Vinyl records make a return

(To pick a figure out of thin air)

Jonesy has dropped science on other threads (one about minidisc for instance) in the past about how digital objectively sounds better than vinyl. Some people just prefer vinyl sound.

i guess vinyl could sound better, but i'm betting the entry-level price for a record player that would make vinyl sound better would be much higher than a similarly serviceable CD player or ipod dock etc. personally, i'm no audiophile, i just love the ritual of putting it on and the big sleeve and the smell and all that.

you can get a nice older turntable for 200+ that will make records sound very nice.

here's one:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dual-506-Vintage-Turntable-with-Ortofon-TKS-55E-Cartridge-/330939973368?pt=Vintage_Electronics_R2&hash=item4d0d8f3ef8

nice too:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/PHILIPS-ELECTRONIC-212-TURNTABLE-Belt-Drive-/221240112432?pt=Vintage_Electronics_R2&hash=item3382f03530

oh there are loads of nice turntables for sale that won't kill your wallet. most people are lazy though. and don't want to be bothered. there's no actual law that says you have to care about good or great sound reproduction though. or care about analog sound. but for people who are into it its not a big deal. i've been listening to records for 44 years and its never been a big deal or a hassle. its one of the easier hobbies to have. there are records everywhere. and the more you learn and know the more fun it can be.

the profit margins aren't high enough to produce any further pressing machines - the tools to build these pressing machines themselves no longer exist.

― data halls and oate (stevie), Friday, June 14, 2013 3:15 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They're called "machinists". Look into them, record companies.

Duals are the shit. My dad replaced his speakers and amplifier a few years ago, but kept his Dual turntable which is approaching 40 years old and still sounding amazing. Never had to have it repaired, either.

There's also this guy in Iowa: http://fixmydual.com

most people are lazy though. and don't want to be bothered.

I'll cop to this. But for me it's less about getting up and flipping the record over, or cleaning the record, or cleaning the needle; and more about worrying about shit like weight and tracking force and whatever the fuck is causing the inner-groove distortion on my Iris DeMent record.

xp - My first turntable was a Dual 1229. That illuminated strobe dial thing looked mad cool.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7157/6768086793_04a03b5011_z.jpg

probably just a crappy new pressing! i listened to my iris dement tape for years. never had a problem. must have played My Life 500 times.

x-post

for me it's less about getting up and flipping the record over, or cleaning the record, or cleaning the needle; and more about worrying about shit like weight and tracking force and whatever the fuck is causing the inner-groove distortion on my Iris DeMent record.

― Tarfumes The Escape Goat, Friday, June 14, 2013 3:42 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

get an '80s Technics with a P-mount cartridge and you won't have to deal with either.

Thanks for the suggestion; I may look into that.

And I think you're right, Scott, as I don't have that problem on any other record. Fortunately, it came with a download card, but I didn't buy the vinyl to listen to a download.

P-mounts really easy to install too - no need to adjust alignment or anything. Apparently some other manufacturers besides Technics adopted them too. The SL-1200 doesn't use it, but their cheaper mainstream turntables did.

http://www.vinylengine.com/images/forum/p-mount.gif

i love records. have i ever mentioned that on here?

don't think you have. Ever thought about owning your own record store? would be v cool

Tuomas is 100% otm though, for the casual music fan vinyl is more trouble than it's worth.

I think I said this before once, but since I loooove my stereo, one of my great pleasures now is helping friends pick up nice gear. AR and Pioneer tables, Klipsch speakers, Pioneer and Marantz receivers, etc.
love this guy: https://www.facebook.com/BrooklynVintageAudio?fref=ts

Fortunately, it came with a download card, but I didn't buy the vinyl to listen to a download.

― Tarfumes The Escape Goat, Friday, June 14, 2013 3:53 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Many people do essentially, so they feel like their money went towards something tangible and hip.

i'm being so enlightened about consumption rn

I wonder how many people download illegally or listen on spotify and then buy the vinyl and never redeem the download code or listen to the record?

my technics sl-q300 is p-mount

Fortunately, it came with a download card, but I didn't buy the vinyl to listen to a download.

― Tarfumes The Escape Goat, Friday, June 14, 2013 3:53 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Many people do essentially, so they feel like their money went towards something tangible and hip.

