Is anyone working on a reasonably priced turntable to play vinyl discs without degrading them? In the mid '80s, Finial Technology announced such a turntable, and had a working unit at CES in 1986.
It had a stylus that contained laser interferometers that could very accurately and precisely measure the distance from the stylus to the grove walls. It kept the stylus near, but not touching, the groove, getting the audio signals from the variations in the distance to the groove.
In addition to not causing any wear, I remember reading an article back then in one of the audiophile magazines that said it also made records that had already been played many times on regular turntables and were degraded sound new, because the Finial could use a part of the groove farther down than had been used by the regular stylus, and so was not worn.
It was going to be pretty expensive, around $8000 at today's prices, so was probably only going to be affordable to radio stations, archivists, and high end audiophiles. Then they got hit with the double whammy of a major recession and the rapid replacement of a large chunk of the vinyl market by CDs.
Finial was liquidated in 1989, and their patents ended up at a Japanese company. Development continued in Japan, and eventually resulted in a product [1]. They seem to be around $15000.
The Library of Congress and a couple of other places have a system that can recover the sound for vinyl records and old wax cylinders what works by photographing the grove through a confocal microscope. The thousands of photographs are then analyzed to figure out the audio signal. This is still research level stuff, I believe, not aimed toward producing a commercial product, and so would be even farther out of reach for consumers than the laser interferometer turntables are.
If only there were a durable music format that had absolute perfect quality, didn't need special handling, no DRM, no compression artifacts, was stereo, and handled frequencies all the way down and all the way up to where humans can hear. Oh, the CD!
This seems kind of counterproductive for the (I think) vinyl target group. If I listen to vinyl, I want the kinda retro feeling "real" analog audio signal, else I'd just get a CD or online download. A mid-range stylus is completly sufficient for a great experience without any noticable noise and next to no real wear on the records.
The ELP Japan has some pretty back drawbacks other than price...
It doesn't work with coloured vinyl and it's worse than regular turntables when it comes to dust since it just reads it instead of potentially moving it away
There are some videos about it on YouTube and it looks like you have to meticulously clean your vinyl before playing it.
The vinyl groove is about 25-100 micrometer, and feature sizes on it go down to about 22.5 micrometer [1]. Lasers are extremely cheap today compared to what they were back in the day, and doing laser interferometry to detect features this small is not that difficult. I imagine a hobbyist with the right skill set could hack together a reader for a few hundred bucks at most.
Unfortunately I don't have a link since I don't remember the name of the device or company, but I read about such a device that was using five lasers to do the tracking etc. The problem with this tech was that it was too accurate and would reproduce every tiny particle of dust in the groove as audible cracks or pops, where the traditional stylus would just have pushed the particle out of its way.
I remember reading an article about somebody 3D-printing vinyls a couple of years ago. It sort-of worked but it wasn't quite there yet. Still, 3D printing technologies improves very fast nowadays so maybe in the not-so-far future it'll make more sense to just print a new vinyl from the master the current one is too badly damaged rather than spend money on a super expensive turntable?
In either case I feel like it's somewhat missing the point of vinyls in this day and age, people like vinyls because they're simple and low-tech like audio tapes, VHS and Polaroids. If you really care about audio quality and preservation you'll be much better off building a good capture setup and digitize your vinyl. It's easier to protect and backup digital audio samples than a fragile physical object.
I know it's not really what you are mentioning, but I remember reading a paper of people being able to playback a vinyl from a high-resolution scan of it.
A needle would easily push tiny dust particles away while lasers have a problem with that. Also, a scratch might be a much bigger problem.
Now, if instead of a relatively simple one scanning laser beam you would make an image of the record with a moving scanner head, exactly like paper scanners and then used what's today is commonly called "AI" ... that could work.
My very limited understanding after talking to someone who was interested in this stuff, is that people are concerned with quantizing of the signal, which will happen with that laser solution. I’ve heard this is why audiophiles also use magnetic tape. To be clear I heard this second hand and am not directly familiar.
I don’t really see why you’d need such a thing (apart from marketing to audiophiles—who are willing to pay the buck—or for research/archiving purposes—who are also ready to pay the buck).
