faults that negatively impact sound quality.
A CD is merely a physical distribution format for 44.1KHz/16-bit digital audio. The physical format is going away, but the same digital audio lives on as FLAC and WAV downloads.
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Oh man yeah, I absolutely hate the term "digital download". Whoever came up with that should be shot.