CDs are cheap but Vinyl is expensive.

Deltadrummer

Platinum Member
I was in Best Buy today and they were selling vinyl for $20.00. It's more expensive then the CD's. The CD's in Virgin were as low as $5.00. I bought Cream Disraeli Gears remaster, Best of the Doobie Brothers and James Brown at the Apollo at 3 for 10 bucks in a clearance bin. So am I to assume that within the next year CD's are out, vinyl is the new HD and I should get a new needle for my technics record player?
 
I gave up on analog some time ago. The work involved and total cost of ownership of vinyl is high. Not just the purchase:

I had a vaccum record cleaning machine that was necessary to get the junk out of the grooves and of course...proper storage. Flipping the record.

As much as I love the midrange on vinyl, the cost (both money and work) were too high for me to continue enjoying the medium.

I am too lazy for vinyl.
 
Putting it simply, the production of vinyl is more expensive because of:

i) The materials (although this has drastically gone down since the price of crude plummeted).

and

ii) The production. Not that the process is any harder or more arduous than CD production, it's that the runs of Vinyl are shorter than of CD because of a lack of demand and therefore the mass-manufacturing possibilities are not there. The price per unit is increased drastically as a result.

Buying second hand vinyl, I seem to find that the price is roughly the same as CD - new ones at least. There's also markup on collector value as well, so if I were to go out and find a copy of 'Freak Out!' by Frank Zappa and the Mothers, it would likely cost me a tidy sum as that record is hard to come by in both CD and Vinyl formats (believe me, I've tried) whereas something like 'Dark Side of the Moon' in a playable condition isn't an expensive record as there are so many made.

I love vinyl, I absolutely do. But when taking into account the practical advantages of CD, I've had to leave my turntable at home whilst I'm at Uni. Possibly buying a USB turntable in a month or two...
 
I love Vinyl. My hobby is collecting LPs. However, I prefer listening to the mp3 version all the time because of convenience.

Yes, LPs today cost more. I love hunting down the garage sales.
 
I always loved vinyl as well. I actually sold all my records from when I was a kid for tuition back in college. And then in that late 80's, I bought them all back for a buck or two. I guess that was a good business move. :) For listening to classical music the cd is definitely preferred. But I guess it will be shortly phased out for popular and rock recordings; but I wonder if audiophiles will keep buying vinyl. It seems silly now that the recordings are digital to begin with.

Love your tabla. One of my students parents just bought me some Zakir Hussain CDs for Christmas. (I traded them in for the vinyl though.)
 
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I always loved vinyl as well. I actually sold all my records from when I was a kid for tuition back in college. And then in that late 80's, I bought them all back for a buck or two. I guess that was a good business move. :) For listening to classical music the cd is definitely preferred. But I guess it will be shortly phased out for popular and rock recordings; but I wonder if audiophiles will keep buying vinyl. It seems silly now that the recordings are digital to begin with.

Love your tabla. One of my students parents just bought me some Zakir Hussain CDs for Christmas. (I traded them in for the vinyl though.)

The recordings may be digital to start with, but that doesn't mean that the vinyl won't impart its own quality onto that recording. I think the CD format is starting to show its age and has been for some time. Ironically, Mp3 has actually saved it by being an even lower quality encoding, so the people who are buying Mp3 and CD don't really hear the highest-quality recordings. DVD might change this though. The quality of the mastering on some DVD's (The Incredibles comes to mind) is just phenomenal and sooner or later, the consumer is going to take note. 5.1 surround sound has been a viable option for years now and yet it has a relatively small uptake - probably due to practical considerations - but with the next generation of media formats coming to the fore, I can see the CD slowly dying as a means of distribution; partly due to the convenience of Mp3 and partly due to the quality of DVD. CD takes the middle ground there and might be squeezed out.
 
The recordings may be digital to start with, but that doesn't mean that the vinyl won't impart its own quality onto that recording. I think the CD format is starting to show its age and has been for some time. Ironically, Mp3 has actually saved it by being an even lower quality encoding, so the people who are buying Mp3 and CD don't really hear the highest-quality recordings. DVD might change this though. The quality of the mastering on some DVD's (The Incredibles comes to mind) is just phenomenal and sooner or later, the consumer is going to take note. 5.1 surround sound has been a viable option for years now and yet it has a relatively small uptake - probably due to practical considerations - but with the next generation of media formats coming to the fore, I can see the CD slowly dying as a means of distribution; partly due to the convenience of Mp3 and partly due to the quality of DVD. CD takes the middle ground there and might be squeezed out.

Yeah my personal opinion is that we're going to start having recordings in HD, by which i mean higher sampling rates. I mean you can buy soundcards for £50 nowdays that can handle 96kz and 24bit recordings. The only thing really holding it back is the size of the files but considering that 5 years ago when i built my first computer the 40gb hdd cost the same amount as you could get a 400gb hard disk today, plus the fact that the internet has improved exponentially in speed it doesn't seem too unreasonable to me that in the very near future we might start seeing albums recorded in HD and released on DVD, USB (you can already buy albums on this format) or maybe even for download. My personal opinion is that both the improvement in sample rate and bits per sample makes the music sound a lot less digitised but hey, maybe that's just me?
 
Well, consider that the Red Book standard for CD hasn't changed since 1983 and that is 44.1KhZ at 16-bit resolution and you're right. Most of even the most basic software packages now offer 96KhZ recording and 24-bit resolution and the DVD format has used these for some time - or at least had them available. Whilst the Red Book is certainly adequate for most applications, some of the geeks can tell the difference and there are subtleties.

