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‘Vinyl is more alive than ever’

LP reproduction is usually inferior to that of a decent CDP. However the care taken over the mastering of the music on many LPs is vastly better to the supposedly same CD versions. It is these differences which IMO make people say vinyl is better than CD.

Nic P
 
Don't know whether Tony has any observations on this, but presumably his vinyl business isn't terribly well represented in the BPI stats either...

I'm certainly not represented in any stats, and neither is any other second hand vinyl dealer. It's a whole different thing really, and I'm not even typical of that market. I'm very much a small niche end of what is a niche market, I'm probably more akin to an antiques or art dealer than to a typical music retailer / reseller - I sell on condition and knowledge of specific pressings to an exclusively audiophiles market. I have no idea what the future will bring, but I suspect there will always be a market for exceptional copies of most titles, both on vinyl and CD (the second hand CD market is actually very interesting at present).
 
Apart from lots of people prefer how vinyl sounds.

Do you think this is due more to vinyl replay or the mastering on many LPs?

For me the clincher is that my CD recordings of LPs (via a Pioneer PD609) are indistinguishable from the LPs playing on my TT.

Nib P
 
Apart from lots of people prefer how vinyl sounds.

Yes, but there is only about a 1 in a million chance that the explanation for that is some as-yet-undiscovered-by-man factor rather one of the multitude of combined effects we have known about for decades.

IME the quality of the recording varies more than the difference between LP and CD anyway. What I listen to depends whether the bit of music I feel like listening to next is on LP or CD.
Both are plenty good enough to enjoy deeply.
 
The issue is too much music which you havent organised properly. Too much music can be a real headache.

The guy I helped, lost a great deal of his million vinyl collection to flood damage and a landlord that wanted him out. He won a court case but all that vinyl was a living nightmare to store! He's started hoarding again with around 50,000 cds :)

I couldnt find a cd for ages the other day because I havent stored all of them in a proper alphabetical system. Thats a disgrace and I must get on with it. Its almost pointless owning something if its very hard to find.

Mescalito is right that digital storage cuts out all that nonsense. It has led to me playing snippets of tracks because I have so much digitally stored. I enjoy that sometimes though.
 
When John Coltrane made "A Love Supreme" did he make a composition, a performance, a series of expressions made into sound or did he make a frozen moment in time that is repackaged and sold and resold and "owned" and stacked on thousands of shelves along with other frozen moments in time?

I see no mutual exclusivity here. To my mind he did all of these things simultaneously and I suspect he would approve of them all, even ones he never considered at the time. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven etc only live through what they wrote down - we can never hear them express anything directly in their own voice, only via the interpretations and re-imaginations of later generations, a folk-law, a re-telling. By Coltrane's time music and technology had altered / advanced to such an extent it was no longer necessary to write things down to make them immortal - his voice and intent is now captured as it appeared in Rudy Van Gelder's studio for all eternity. It is now part of human history along with the Pyramids, the speaches of Martin Luther King, the death of JFK, the moon landings etc. John Coltrane will never die. That is the driving motivation behind much art - to produce something that is so much larger than yourself that it lasts forever. Commoditisation is a always a factor too, be it a sculpture, a painting, a numbered limited print, a woodcut, a first edition hardback, first press album, a fancy limited edition reissue box set or whatever. It's all good. All a manner to capture and celebrate something that is truly exceptional, even if it is only a few moments in time.
 
The music is the art & poetry. Five ounces of plastic with a hole in the middle (thank's, Man) is a piece of petrochemistry.

Chris

^ Lols.

It is 2 ozs fyi.

Man+-+2+Ozs.+Of+Plastic+With+A+Hole+In+The+Middle+-+LP+RECORD-543890.jpg


543890b.jpg


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Ozs_of_Plastic_with_a_Hole_in_the_Middle

Great Band, check out the welsh male voice choir track on their LP, "Back into the Future."

cover_552616962010.jpg


Prog Archives Source & track listing: http://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=10907
 
No. That's like saying that the can the beer comes in IS the beer. It's not.

Chris

But the can is intrinsically associated with its contents.

Andy Warhol painted tins of Campbell's soup. Picasso and Manet painted bottles of Bass.
 
There is a clue in the first sentence.

You can never divorce the content from the packaging .

I have no problem whatsoever. It's the music I'm interested in. I have no desire to indulge in some albeit harmless, but nevertheless fetishistic ritual of "playing the record" before I listen to the music. I prefer to just tap a screen & voila!..the music starts.

Chris
 
Right. ok.

Beatles-music-finally-goes-digital.jpg

That's clever. :)

The problem for me with digital streaming/downloading and all that stuff - this is personal and probably an age thing - is the tyranny of choice .

The more choice and ease of access I have the less advantage I take of it. I have three computers, three TVs (one of which thinks it's a computer) plus assorted clever 'phones which give me access to over 150 TV channels plus I don't know how many on-line 'Tubes' etc. The end result? I now watch almost nothing. It would be the same with music if I let it go that way, I just know it. I want tangible artefacts, sleeve notes and all the rest, otherwise it's no different to listening to random stuff on the wireless.
 
That's pretty much how I regard streaming audio via Qubuz and Spotify: a sort of "radio 2.0" meets "going down to the library and renting a few records for a week". Which was my first experience of music, to me that *was* how one listened to music. I keep an eye on what people here are listening to and play it (Gil Evans right now), on the basis there is way too much good music out there to deliberately hem yourself in by the limitations of a collection, or allegiance to a medium or style, or even a knowledge of a genre so I dive in... Swim about a bit, it's all generally worth listening to, it all has something going for it.

I think that mindset takes adjustment and maybe many people of our generation will never adjust but its clear that to a future generation, only a tiny tiny proportion will feel comfy with a fragile medium prone to wear and setup issues and storage space and the era of connected media and playlists will influence our listening habits in ways not possible with a personally curated collection. That side of it will happen when music files and NASes and other storage eventually disappears completely and our collections follow us around, if not by online services then via our own cloud services we build ourselves.

For music not in the cloud I currently use Volumio, a UI that does not show sleeve art or attempt to simulate the LP or cd sleeve experience either and it's actually fantastic because of it. its chunky, simple and minimal. I thought I would need a complete simulation of the CD at the very least but I got on well with it because attempting to recreate the artefact was the wrong UI metaphor for that particular carrier format.

I love the tactility of the record as an artefact but it's not the music, so I can peel away the two: record collecting is an experience in and of itself that sits aside from listening to the music, it never worked for me with CDs because clever as the technology was, the user-interface was a necessary but poorly implemented simulacrum of the vinyl record. The sleeve is too small, the booklet is not a good size to hold and get out and interact with, the disk is poorly stored with no modularity, the cases were fragile; worst of all it had a "stacked shelf" mentality like books and Lps. Frankly, as a music listener I am glad its over, it's freed me to just listen, but as a record collector and enthusiast I am still devastated.
 


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