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https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/13/tech/vinyl-records-cd-sales-riaa/index.html

"Vinyl records accounted for $232.1 million of music sales in the first half of the year, compared to CDs, which brought in only $129.9 million, according to a report from the Recording Industry Association of America."

I find this incredibly interesting. I returned to Vinyl myself in December 2019 having last bought a vinyl record in 1990 and I'm addicted. Having bought over 40 albums on vinyl since then.

Anyone else returned to vinyl after a long break or stuck with it all along? 

 

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If I'm buying new, it'll be digital, whether disc or file.

But when I visit a second-hand shop, there are almost always more interesting records in the LP section than the CD racks.

All CDs get ripped immediately to the hard drive, with the physical media kept only as backup. I did a bit of a purge of my LP collection about 15 years ago, to get rid of records I didn't want, so I probably have only 1,000 left.

I have digitised my absolute favourites for instant access and searchability. The downside to that is that I upgraded parts of my turntable over the years, so when I listen to rips of the LPs I digitised first, I know I should do them again for better sound quality.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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1 hour ago, Vambo said:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/13/tech/vinyl-records-cd-sales-riaa/index.html

"Vinyl records accounted for $232.1 million of music sales in the first half of the year, compared to CDs, which brought in only $129.9 million, according to a report from the Recording Industry Association of America."

I find this incredibly interesting. I returned to Vinyl myself in December 2019 having last bought a vinyl record in 1990 and I'm addicted. Having bought over 40 albums on vinyl since then.

Anyone else returned to vinyl after a long break or stuck with it all along? 

 

Last vinyl album i bought was change II by the Alarm. I gave all my vinyl away this year. 

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At the risk of sounding very pretentious, I got into vinyl before it exploded. It was purely a coincidence but it meant that you could pick up a ton of pretty rare records for 1p + postage on ebay as people were selling their old collections all the time and they were close to worthless at the time. Managed to get some original pressings of The Wall, Dark Side Of The Moon, Led Zeppelin IV amongst others for pennies that way.

Now it's a different story; Such is the rush to get stuff out on vinyl, you find that a lot of stuff has been one of recorded, mixed or mastered on in digital, rendering the positive of analogue completely null. Why spend £30 on a record when it's CD counterpart holds exactly the same soundwave so sounds exactly the same.

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33 minutes ago, andyscoot said:

At the risk of sounding very pretentious, I got into vinyl before it exploded. It was purely a coincidence but it meant that you could pick up a ton of pretty rare records for 1p + postage on ebay as people were selling their old collections all the time and they were close to worthless at the time. Managed to get some original pressings of The Wall, Dark Side Of The Moon, Led Zeppelin IV amongst others for pennies that way.

Now it's a different story; Such is the rush to get stuff out on vinyl, you find that a lot of stuff has been one of recorded, mixed or mastered on in digital, rendering the positive of analogue completely null. Why spend £30 on a record when it's CD counterpart holds exactly the same soundwave so sounds exactly the same.

Some LPs are pressed from digital files with a higher-resolution than CD. Whether that can be discerned by the human ear, especially after being transferred to analogue and cut onto a disc is a discussion in itself. And with the prices of some new LPs these days, it is like buying exclusively imports back in the pre-CD era.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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1 hour ago, andyscoot said:

Why spend £30 on a record when it's CD counterpart holds exactly the same soundwave so sounds exactly the same.

A quedtion I fully understand. 

I personally won't pay more than 20 notes for a new vinyl. I listen to a lot of punk with a diy ethos so anywhere between £10 to £13 + p&p is usually the ballpark figure for me.

I do also listen to a fair bit of metal (thrash, doom and prog mostly) and that stuff can be quite expensive but I will buy the cd if I can't get it cheap enough.

The reason I prefer to get stuff on vinyl is twofold:

1) The act of playing a vinyl record is almost a ritual. A ritual I used to love and now love again.

2) The artwork! 

 

 

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Invested heavily in vinyl. Bought a new  Thorens TD150 in 1967 for around £21. Then much later in a Linn Akito/Golding combo. Hundreds of vinyl discs. Gimme digital any time. More flexible, portable etc etc and best by far to these 74 year old ears with their sharp hf rolloff. No clicks, no pops, no storage issues. 