If you want supreme sound quality you don’t play from a vinyl. A CD (or even FLAC file) will always “sound” better, even from first play. I, at least, don’t really care about the minor degrading my mid-range turn table does to my records. Almost all of the new records I buy come with a download code, so if, for some reason, my record becomes degraded beyond listening—however many listenings that would take—I always have the option of listening to the higher quality FLAC file.
I've been looking at the possibility of using high speed cameras and image processing. I suspect this is a hackable problem using just open source libraries, off the shelf camera modules and cheap single board computers.
I think there’s some confusion in here that everyone buying vinyl is repeating the habits of our parents and grandparents. I think there’s this misconception we’re buying records of whatever the latest hit band is with only 3 good songs and mostly filler.
Vinyl today is very much about the collecting of good music and taking part in the physical ness of that collection. The b-side is just as good as the A-side, even if the sound quality isn’t as perfect as the original studio recording. It doesn’t need to be, and it has its own unique sound.
What I most love about the experience of owning vinyl is that it’s annoying to pick one song. So you almost have to expect to put it on the first track and listen to the entire set. It’s listening in the moment, since you can’t skip and you have to be ready to flip the album over. I love it.
Also the experience of going to second hand stores to chat with fellow music lovers and discover new artists feels very human to me. Even if Spotify can recommend with precision, it mostly acts as background music since I don’t have to pay attention.
Not saying this is everyone’s cup of tea, but as a music nerd, I’m happy with my hobby.
Still interesting, and not really surprising based on my anecdotal experience of artists I follow. Streaming audio is good enough for most sound systems commonly in use.
Vinyl serves as a better collectible from a favorite artist for a few reasons.
- more room for cover art
- physical analog medium (superficial, but has value to some)
- requires more care than CDs (proves the owner’s dedication to maintaining the collection)
- limited production runs make it more scarce than easily copied CDs
I think the "good enough" phrase you used really touches on the reason vinyl still exists.
Streaming is "good enough." But physical media is a different experience. It's more intimate. You can touch, feel, and examine the music and the packaging. Some bands (REM is one) even put Easter Eggs in their physical media that can't be reproduced by digital.
Streaming is fine for when you want to fill your space with sound. Physical media is for when you want to really enjoy the music. Read about what you're listening to, see the artwork and photographs, and experience an album of music on the order it was meant to be heard.
As one of many examples, a streaming service can play "Home by the Sea" by Genesis. But I've never encountered one smart enough to then follow that with "Second Home by the Sea," which is how the music was made to be heard. Some services will even play "Second Home" on its own, which is jarring.
Music is one of the increasing number of areas where people are figuring out that abdicating human curation for machine selection just isn't the same thing.
Yeah, vinyl has a lot of love behind it because it has "object appeal" for the reasons you cite. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a niche thing. As are cassettes (which ALSO are making a comeback of sorts, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EbJ4ZX4RIw)
None of these physical media are remotely comparable in terms of market-share to streaming, I expect.
It's just a thing, It won't last forever.
Good turntables are expensive and, let's face it, it's a pain in the ass to queue an LP.
>physical analog medium (superficial, but has value to some)
I dissagree that vinyl medium is superficial. It is different entirely. Vinyl has a unique sound. Dynamic entropy is added during the playback from imperfections, many favor this outcome, not all.
Audio sources for vinyl duplication will undergo a seperate mastering process that is taylored for the vinyl version. Even if you do not request another mastering any good vinyl shop will have some adjustments they make before duplication.
All these variables will produce another version of the audio at the end. This will change propective and therefore put a perfect digital copy above or below the other in their mind.
The ritual of electromechanical device has some appeal. The arm, the spin up, the pops. Even CDs had some ~groove (yes intended), the tray and interface.
That's something digital media reduced almost to zero (I guess younger generations had the bliss of the ipod wheel).
While streaming is obviously the revenue king, the apples-to-apples soft-media comparison point for vinyl and CD is not streaming but digital downloads, which isn't covered in the OP article but is in the linked RIAA report. tl;dr: Currently digital downloads see about twice as much revenue as either CD or vinyl, but trending downwards while CD revenue is holding steady and vinyl experiencing mild growth.
