24 ms·

Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

545 points by ValentineC 7y ago

big_chungus 7y ago
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.
- tyingq 7y ago
  Nostalgia and appearance. Old cars drive like crap and are unsafe, but popular for the same reason.
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    I understand that, but old cars are a hobby of a limited number of people, not of "Joe Average". This would be like old cars out-selling new ones.
    - tomhoward 7y ago
      Digital recordings still vastly outsell vinyl; it’s just that CDs are declining in favor of MP3s and streaming, whilst demand for vinyl among enthusiasts/collectors holds up.
    - liability 7y ago
      In this analogy 'new cars' (CDs) have already largely been antiquated by the new technology of personal teleportation (audio files distributed over networks.) The market for new cars still exists because some people don't like teleportation. Some people worry that teleportation recreates you imperfectly on the other side and thus prefer a new car. But that demographic is shrinking. Teleportation is simply so convienent that the overwhelming majority of consumers think the price worth paying.
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        "Some people worry that teleportation recreates you imperfectly on the other side" Teleportation could recreate me perfectly, imperfectly, or better than perfectly - the issue is what happens to the original me. Rumor has it that after scanning your body the origin portal drops you into a trash compactor.
    - leapis 7y ago
      The CD standard as the "Joe Average" is quickly changing. Anecdotally, as a younger person (recent college grad), people my age don't buy CDs out of necessity nearly as much anymore as they used to. We've gotten to the point where the vast majority of devices (car stereos, home systems, etc) have at the very least, an aux port. Adding on to this, the prevalence of phones as speakers and music players means that you hardly every "need" a CD. CDs are quickly going the way of records and cassettes. We can see this pretty clearly looking at consumer reports[1], where you'll find that vinyls, compared to CDs, are actually being propped up largely by generations (18-44) that never properly experienced them. CD usage, on the other hand, is generally supported by older generations that are slower to adapt to modern streaming. Vinyl is almost vicarious nostalgia- most vinyl users I know (generally from the same age bracket) enjoy it as a deprecated technology that feels exotic. CDs aren't necessary for us anymore, and since we grew up with them, they aren't as enchanting and romanticized as vinyl. [1] http://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/MusicWatch-Consumer-Profile-RIAA-2018.pdf http://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/MusicWatch-Co...
    - iamnotacrook 7y ago
      It would be like - in a world where everyone used Uber, public transport etc - 5 old cars outselling 3 new ones.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    Vinyl is way more popular than old cars.
    - dTal 7y ago
      What a weird thing to say. The analogy was vinyl : digital :: old cars : new cars. Obviously cars are way more expensive than music, so it doesn't make sense to directly compare their popularity in an absolute sense.
    - chucksmash 7y ago
      It's pretty clear if you think it through a bit. You can buy Pet Sounds, a classic album recorded in 1966, on vinyl: - Distribution: you can buy it from Amazon, the same distribution channel as more modern media - Price: for $18 (very small premium over digital media in absolute terms) - Condition: in perfect, newly manufactured condition - Substitutability: a functionally perfect substitute good for the artifact manufactured in 1966 (even available in original mono!) - Supply: from a growing supply of records (record company always reissuing classics!) - Maintenance: with the same maintenance requirements as an LP of a 2019 album Consider the equivalent for a classic car, say a 1966 Corvette: I want a 1966 Corvette. "Old Corvettes have a soul that new Corvettes lack, there's just some ineffable quality I prefer, y'know?", yadda yadda yadda - Distribution: Can I walk into a Chevy dealership and buy a 1966 Corvette? Nope! - Price: Can I buy a mint condition 1966 Corvette for substantially the same price as a 2019 Corvette? Nope! DDG says perfect 1966 Corvette value would be $82k, 2019 Corvette would be $55k and I suspect the difference would be even greater tbh. $30k+ price difference! - Condition: Can I buy a newly manufactured 1966 Corvette at all? Nope! - Substitutability: the 1966 Corvette is substantially different from the 2019 Corvette - Supply: the number of well-maintained 1966 Corvettes is constrained. They aren't making any more! - Maintenance: Entirely different beasts. No common parts. So if I want a conversation piece in my living room, I can buy a $100 record player and spend $8 more for the LP
      - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
        Well sure, if you’re just getting vinyl as conspicuous consumption, it’s a bad investment. I recommend against that. There are perfectly rational material reasons to prefer vinyl that don’t involve a midlife crisis or greenhouse gases. Anyone who spends $55k on a car clearly has very different values than most people.
- ch4s3 7y ago
  I think it's a mix of aesthetics, nostalgia, and some elements of the experience. Vinyl albums have big. often interesting art. Browsing a collection of vinyl has an element of serendipity as well, who knows what you may and on. Additionally, the listening experience is different because it's hard to skip around, songs bleed into one another. It's a case of worse is better.
  - benologist 7y ago
    I think it's mostly nostalgia because if you listen to music a lot in album form you'll ruin them, if you have kids you'll ruin them, if you have friends you'll ruin them, if they're near a window you'll ruin them, your record player can ruin them, an earthquake can ruin them. This is a music format with moving, degrading parts. I think LPs are bad for our environment compared to digital. I don't need tens of kilograms of plastic to enjoy music even if I would enjoy the process more than digital music players.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      I don't need tens of kilograms of plastic to enjoy music What brand of computer, MP3 player, or phone are you using that isn't made of plastic and filled with minerals that come from strip mines and processed with chemicals like cyanide?
      - benologist 7y ago
        You're totally right that there's a massive environmental cost either way. Digitally the price per song of is offset by the sheer number of albums you can have. I have 1,926 albums and I can overwrite them with new artists on the same storage and I can add 10x more to the same storage. Or I can reuse the storage for something else. This versatility is called "re-use" and it's a pillar of environmental sustainability. If it wasn't a malleable plastic, and I've read of metals being used, then perhaps it would be different. But even then density and permanence and shipping still make it incredibly inefficient to distribute data in this fashion - an LP only holds about 200 - 300 megabytes of write-once data.
      - 7y ago
- mulmen 7y ago
  There's a ritual involved in playback. The format is conducive to browsing a collection like a library. They're easy to trade. Most (new) physical records I buy come with a download code to get high quality drm-free recordings. It's like getting the physical book and the e-reader copy.
- kome 7y ago
  Vinyls are better objects to handle: they are bigger, they have better artworks and usually richer booklet. To play vinyl is like a beautiful ritual, full of little gestures. It's not about technology, of course, it's about fun. Like analog photography.
  - geogra4 7y ago
    I wonder at some point if film cameras will outsell digital ones
    - criddell 7y ago
      I don't think so. One of the big drivers of vinyl is the collectible aspect of it.
    - jccalhoun 7y ago
      if we mean stand alone cameras then I could see it happening at some point as phone cameras get better and better.
- itsoggy 7y ago
  I always see the degradation argument. I look after my vinyl with a properly calibrated turntable. I will degrade faster than my records!
  - Zardoz84 7y ago
    I have few vinyls that are from late 70's and it keeps playing like the first time. And I don't have a great turntable.
    - stjohnswarts 7y ago
      Unless you have one of those laser ones then that is physically impossible as there is always wear with each play, even if it is just a minute amount because there is always friction and degradation of the vinyl over time
- JohnGB 7y ago
  The quality isn't necessarily worse. Vinyl is analogue, and so good quality vinyl has a different sound to the same audio played from a CD. That isn't to say that all vinyl is better, just that the best vinyl is better than the best CD recordings.
  - lawnchair_larry 7y ago
    Worse is a subjective assessment, but it is necessarily lower fidelity.
  - iamnotacrook 7y ago
    No it's not. If there's a digital recording of a band and you can either listen to that exact set of bits encoded losslessly, for example from a flac file from a cheap usb key, Vs whatever the hell happens when you convert those bits into analogue and press them into some plastic with demonstrably worse track separation, distortion, and which physically degrades during each play even in optimal circumstances and where slightly moving the little box doing the playback can cause permanent damage to the vinyl then clearly the choice isn't based on sound quality.
    - efdee 7y ago
      It depends what the digital recording is mastered for, really.
      - iamnotacrook 7y ago
        I dunno about that...I've recorded some of my acoustic guitar playing, and some electronic pieces. Some mastering exists which would make the recordings sound better than a 100% unaltered digital playback?
        mrob 7y ago
        If you're playing in a noisy environment like a car then some dynamic range compression will make it sound better.
- b1476 7y ago
  As someone who only buys physical music on vinyl, it’s not just one thing but a whole ritual around it. I love having bulky gatefold albums to explore while the record’s playing, I love the intricate precision needed when dropping the needle down, I love the many limited edition pressings I have that come in ridiculous psychedelic colours, I love the overly expensive setup I have that sounds incredible, I rarely buy used records but I still love peering through endless dusty records in second hand shops. It’s timeless. I’m sure audiophiles will show up and talk about the exact sound qualities of it vs digital copies, but I don’t particularly care about that side of things too much. I enjoy it the same way some people enjoy the ritual behind drinking whiskey.
- imstate 7y ago
  I like to collect vinyl for a few reasons. I like having a physical copy, it supports the bands I love, and it comes with the digital copy. There's a lot to be said about the imperfections in vinyl playback combined with the analog output.
  - ddingus 7y ago
    I find that I crave that sound. It's subtle changes, often the mastering is a little different, but most of it is just how the vinyl is flawed. Each play is special, like you hear it that time that way, never again.