― Evan, Friday, June 14, 2013 3:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my SO's former roommate had a few cartons on vinyl records that she never listened to. she had one of those incredibly shitty USB record players and I'm not sure she even opened the box when she moved in. she just downloaded everything on iTunes and bought the vinyl for... i dunno actually. i guess it supports the artists so good on her.

cartons OF vinyl records

should say crates instead of cartons though

It's no fun to buy downloads especially when most people have the wrong mindset that everything downloadable should be free. The fact that there is no sense of ownership when it comes to files. And similarly many people consider buying CDs a thing only their parents would do. So what's left to not feel guilty about doing? Buying hip vinyl to mine free downloads.

Q: Vinyl sales are steadily increasing in the past few years. Why in your opinion people are going back to vinyl?

A: Well, my vinyl sales aren’t increasing, they’re decreasing – and markedly. People who buy vinyl because they just bought some crappy portable turntable in Urban Outfitters and want to have some 180 gram deluxe reissue of the Velvet Underground and Nico’s album sitting on their coffee table because it looks cool might be temporarily driving some portion of the market up, but I can safely say, from vantage point, that it’s harder and harder to sell the same amount of records, year after year. And most of my peers are in the same boat.

Eothen ‘Egon’ Alapatt interview.
http://www.dustandgrooves.com/eothen-egon-alapatt-los-angeles-ca/

People who buy vinyl because they just bought some crappy portable turntable in Urban Outfitters and want to have some 180 gram deluxe reissue of the Velvet Underground and Nico’s album sitting on their coffee table because it looks cool

amazing to think lester bangs made this exact same grumble about posers about 40 years ago

well minus the UO and reissue bits

People who buy vinyl because they just bought some crappy portable turntable in Urban Outfitters and want to have some 180 gram deluxe reissue of the Velvet Underground and Nico’s album

Kids don't know how good they have it. My first VU was this, which was the only thing I could find by them on CD at Best Buy in the mid-90s:

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/28630743/The+Best+of+The+Velvet+Underground+Words+and+Music+Folder.jpg

I don't know ... I think it would be kind of awesome to own only one record and have it be a 180 gram edition of Velvet Underground and Nico and only listen to it on a shitty portable with built-in speakers.

damn, that guy has some awesome records. I guess he probably paid serious money for all of that though. funny because I sort of snobbily don't consider that serious cratedigging, but whatever.

i don't really think there's a way in which Egon can't be considered a serious crate-digger. read the notes to stones throw's sixteen corners compilation, for starters.

yeah, I didn't read the whole thing. at first it sounded like dealers just bring him records they know he'll like but now I see I misread.

Nostalgia-->audiophilia--->received nostalgia.

