Slightly O/T ... Hope for the Future of the hobby

[Steve]

One possible reason for records outselling CD's is due to the fact that a lot of people (even those with cotton wool stuffed in their ears) now recognize the superiority of vinyl reproduction to the whole digital domain. It seems that we have all been conned over the past 25 years, but not anymore. It is somewhat ironic I think to consider that NOW is possibly the time to discover CD, albeit in its twilight years. Certainly a lot of CD's sound better than their older counterparts and todays playback equipment is 20 times as good as the earlier incarnations.

However, for many it has come too late. Digital now means downloads at the click of a mouse and even a lot of high-end audio companies are going straight to direct data streaming and dumping the humble compact disc format.

There is something unique about the whole vinyl experience though. Quite apart from the superior packaging and sound quality, owning a record makes you feel part of the whole experience of collecting a particular recording artist in the way that a digital file never can. This is the problem with CD - it is simply an outdated medium for carrying a 'data file'. I'm not surprised it's being phased out.

Records, in contrast, appear to be timeless and the experience of opening up a sleeve and removing something which has been entirely created using analogue processes is certainly unique and something previous generations cherished as much as we do now. Into this fold, we then have the earlier 78rpm disc. I was listening to a radio programme recently where they were discussing the superiority of high speed vinyl pressings for replay. Of course a 45rpm is theoretically better than a 33rpm and so forth due to the amount and potentially more accurate groove information passed to the cartridge in a split second ie less distortion of the original signal. This was always said to apply to 78rpm discs. That means very simplistically that 78's were superior to microgroove 45's which in turn are better than 33's which are also better than CD's due to the differences between analogue and digital. So after all these years, sound quality has gradually been eroded and everything has become lesser quality!

As a result of this, even some modern entertainers are now having their recordings pressed on 78rpm. Yes, that's right, 78's are making a comeback, albeit on a modest scale and probably as much for novelty reasons as anything else. But it's a start. This has surely got to be good and in time, younger people will accept that they will have access to everything, both old and new, in the analogue formats. Hopefully this will encourage them to seek out the very items that we all collect today.

[Valecnik]

There is something unique about the whole vinyl experience though. Quite apart from the superior packaging and sound quality, owning a record makes you feel part of the whole experience of collecting a particular recording artist in the way that a digital file never can. This is the problem with CD - it is simply an outdated medium for carrying a 'data file'. I'm not surprised it's being phased out.

Records, in contrast, appear to be timeless and the experience of opening up a sleeve and removing something which has been entirely created using analogue processes is certainly unique and something previous generations cherished as much as we do now. Into this fold, we then have the earlier 78rpm disc. I was listening to a radio programme recently where they were discussing the superiority of high speed vinyl pressings for replay. Of course a 45rpm is theoretically better than a 33rpm and so forth due to the amount and potentially more accurate groove information passed to the cartridge in a split second ie less distortion of the original signal. This was always said to apply to 78rpm discs. That means very simplistically that 78's were superior to microgroove 45's which in turn are better than 33's which are also better than CD's due to the differences between analogue and digital. So after all these years, sound quality has gradually been eroded and everything has become lesser quality!

And then there's the way that CDs, and even expensive DVDs, Blu Rays are treated today. I see piles of discs on the floor of cars, out of thier cases, laying in front of televisions. I treat my 78's and cylinders like gold, well they are in a way. I treated my vinyl records in the same way, bought plastic covers for the jackets,special soft liners for the dics, NEVER put a finger on the surface of a vinyl disc...

[scullylathe]

Yes, vinyl is coming back worldwide because people are re-discovering the superior quality. I do vinyl mastering and one of the factors is that the existing equipment (no new lathes or cutting heads have been made in many years) that is being used today has been rebuilt and modified for even better performance than was possible when the equipment was new. A colleague of mine was interviewed for a magazine several years ago when the resurgence in vinyl started and he explained very well why purely analog audio is, from an engineering standpoint, superior to digital. Years ago, the sample rate of 44,100 (and up to 48,000) samples per second was established because of the limitations of computing technology of the late 1970's/early 1980's when digital audio was introduced. As he stated, if you do the math, a 100hz tone (low end) will generate 441 samples per second. A 1000hz tone in the midrange will generate 44.1 per second. When you reach the mid-high and high end of frequencies extending into the 10,000hz range and above (where recordings get their "life") you're seeing only 4.41 samples per second. In other words, as frequency rises, the number of samples drops sharply. Cutting equipment of the day had a given response of about 20hz through 15,000 to 20,000 hz. Even with SACD and DVD-A formats you're still only seeing 8 or a few more samples per second in the high end. Even though the filtering and anti-aliasing circuits in digital audio equipment attempt to 'smooth out' the sampling limitations, it still just don't sound like good analog!