Personally I like DRM-free digital downloads (as opposed to streaming) as they provide the best advantages of soft media while also being mine to fully control forever.
Vinyl is one of those old-school technologies that seems like it's from the future. Somehow we turned sound into a disk. You can see and feel the sound and then a tiny needle will reproduce the original sound just by touching the disk. And in very high quality!
The CED offers one hour of VHS quality per side that rapidly degenerates. I own a sizeable collection of them, and while sorta neat, it’s also sorta terrible.
The vinyl offers quality superior to most consumer tape equipment rivaled only by 11 ips reel to reel. CED had no quality advantages, decays rapidly and is non recordable. It was a non-starter.
The fact is that CED was in the works since the 50s when it may have had a short successful life, but RCA couldn’t get off their ass. In fact CED was the last consumer product ever released by RCA. (The RCA of today is just a badge on various crap after being divested by Thomson Consumer Electronics)
Also even though CED uses a stylus, the similarities end there. You can literally run your nail in a phono groove and hear the sound. It is a literal imprint of the sound wave. Video cannot be encoded in such a straightforward manner, NTSC and PAL are not trivially. Also the CED is not vibrating the stylus. Rather the stylus sits on ridges and the signal is depth encoded (therefore varying the capacitance, hence the name). It is much closer to a crappy laser disc in operation (which also encodes in analog.. not digital)
We kinda did keep going, except we put the grooves onto foil as little dots, and read them with a laser. Also, the whole thing is encased in polycarbonate.
It talks about, demonstrates and measures the air quality around vinyl. Apparently the things are leaching dangerous compounds into the air constantly, especially when being played. It made his air quality measuring device give an alarm, instead of just reporting the number of particles or something.
I'm not sure, maybe it's just one of those thousands of every day life things which are technically carcinogenic, or not. It made me pause personally though, having recently lost a friend, who worked at a record store, died at a young age to cancer, had otherwise always been a strong healthy man. I'm actually more comfortable talking about this here, semi-anonymously, I don't think it'd be wise to bring this up IRL with anyone, on account of it possibly not having to do with anything. I kind of half-wish I hadn't seen the video.
I lost my dad to cancer last year, and I think it can be maddening to try to unwind the causes. I think when you lose somebody, the natural impulse can be to reach out for a cause, at least so you can understand it, and there's a tendency to seize on any evidence or theory, no matter how weak, just to have somewhere to lay down the blame.
So you might be right that vinyl records are dangerous, or maybe that had no impact. In my opinion it's best for one's mental health to trust scientific inquiry to tell us what's dangerous or not, and to leave everything else as an open question.
CDs are dying, but they are mostly being killed by streaming services, not by vinyl. Digital music formats are still the king by far. The vast majority of people don't even care that their streamed music is lossy and they lose out on high frequencies that their ears can't hear and their headphones can't reproduce.
Vinyl appeals to hipsters and dumb audiophiles (there are smart audiophiles, but they aren't buying vinyl), both communities that are prone to buying into hype. Hipsters move on as soon as something becomes mainstream, and dumb audiophiles will move on as soon as there is a more expensive option with newer/cooler buzzwords attached to it. Cassette tapes could replace vinyl someday as the hip alternative to digital music- it's retro and analog, plus they are portable and don't skip/lose track during heavy movement (which a record player would do if you could go jogging with one).
> Vinyl appeals to hipsters and dumb audiophiles (there are smart audiophiles, but they aren't buying vinyl), both communities that are prone to buying into hype.
I think enough people have commented about how obnoxious this statement is, but I'll go ahead and throw another couple of cents into the conversation
I think there is genuine value to artifacts. When you buy a record, you get:
* The record itself
* An 12" x 12" piece of art accosiated with the album
* A booklet of bonus content and anything else the artist wanted to include.
Not only is there added extra value in that (larger than a CD), but it can feel like an occasion to get.
But beyond that, there can be an interesting satisfaction in holding the literal physical interpretation of the sound you enjoy. There's a connection there for some people, and it shouldn't be discounted.
