Wednesday, September 12, 2007

I love the smell of vinyl in the morning


I was vinyl when vinyl wasn't cool.

All right, I was vinyl when the only alternatives were eight-track or cassette. And I remember when reel-to-reel tape was an option, too.

But now vinyl is cool --
just ask MSNBC's tech guy, Gary Krakow -- and I welcome all the young folk arriving late to the party CLICK! to the party CLICK! to the party CLICK! to the party CLICK! to the party CLICK! to the party CLICK! . . .

Downloaded music may be the way most people buy their music these days – but there is a growing number of aficionados who are turning back to analog – all the way back to vinyl LPs.

Today’s rebellious young adults started turning to long-playing records because they looked cool -- flat, 12-inch, black discs from the ancient past, which stored only 50 minutes or so of music. So retro!

Then something happened. People actually started to listen to what was on those LPs and discovered they contained great-sounding music. Music that was more lifelike than they were used to.

They liked what they heard -- so much so that vinyl LPs started selling in numbers. Same for all sorts of turntables that play them. Today, many new CD/MP3s releases are also being pressed for vinyl fans.

There’s a good reason for this. In addition to what people remember as the bad things that LPs provide (scratches, clicks and pops) vinyl discs have lots of good things going for them. LPs contain close to 100-percent of the uncompressed music information as originally recorded. CDs contain only about half of that recorded information. And compressed music files are left with only a small percentage of the information that’s on a CD.

Forget convenience. What would you rather listen to?

This back-to-vinyl movement has not escaped the attention of some of the major electronics retailers in this country. When they began noticing turntable sales on the rise they figured it was time to provide some “software’ for customers to play on their “hardware.”

If you look carefully on Circuit City’s Web site, you’ll notice a bunch of albums for sale.

According to spokeswoman Jackie Foreman, Circuit City currently has more than 10,000 album titles available on their Web site.“We want to offer customers a wide variety of entertainment products,” she said.

3 comments:

bloglogger said...

I have a large -about 3,000- collection of LP's, in mint condition most of them. I have 3 turntables, the newest one an USB one. I bought this one for special purposes. My grandchildren loved some of my records but they wanted to have their music in a more portable mp3 device. I just want to add a comment to your posting. You wrote that music on LP's is 100% uncompressed. I do not agree with this statement, at least not with the "older" LP's. These vinyl records contain truly compressed music to maintain the stylus on the track . Y remember the manufacturers kept music above 200 hertz or so in the bottom and at 15,000 at the high limit. The tracking hability of stylus was not achievable beyond those limits. Now, with the new technologies at hand, I don't know what the limits are. Maybe you could comment on that. By the way, I'm posting this comment from Mazatlan, Mexico. It's been a pleasure.

The Mighty Favog said...

Bloglogger writes:

"You wrote that music on LP's is 100% uncompressed. I do not agree with this statement, at least not with the "older" LP's. These vinyl records contain truly compressed music to maintain the stylus on the track . Y remember the manufacturers kept music above 200 hertz or so in the bottom and at 15,000 at the high limit."


I think you're referring to equalization.

In the early days of the LP -- running through the '50s, at least -- there wasn't necessarily as standardized equalization curve for records. For example, an old Zenith console I have has EQ settings for 78s, LPs, foreign recordings and for what became the standardized RIAA curve.

I would imagine that rolling off the bass at 200 Hz and treble at 15 kHz didn't last that long.

Anyway, I think what Gary Krakow was getting at is that vinyl, being an analog format, cannot suffer from *data* compression, as digital can when you start removing parts of the digital information in order to shrink the file size.

And that's a totally different deal than audio compression (which squishes the dynamic range) or equalization.

bloglogger said...

Yes, I guess you're right. Thanks for the information.