Compression-free download has been a realistic option for a while now as well. FLAC files and .WAV recordings are being released all the time, but mainly as whole-album downloads or as individual multitrack files (Nine Inch Nails have been doing this, for instance) and these offer the consumer pretty much any quality they could want. If they want smaller files for their iPod, they can compress them themselves into .Mp3 (or .M4A on iTunes) or if they have the space, they can hold onto the original quality recordings.

This does bring us closer to analogue, yes. Analogue has a theoretically infinite sample rate and resolution so the higher the numbers, the closer to analogue we get.
 
If you're buying old vinyl, it's half the price of CD re-releases in my experience! That is second-hand though.
 
Blue-ray supports uncompressed audio...that medium is amazing.

I compared (there was NO comparision) the DVD and blu-ray of "Superman returns."

The audio was easily 30% more powerful, and much more vivid.

There is no way to get that kind of low-bass power out of vinyl without the arm jumping off the plinth.
 
Well, consider that the Red Book standard for CD hasn't changed since 1983 and that is 44.1KhZ at 16-bit resolution and you're right. Most of even the most basic software packages now offer 96KhZ recording and 24-bit resolution and the DVD format has used these for some time - or at least had them available. Whilst the Red Book is certainly adequate for most applications, some of the geeks can tell the difference and there are subtleties.

Compression-free download has been a realistic option for a while now as well. FLAC files and .WAV recordings are being released all the time, but mainly as whole-album downloads or as individual multitrack files (Nine Inch Nails have been doing this, for instance) and these offer the consumer pretty much any quality they could want. If they want smaller files for their iPod, they can compress them themselves into .Mp3 (or .M4A on iTunes) or if they have the space, they can hold onto the original quality recordings.

This does bring us closer to analogue, yes. Analogue has a theoretically infinite sample rate and resolution so the higher the numbers, the closer to analogue we get.

The thing is though that people do say this about analogue and in theory it's true. However what you have to remember is that the soundwave analogue has to be recorded onto a medium and the actual accuracy of the recording although in theory it could be infinite will only be as much as can actually be recorded onto the medium. In the case of vinyl it's only ever going to be as accurate as the plastic can be moulded.

As for the standard for CD yes it hasn't changed in a long while however if you think about it the standard resolution for TV has been 640x480 for many many years but it's only in the last 2 or 3 years that HDTV has hit the mainstream even though the capabilities to produce images of such quality on even relatively inexpensive monitors has been around for nearly 10 years now so maybe it'll be a bit of a wait before HD audio comes out, but it will.

Trkdrmr, I haven't seen a blu-ray movie but even better than that i watched Quantum of Solace in a digital cinema which presumably uses the same HD standards and it was incredible, not only better than TV or standard DVD but i think better than analogue. The problem i've always had with analogue film is that every little speck of dirt that gets onto the film goes onto the screen, creating a lot of visual noise, made worse by the large upscaling factor that you get with the cinema.
 
The thing is though that people do say this about analogue and in theory it's true. However what you have to remember is that the soundwave analogue has to be recorded onto a medium and the actual accuracy of the recording although in theory it could be infinite will only be as much as can actually be recorded onto the medium. In the case of vinyl it's only ever going to be as accurate as the plastic can be moulded.

Considering that many recordings are still mastered onto analogue tape or even recorded onto tape - and that the standards for digital recording are far, far higher than those onto which they're being mastered and it becomes pretty obvious that the limiting factor of CD quality is the mastering, not the recording.
 
Considering that many recordings are still mastered onto analogue tape or even recorded onto tape - and that the standards for digital recording are far, far higher than those onto which they're being mastered and it becomes pretty obvious that the limiting factor of CD quality is the mastering, not the recording.

Of course i know that but i was on about digital music as a concept rather than CD. If you think about it, as long as you have enough data storage capacity you could in theory have sample rates and bits per sample so high that they surpass even the accuracy of vinyl.
 
Of course i know that but i was on about digital music as a concept rather than CD. If you think about it, as long as you have enough data storage capacity you could in theory have sample rates and bits per sample so high that they surpass even the accuracy of vinyl.

Subjectively, perhaps, but theoretically vinyl has an infinite sampling rate and bit depth. In terms of accurate reproduction - we're already there and have been for a long time, but in terms of what people 'prefer' to hear, we're not. Vinyl imparts its own character onto the sound that is not present on CD.
 
I think the problem you get in with a lot of the new technolgy is that it can be over kill. You can talk about sampling; but there is a point at which it is inaudible. and you can look at Blue Ray of HD; but often the only thing that it is greater defining is fake sets, bad acting and that zit on someone's forehead. And for the price you pay, you'd be better off going to the movie theater or seeing some live music.
 

Just to add to this - the availability of compression-free downloads has also been increasing rapidly along with the availability of vinyl. In the end, it comes down to the preference between accurate reproduction and vinyl reproduction (for the purists/audiophiles) and the CD covers neither of these to any extent.

Funnily enough, I'm one very few new generation guys who can operate a tape machine. I'm talking about my generation at University. Right now I'm doing a degree in Music Technology and whilst there are a few of us who can operate tape, at college it was altogether a different experience. Give it five years and I suspect that all my compatriots who go into the recording industry (still don't know if I want to end up there) ought to know how to use tape.
 
I used to use a PCM to record on to video tape. I also used a video cassette as a 8-hour music tape, it worked well.

I do remember firing up an old Revox R2R that sounded quite good.

My ultimate "cassette" days consisted of the following decks:

Akai: budget 3-head
Teac R-888x - outstanding for the money
Panasonic hi-fi VHS deck
Harmon Kardon---In 85 $650 was a LOT of money but....

I lusted with all my being after a Namakmichi dragon... $2,000 of cassette tape auto-azimuth correction bliss (NAAC). Even the simpler CR-7 was amazing.

Half-speed masters and heavy vinyl were the rage.
 
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