Your conception of vinyl buyers is very negative. I think there's another category of people that buy vinyl. If you really love an album and want to support the artist you can purchase the vinyl version of the album. Apart from supporting the artist you often get additional treats like a nice booklet with the lyrics or additional art/imagery.
I really think there's extra value in buying vinyl apart from it being hip.
Perhaps you should spend a bit more time around music junkies before making such authoritative statements about the market for vinyl :). I am personally close to two communities who still consume vinyl for neither of the reasons you've listed:
1. Underground enthusiasts who enjoy digging for hidden gems that are difficult to find or don't exist on streaming/digital services
I think vinyl has a lot of understated advantages. Vinyl records are large physical artifacts that contain your music with nice, big covers that provide a great medium for artwork. And you have a cool physical ritual of placing it on the turntable. All of that gets lost with tapes and CD's.
Vinyl is one of the best ways to feel like you actually "own" music in today's streaming first world.
It's also a way to support underground artists who make art you appreciate - from the music itself to the cover art and the arrangement of the tracklist.
In hip-hop there's been a few small vinyl producers making super high quality vinyls for underground artists. They've gained a cult like following and can continuously sell out of 1500-2000 records at $60 per within an hour of release.
As much as it pains me to say this, I think I'm a hipster.
I put a lot of attention and care into my audio and vinyl setup, but now that you can find albums at Walmart, the hip factor has been sucked out of it like a vacuum.
I've recently been downsizing, and this might be something that doesn't stay with me. I'll keep my signed albums, but maybe not the rest.
Here I am listening to Daniel Barenboim's Beethoven Piano Sonatas spread over 24 sides of vinyl, purchased for under a tenner in a charity shop. A CD would be more practical, but the set of records is a real experience, even the getting up to skip the occasional scratch and turn over the records.
Edit: downvotes over 20 minutes. Do you doubt that I'm really listening to it (I am, before I read this news)? Or that vinyl is a real experience? Or that I'm some kind of "hipster" (I have thousands of records, and an equal number of CDs, collected over 30 years). Please reply, I'm interested what you have to say.
I'm pretty biased in my thoughts on this. I used to DJ EDM back in my early 20s and still have thousands of dollars worth of equipment and vinyl records accumulating dust. Every once in a while I'll whip out a record and listen to it on my Technics. I never find myself playing CDs on my CD decks. There is something about vinyl that feels like a collectible that you want to take out of a sleeve and put a needle on. CDs just don't have that and feel like disposable junk. I'm surprised that vinyl is outselling CDs, but I am not surprised that it's still relevant.
I bought a turntable from the 80s several months ago and I love it :-) I never had a turntable before so it's actually a "new" technology to me, but I find the physicality of the whole thing wonderful - choosing a record and setting up the turntable is like a ritual, you just enjoy the moment.
Note that this is talking about revenue, not unit sales:
The new report states that vinyl records earned $224.1 million (from 8.6 million units) in the first half of 2019. This figure is impressively close to the CD numbers ($247.9 million, 18.6 million units).
The biggest relevation for me about vinyl was when I realized that it's CAV (constant angular velocity) and not CLV (constant linear velocity). It means that audio quality gets progressively worse as you move from outer tracks to inner tracks!
CDs are a nearly-perfect format and it's sad to see them decline. Mainstream digital music stores don't even offer CD quality, and streaming services are antithetical to preservation and allow content to disappear overnight.
Would some one please enlighten me as to what on God's green earth is going on with vinyl? It's less dense, lower-quality, degrades with use, and is more expensive. It's probably less environmentally-friendly, too (though I'm not sure what it's target demographic is, so I don't know if that means much). Why is vinyl popular, all of a sudden? I had to rip all my grandmother's vinyl records, once, and it was a pain in the be-hind. I'm not sure why any one would willingly subject himself to that when better alternatives exist. I thought it was dead as of long ago.
Vinyl is 90% nostalgia and 10% logical. Modern recording methods are far superior and have much better fidelity. I much prefer my flacs on amodern high end system
Recently re-experienced vinyl player with a music library in a hotel.
The experience of vinyl is great you can touch and hold
the music you like and love. The search depth of the
music catalog is good its a stack of vinyls vs all music that was ever created. Carbon foot print from vinyl is lower than online streamed music due to the co2 foot print of all the servers serving online music. I think vinyl is a fun form to share and consume music.
