Long and interesting (to me, so dull to everyone else) article on vinyl pressing capacity over at SDE.
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Long and interesting (to me, so dull to everyone else) article on vinyl pressing capacity over at SDE.
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What’s the carbon footprint of vinyl, btw? I mean… It’s a fossil-fuel product, innit?
Greta says… Listen to the science, not Scientist.
Kids say the darnedest things!
PS. Speaking of children – having looked at the piece, it seems that coloured vinyl is at the heart of the problem. Well I never.
@Moose-the-Mooche
Given that we are living in an increasingly woke world
I suspect you may wish to change that to “vinyl of colour”
Black vinlies matter!
The dull answer to the question is “not as bad as CD, and not as bad as streaming either”. All those server farms and IT networks have to be powered.
Play a record 10 times and you will have put a big smile on Greta’s little face.
Or you could buy the digital download
But a record player runs on electrickery. Unless you have solar, Ms T still won’t be impressed.
Unless it’s Matt Bianco.
Hand crank? She’d like that.
Are ‘modern’ vinyl albums worth the bother? Serious question. I was listening to an older record the other day and it did sound terrific, but it was from around 1982 so would have been recorded to tape and somewhat engineered to sound good as a vinyl record. How do these newer releases compare? Surely you can’t get that same richness of sound by transferring a pure digital original to vinyl?
It depends, doesn’t it? Something done in Garage Band, probably not.
Something recorded and mixed in hi-res digital using Prism interfaces is as close to 2″ analogue tape (or even better).
Hi-res mastering for vinyl is very much a thing. You can do a lot more in digital (e.g. correcting clicks caused by master tape cut-and-stick edits). King of the half-speed master Miles Showell does his pre-cut mastering in 24/96 digital and they all sound great.
Where is Porky Prime Cut?
Ou est Bob Ludwig?
He’s moved to Skye. Really!
http://www.skyemastering.com/
I should have thought they are often better sounding because there’s this influential audiophile audience, for better or worse, demanding high standards, who will ruthlessly deride any failing in sound and the record company will not want to let them down. That is the USP – audiophile quality, for example, heavier vinyl than in the past. I suppose there are those who have bought cheap all-in-one turntable affairs that aren’t audiophiles, more into nostalgia or novelty maybe, but they clearly have to cater to the fussy ones as well, especially with classic, heritage acts.
Heavier vinyl is a marketing thing, doesn’t help at all with sound I believe (As long as it is good quality)
Well it does, but only a bit. As the article says, 140g is good enough.
Sub-100g, as many late-80s/early-90s were, was not good enough. Warps and wobbles ahoy! It’s almost like the record companies deliberately made shite vinyl to encourage us to buy their twice-as-expensive new format.
Yeah I meant compared to 140g
Yes I said heavier as opposed to thin and bendy as was. Helps.
I don’t get the vinyl revival at all. Or rather, I get it in relation to streaming, but not to CDs. If the advent of CDs encouraged us to repurchase our record collections initially at a massively increased cost, the vinyl revival seems to be doing it all over again, but in reverse. And it’s not like the vinyl’s a cheaper option.
I’ll stick my neck out here and say that future generations will see this as one more example of our culture eating itself, a sort of last-days-of-Ancient-Rome decadence before terminal decline and eventual extinction.
I’ve done the whole vinyl thing in the past, and I’ve no inclination to return to it, no matter how many vinyl fetishists try and tell me that it’s a “warmer” format or some such nonsense.
The actual vinyl bit is only the last step in the chain, though. I don’t stream because I like to “hold the music in my hands” (to quote SDE).
The best vinyl can sound better than CD (I have both high-end turntable and CD player), but many don’t. Many CDs sound no better than streaming. Death Magnetic, anyone?
There are a number of factors involved in good sound (recording, master tape sources, etc – mastering is the last in the long chain of potential f*ckups). These affects all playback formats. Vinyl then adds cutting and pressing to the list.
But holding a 12″ sleeve beats a 5″ CD case, which beats a stream and screen as a tactile experience.
And I like record shops (and CD shops).
Yes, I am a dinosaur.
Okay so you say that the best vinyl can sound better than CD…. which I can almost accept, but what’s your position on best vinyl vs hi resolution ?