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11 minutes ago, JohnM said:

Invested heavily in vinyl. Bought a new  Thorens TD150 in 1967 for around £21. Then much later in a Linn Akito/Golding combo. Hundreds of vinyl discs. Gimme digital any time. More flexible, portable etc etc and best by far to these 74 year old ears with their sharp hf rolloff. No clicks, no pops, no storage issues. 

Worth buying decent playback kit if you have an existing collection on vinyl. But digital's been the way forward ever since they got rid of the early bugs and made the prices of discs and players less blatantly opportunist.

The worst of both worlds is paying inflated reissue LP prices, buying into the Record Store Day scam, and playing your collection on a Crosley* turntable.

*caveat: some of their more recent top of the range models are designed by Pro-Ject and therefore very decent. I mean the retro-styled disc-destroyers.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Also NEVER buy early picture CD's, my uncle was production manager at Disktronics in the 80's when they were the first commercial UK  mass cd producer - he came to it from having been a printer and said from day 1 the inks they were using would degrade the plastic substrate of the cd - they did and those early picture cd's are horribly likely to be unreadable now

Old scratched vinyl doesnt sound good but you can still discerne the song - cd's are binary, they either work or they do not

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13 minutes ago, SSoutherner said:

Also NEVER buy early picture CD's, my uncle was production manager at Disktronics in the 80's when they were the first commercial UK  mass cd producer - he came to it from having been a printer and said from day 1 the inks they were using would degrade the plastic substrate of the cd - they did and those early picture cd's are horribly likely to be unreadable now

Old scratched vinyl doesnt sound good but you can still discerne the song - cd's are binary, they either work or they do not

A (thankfully) small number of my older CDs are unplayable now. First prize goes to 'Batman' by Prince, which is almost transparent. Thankfully I managed to take a verified EAC rip from it before it was too late.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Never mind vinyl, what about shellac? 🤔

I have a box of old 78rpm records that belonged to my parents.

I don't have anything to play them on, but don't want to part with them either.

I doubt any of them have any value beyond personal. There are no Elvis Presley originals in there. My mum and dad had very old fashioned tastes.

I can't decide whether to invest in a record player that will bring them back to musical life and allow me to wallow in some of the crackly sounds of my childhood, or just keep them to look at the labels occasionally?

My favourite was always Albert & The Lion / Albert Comes Back performed by Stanley Holloway.

.

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58 minutes ago, John Drake said:

Never mind vinyl, what about shellac? 🤔

I have a box of old 78rpm records that belonged to my parents.

I don't have anything to play them on, but don't want to part with them either.

I doubt any of them have any value beyond personal. There are no Elvis Presley originals in there. My mum and dad had very old fashioned tastes.

I can't decide whether to invest in a record player that will bring them back to musical life and allow me to wallow in some of the crackly sounds of my childhood, or just keep them to look at the labels occasionally?

My favourite was always Albert & The Lion / Albert Comes Back performed by Stanley Holloway.

My dad has an old gramophone, which he modified with an electric motor and a triple-size horn (the latter he made himself from chickenwire and papier mache). There was a period of several years when he couldn't use it, 'til we moved house and discovered an old bloke in the nearest village who actually still made the required wooden needles (cherrywood, apparently). It actually sounds pretty impressive.

But a modern turntable that can do 78rpm and fitted with a proper mono stylus can sound startlingly good with a clean shellac disc... at a price. Whether it is worth the investment is up to you. There'll always be some background noise, which will have been cleaned up on most digital re-issues.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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On 16/09/2020 at 13:21, Vambo said:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/13/tech/vinyl-records-cd-sales-riaa/index.html

"Vinyl records accounted for $232.1 million of music sales in the first half of the year, compared to CDs, which brought in only $129.9 million, according to a report from the Recording Industry Association of America."

I find this incredibly interesting. I returned to Vinyl myself in December 2019 having last bought a vinyl record in 1990 and I'm addicted. Having bought over 40 albums on vinyl since then.

Anyone else returned to vinyl after a long break or stuck with it all along? 

 

I'm in the stuck with it all along camp.

Also have a Spotify Premium account that I stream to my amp via Chromecast Audio.

Have a CD player that I occasionally blow the cobwebs off but it's mainly a waste of shelf space.

