7 ms·
Time for vinyl to get back in its groove after pressing times
- MrJagil 11y agoWe had a good discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10225203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10225203
- eikenberry 11y agoEver since Napster physical media is no longer about distribution but has become merchandise, like T-shirts or stickers. And CDs just aren't as nice of a collectible as Vinyl.
- acd 11y agoOne thing that is still very appealing with buying on physical media is that you really own the item. When you buy digital downloads they could become worthless if the seller for some reason go out of business, often its DRM protected so you cannot do what you want with your own media. License restrictions also restrict what you may do with your digital downloads. Vinyl is a bit like Instagram purposeful alteration of the original for artful purposes.
- FigBug 11y agoOften? I can think of a single online music store that still sells DRM music. Music subscriptions use DRM, but I wouldn't call that 'buying'.
- digi_owl 11y agoIn large part because consumer watchdogs complained about how DRM was effectively platform lock-ins. And the easiest choice was to dump DRM fully rather than come up with a cross platform system.
- DanBC 11y agoThat's only true if people keep making the playing devices. I have a bunch of minidiscs that I'll lose access to when the player dies. (Which is fine, I still have all the content in other forms).
- vpribish 11y agolooks like the singularity is here for records : http://3dprintingindustry.com/2014/12/03/3d-printed-hand-cranked-record-player/ http://3dprintingindustry.com/2014/12/03/3d-printed-hand-cra... http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-Printed-Record/ http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-Printed-Record/
- Almaviva 11y ago> That's only true if people keep making the playing devices. I think that's also a lot of the charm of vinyl: the technology is transparent, direct and simple, and a child could literally build a functional player in two minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJa6Ik6xmiU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJa6Ik6xmiU
- david-given 11y agoErm. Not really. Not if you want to play anything other than 78s. 78s were mono, and the data was encoded via a vertical movement of the stylus. A needle-and-paper-cup player will work fine on one of these. Modern records are stereo, and the data is encoded as two channels, so the needle moves in two directions; these directions are diagonal to the plane of the record. The only real way to build a needle that will play these is via a magnetic pickup on the other end of the needle. These are rather non-trivial to build. Once you've done that, there's an additional complication, which is that the dynamic range of the vinyl isn't up to reproducing the audio signal; low notes at high volume require large displacements and the grooves are too close together to allow this (even if it can move fast enough, which I'm unsure about). So you encode the audio signal in a standard way before pressing it onto the vinyl, compressing the low frequencies and... expanding? the high ones. The record player then undoes this encoding after reading the signal off the disk. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization for the full details. Of course, getting a decoder is as simple as ordering the standard part and wiring it in. But now you've got a full electronic system, and it's decidedly non-trivial to build. Modern vinyl has a lot of subtlety and sophistication to it. If you use a needle-and-paper-cup player on a 33, it'll make noises that sound a bit like music, but actually playing it properly is highly non-trivial.
- pkamb 11y ago> and the first plant in the Pacific north-west. Strange style choice, when "Pacific Northwest" is available. Does not seem like British English rules for cardinal directions should supersede the region's proper noun place name.
- kzhahou 11y agoThe article title tries to put a good spin on it, but the revolution is behind us.
- cthalupa 11y agoRecord Store Day is maddening. You have the huge name bands like Foo Fighters clogging up the vinyl plants for months to produce their stuff in huge quantities, and then you find out that they just used the brickwalled DR6 CD master for the source material, killing all of the benefits of vinyl, and leaving you with all of the downsides. The plants are obviously happy to have extra business, but they're not making enough money to buy more presses, so as these big name releases that actually sound worse than their digital counterparts are taking up more and more of a finite resource and preventing quality content from being pressed. I have an extensive vinyl collection, but I'll be the first to tell you that the actual physical format is vastly inferior to CD. The only benefit is that a decent amount of vinyl releases do not have the same mastering as the CD, due to the perception that many of the vinyl purchasers are audiophiles and want the higher dynamic range master or are only buying the vinyl to display it somewhere and never listen to it, and don't care about the DR on the release. But plenty of releases are also lazily done and are just the shitty CD masters with the RIAA curve applied and pressed onto an LP. The Loudness War ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war ) needs to go away so I can go back to happily buying digital formats and stop dealing with all of this bullshit.
- brandonmenc 11y ago> The Loudness War needs to go away according to your link, it is going away: "Analysis suggests that the loudness trend may have peaked around 2005 and subsequently reduced, with a pronounced increase in overall and minimum album DR (crest factor) for albums since 2005." This tracks with what I hear on new recordings.
- cthalupa 11y agoIt's gotten better, but it's still plenty prevalent, especially in rock and all of it's various subgenres. One of my favorite albums from 2014 has perhaps some of the absolute worst mastering I've ever listened to. http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/69622 http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/69622 The dynamic range is so low you actually hear clipping on the CD version. The same album, on vinyl? http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/91768 http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/91768 Now, because of the way DR is scored, a vinyl album will almost always score higher on a DR test, but you can generally see this right away without even listening, because everything will have a pretty uniform 3-4 DR boost. But this one is a dedicated vinyl master, and the score increase comes from that. (For more in depth on this specific release, the guys at AngryMetalGuy wrote up a lengthy review/screed about the loudness war/etc http://www.angrymetalguy.com/fallujah-the-flesh-prevails-prevails-review-of-the-dr10-master/ http://www.angrymetalguy.com/fallujah-the-flesh-prevails-pre... ) Mainstream rock is still really bad about it, and less-mainstream metal is some of the worst.
- amelius 11y agoI'm hoping we can one day have "vinyl burners" (like CD burners), so I can make my music collection look "cool" again.
- voltagex_ 11y agohttp://www.instructables.com/id/3D-Printed-Record/?ALLSTEPS http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-Printed-Record/?ALLSTEPS (modal popup warning)