- tsomctl 7y ago
  Go smoke some weed and drop the needle down onto Dark Side of the Moon. You’ll understand.
  - ddingus 7y ago
    Truth Have a good friend to share the experience with? Recommended.
- monocasa 7y ago
  There's a lot of albums that aren't mastered correctly for digital. They end up clipping outside the dynamic range because they're too loud. Vinyl doesn't really clip in the same way. And this isn't an old phenomenon, it's getting worse in fact. You can see some of that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war Additionally, bands will typically get better margins on vinyl (although that's starting to disappear).
  - CharlesW 7y ago
    I'm sure there were early cases of bad audio engineers introducting digital clipping during the digital mastering process. You mention that "it's getting worse", but it's unlikely that you'd be able to find a release mastered/remastered with noticable digital clipping within the last decade. As one example of how basic a concern this is for digital mastering, Apple's "Apple Digital Masters" (formerly "Mastered for iTunes") program strictly limits it, recommendeds testing for the existence of clipping both pre- and post-encode, and provides tools (afclip, AURoundTripAAC Audio Unit) for helping to do that. Generally, "loudness wars" refers primarily to dynamic range compression, which can easily destroy a track (in the musical sense) even if there is zero clipping.
    - monocasa 7y ago
      AFAIC, dynamic range compression is very nearly as bad as clipping. It just curves out the signal so you don't go straight off of a cliff, but you're still trying to fit 10 lbs of potatoes into a 5 pound bag.
      - stjohnswarts 7y ago
        You don't understand it then especially with modern 24 bit and up sampling available in flacs and other standards. clipping is almost always going to be worse than dynamic compression except under the worst edge case conditions in 16 bit and above (standard CD limit)
        7y ago
- nacho_weekend 7y ago
  Some People are starting to grow sick of the all digital access off the post-iTunes MP3 era, now the streaming era. The physical connection to the album is lost - and if you’re a music nerd, and want to have a physical connection to the music, Vinyl is a superior format. Often the artwork is much larger, intricate, and gatefolds are beautiful, not to mention limited color releases and picture discs. It’s something you can frame or display on a shelf, and feels more vintage than a CD. Rarely would I say people listen to them as much as collect and display them.
- holy_city 7y ago
  People like it.
  - ranger207 7y ago
    And that's the only reason that really matters.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    This is also true for books. Although books are actually more fidelic to the author's work unlike vinyl and actually do have a higher quality, comparing text resolutions
- tomhoward 7y ago
  This 2013 article explores it https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/29-does-vinyl-really-sound-better/ https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/29-does-vinyl-really-sound-be...
- lawnchair_larry 7y ago
  Hipsterism
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  It’s a pain in the ass to change the music so it’s easier to focus on it. Just my perspective.
- cptskippy 7y ago
  You are looking at this as a CD vs Vinyl battle. Vinyl found a niche and never died entirely. Now CDs are dying because of downloads and streaming and you're saying "why the resurgence vinyl?" There is no resurgence, perhaps a Renaissance in vinyl, but what you're really seeing is just the fall of CD down to vinyl's levels.
  - skinnymuch 7y ago
    Go to https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ and select only LP/EP and vinyl single. Or just LP/EP. Including both and just looking without inflation, it’s above 1989 levels and could hit 1988 levels eventually. It’s 5x higher than mid 90s through late 00s. Almost 4x since 2010. Take out vinyl singles and the increase is absurd. It’s 9x to 40x+ increase from any year between 1991 and 2007. 8x from 2008. Almost 2x from 2013. And this is all for 2018 figures. 2019 will bump things up even more. Though the pace has slowed a lot. Even if you add inflation, the resurgence is still there. IE for LP/EP, 2019 will beat out 1989. After a low of nearly 25x less in 93 and 05-06.
    - cptskippy 7y ago
      > Even if you add inflation, the resurgence is still there. IE for LP/EP, 2019 will beat out 1989. I'm having trouble viewing those graphs on mobile but it looks like in 1989 vinyl only had >4% market share and 34.6 million units, where as in 2018 it had >3% with 16.7 million units. It's not nothing and it's not a large part of the overall market. It appears to be smaller than 30 years ago when it was considered a dead format.
      - skinnymuch 7y ago
        I can be convinced otherwise as statistics isn’t a strength of mine, but those two numbers are by units. Unit share doesn’t seem to make sense as a comparison point to me. A single or ringtone shouldn’t be given equal respect to a full collection of songs. Downloaded singles are 75% of the unit market share but only 5% of the revenue market share in 2018. 2018 will be the last year downloaded singles have a greater revenue share than vinyl. To me this looks like a resurgence because of how its revenue share has been. Its collapse of market and revenue share from ~83 to ~92 and being dead by 89 (with 3.3% revenue share, less than the past 5 years if including 2019). Having a revenue share of 0.1% from 93 to 07. Yeah, for 25 years it’s revenue share was 0.1%. Then ~1.5% for the next 5-6 years and ~4.5% for the past couple of years. It’s not a crazy resurgence, but compared to 93 to ~2012, a 25 year span, it’s many multiples higher and not looking to let up for now.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  I listen to vinyl because a lot of the music I like never made it to digital. I have at least 30 albums that simply do not exist as downloads, streaming, or any other digital medium. And there are people today who are still putting out new music in analog formats that will never get a digital release. And I'm not even much of a music buff. If I have 30 "lost" albums, there must be tens of thousands more out there that simply do not exist to people who restrict themselves to digital formats. I really don't understand why some people choose to limit themselves to digital. That's like deciding to only eat tacos for the rest of your life.
  - rsl7 7y ago
    Indeed. So many people seem not to realize that there will not be one final best source of music.
  - Marsymars 7y ago
    > I really don't understand why some people choose to limit themselves to digital. I can't afford the physical space for physical goods and the expense involved with moving them.
- lukev 7y ago
  We are reaching a point where digital delivery is objectively the best way to consume music. It maximizes each of quality, price, convenience and availability. No physical media, including CDs, can compare. There is only one thing digital delivery can't do: satisfy the collector's itch. There's no rarity or difficulty. You can't keep it on a shelf and take pride in your collection. You can't trade or barter. You can't get it signed by the band or buy it at a show. You can't browse it in a shop. You can't pass it on to your children. There's no romanticism about it, and it doesn't engage any other senses. It turns out however, that vinyl is great at all those things. It seems evident that its resurgence is because everyone who wants to collect music is consolidating on vinyl as a format, while those who just want to listen to music stick with streaming services. It's highlighting the fact that music consumption is actually highly bimodal, and delivering a product optimized for each modality.
jrmg 7y ago
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).
thinkmassive 7y ago
By revenue, not by units sold. 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
- xenocyon 7y ago
  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.
- taxidump 7y ago
  >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.
  - jameshart 7y ago
    ‘Dynamic entropy’ - you mean ‘noise’, right?
  - cortesoft 7y ago
habosa 7y ago
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! Blows me away every time I think about it. And we could have kept going: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc
- ofibrvev 7y ago
  Could have kept going... 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)
  - dbcurtis 7y ago
    An old boss of mine worked on that beast! From the sounds of it, it barely worked in the lab. He told a story of getting so frustrated one day that he literally shoved his ‘scope off the back of the bench in frustration and walked out for the day. In his opintion, it is a good thing that it is dead and buried.
    - ofibrvev 7y ago
      I have dismantled the players. Truly a marvel of electromechanical design. So many hand soldered and assembled parts. It is incredible they made it work mass produced. Too bad it was 20 years too late.
oe 7y ago
Vinyl's growth is somewhat limited by the world's pressing capacity. Old pressing machines are being brought back online where possible: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/dec/10/record-demand-vinyl-sales-exceed-supply-lps https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/dec/10/record-demand-... [2017].
- aodin 7y ago
  When Jack White (of the White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and more) opened Third Man Pressing in 2017, he had the first vinyl pressing machines built in over 35 years. The machines were build by NEWBILT in Germany [1]. Third Man Pressing's about page also has a great video about the process: https://thirdmanpressing.com/about https://thirdmanpressing.com/about [1] https://newbilt-machinery.com https://newbilt-machinery.com
enqk 7y ago
On the toxicity and environmental impact of vinyl records https://youtu.be/aZ2czFuIYmQ https://youtu.be/aZ2czFuIYmQ
- stemcc 7y ago
  Seems like the author of this video has gone silent after being asked for the references he used to make his claims.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    There was a documentary years ago about the hazards of working in a vinyl chloride chemical plant along the lines of nerve damage and dissolving bones in the fingers. No idea where to find it again, but I'm sure processes have improved considerably.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
rwmj 7y ago
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. For the doubters, here's a photo: http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/20190908_183833.jpg http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/20190908_183833.jpg
- INTPenis 7y ago
  > A CD would be more practical Actually most practical would be a streaming service where you can enjoy the entire work of art without interruptions. Tongue in cheek so don't get riled up.
  - rwmj 7y ago
    Sure :-) I guess by "CD" I should have said "digital format" or "digital stream". Having said that is there even a streaming service which would play an entire set of piano concertos? This thing must be 8 or more hours long. I've been listening to it in fits and starts over several weekends. Also for the doubters, here's a photo: http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/20190908_183833.jpg http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/20190908_183833.jpg As you can see I have CDs and a Squeezebox so I'm hardly opposed to digital :-)