its hard to avoid SOME level of nostalgia if you are looking at and using something that is 50 or 60 years old. or even 40 or 30 years old. but for me, the thrill is playing that old thing and hearing new sounds in the present. its very much a now thing for me. some people definitely try and evoke the past and that's their primary relationship with old things. or they want to be reminded of the past. their own or an earlier past. there are always going to be people who prize things based on age. and who will insist, sometimes ignorantly, that the old or the new is the best. we should just avoid those people altogether. my own bias toward analog and tape and records and older recording techniques, older microphones(!), older studios, and older mixing boards is based on the variety of religious experience i have witnessed over the years. i can play 50 records (or a hundred or a thousand) and they can all sound wildly different! how they were recorded, how they were pressed, when and where they were recorded, what the room was like, what gear was used, what mics, etc, etc, and on and on forever all play a part in why they sound so different. granted, i've got history on my side. over a hundred years of recordings. but out of every 100 CDs i play, i might hear one or two that are genuinely striking. sound-wise. and they are usually the ones that were worked on endlessly and hundreds of hours of time and effort went in to making them. whereas some of the greatest records i've ever heard, again sonically, were made in a couple of hours on the cheap. there is a digital uniformity that my chaotic brain rebels against. actual noises that you hear in real life are not free of distortion or separated from other ambient noises/sounds. you don't hear things in a vacuum. and i guess i've never really understood people who wanted to divorce musical sounds from the ambient hum that is all around us. one of the great joys of listening to old records for me is actually hearing the room that the music is being played in. the reverberations. the echo. 78s and 50's-era records are good for this. old jazz. it increases my feeling of intimacy with the music and makes me feel closer to the people playing it. and its a different feeling completely than the feeling i get listening to the clear reallyreallyclose fidelity of a digital recording. which can often be lysergic in its closeness. you can hear someone's uvula flapping in the breeze. i can see why people dig that though. tech-wise. geek-wise. that ultrahuman clearness. like HD or blu-ray. i appreciate it more when i'm listening to sound artists or electro-acoustic music. very trippy. can be a little jarring if its just some acoustic folk record and i'm sitting inside someone's guitar or throat. i appreciate a little distancing. and that's what i think people mean by warmness when they talk about records. voices have more glow on tape? i dunno. its certainly possible to make a pretty accurate recording of the human voice on tape. maybe its like the difference between old tube televisions and new flat screens. when everyone had tubes, you would walk down the street at night and little electric fireplaces beamed out of windows. the windows would actually glow. you could see what people were watching. you could hear the sound outside a window loud and clear. with flatscreens the flatness is supreme. you don't get the glow. you can walk by a hundred of them and never have your eye drawn to the picture. they are easy to ignore and hide. same with digital muzak and radio. very easy to tune out. the uniform levels don't engage the ear. nothing leaps out. having said all that, i absolutely LOVE the possibilities within the world of electronic/dance/rap and digital sound. and that, to me, is the greatest stuff to listen to on cd. that tooclose and ultra-clear vocal sound you can get with a computer is stunning when applied to rap. talk about hard to ignore and jarring and visceral. when i take off a record and put on a rap cd its like a bomb has gone off. and that's a good thing. and i've already talked a lot about my undying love for those Kompakt CDs that ILM made me buy years ago. they IMMEDIATELY draw you in. they are definitely a gold standard for me. no doubt anyone here could name a dozen other labels who have achieved similar results and created amazing sound over the last 20 years. warp, mego, etc. whoever. i've also mentioned that when i put a kompakt cd on in the store almost everyone without exception who walks in the store asks me what i'm playing. they quickly become addicted. because it sounds so undeniably good! and cool! and it IS sound that leaps out at you and is 3D in an amazing textural way. so the uses (and sci-fi potential) for digi sound are endless. and i'm gonna guess that in 20 years we won't know what hit us. binaural blu-ray friggin' death ray ridiculousness, i'm guessing. but whatever comes will always be - it can't help but be - DIFFERENT from magnetic tape and all manner of electrical recordings of the distant past. there's something for everyone. my own nostalgic defense is this: bad digital recordings are often just that, bad. and sometimes, to me, unlistenable. bad analog recordings, or cheap or amateurish recordings, often have SOME sort of charming or idiosyncratic quality that can make them either endearing in their badness (muffed use of fx or just dementedly poor placement of microphones) or even addictively listenable from a sound collector/lover perspective (nasty guitar distortion, epic echo abuse, etc.). and when analog recordings on vinyl are great - and arguably they reached their height all the way back in the 1950's - i think they rival any art or art form that the 20th century had to offer.

blood hell.
thats a lot of words.

I'm looking forward to reading that post

Speaking Of Old Vinyl Records, Here's My Father's Day Playlist For Tomorrow

Right on, Scott. My theory about why I can't listen to the Magic Transistor site for more than an hour at a time: it's all direct from vinyl. Yes, I'm a vinyl wuss. Such rich, aromatic, twilight tides So far I'm hooked on the far left channel: early 60s-to-early 70s, European and American r&b and related (incl Northern Soul and garageness) with some rock (Love's or Arthur Lee's "Everybody's Gotta Live"["because everybody's gotta die"]). Anyway that's the orientation when I've approached. Elsewhere on there, we get Krautrock, UK L.Cohen rivals, lots more from them days.

i'm not saying you can't go too far though...

https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/942564_10151663506842165_922860171_n.jpg

i don't have a link to the article, but a friend mentioned that the queens album that hit #1 last week had something like 20% of its sales through vinyl, which seems like a large portion.

Yeah, but these days you only need to sell like 75 records to hit #1.

i was working at their label for two weeks when the queens of the stone age record shipped and can verify shipping TONS of vinyl. also note, however, that there are THREE DIFFERENT VINYL FORMATS, and many people bought at least two of them. i don't have any numbers in front of me. but if there had been only one format and no reason to buy two or three copies, i imagine the percentage would be, i dunno, more like 15%?

(ballpark estimate there.)

yeah, was gonna say, they went some lengths to make the vinyl for that desirable.

lol
Is It Ok to Buy Records at Urban Outfitters?

an Instagram contest where users submitted pictures of Sub Pop-themed temporary tattoos.

local t.v. news guy came in and said he wanted to do a story in my store about turntables and vinyl. i told him to go away.

Did you explain to him why at all?

not really. i did say that i wasn't ready. but that was just off the top of my head. but not far from the truth. i'm tired and i look like crap and my store - in my eyes anyway - looks terrible. probably looks fine to other people. he really didn't want to leave. he kept saying i'd be doing him a big favor. what i wanted to say and didn't say was that he would have done me a big favor by calling a day or two beforehand and letting me get ready and then maybe i would have. but i'm just cranky really. and i hate t.v. news.