Study of co2 emissions from streaming vs analogue music
"The research shows GHGs of 140 million kilograms in 1977, 136 million kilograms in 1988, and 157 million in 2000. But by 2016 the generation of GHGs by storing and transmitting digital files for those listening to music online is estimated to be between 200 million kilograms and over 350 million kilograms in the US alone."
source: https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_643297_en.html
[+] [-] tzs|6 years ago|reply
It had a stylus that contained laser interferometers that could very accurately and precisely measure the distance from the stylus to the grove walls. It kept the stylus near, but not touching, the groove, getting the audio signals from the variations in the distance to the groove.
In addition to not causing any wear, I remember reading an article back then in one of the audiophile magazines that said it also made records that had already been played many times on regular turntables and were degraded sound new, because the Finial could use a part of the groove farther down than had been used by the regular stylus, and so was not worn.
It was going to be pretty expensive, around $8000 at today's prices, so was probably only going to be affordable to radio stations, archivists, and high end audiophiles. Then they got hit with the double whammy of a major recession and the rapid replacement of a large chunk of the vinyl market by CDs.
Finial was liquidated in 1989, and their patents ended up at a Japanese company. Development continued in Japan, and eventually resulted in a product [1]. They seem to be around $15000.
The Library of Congress and a couple of other places have a system that can recover the sound for vinyl records and old wax cylinders what works by photographing the grove through a confocal microscope. The thousands of photographs are then analyzed to figure out the audio signal. This is still research level stuff, I believe, not aimed toward producing a commercial product, and so would be even farther out of reach for consumers than the laser interferometer turntables are.
[1] http://www.elpj.com/
[+] [-] cosmotic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] explodingcamera|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KiSM|6 years ago|reply
It doesn't work with coloured vinyl and it's worse than regular turntables when it comes to dust since it just reads it instead of potentially moving it away
There are some videos about it on YouTube and it looks like you have to meticulously clean your vinyl before playing it.
[+] [-] abdullahkhalids|6 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.gzvinyl.com/About-vinyl.aspx
[+] [-] iforgotpassword|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simias|6 years ago|reply
In either case I feel like it's somewhat missing the point of vinyls in this day and age, people like vinyls because they're simple and low-tech like audio tapes, VHS and Polaroids. If you really care about audio quality and preservation you'll be much better off building a good capture setup and digitize your vinyl. It's easier to protect and backup digital audio samples than a fragile physical object.
[+] [-] TylerE|6 years ago|reply
Turntables that trash records are usually shitty turntables that, if they're even adjustable at all, aren't adjusted properly.
[+] [-] TheGallopedHigh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekingr|6 years ago|reply
I can't find back the paper in question but I've found this which is in the same spirit: https://www.cse.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.htm...
[+] [-] chx|6 years ago|reply
Now, if instead of a relatively simple one scanning laser beam you would make an image of the record with a moving scanner head, exactly like paper scanners and then used what's today is commonly called "AI" ... that could work.
[+] [-] renlo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runarberg|6 years ago|reply
If you want supreme sound quality you don’t play from a vinyl. A CD (or even FLAC file) will always “sound” better, even from first play. I, at least, don’t really care about the minor degrading my mid-range turn table does to my records. Almost all of the new records I buy come with a download code, so if, for some reason, my record becomes degraded beyond listening—however many listenings that would take—I always have the option of listening to the higher quality FLAC file.
[+] [-] inflatableDodo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puranjay|6 years ago|reply
If you have a higher budget, check out Pro-Ject or Rega Planar
[+] [-] jarjoura|6 years ago|reply
Vinyl today is very much about the collecting of good music and taking part in the physical ness of that collection. The b-side is just as good as the A-side, even if the sound quality isn’t as perfect as the original studio recording. It doesn’t need to be, and it has its own unique sound.
What I most love about the experience of owning vinyl is that it’s annoying to pick one song. So you almost have to expect to put it on the first track and listen to the entire set. It’s listening in the moment, since you can’t skip and you have to be ready to flip the album over. I love it.