    - mikeash 7y ago
      Any decent streaming service will let you build a custom playlist and play it in order, if it doesn’t already have the entire work as one “album.”
      - rwmj 7y ago
        Thank you. There's an experience of owning, holding and playing a vinyl record which is quite different from clicking on a stream. It ties you to a place, forces you to pay attention at least when changing sides, has quirks, crackles and pops, and beautiful artwork you can hold in your hand while listening. The digital stream is certainly more convenient and quite obviously available in more places. I don't say this as someone who is in any way "opposed" to digital music - I own and play a lot of it myself. In units of "minutes listened" probably much more than vinyl.
klingonopera 7y ago
A CD, and a FLAC-rip for me, please. I'd pick it over vinyl or any digital stream any day.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Why bother with CD or FLAC? If you're not listening in analog, you're losing fidelity. That's simply the nature of digital.
  - edejong 7y ago
    I hope you’re /s
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      Partly. When I read his comment I remembered an argument some people had in HN a few months back where they were saying there's no point in listening to music in a car unless you had their particular brand and model of sound system because you don't get the full experience. My thought at the time was that unless they have a string orchestra in the back seat, they're not getting the full experience. I still maintain that a string orchestra in the back seat of my car will sound better than FLAC.
      - JasonFruit 7y ago
        It's too cramped. If you can't move your bow arm freely, you're using pressure instead of speed to produce volume, which ruins the tone and kills projection. Might as well go with mp3 at that point, honestly.
        reaperducer 7y ago
        I'm glad someone gets it.
      - tripzilch 7y ago
        I've listened to string orchestra reproductions of some of my favourite music and while it sounds nice, they couldn't quite reproduce every sound accurately. And strangely enough, even with the usually great "right to repair" laws in the EU, unless you have a very specific and expensive license that takes many years to request, it is actually highly illegal to perform certain kinds of repairs on your string orchestra.
echelon 7y ago
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.
- vlunkr 7y ago
  Admitting to hipsterism is the first step on the road to recovery. If you enjoy it, don’t throw it out just because it’s mainstream!
- tuxxy 7y ago
  Don't worry. If the music you listen to is sold in vinyl format at a Walmart, then you're not hipster enough to call yourself a hipster. :P
  - cassettesback 7y ago
    You misunderstood parent. He is worried that the vinyl format is sold at Walmart. Nobody cares what music is on that vinyl, it's all about the format.
    - benologist 7y ago
      The music matters too - you can only put hit albums from the 60s - 90s next to checkouts for $5 - $10 or the savvy shopper won't recognize they're an audiophile.
- sverige 7y ago
  I advise against selling your collection. I sold almost all of my vinyl in the late 80s and really regret it. Also, one of my favorite vinyl albums ever was a cutout Flying Lizards record that I got for a dollar at some very un-hip store. Provenance has nothing to do with it, it's the album itself.
  - 7y ago
BurningFrog 7y ago
This is mostly about CD sales shrinking.
linuxftw 7y ago
Vinyl is for hipsters. Objectively inferior capability to reproduce sounds.
- rcoveson 7y ago
  > Objectively inferior capability to reproduce sounds. Maybe when it comes to something like music, that's not the most important thing. In fact, most music listeners would say it's not really important at all. Vinyls have great UX. The LP format encourages you to listen to an uninterrupted, un-shuffled 23 or 46 minutes of music. Album artwork and lyrics are presented at a scale where it doesn't hurt the eyes to look at them. Your statement reminds me of whiskey drinkers who only drink out of one type of glass which is olfactorily optimal. It totally misses the fact that our senses are so easily tricked into enjoying things more if we enjoy the hints that surround the experience. Music is better on vinyl because you spent that much longer picking out the record and placing the needle. Whiskey is better in rocks glasses because it looks cinematic. It has next to nothing to do with being "objectively inferior" or superior.
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    > The LP format encourages you to listen to an uninterrupted, un-shuffled 23 or 46 minutes of music You can do this on a CD with superior audio quality. > Album artwork and lyrics are presented at a scale where it doesn't hurt the eyes to look at them. There's nothing stopping someone from celling a CD in a vinyl-sized case. > Maybe when it comes to something like music, that's not the most important thing. In fact, most music listeners would say it's not really important at all. I'm pretty sure almost every single fan of vinyl will tell you it 'sounds better.' What they really mean is they like the typical mix of a vinyl recording, but CDs can be mixed to sound exactly like vinyl. If you want the same sound as live music, vinyl cannot compete.
    - rcoveson 7y ago
      I don't think you're understanding the gist of what I'm saying. Of course it's _possible_ to recreate the exact _audio_ experience of vinyl with a higher fidelity medium like a CD. But it's not about just the audio. It's the tactile, visual, and cultural experience around the audio. Just like food isn't just about the flavor. And with your closing comment, I don't think you're describing as great a percentage of vinyl fans as you think you are. Sure, if you read audiophile forums you'll find such individuals. And if you encounter such an individual, they'll likely be extremely vocal about their opinions. But we're talking about vinyl outselling CDs here. That's a lot of people. If you asked most of them which format had higher fidelity, they'd certainly reply, "the one that doesn't pop and scratch."
gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
During EE undergrad I learned about DSP, math and other theory involved in digital audio reproduction and it's clear to me that it's technically superior. There's some truly marvelous engineering behind digital audio. And the best part is that it enhances life: now playing an album isn't "a ritual", I can do it anytime without needing physical, wasteful storage for a degrading format. I'm absolutely baffled how people (the same trendy hipsters who in my experience are disgusted by capitalism and luxury consumerism) shell out for vinyl when they'd be better off spending more money on something that's usually much more important and will make a significant, audible difference: nice speakers.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  I agree to you mostly, but I do have some vinyls if my favorite all time albums. Maybe 50 or so. However the analog priests are wrong about superiority of vinyl both technically and philosophically. However, I do love me some 70s and 80s punk music on vinyl which makes it even a little bit dirtier and less refined
  - gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
    It usually goes over peoples' heads that "hearing the difference" in vinyl is probably distortion, if truly audible and not just a delusion. In terms of reconstructing a signal, it's simply inferior. But distortion can be good, just like food has variability and nuance and we sometimes love it for that!
- taylodl 7y ago
  Digital formats (FLAC) are not only technically superior, but digital distribution is also greener.
  - gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
    As a storage format sure. Streaming at 192kbps or 320 if you really care, is more than adequate for the listening habits and ear health of most people.
- 7y ago
TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
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.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  Mwhat are you talking about, almost all are released as flacs these days. Superior to CD and tend to have better dynamic range as well.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
    I said “mainstream”
- phicoh 7y ago
  The thing that got me to stop buying CDs for the most part is how badly they are mastered. In past it was some labels that put out badly mastered CDs, these days artists that once produced excellent albums now seems to accept a final result that tries to win the loudness war.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
    Yes, unfortunately mastering is an issue. It's the only reason that new “superior to CD” formats ever sound better (aside from perhaps extra surround channels), and entirely not the fault of the format.
tzs 7y ago
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. [1] http://www.elpj.com/ http://www.elpj.com/
- puranjay 7y ago
  Look at Audio Technica's LP series If you have a higher budget, check out Pro-Ject or Rega Planar
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  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.
- simias 7y ago
stjohnswarts 7y 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
- Etheryte 7y ago
  I'm not sure whether this still holds, but for quite a long time, vinyl was a surefire way to avoid the loudness war [1] — the physical medium simply wouldn't allow for such extreme transformation and still play well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    Yeah but it's got a bit better over the past decade as more people realized why that certain something was missing
    - monocasa 7y ago
      Has it though? The wiki article (and my experience) implies that it's been getting worse, not better.
      - stordoff 7y ago
        Last line of 2010s: > Analysis suggests that the loudness trend may have peaked around 2005 and subsequently reduced, with a pronounced increase in overall and minimum album DR for albums since 2005. It also hints how we may continue to move away from it: > With music sales moving towards file-based playback and streaming and away from CDs, there is a possibility that the loudness war will be blunted by normalization technology such as ReplayGain and Apple's Sound Check. Most cloud-based music services perform loudness normalization by default and may reduce the market pressure to overcompress material.
- hevi_jos 7y ago
  I believe the main reason for its use is that music is not compressed like with CDs. CD quality could be better, but thanks to abuse (Loudness wars), it is way worse from the music quality point of view. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war So in practice most vinyl records surpass CDs in dynamic range, because loudness in vinyl means your disc is able to hold less music. So if you want to listen music with good speakers, you better do with vinyl. Using vinyl has been a way to shortcut the music producers destruction of its music.
neallindsay 7y ago