As another engineer (admittedly not with the audio expertise you have and remembering stuff from my Electronics degree which was a long time ago…!) there are still a couple of points that I always come back to in this debate…
1) Shannon’s sampling theorem tells me that ALL of the information is there on a CD. Yes, there is some debate on aggressive / poor filtering at 44KHz, but surely high resolution takes care of that ?
2) Doesn’t vinyl have poorer frequency response as you move across the platter (hence the trend for ballads at the end of sides). I can’t remember the numbers, but I recall being surprised how poor it was. CD / Digital obviously doesn’t have this limitation.
I still think that the overriding factor in sound quality is the mastering and what you are often seeing is that it is mastered better if the target media is vinyl – none of this ‘loudness wars’ stuff.
Hi-res downloads/streaming is even more of an outlier than vinyl (or cassette!). It can sound great, it can also sound no better than CD. Again, dependent on chain & mastering. Also I don’t have anything to hold in my hand, nor a shop to hang around in on a Saturday afternoon with fellow dinosaurs.
Point 1: Shannon/Nyquist at 2xFs only applies to steady-state signals with perfect filters. Music is not steady-state and ADC/DAC filters are not perfect. A good engineering rule of thumb is sampling at 3x signal bandwidth, so for a 20kHz audio signal, 120kHz is a bare minimum. CDs are a 1983 technology, and I no longer use my ZX81.
2. Yes, also why 12″ singles sound better than LPs (all other things being equal).
Dull fact: CDs play at constant linear speed (not like vinyl’s constant rotational speed), starting from the inner edge, so actually slow down during playback (as the track circumference increases).
Isn’t the 44.1KHz sampling rate chosen to allow for non-perfect filters? (instead of 40)
A few reasons:
1. in 1981, they couldn’t do 16 bit sampling much above 48k (which is DAT sampling frequency).
2. DAT tapes didn’t exist, so they had to use Betamax tapes as masters (I’m not joking!).
3. 44.1k allowed them to get to 74 minutes on a CD.
4. 44.1k and 48k are both related to the 27MHz used in 525/625-line studio telly digital tapes.
They were well aware of how imperfect ADCs/DACs/filters were.
I’ve got a 12” single. Straight up.
Is it this one?
http://www.mybeatlescollection.co.uk/hey-jude-revolution-12-single/
Strikes me as a rather desirable item. The 45 Revolution is the loudest thing in the Beatles catalogue and a 12″ would be louderer.
No, I think you could right about the volume.
A Marc Bolan release which was the only place you could get Pewter Suitor for years.
I do both, but vinyl is much more fun to buy, feels substantial walking home with a nice record. That may be nostalgia for my teenage years.
CDs feel disposable, I can make an exact copy and then the disc is a useless piece of plastic worth almost nothing for resale (not that that is a huge factor) . Artwork unreadable (at my age) and then those horrible plastic “jewel cases”. And whether it sounds better or not (sometimes yes, sometimes no) playing vinyl is an enjoyable experience.
Fun? Fun! What do you think this is, enjoyable?
To put all this into context we shouldn’t forget that the bulk of the profit of the music business now comes from streaming and, to a far lesser extent, downloads. The majority of the artists vinyl fans appear to prefer don’t feature on any best-seller list, save for a few back catalogue usual suspects. That doesn’t negate vinyl as a medium, nor indeed the artists that do well in the niche market. But it might blunt the enthusiasm of potential investors in new large scale vinyl manufacturing facilities.
I didn’t get on the CD bus until 1997, and so I have only ever really known it as a relatively cheap option. Not just second hand either, in 1997/8 the earliest CDs I bought (the Byrds’ reissues, Them, Kinks, Monkees) retailed at about £7/£8.
Also, I like the way they look on a shelf. They look great, it’s the boxes of vinly that look untidy.
Playing a 50 track double-CD “Louisiana Rock ‘n’ Roll” (essentially 4 LPs in old money) yesterday made me think “how much would this cost on vinly?” and “how unwieldy would it be?”
I’m in the process of binning all my “jewel cases” and transferring all my CDs into paper sleeves inside custom made vinyl envelopes. Reduces the shelf space by a factor of approx. 66%. This means that CDs which took up three feet of shelf now only take up 1 foot of shelf. I may be able to get this process finished by the end of the year. Then I shall embark on alphabetising them all…….