Also the experience of going to second hand stores to chat with fellow music lovers and discover new artists feels very human to me. Even if Spotify can recommend with precision, it mostly acts as background music since I don’t have to pay attention.
Not saying this is everyone’s cup of tea, but as a music nerd, I’m happy with my hobby.
[+] [-] thinkmassive|6 years ago|reply
Still interesting, and not really surprising based on my anecdotal experience of artists I follow. Streaming audio is good enough for most sound systems commonly in use.
Vinyl serves as a better collectible from a favorite artist for a few reasons.
[+] [-] reaperducer|6 years ago|reply
Streaming is "good enough." But physical media is a different experience. It's more intimate. You can touch, feel, and examine the music and the packaging. Some bands (REM is one) even put Easter Eggs in their physical media that can't be reproduced by digital.
Streaming is fine for when you want to fill your space with sound. Physical media is for when you want to really enjoy the music. Read about what you're listening to, see the artwork and photographs, and experience an album of music on the order it was meant to be heard.
As one of many examples, a streaming service can play "Home by the Sea" by Genesis. But I've never encountered one smart enough to then follow that with "Second Home by the Sea," which is how the music was made to be heard. Some services will even play "Second Home" on its own, which is jarring.
Music is one of the increasing number of areas where people are figuring out that abdicating human curation for machine selection just isn't the same thing.
[+] [-] crispyambulance|6 years ago|reply
None of these physical media are remotely comparable in terms of market-share to streaming, I expect.
It's just a thing, It won't last forever.
Good turntables are expensive and, let's face it, it's a pain in the ass to queue an LP.
[+] [-] taxidump|6 years ago|reply
I dissagree that vinyl medium is superficial. It is different entirely. Vinyl has a unique sound. Dynamic entropy is added during the playback from imperfections, many favor this outcome, not all.
Audio sources for vinyl duplication will undergo a seperate mastering process that is taylored for the vinyl version. Even if you do not request another mastering any good vinyl shop will have some adjustments they make before duplication.
All these variables will produce another version of the audio at the end. This will change propective and therefore put a perfect digital copy above or below the other in their mind.
[+] [-] agumonkey|6 years ago|reply
That's something digital media reduced almost to zero (I guess younger generations had the bliss of the ipod wheel).
[+] [-] xenocyon|6 years ago|reply
Personally I like DRM-free digital downloads (as opposed to streaming) as they provide the best advantages of soft media while also being mine to fully control forever.
[+] [-] chx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] habosa|6 years ago|reply
Blows me away every time I think about it. And we could have kept going: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc
[+] [-] ofibrvev|6 years ago|reply
The CED offers one hour of VHS quality per side that rapidly degenerates. I own a sizeable collection of them, and while sorta neat, it’s also sorta terrible.
The vinyl offers quality superior to most consumer tape equipment rivaled only by 11 ips reel to reel. CED had no quality advantages, decays rapidly and is non recordable. It was a non-starter.
The fact is that CED was in the works since the 50s when it may have had a short successful life, but RCA couldn’t get off their ass. In fact CED was the last consumer product ever released by RCA. (The RCA of today is just a badge on various crap after being divested by Thomson Consumer Electronics)
Also even though CED uses a stylus, the similarities end there. You can literally run your nail in a phono groove and hear the sound. It is a literal imprint of the sound wave. Video cannot be encoded in such a straightforward manner, NTSC and PAL are not trivially. Also the CED is not vibrating the stylus. Rather the stylus sits on ridges and the signal is depth encoded (therefore varying the capacitance, hence the name). It is much closer to a crappy laser disc in operation (which also encodes in analog.. not digital)
[+] [-] falcrist|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tripzilch|6 years ago|reply
It talks about, demonstrates and measures the air quality around vinyl. Apparently the things are leaching dangerous compounds into the air constantly, especially when being played. It made his air quality measuring device give an alarm, instead of just reporting the number of particles or something.
I'm not sure, maybe it's just one of those thousands of every day life things which are technically carcinogenic, or not. It made me pause personally though, having recently lost a friend, who worked at a record store, died at a young age to cancer, had otherwise always been a strong healthy man. I'm actually more comfortable talking about this here, semi-anonymously, I don't think it'd be wise to bring this up IRL with anyone, on account of it possibly not having to do with anything. I kind of half-wish I hadn't seen the video.