Audio quality on CDs is better than Vinyl (especially over time), but it’s not great. If you care about quality you’re downloading music anyway. But if you’re going to get something physical, you want it to look cool, and Vinyl beats CDs by a mile.
- puranjay 7y ago
  In addition, vinyl's cover art looks great. So many album covers are legit works of art. It's awful shrinking them down to a 250x250px image or a CD cover
- benj111 7y ago
  Pah, tapes are cooler than vinyl. My Dad has vinyl, plus only popular bands can justify a vinyl print run. You can release a tape album even if you can only count your fans on one hand, including the band members.
  - rwmj 7y ago
    If you were a tiny band why would you release a cassette tape album instead of an MP3 or digital stream?
    - benj111 7y ago
      Because tapes are cool. Or for a longer answer. Bands don't need to release vinyl. Fans appreciate the physicality, and will pay for it. But tiny bands probably don't have the resources for a vinyl pressing. I was also making reference to back in the day when your options were vinyl/cd or tape. If you wanted to release an album, tape was your only choice unless you were likely to sell at least X hundred units. And as I said, tapes are cool :)
kozak 7y ago
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!
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Is that surprising? It would be a lot cheaper to make CAV players that CLV.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  Not necessarily worse, though. There could be undesirable mechanical side-effects from the track moving too fast against the needle as well. (I am sure there is a huge body of engineering science about this.)
  - kozak 7y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Afikv6k1-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Afikv6k1-c
- taylodl 7y ago
  Then you realize Led Zeppelin thought Stairway to Heaven was a throwaway song - they laid it down on an inside track. It’s popularity caught them by surprise.
agumonkey 7y ago
Can't wait for CEDs to outsell DVDs
sakopov 7y ago
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.
sebastianconcpt 7y ago
With vinyl revenue growing by 12% in the second half of 2018 and first half of this year, and CD rates barely changing at all, it could see vinyl revenue overtake that of CDs by the end of the year. If it does happen, it’ll be the first time that vinyl has generated more revenue than CDs since 1986.
parsimo2010 7y ago
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).
- Aaronmacaron 7y ago
  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.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    If you want to buy a physical medium then CDs are the obvious option because objectively they are superior to vinyls in every aspects and they can also come with nice booklets. I think that the hip-value of vinyls is extremely important. I write that as someone who had no choice but use vinyls and tapes until I got a CD player...
    - aibara 7y ago
      CDs are just... awful. Nice booklets? You mean small booklets with tiny pictures and even tinier text. And they come in what I consider one of the most horrible containers of all time: the ugly and easily-broken jewel case. Like vinyl, CDs can be scratched, but they sure don't degrade gracefully: the nice pops of vinyl becomes jarring skips on a CD up to the point where the CD just becomes unplayable. Nowadays I have all my music on my computer, as files on the drive or from a stream. But when it comes to wanting something physical, something I can hold and look at (from the cover and extra material that comes with an LP to the wonderful spinning of a record as the sound emerges), vinyl easily wins. But maybe I'm weird, because even in the mid '90s as a teenager I thought vinyl looked cool and was fun and fascinating to interact with. I hated CDs and their cases so much I even converted all my CDs to minidisc! Happily I kept them around until I ripped them to FLAC files.
pkorzeniewski 7y ago
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.
- mnd999 7y ago
  The novelty factor is a definitely a thing with vinyl. I'm nearly 40 and my first music (Disney etc.) was on record but we quickly moved on to tape and then CD. A lot of people not much younger than me will never have seen a record growing up.
nine_k 7y ago
With CD being in decline, and vinyl on the rise, it's natural for vinyl to overcome CDs. But I'd say it's mostly because CDs have all but disappeared from mass sales channels. E.g. this chart says a lot: https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/
vr46 7y ago
I was in the local record shop on Saturday, picking up the latest Bat For Lashes and Brand New Heavies albums. CDs are still selling more units, but vinyl is up to 3 times the price of a CD, so no wonder it can make up the shortfall. Vinyl packaging is just nicer. Back in the 1980s and 90s, vinyl and cassettes were the same price. I wish I'd bought fewer tapes during my Walkman years and instead recorded the vinyl onto tape. Those tapes are all shot now, but my record collection is still here...
madengr 7y ago
All these comments and no one has mentioned reel-to-reel tape decks. That will be the next hipster craze.
honkycat 7y ago
I purchase vinyl to support the artist and the artwork on the vinyl is much larger and prettier. Additionally, most vinyl releases these days come with a high-quality FLAC audio download, so I get the digital music as well.
m12k 7y ago
Makes sense - streaming has won, so the people buying physical media might as well go full hipster instead of half-assing it.
baud147258 7y ago
Or the sales of CDs have declined so much that they are going to get outsold by a niche product.
RickSanchez2600 7y ago
We used to have a turntable stereo that was mono with one speaker built into a console that had a wooden lid on it on top so it could be closed and we used it as a computer monitor holder. My nephews stole my vinyl records inside of it. It was damaged in a flood and we never replaced it. Turntables these days are expensive, but worth it for the vinyl experience.
mudlus 7y ago
Makes perfect since, in the virtual age collectables will have more value than the thing anyone can access. Reminds me of an article I can't find about the lack of middle road anymore for many goods, you either care a lot or don't care at all about what you're getting. McDonalds vs Wagyu. Where's the bespoke Coke? (actually my wife enjoys elderflower syrup in her soda water)
jarjoura 7y ago
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.
- Godel_unicode 7y ago
  Vinyl is one of the best examples I have found of "worse is better".
- rhcom2 7y ago
  > Also the experience of going to second hand stores to chat with fellow music lovers and discover new artists feels very human to me. It's really fun to buy .50 cent records because you like the cover. I've discovered some good music that way.
- Jaruzel 7y ago
  > The b-side is just as good as the A-side For me this is really important, When I used to collect vinyl I'd seek out 12" special editions of songs simply because of the obscure gems that the artist/label would put on the B-sides. Even now I'm sure that a lot of those B-sides still haven't made it into the digital domain. I also loved picture discs along with great album art. Both of these things seem to now be a relic of history now that digital music is the de facto method of consumption.
- 7y ago
magoon 7y ago
CDs were supposed to eventually be cheaper than tapes, but the industry kept raising prices. Even Blu-ray discs were grossly overpriced before people turned to digital sales.
stephencoyner 7y ago
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. Those interested should check out... Daupe https://daupe.bandcamp.com/music https://daupe.bandcamp.com/music https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.factmag.com/2018/02/08/daupe-westside-gunn-mf-doom/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.factmag.com/2018/02/08/daup... De Rap Winkel https://derapwinkelrecords.bandcamp.com/music https://derapwinkelrecords.bandcamp.com/music
acd 7y ago
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 https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_643297_en.html
- tyrust 7y ago
  >Carbon foot print from vinyl is lower than online streamed music due to the co2 foot print of all the servers serving online music. The quote and article you linked doesn't say or support that. It is more likely that there are just far more people listening to music now than there were before. I don't think that switching from streaming to records would result in fewer GHGs. The article you linked doesn't specify.
mikorym 7y ago
Not really on topic here, but I've been trying this for a while and maybe someone can point me in the right direction. What are the preferred synthesisers / synth emulators that one can (or should) install on Linux? My quest is also one of audio fidelity; I am looking for specific sounds on proprietary DAWs that I can reverse engineer from first principles.
Pulletwee12549 7y ago
I am getting the feeling that this has less to do with vinyl sales surging and more to do with CD sales plunging.
amelius 7y ago
Is there a service where I can transform my (rare) CDs into vinyl, including the artwork?
tripzilch 7y ago
So I've been thinking a lot about this video recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ2czFuIYmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ2czFuIYmQ 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 7y ago
  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.
  - consumer451 7y ago
    I just watched the GP video, and science does seem to support that vinyl records are likely dangerous. The video creator uses an air pollution meter[0] to find out that his records are causing very high PM 2.5, VOC, and formaldehyde. The vinyl records seem to only need to be taken out of their sleeves. The results look shocking. There have to be some HN users who have the knowledge and equipment to attempt to replicate this experiment. Please do that and share! [0] https://youtu.be/aZ2czFuIYmQ?t=553 https://youtu.be/aZ2czFuIYmQ?t=553
  - c0vfefe 7y ago
wodenokoto 7y ago
What really surprises me is that CDs were that big in the mid 80s. If I had to guess, I would have said CD beats vinyl in early 90s. Or maybe I'm just not taking cassettes into account.
mrdobelina 7y ago
We’re looking for a tech co-founder for a project about vinyl records. The iOS MVP app has been launched, got over thousands of paid downloads, reached second on App Store top paid music app, gathered interest from major magazines about music (Resident Advisor, DJ Mag and many more) and a couple of accelerators. Now we’re looking to add features and improve it to start monetizing. If you’re passionate about vinyl records and have exceptional skills on iOS, Firebase Suite and React, we’d love to discuss.
aguzzi94 7y ago
So interesting! I think that on a philosophical level it matches the trend that, while the world keeps on being more and more caught by fakeness and mediocrity, there's a counter culture and counter sentiment that yearns for something authentic again. There's still hope guys!
CraptinPants 7y ago
That’s what’s up!
michalnet 7y ago
lol
dylanler 7y ago
Is likely a cycle when people are scrambling to collect things that are going out of style.
moorsc0de 7y ago
I like Vinyl - CD's not so much.
xbiitx 7y ago
most of them should end up framed