"I'm from a fishing family. Trawlermen are like pirates with biscuits." - Lucy Beaumont.

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The one thing about Vinyl albums which worked well was the fact that side one gave you the opportunity to put something else on as the album came to a natural end .Studies were done in the 70s where they tested peoples attention span when listening to albums and they came up with 36 minutes as the ideal length , which fitted in well with most albums of that time .Another reason why the 80s was the decade of death for music as most artists/bands didn`t throw away the tracks that weren`t up to the mark and so released everything regardless and often you ended up with albums 80 minutes long .People say just switch off or miss tracks , but back in the day artists took more care with albums , throwing out average tracks , thinking about the running order , etc. , most good albums of that time have no filler , i never skip tracks on my albums .

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37 minutes ago, ivans82 said:

The one thing about Vinyl albums which worked well was the fact that side one gave you the opportunity to put something else on as the album came to a natural end .Studies were done in the 70s where they tested peoples attention span when listening to albums and they came up with 36 minutes as the ideal length , which fitted in well with most albums of that time .Another reason why the 80s was the decade of death for music as most artists/bands didn`t throw away the tracks that weren`t up to the mark and so released everything regardless and often you ended up with albums 80 minutes long .People say just switch off or miss tracks , but back in the day artists took more care with albums , throwing out average tracks , thinking about the running order , etc. , most good albums of that time have no filler , i never skip tracks on my albums .

Not that there weren't flabby, self-indulgent albums released before the CD era, but the artist had to convince the record company to budget for an extra disc to hold it, which was a form of natural selection in the majority of cases.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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On 16/09/2020 at 23:21, SSoutherner said:

Also NEVER buy early picture CD's, my uncle was production manager at Disktronics in the 80's when they were the first commercial UK  mass cd producer - he came to it from having been a printer and said from day 1 the inks they were using would degrade the plastic substrate of the cd - they did and those early picture cd's are horribly likely to be unreadable now

Old scratched vinyl doesnt sound good but you can still discerne the song - cd's are binary, they either work or they do not

Does anybody remember flexi discs, usually given away with magazines? They were usually low profile band trying to make a name for themselves, but I remember getting a Duran Duran Flexi with Girls on Film on it, the discs didnt last long obviously.

I was also a member of something call the " Stereo Cassette Lending Library ", based in Canterbury, and for a small fee they would take your genre preference and once a month would send you up to 5 tapes. As I had a tape-to-tape recording machine, I amassed a huge collection of some famous, some unheard of, tracks.

You would then return the tapes, and get a new bunch a week later.

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22 minutes ago, Bleep1673 said:

Does anybody remember flexi discs, usually given away with magazines? They were usually low profile band trying to make a name for themselves, but I remember getting a Duran Duran Flexi with Girls on Film on it, the discs didnt last long obviously.

I was also a member of something call the " Stereo Cassette Lending Library ", based in Canterbury, and for a small fee they would take your genre preference and once a month would send you up to 5 tapes. As I had a tape-to-tape recording machine, I amassed a huge collection of some famous, some unheard of, tracks.

You would then return the tapes, and get a new bunch a week later.

I used to have quite a few flexidiscs. No idea where they are now, but there were ones from Private Eye, American guitar magazines and UK mags.

I used to tape any that I really liked, as I assumed the discs wouldn't last many plays, even if they didn't get accidentally creased.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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5 hours ago, Bleep1673 said:

Does anybody remember flexi discs, usually given away with magazines? They were usually low profile band trying to make a name for themselves, but I remember getting a Duran Duran Flexi with Girls on Film on it, the discs didnt last long obviously.

I was also a member of something call the " Stereo Cassette Lending Library ", based in Canterbury, and for a small fee they would take your genre preference and once a month would send you up to 5 tapes. As I had a tape-to-tape recording machine, I amassed a huge collection of some famous, some unheard of, tracks.

You would then return the tapes, and get a new bunch a week later.

my schoolmates  dad (who had split from his mum so lived miles away) was head librarian for Kingston libaries, not only did he get to tell his dad what casettes to get ofr the music library but also he got him to start a computer games library - our tape to tape machines were red hot (helped i worked for part of BASF and we had a staff shop you could get shopsoiled blank casettes in)

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