[+] [-] skohan|6 years ago|reply
So you might be right that vinyl records are dangerous, or maybe that had no impact. In my opinion it's best for one's mental health to trust scientific inquiry to tell us what's dangerous or not, and to leave everything else as an open question.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] parsimo2010|6 years ago|reply
Vinyl appeals to hipsters and dumb audiophiles (there are smart audiophiles, but they aren't buying vinyl), both communities that are prone to buying into hype. Hipsters move on as soon as something becomes mainstream, and dumb audiophiles will move on as soon as there is a more expensive option with newer/cooler buzzwords attached to it. Cassette tapes could replace vinyl someday as the hip alternative to digital music- it's retro and analog, plus they are portable and don't skip/lose track during heavy movement (which a record player would do if you could go jogging with one).
[+] [-] jedimastert|6 years ago|reply
I think enough people have commented about how obnoxious this statement is, but I'll go ahead and throw another couple of cents into the conversation
I think there is genuine value to artifacts. When you buy a record, you get:
* The record itself
* An 12" x 12" piece of art accosiated with the album
* A booklet of bonus content and anything else the artist wanted to include.
Not only is there added extra value in that (larger than a CD), but it can feel like an occasion to get.
But beyond that, there can be an interesting satisfaction in holding the literal physical interpretation of the sound you enjoy. There's a connection there for some people, and it shouldn't be discounted.
[+] [-] Aaronmacaron|6 years ago|reply
I really think there's extra value in buying vinyl apart from it being hip.
[+] [-] fortran77|6 years ago|reply
I'm also 56 years old so I grew up with vinyl. There's nothing "hip" about me.
[+] [-] _bohm|6 years ago|reply
1. Underground enthusiasts who enjoy digging for hidden gems that are difficult to find or don't exist on streaming/digital services
2. DJs who prefer vinyl as a medium for mixing
[+] [-] philwelch|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephencoyner|6 years ago|reply
It's also a way to support underground artists who make art you appreciate - from the music itself to the cover art and the arrangement of the tracklist.
In hip-hop there's been a few small vinyl producers making super high quality vinyls for underground artists. They've gained a cult like following and can continuously sell out of 1500-2000 records at $60 per within an hour of release.
Those interested should check out...
Daupe https://daupe.bandcamp.com/music
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.factmag.com/2018/02/08/daup...
De Rap Winkel https://derapwinkelrecords.bandcamp.com/music
[+] [-] oe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] echelon|6 years ago|reply
I put a lot of attention and care into my audio and vinyl setup, but now that you can find albums at Walmart, the hip factor has been sucked out of it like a vacuum.
I've recently been downsizing, and this might be something that doesn't stay with me. I'll keep my signed albums, but maybe not the rest.
[+] [-] rwmj|6 years ago|reply
Edit: downvotes over 20 minutes. Do you doubt that I'm really listening to it (I am, before I read this news)? Or that vinyl is a real experience? Or that I'm some kind of "hipster" (I have thousands of records, and an equal number of CDs, collected over 30 years). Please reply, I'm interested what you have to say.
For the doubters, here's a photo: http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/20190908_183833.jpg
[+] [-] klingonopera|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sakopov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkorzeniewski|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrmg|6 years ago|reply
The new report states that vinyl records earned $224.1 million (from 8.6 million units) in the first half of 2019. This figure is impressively close to the CD numbers ($247.9 million, 18.6 million units).
[+] [-] kozak|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] big_chungus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] honkycat|6 years ago|reply
Additionally, most vinyl releases these days come with a high-quality FLAC audio download, so I get the digital music as well.
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acd|6 years ago|reply
Study of co2 emissions from streaming vs analogue music "The research shows GHGs of 140 million kilograms in 1977, 136 million kilograms in 1988, and 157 million in 2000. But by 2016 the generation of GHGs by storing and transmitting digital files for those listening to music online is estimated to be between 200 million kilograms and over 350 million kilograms in the US alone." source: https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_643297_en.html