545 points by ValentineC 7y ago

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.

tyingq 7y ago
Nostalgia and appearance. Old cars drive like crap and are unsafe, but popular for the same reason.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  I understand that, but old cars are a hobby of a limited number of people, not of "Joe Average". This would be like old cars out-selling new ones.
  - tomhoward 7y ago
    Digital recordings still vastly outsell vinyl; it’s just that CDs are declining in favor of MP3s and streaming, whilst demand for vinyl among enthusiasts/collectors holds up.
  - liability 7y ago
    In this analogy 'new cars' (CDs) have already largely been antiquated by the new technology of personal teleportation (audio files distributed over networks.) The market for new cars still exists because some people don't like teleportation. Some people worry that teleportation recreates you imperfectly on the other side and thus prefer a new car. But that demographic is shrinking. Teleportation is simply so convienent that the overwhelming majority of consumers think the price worth paying.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      "Some people worry that teleportation recreates you imperfectly on the other side" Teleportation could recreate me perfectly, imperfectly, or better than perfectly - the issue is what happens to the original me. Rumor has it that after scanning your body the origin portal drops you into a trash compactor.
  - leapis 7y ago
    The CD standard as the "Joe Average" is quickly changing. Anecdotally, as a younger person (recent college grad), people my age don't buy CDs out of necessity nearly as much anymore as they used to. We've gotten to the point where the vast majority of devices (car stereos, home systems, etc) have at the very least, an aux port. Adding on to this, the prevalence of phones as speakers and music players means that you hardly every "need" a CD. CDs are quickly going the way of records and cassettes. We can see this pretty clearly looking at consumer reports[1], where you'll find that vinyls, compared to CDs, are actually being propped up largely by generations (18-44) that never properly experienced them. CD usage, on the other hand, is generally supported by older generations that are slower to adapt to modern streaming. Vinyl is almost vicarious nostalgia- most vinyl users I know (generally from the same age bracket) enjoy it as a deprecated technology that feels exotic. CDs aren't necessary for us anymore, and since we grew up with them, they aren't as enchanting and romanticized as vinyl. [1] http://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/MusicWatch-Consumer-Profile-RIAA-2018.pdf http://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/MusicWatch-Co...
  - iamnotacrook 7y ago
    It would be like - in a world where everyone used Uber, public transport etc - 5 old cars outselling 3 new ones.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  Vinyl is way more popular than old cars.
  - dTal 7y ago
    What a weird thing to say. The analogy was vinyl : digital :: old cars : new cars. Obviously cars are way more expensive than music, so it doesn't make sense to directly compare their popularity in an absolute sense.
  - chucksmash 7y ago
    It's pretty clear if you think it through a bit. You can buy Pet Sounds, a classic album recorded in 1966, on vinyl: - Distribution: you can buy it from Amazon, the same distribution channel as more modern media - Price: for $18 (very small premium over digital media in absolute terms) - Condition: in perfect, newly manufactured condition - Substitutability: a functionally perfect substitute good for the artifact manufactured in 1966 (even available in original mono!) - Supply: from a growing supply of records (record company always reissuing classics!) - Maintenance: with the same maintenance requirements as an LP of a 2019 album Consider the equivalent for a classic car, say a 1966 Corvette: I want a 1966 Corvette. "Old Corvettes have a soul that new Corvettes lack, there's just some ineffable quality I prefer, y'know?", yadda yadda yadda - Distribution: Can I walk into a Chevy dealership and buy a 1966 Corvette? Nope! - Price: Can I buy a mint condition 1966 Corvette for substantially the same price as a 2019 Corvette? Nope! DDG says perfect 1966 Corvette value would be $82k, 2019 Corvette would be $55k and I suspect the difference would be even greater tbh. $30k+ price difference! - Condition: Can I buy a newly manufactured 1966 Corvette at all? Nope! - Substitutability: the 1966 Corvette is substantially different from the 2019 Corvette - Supply: the number of well-maintained 1966 Corvettes is constrained. They aren't making any more! - Maintenance: Entirely different beasts. No common parts. So if I want a conversation piece in my living room, I can buy a $100 record player and spend $8 more for the LP
    - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
      Well sure, if you’re just getting vinyl as conspicuous consumption, it’s a bad investment. I recommend against that. There are perfectly rational material reasons to prefer vinyl that don’t involve a midlife crisis or greenhouse gases. Anyone who spends $55k on a car clearly has very different values than most people.
ch4s3 7y ago
I think it's a mix of aesthetics, nostalgia, and some elements of the experience. Vinyl albums have big. often interesting art. Browsing a collection of vinyl has an element of serendipity as well, who knows what you may and on. Additionally, the listening experience is different because it's hard to skip around, songs bleed into one another. It's a case of worse is better.
- benologist 7y ago
  I think it's mostly nostalgia because if you listen to music a lot in album form you'll ruin them, if you have kids you'll ruin them, if you have friends you'll ruin them, if they're near a window you'll ruin them, your record player can ruin them, an earthquake can ruin them. This is a music format with moving, degrading parts. I think LPs are bad for our environment compared to digital. I don't need tens of kilograms of plastic to enjoy music even if I would enjoy the process more than digital music players.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    I don't need tens of kilograms of plastic to enjoy music What brand of computer, MP3 player, or phone are you using that isn't made of plastic and filled with minerals that come from strip mines and processed with chemicals like cyanide?
    - benologist 7y ago
      You're totally right that there's a massive environmental cost either way. Digitally the price per song of is offset by the sheer number of albums you can have. I have 1,926 albums and I can overwrite them with new artists on the same storage and I can add 10x more to the same storage. Or I can reuse the storage for something else. This versatility is called "re-use" and it's a pillar of environmental sustainability. If it wasn't a malleable plastic, and I've read of metals being used, then perhaps it would be different. But even then density and permanence and shipping still make it incredibly inefficient to distribute data in this fashion - an LP only holds about 200 - 300 megabytes of write-once data.
    - 7y ago
mulmen 7y ago
There's a ritual involved in playback. The format is conducive to browsing a collection like a library. They're easy to trade. Most (new) physical records I buy come with a download code to get high quality drm-free recordings. It's like getting the physical book and the e-reader copy.
kome 7y ago
Vinyls are better objects to handle: they are bigger, they have better artworks and usually richer booklet. To play vinyl is like a beautiful ritual, full of little gestures. It's not about technology, of course, it's about fun. Like analog photography.
- geogra4 7y ago
  I wonder at some point if film cameras will outsell digital ones
  - criddell 7y ago
    I don't think so. One of the big drivers of vinyl is the collectible aspect of it.
  - jccalhoun 7y ago
    if we mean stand alone cameras then I could see it happening at some point as phone cameras get better and better.
itsoggy 7y ago
I always see the degradation argument. I look after my vinyl with a properly calibrated turntable. I will degrade faster than my records!
- Zardoz84 7y ago
  I have few vinyls that are from late 70's and it keeps playing like the first time. And I don't have a great turntable.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    Unless you have one of those laser ones then that is physically impossible as there is always wear with each play, even if it is just a minute amount because there is always friction and degradation of the vinyl over time
JohnGB 7y ago
The quality isn't necessarily worse. Vinyl is analogue, and so good quality vinyl has a different sound to the same audio played from a CD. That isn't to say that all vinyl is better, just that the best vinyl is better than the best CD recordings.
- lawnchair_larry 7y ago
  Worse is a subjective assessment, but it is necessarily lower fidelity.
- iamnotacrook 7y ago
  No it's not. If there's a digital recording of a band and you can either listen to that exact set of bits encoded losslessly, for example from a flac file from a cheap usb key, Vs whatever the hell happens when you convert those bits into analogue and press them into some plastic with demonstrably worse track separation, distortion, and which physically degrades during each play even in optimal circumstances and where slightly moving the little box doing the playback can cause permanent damage to the vinyl then clearly the choice isn't based on sound quality.
  - efdee 7y ago
    It depends what the digital recording is mastered for, really.
    - iamnotacrook 7y ago
      I dunno about that...I've recorded some of my acoustic guitar playing, and some electronic pieces. Some mastering exists which would make the recordings sound better than a 100% unaltered digital playback?
      - mrob 7y ago
        If you're playing in a noisy environment like a car then some dynamic range compression will make it sound better.
b1476 7y ago
As someone who only buys physical music on vinyl, it’s not just one thing but a whole ritual around it. I love having bulky gatefold albums to explore while the record’s playing, I love the intricate precision needed when dropping the needle down, I love the many limited edition pressings I have that come in ridiculous psychedelic colours, I love the overly expensive setup I have that sounds incredible, I rarely buy used records but I still love peering through endless dusty records in second hand shops. It’s timeless. I’m sure audiophiles will show up and talk about the exact sound qualities of it vs digital copies, but I don’t particularly care about that side of things too much. I enjoy it the same way some people enjoy the ritual behind drinking whiskey.
imstate 7y ago
I like to collect vinyl for a few reasons. I like having a physical copy, it supports the bands I love, and it comes with the digital copy. There's a lot to be said about the imperfections in vinyl playback combined with the analog output.
- ddingus 7y ago
  I find that I crave that sound. It's subtle changes, often the mastering is a little different, but most of it is just how the vinyl is flawed. Each play is special, like you hear it that time that way, never again.
tsomctl 7y ago
Go smoke some weed and drop the needle down onto Dark Side of the Moon. You’ll understand.
- ddingus 7y ago
  Truth Have a good friend to share the experience with? Recommended.
monocasa 7y ago
There's a lot of albums that aren't mastered correctly for digital. They end up clipping outside the dynamic range because they're too loud. Vinyl doesn't really clip in the same way. And this isn't an old phenomenon, it's getting worse in fact. You can see some of that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war Additionally, bands will typically get better margins on vinyl (although that's starting to disappear).
- CharlesW 7y ago
  I'm sure there were early cases of bad audio engineers introducting digital clipping during the digital mastering process. You mention that "it's getting worse", but it's unlikely that you'd be able to find a release mastered/remastered with noticable digital clipping within the last decade. As one example of how basic a concern this is for digital mastering, Apple's "Apple Digital Masters" (formerly "Mastered for iTunes") program strictly limits it, recommendeds testing for the existence of clipping both pre- and post-encode, and provides tools (afclip, AURoundTripAAC Audio Unit) for helping to do that. Generally, "loudness wars" refers primarily to dynamic range compression, which can easily destroy a track (in the musical sense) even if there is zero clipping.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    AFAIC, dynamic range compression is very nearly as bad as clipping. It just curves out the signal so you don't go straight off of a cliff, but you're still trying to fit 10 lbs of potatoes into a 5 pound bag.
    - stjohnswarts 7y ago
      You don't understand it then especially with modern 24 bit and up sampling available in flacs and other standards. clipping is almost always going to be worse than dynamic compression except under the worst edge case conditions in 16 bit and above (standard CD limit)
      - 7y ago
nacho_weekend 7y ago
Some People are starting to grow sick of the all digital access off the post-iTunes MP3 era, now the streaming era. The physical connection to the album is lost - and if you’re a music nerd, and want to have a physical connection to the music, Vinyl is a superior format. Often the artwork is much larger, intricate, and gatefolds are beautiful, not to mention limited color releases and picture discs. It’s something you can frame or display on a shelf, and feels more vintage than a CD. Rarely would I say people listen to them as much as collect and display them.
holy_city 7y ago
People like it.
- ranger207 7y ago
  And that's the only reason that really matters.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  This is also true for books. Although books are actually more fidelic to the author's work unlike vinyl and actually do have a higher quality, comparing text resolutions
tomhoward 7y ago
This 2013 article explores it https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/29-does-vinyl-really-sound-better/ https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/29-does-vinyl-really-sound-be...
lawnchair_larry 7y ago
Hipsterism
SomeOldThrow 7y ago
It’s a pain in the ass to change the music so it’s easier to focus on it. Just my perspective.
cptskippy 7y ago
You are looking at this as a CD vs Vinyl battle. Vinyl found a niche and never died entirely. Now CDs are dying because of downloads and streaming and you're saying "why the resurgence vinyl?" There is no resurgence, perhaps a Renaissance in vinyl, but what you're really seeing is just the fall of CD down to vinyl's levels.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  Go to https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ and select only LP/EP and vinyl single. Or just LP/EP. Including both and just looking without inflation, it’s above 1989 levels and could hit 1988 levels eventually. It’s 5x higher than mid 90s through late 00s. Almost 4x since 2010. Take out vinyl singles and the increase is absurd. It’s 9x to 40x+ increase from any year between 1991 and 2007. 8x from 2008. Almost 2x from 2013. And this is all for 2018 figures. 2019 will bump things up even more. Though the pace has slowed a lot. Even if you add inflation, the resurgence is still there. IE for LP/EP, 2019 will beat out 1989. After a low of nearly 25x less in 93 and 05-06.
  - cptskippy 7y ago
    > Even if you add inflation, the resurgence is still there. IE for LP/EP, 2019 will beat out 1989. I'm having trouble viewing those graphs on mobile but it looks like in 1989 vinyl only had >4% market share and 34.6 million units, where as in 2018 it had >3% with 16.7 million units. It's not nothing and it's not a large part of the overall market. It appears to be smaller than 30 years ago when it was considered a dead format.
    - skinnymuch 7y ago
      I can be convinced otherwise as statistics isn’t a strength of mine, but those two numbers are by units. Unit share doesn’t seem to make sense as a comparison point to me. A single or ringtone shouldn’t be given equal respect to a full collection of songs. Downloaded singles are 75% of the unit market share but only 5% of the revenue market share in 2018. 2018 will be the last year downloaded singles have a greater revenue share than vinyl. To me this looks like a resurgence because of how its revenue share has been. Its collapse of market and revenue share from ~83 to ~92 and being dead by 89 (with 3.3% revenue share, less than the past 5 years if including 2019). Having a revenue share of 0.1% from 93 to 07. Yeah, for 25 years it’s revenue share was 0.1%. Then ~1.5% for the next 5-6 years and ~4.5% for the past couple of years. It’s not a crazy resurgence, but compared to 93 to ~2012, a 25 year span, it’s many multiples higher and not looking to let up for now.
reaperducer 7y ago
I listen to vinyl because a lot of the music I like never made it to digital. I have at least 30 albums that simply do not exist as downloads, streaming, or any other digital medium. And there are people today who are still putting out new music in analog formats that will never get a digital release. And I'm not even much of a music buff. If I have 30 "lost" albums, there must be tens of thousands more out there that simply do not exist to people who restrict themselves to digital formats. I really don't understand why some people choose to limit themselves to digital. That's like deciding to only eat tacos for the rest of your life.
- rsl7 7y ago
  Indeed. So many people seem not to realize that there will not be one final best source of music.
- Marsymars 7y ago
  > I really don't understand why some people choose to limit themselves to digital. I can't afford the physical space for physical goods and the expense involved with moving them.
lukev 7y ago
We are reaching a point where digital delivery is objectively the best way to consume music. It maximizes each of quality, price, convenience and availability. No physical media, including CDs, can compare. There is only one thing digital delivery can't do: satisfy the collector's itch. There's no rarity or difficulty. You can't keep it on a shelf and take pride in your collection. You can't trade or barter. You can't get it signed by the band or buy it at a show. You can't browse it in a shop. You can't pass it on to your children. There's no romanticism about it, and it doesn't engage any other senses. It turns out however, that vinyl is great at all those things. It seems evident that its resurgence is because everyone who wants to collect music is consolidating on vinyl as a format, while those who just want to listen to music stick with streaming services. It's highlighting the fact that music consumption is actually highly bimodal, and delivering a product optimized for each modality.

jrmg 7y ago

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).

thinkmassive 7y ago

By revenue, not by units sold. 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

xenocyon 7y ago
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.
taxidump 7y ago
>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.
- jameshart 7y ago
  ‘Dynamic entropy’ - you mean ‘noise’, right?
- cortesoft 7y ago

habosa 7y ago

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! Blows me away every time I think about it. And we could have kept going: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc

ofibrvev 7y ago
Could have kept going... 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)
- dbcurtis 7y ago
  An old boss of mine worked on that beast! From the sounds of it, it barely worked in the lab. He told a story of getting so frustrated one day that he literally shoved his ‘scope off the back of the bench in frustration and walked out for the day. In his opintion, it is a good thing that it is dead and buried.
  - ofibrvev 7y ago
    I have dismantled the players. Truly a marvel of electromechanical design. So many hand soldered and assembled parts. It is incredible they made it work mass produced. Too bad it was 20 years too late.

oe 7y ago

Vinyl's growth is somewhat limited by the world's pressing capacity. Old pressing machines are being brought back online where possible: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/dec/10/record-demand-vinyl-sales-exceed-supply-lps https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/dec/10/record-demand-... [2017].

aodin 7y ago
When Jack White (of the White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and more) opened Third Man Pressing in 2017, he had the first vinyl pressing machines built in over 35 years. The machines were build by NEWBILT in Germany [1]. Third Man Pressing's about page also has a great video about the process: https://thirdmanpressing.com/about https://thirdmanpressing.com/about [1] https://newbilt-machinery.com https://newbilt-machinery.com

enqk 7y ago

On the toxicity and environmental impact of vinyl records https://youtu.be/aZ2czFuIYmQ https://youtu.be/aZ2czFuIYmQ

stemcc 7y ago
Seems like the author of this video has gone silent after being asked for the references he used to make his claims.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  There was a documentary years ago about the hazards of working in a vinyl chloride chemical plant along the lines of nerve damage and dissolving bones in the fingers. No idea where to find it again, but I'm sure processes have improved considerably.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

rwmj 7y ago

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. For the doubters, here's a photo: http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/20190908_183833.jpg http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/20190908_183833.jpg

INTPenis 7y ago
> A CD would be more practical Actually most practical would be a streaming service where you can enjoy the entire work of art without interruptions. Tongue in cheek so don't get riled up.
- rwmj 7y ago
  Sure :-) I guess by "CD" I should have said "digital format" or "digital stream". Having said that is there even a streaming service which would play an entire set of piano concertos? This thing must be 8 or more hours long. I've been listening to it in fits and starts over several weekends. Also for the doubters, here's a photo: http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/20190908_183833.jpg http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/20190908_183833.jpg As you can see I have CDs and a Squeezebox so I'm hardly opposed to digital :-)
  - mikeash 7y ago
    Any decent streaming service will let you build a custom playlist and play it in order, if it doesn’t already have the entire work as one “album.”
    - rwmj 7y ago
      Thank you. There's an experience of owning, holding and playing a vinyl record which is quite different from clicking on a stream. It ties you to a place, forces you to pay attention at least when changing sides, has quirks, crackles and pops, and beautiful artwork you can hold in your hand while listening. The digital stream is certainly more convenient and quite obviously available in more places. I don't say this as someone who is in any way "opposed" to digital music - I own and play a lot of it myself. In units of "minutes listened" probably much more than vinyl.

klingonopera 7y ago

A CD, and a FLAC-rip for me, please. I'd pick it over vinyl or any digital stream any day.

reaperducer 7y ago
Why bother with CD or FLAC? If you're not listening in analog, you're losing fidelity. That's simply the nature of digital.
- edejong 7y ago
  I hope you’re /s
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    Partly. When I read his comment I remembered an argument some people had in HN a few months back where they were saying there's no point in listening to music in a car unless you had their particular brand and model of sound system because you don't get the full experience. My thought at the time was that unless they have a string orchestra in the back seat, they're not getting the full experience. I still maintain that a string orchestra in the back seat of my car will sound better than FLAC.
    - JasonFruit 7y ago
      It's too cramped. If you can't move your bow arm freely, you're using pressure instead of speed to produce volume, which ruins the tone and kills projection. Might as well go with mp3 at that point, honestly.
      - reaperducer 7y ago
        I'm glad someone gets it.
    - tripzilch 7y ago
      I've listened to string orchestra reproductions of some of my favourite music and while it sounds nice, they couldn't quite reproduce every sound accurately. And strangely enough, even with the usually great "right to repair" laws in the EU, unless you have a very specific and expensive license that takes many years to request, it is actually highly illegal to perform certain kinds of repairs on your string orchestra.

echelon 7y ago

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.

vlunkr 7y ago
Admitting to hipsterism is the first step on the road to recovery. If you enjoy it, don’t throw it out just because it’s mainstream!
tuxxy 7y ago
Don't worry. If the music you listen to is sold in vinyl format at a Walmart, then you're not hipster enough to call yourself a hipster. :P
- cassettesback 7y ago
  You misunderstood parent. He is worried that the vinyl format is sold at Walmart. Nobody cares what music is on that vinyl, it's all about the format.
  - benologist 7y ago
    The music matters too - you can only put hit albums from the 60s - 90s next to checkouts for $5 - $10 or the savvy shopper won't recognize they're an audiophile.
sverige 7y ago
I advise against selling your collection. I sold almost all of my vinyl in the late 80s and really regret it. Also, one of my favorite vinyl albums ever was a cutout Flying Lizards record that I got for a dollar at some very un-hip store. Provenance has nothing to do with it, it's the album itself.
- 7y ago

BurningFrog 7y ago

This is mostly about CD sales shrinking.

linuxftw 7y ago

Vinyl is for hipsters. Objectively inferior capability to reproduce sounds.

rcoveson 7y ago
> Objectively inferior capability to reproduce sounds. Maybe when it comes to something like music, that's not the most important thing. In fact, most music listeners would say it's not really important at all. Vinyls have great UX. The LP format encourages you to listen to an uninterrupted, un-shuffled 23 or 46 minutes of music. Album artwork and lyrics are presented at a scale where it doesn't hurt the eyes to look at them. Your statement reminds me of whiskey drinkers who only drink out of one type of glass which is olfactorily optimal. It totally misses the fact that our senses are so easily tricked into enjoying things more if we enjoy the hints that surround the experience. Music is better on vinyl because you spent that much longer picking out the record and placing the needle. Whiskey is better in rocks glasses because it looks cinematic. It has next to nothing to do with being "objectively inferior" or superior.
- linuxftw 7y ago
  > The LP format encourages you to listen to an uninterrupted, un-shuffled 23 or 46 minutes of music You can do this on a CD with superior audio quality. > Album artwork and lyrics are presented at a scale where it doesn't hurt the eyes to look at them. There's nothing stopping someone from celling a CD in a vinyl-sized case. > Maybe when it comes to something like music, that's not the most important thing. In fact, most music listeners would say it's not really important at all. I'm pretty sure almost every single fan of vinyl will tell you it 'sounds better.' What they really mean is they like the typical mix of a vinyl recording, but CDs can be mixed to sound exactly like vinyl. If you want the same sound as live music, vinyl cannot compete.
  - rcoveson 7y ago
    I don't think you're understanding the gist of what I'm saying. Of course it's _possible_ to recreate the exact _audio_ experience of vinyl with a higher fidelity medium like a CD. But it's not about just the audio. It's the tactile, visual, and cultural experience around the audio. Just like food isn't just about the flavor. And with your closing comment, I don't think you're describing as great a percentage of vinyl fans as you think you are. Sure, if you read audiophile forums you'll find such individuals. And if you encounter such an individual, they'll likely be extremely vocal about their opinions. But we're talking about vinyl outselling CDs here. That's a lot of people. If you asked most of them which format had higher fidelity, they'd certainly reply, "the one that doesn't pop and scratch."

gnusty_gnurc 7y ago

During EE undergrad I learned about DSP, math and other theory involved in digital audio reproduction and it's clear to me that it's technically superior. There's some truly marvelous engineering behind digital audio. And the best part is that it enhances life: now playing an album isn't "a ritual", I can do it anytime without needing physical, wasteful storage for a degrading format. I'm absolutely baffled how people (the same trendy hipsters who in my experience are disgusted by capitalism and luxury consumerism) shell out for vinyl when they'd be better off spending more money on something that's usually much more important and will make a significant, audible difference: nice speakers.

stjohnswarts 7y ago
I agree to you mostly, but I do have some vinyls if my favorite all time albums. Maybe 50 or so. However the analog priests are wrong about superiority of vinyl both technically and philosophically. However, I do love me some 70s and 80s punk music on vinyl which makes it even a little bit dirtier and less refined
- gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
  It usually goes over peoples' heads that "hearing the difference" in vinyl is probably distortion, if truly audible and not just a delusion. In terms of reconstructing a signal, it's simply inferior. But distortion can be good, just like food has variability and nuance and we sometimes love it for that!
taylodl 7y ago
Digital formats (FLAC) are not only technically superior, but digital distribution is also greener.
- gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
  As a storage format sure. Streaming at 192kbps or 320 if you really care, is more than adequate for the listening habits and ear health of most people.
7y ago

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago

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.

stjohnswarts 7y ago
Mwhat are you talking about, almost all are released as flacs these days. Superior to CD and tend to have better dynamic range as well.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  I said “mainstream”
phicoh 7y ago
The thing that got me to stop buying CDs for the most part is how badly they are mastered. In past it was some labels that put out badly mastered CDs, these days artists that once produced excellent albums now seems to accept a final result that tries to win the loudness war.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  Yes, unfortunately mastering is an issue. It's the only reason that new “superior to CD” formats ever sound better (aside from perhaps extra surround channels), and entirely not the fault of the format.

tzs 7y ago

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. [1] http://www.elpj.com/ http://www.elpj.com/

puranjay 7y ago
Look at Audio Technica's LP series If you have a higher budget, check out Pro-Ject or Rega Planar
inflatableDodo 7y ago
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.
simias 7y ago

stjohnswarts 7y 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

Etheryte 7y ago
I'm not sure whether this still holds, but for quite a long time, vinyl was a surefire way to avoid the loudness war [1] — the physical medium simply wouldn't allow for such extreme transformation and still play well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  Yeah but it's got a bit better over the past decade as more people realized why that certain something was missing
  - monocasa 7y ago
    Has it though? The wiki article (and my experience) implies that it's been getting worse, not better.
    - stordoff 7y ago
      Last line of 2010s: > Analysis suggests that the loudness trend may have peaked around 2005 and subsequently reduced, with a pronounced increase in overall and minimum album DR for albums since 2005. It also hints how we may continue to move away from it: > With music sales moving towards file-based playback and streaming and away from CDs, there is a possibility that the loudness war will be blunted by normalization technology such as ReplayGain and Apple's Sound Check. Most cloud-based music services perform loudness normalization by default and may reduce the market pressure to overcompress material.
hevi_jos 7y ago
I believe the main reason for its use is that music is not compressed like with CDs. CD quality could be better, but thanks to abuse (Loudness wars), it is way worse from the music quality point of view. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war So in practice most vinyl records surpass CDs in dynamic range, because loudness in vinyl means your disc is able to hold less music. So if you want to listen music with good speakers, you better do with vinyl. Using vinyl has been a way to shortcut the music producers destruction of its music.

neallindsay 7y ago

Audio quality on CDs is better than Vinyl (especially over time), but it’s not great. If you care about quality you’re downloading music anyway. But if you’re going to get something physical, you want it to look cool, and Vinyl beats CDs by a mile.

puranjay 7y ago
In addition, vinyl's cover art looks great. So many album covers are legit works of art. It's awful shrinking them down to a 250x250px image or a CD cover
benj111 7y ago
Pah, tapes are cooler than vinyl. My Dad has vinyl, plus only popular bands can justify a vinyl print run. You can release a tape album even if you can only count your fans on one hand, including the band members.
- rwmj 7y ago
  If you were a tiny band why would you release a cassette tape album instead of an MP3 or digital stream?
  - benj111 7y ago
    Because tapes are cool. Or for a longer answer. Bands don't need to release vinyl. Fans appreciate the physicality, and will pay for it. But tiny bands probably don't have the resources for a vinyl pressing. I was also making reference to back in the day when your options were vinyl/cd or tape. If you wanted to release an album, tape was your only choice unless you were likely to sell at least X hundred units. And as I said, tapes are cool :)

kozak 7y ago

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!

quickthrower2 7y ago
Is that surprising? It would be a lot cheaper to make CAV players that CLV.
Koshkin 7y ago
Not necessarily worse, though. There could be undesirable mechanical side-effects from the track moving too fast against the needle as well. (I am sure there is a huge body of engineering science about this.)
- kozak 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Afikv6k1-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Afikv6k1-c
taylodl 7y ago
Then you realize Led Zeppelin thought Stairway to Heaven was a throwaway song - they laid it down on an inside track. It’s popularity caught them by surprise.

agumonkey 7y ago

Can't wait for CEDs to outsell DVDs

sakopov 7y ago

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.

sebastianconcpt 7y ago

With vinyl revenue growing by 12% in the second half of 2018 and first half of this year, and CD rates barely changing at all, it could see vinyl revenue overtake that of CDs by the end of the year. If it does happen, it’ll be the first time that vinyl has generated more revenue than CDs since 1986.

parsimo2010 7y ago

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).

Aaronmacaron 7y ago
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.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  If you want to buy a physical medium then CDs are the obvious option because objectively they are superior to vinyls in every aspects and they can also come with nice booklets. I think that the hip-value of vinyls is extremely important. I write that as someone who had no choice but use vinyls and tapes until I got a CD player...
  - aibara 7y ago
    CDs are just... awful. Nice booklets? You mean small booklets with tiny pictures and even tinier text. And they come in what I consider one of the most horrible containers of all time: the ugly and easily-broken jewel case. Like vinyl, CDs can be scratched, but they sure don't degrade gracefully: the nice pops of vinyl becomes jarring skips on a CD up to the point where the CD just becomes unplayable. Nowadays I have all my music on my computer, as files on the drive or from a stream. But when it comes to wanting something physical, something I can hold and look at (from the cover and extra material that comes with an LP to the wonderful spinning of a record as the sound emerges), vinyl easily wins. But maybe I'm weird, because even in the mid '90s as a teenager I thought vinyl looked cool and was fun and fascinating to interact with. I hated CDs and their cases so much I even converted all my CDs to minidisc! Happily I kept them around until I ripped them to FLAC files.

pkorzeniewski 7y ago

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.

mnd999 7y ago
The novelty factor is a definitely a thing with vinyl. I'm nearly 40 and my first music (Disney etc.) was on record but we quickly moved on to tape and then CD. A lot of people not much younger than me will never have seen a record growing up.

nine_k 7y ago

With CD being in decline, and vinyl on the rise, it's natural for vinyl to overcome CDs. But I'd say it's mostly because CDs have all but disappeared from mass sales channels. E.g. this chart says a lot: https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/

vr46 7y ago

I was in the local record shop on Saturday, picking up the latest Bat For Lashes and Brand New Heavies albums. CDs are still selling more units, but vinyl is up to 3 times the price of a CD, so no wonder it can make up the shortfall. Vinyl packaging is just nicer. Back in the 1980s and 90s, vinyl and cassettes were the same price. I wish I'd bought fewer tapes during my Walkman years and instead recorded the vinyl onto tape. Those tapes are all shot now, but my record collection is still here...

madengr 7y ago

All these comments and no one has mentioned reel-to-reel tape decks. That will be the next hipster craze.

honkycat 7y ago

I purchase vinyl to support the artist and the artwork on the vinyl is much larger and prettier. Additionally, most vinyl releases these days come with a high-quality FLAC audio download, so I get the digital music as well.

m12k 7y ago

Makes sense - streaming has won, so the people buying physical media might as well go full hipster instead of half-assing it.

baud147258 7y ago

Or the sales of CDs have declined so much that they are going to get outsold by a niche product.

RickSanchez2600 7y ago

We used to have a turntable stereo that was mono with one speaker built into a console that had a wooden lid on it on top so it could be closed and we used it as a computer monitor holder. My nephews stole my vinyl records inside of it. It was damaged in a flood and we never replaced it. Turntables these days are expensive, but worth it for the vinyl experience.

mudlus 7y ago

Makes perfect since, in the virtual age collectables will have more value than the thing anyone can access. Reminds me of an article I can't find about the lack of middle road anymore for many goods, you either care a lot or don't care at all about what you're getting. McDonalds vs Wagyu. Where's the bespoke Coke? (actually my wife enjoys elderflower syrup in her soda water)

jarjoura 7y ago

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.

Godel_unicode 7y ago
Vinyl is one of the best examples I have found of "worse is better".
rhcom2 7y ago
> Also the experience of going to second hand stores to chat with fellow music lovers and discover new artists feels very human to me. It's really fun to buy .50 cent records because you like the cover. I've discovered some good music that way.
Jaruzel 7y ago
> The b-side is just as good as the A-side For me this is really important, When I used to collect vinyl I'd seek out 12" special editions of songs simply because of the obscure gems that the artist/label would put on the B-sides. Even now I'm sure that a lot of those B-sides still haven't made it into the digital domain. I also loved picture discs along with great album art. Both of these things seem to now be a relic of history now that digital music is the de facto method of consumption.
7y ago

magoon 7y ago

CDs were supposed to eventually be cheaper than tapes, but the industry kept raising prices. Even Blu-ray discs were grossly overpriced before people turned to digital sales.

stephencoyner 7y ago

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. Those interested should check out... Daupe https://daupe.bandcamp.com/music https://daupe.bandcamp.com/music https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.factmag.com/2018/02/08/daupe-westside-gunn-mf-doom/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.factmag.com/2018/02/08/daup... De Rap Winkel https://derapwinkelrecords.bandcamp.com/music https://derapwinkelrecords.bandcamp.com/music

acd 7y ago

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 https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_643297_en.html

tyrust 7y ago
>Carbon foot print from vinyl is lower than online streamed music due to the co2 foot print of all the servers serving online music. The quote and article you linked doesn't say or support that. It is more likely that there are just far more people listening to music now than there were before. I don't think that switching from streaming to records would result in fewer GHGs. The article you linked doesn't specify.

mikorym 7y ago

Not really on topic here, but I've been trying this for a while and maybe someone can point me in the right direction. What are the preferred synthesisers / synth emulators that one can (or should) install on Linux? My quest is also one of audio fidelity; I am looking for specific sounds on proprietary DAWs that I can reverse engineer from first principles.

Pulletwee12549 7y ago

I am getting the feeling that this has less to do with vinyl sales surging and more to do with CD sales plunging.

amelius 7y ago

Is there a service where I can transform my (rare) CDs into vinyl, including the artwork?

tripzilch 7y ago

So I've been thinking a lot about this video recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ2czFuIYmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ2czFuIYmQ 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 7y ago
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.
- consumer451 7y ago
  I just watched the GP video, and science does seem to support that vinyl records are likely dangerous. The video creator uses an air pollution meter[0] to find out that his records are causing very high PM 2.5, VOC, and formaldehyde. The vinyl records seem to only need to be taken out of their sleeves. The results look shocking. There have to be some HN users who have the knowledge and equipment to attempt to replicate this experiment. Please do that and share! [0] https://youtu.be/aZ2czFuIYmQ?t=553 https://youtu.be/aZ2czFuIYmQ?t=553
- c0vfefe 7y ago

wodenokoto 7y ago

What really surprises me is that CDs were that big in the mid 80s. If I had to guess, I would have said CD beats vinyl in early 90s. Or maybe I'm just not taking cassettes into account.

mrdobelina 7y ago

We’re looking for a tech co-founder for a project about vinyl records. The iOS MVP app has been launched, got over thousands of paid downloads, reached second on App Store top paid music app, gathered interest from major magazines about music (Resident Advisor, DJ Mag and many more) and a couple of accelerators. Now we’re looking to add features and improve it to start monetizing. If you’re passionate about vinyl records and have exceptional skills on iOS, Firebase Suite and React, we’d love to discuss.

aguzzi94 7y ago

So interesting! I think that on a philosophical level it matches the trend that, while the world keeps on being more and more caught by fakeness and mediocrity, there's a counter culture and counter sentiment that yearns for something authentic again. There's still hope guys!

CraptinPants 7y ago

That’s what’s up!

michalnet 7y ago

lol

dylanler 7y ago

Is likely a cycle when people are scrambling to collect things that are going out of style.

moorsc0de 7y ago

I like Vinyl - CD's not so much.

xbiitx 7y ago

most of them should end up framed