Can anyone explain the vinyl renaissance?

[board]

To me "sum to mono" for lower bass is not a big deal as a lot of people do that with a sub anyway. Some roll off of highs and lows are also not a big deal for most pop music and neither is dynamic compression.

IMO the summing of bass into mono isn't a big deal either, as most music from the 70s onwards have the bass more or less in the middle (or equally panned to both sides) anyway.
As for the roll-off, it obviously depends a lot on the content, and how much is rolled off, but I imagine that the effects are usually rather subtle, and the rolling off of low frequencies might seem to be "restored" by rumble and tonearm resonances, and most music contains relatively little high frequency content in the frequency band that would be rolled off anyway.

 

[antcollinet]

That was the joy of life in the 80s and early 90s - if someone among your friends, at school, at work, in the youth club, whatever, had some music you liked, you could get the music for free - just dub it to a cassette tape.
Of course, when the mp3 craze began many years later, the same thing happened in a different way.



View attachment 383788

That is reminding me of the interminable anti piracy "ads" we were forced to sit through in the days of DVD. (An incentive to watch ripped off copies, which didn't contain them, if ever I saw one)

"...You wouldn't steal a car..."

To which my answer - invariably screamed at the TV was....

"No, of course I wouldn't! But I would 'kin download one"

 

[restorer-john]

But wasn't the source of what they were recording (in most cases) LPs?

The radio, an LP they borrowed, or an original cassette (dubbed).

Audiophiles like us were fussy, only played LPs or perfect recordings on the deck we made those recordings on, but the general public (the majority) played their cassettes on anything and everything, and didn't care.

 

[antcollinet]

The radio, an LP they borrowed, or an original cassette (dubbed).

Audiophiles like us were fussy, only played LPs or perfect recordings on the deck we made those recordings on, but the general public (the majority) played their cassettes on anything and everything, and didn't care.

True - I remember as an early teen with my little cassette recorder, hanging the microphone from the top of the TV so that it was next to the TV speaker.

Then shouting "RECORDING" as I pressed Play/Record when my fav song came on Top of the Pops. People were expected to be quiet for the duration. They never were.

Life got so much better when I got a radio/cassette recorder with no mic required

 

[Robin L]

The radio, an LP they borrowed, or an original cassette (dubbed).

Audiophiles like us were fussy, only played LPs or perfect recordings on the deck we made those recordings on, but the general public (the majority) played their cassettes on anything and everything, and didn't care.

Around 1998 a box of cassettes appeared in People's Park (Berkeley, of course) and wound up in my possession. They were all mix tapes, all carefully made on high bias tape. Lots of good music, clearly transferred from clean LPs - over electrostatic headphones one could hear very low levels of surface noise from the source discs. I don't know the intent of those who made these tapes, but it's clear they cared about the sound quality.

 

[Galliardist]

Respectfully, not a single point you make here changes the fact that preserving the original mixdown master is in every case preferable to not preserving it and instead preserving only a CD that has been made from that master.

I'm not arguing that. I'm saying that after the loss of the master tapes, if a decent copy exists, the music remains available and we can still listen to and appreciate it.

We as in the public have that CD, LP, cassette, 78 or even cylinders the day before the master tapes are lost, and we still have that the day after they are lost. In the case of analogue tape, every single one is going to deteriorate over time, and just making a new mix or master from degraded originals requires greater effort: surprisingly often, that master tape is degraded beyond use, or has to be baked to keep oxide in place for one final playback and is lost. Then, what for? How often do we get a revelatory moment from a twenty first century remaster of an album where we could hear everything of importance on that late '60s LP?

So: losing tens of thousands of tapes is still a disaster, yes. Especially where content was lost forever.
But those tapes will still be lost soon enough anyway through degradation, at least to the point where any existing digital copy is going to be better
Most of the subsequent remasterings are nowhere near as important as you might think, except commercially. In the scheme of things, will we really need the inevitable 60th anniversary copy of DSOTM, did we need the stereo versions for the 50th? How many more Beatles remixes are in any way necessary? For most of those first generation CD copies, how many were ever going to be revisited in the lifetime of the analogue tapes?

All we can ever do is acquire the best available copy of the music, in whatever format there is or we can play back: and ensure we have good playback systems (whatever that means to us) that will do a good job of playing back whatever we get.

And personally, I would rate digitising the many archives of audio and audiovisual material around the world, in whatever analogue formats, that are rotting away forever - there's a real crisis, if you want one - over making yet another set of "gotta be from the original analogue tapes" copy of some album that millions already own and listen to in a decent form and is well preserved in multiple copies and backups now.

 

[tmtomh]

I'm not arguing that. I'm saying that after the loss of the master tapes, if a decent copy exists, the music remains available and we can still listen to and appreciate it.

We as in the public have that CD, LP, cassette, 78 or even cylinders the day before the master tapes are lost, and we still have that the day after they are lost. In the case of analogue tape, every single one is going to deteriorate over time, and just making a new mix or master from degraded originals requires greater effort: surprisingly often, that master tape is degraded beyond use, or has to be baked to keep oxide in place for one final playback and is lost. Then, what for? How often do we get a revelatory moment from a twenty first century remaster of an album where we could hear everything of importance on that late '60s LP?

So: losing tens of thousands of tapes is still a disaster, yes. Especially where content was lost forever.
But those tapes will still be lost soon enough anyway through degradation, at least to the point where any existing digital copy is going to be better
Most of the subsequent remasterings are nowhere near as important as you might think, except commercially. In the scheme of things, will we really need the inevitable 60th anniversary copy of DSOTM, did we need the stereo versions for the 50th? How many more Beatles remixes are in any way necessary? For most of those first generation CD copies, how many were ever going to be revisited in the lifetime of the analogue tapes?

All we can ever do is acquire the best available copy of the music, in whatever format there is or we can play back: and ensure we have good playback systems (whatever that means to us) that will do a good job of playing back whatever we get.

And personally, I would rate digitising the many archives of audio and audiovisual material around the world, in whatever analogue formats, that are rotting away forever - there's a real crisis, if you want one - over making yet another set of "gotta be from the original analogue tapes" copy of some album that millions already own and listen to in a decent form and is well preserved in multiple copies and backups now.

Of course we can still listen and appreciate the music if only a decent copy exists - I never argued otherwise, and if you think I did, then with all due respect that's a problem with your reading skills.

And of course, yes, I am all in favor of archiving analogue master tapes to digital for preservation purposes - which is why this ridiculous exchange between us started with me writing precisely that: this nonsense began when I wrote that I hoped the "clones" Universal reports having of the masters lost in that fire are actual digitizations of those masters - actual "clones" - rather than just commercial CDs that are not actually clones of those masters. That's when YOU jumped in to ride this hobby horse of saying it doesn't really matter if the master is preserved because the master might not be great and we don't want to listen to flat transfers anyway so a CD could be fine.

We are not disagreeing here - you just don't seem to understand that. FFS.

One thing I was definitely right about in my initial comment from yesterday - I was out of my mind to even return to this interminable, surreal thread.

 

[Count Dacula]

Someone asked for guidance on a tube-boosted MC preamp. My reply was this...

Anachronism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The most common type of anachronism is an object misplaced in time, but it may be a verbal expression, a technology, a philosophical idea, a musical style, a custom, or anything else associated with a particular period that is placed outside its proper temporal domain.

I don't think he "got it"

 

[Newman]

with all respect, atmasphere's posts here are invariably anecdotal in nature. The pattern is quite clear and repeated: the posts start with a blanket factual claim, and the evidence usually turns out to be what he did or saw in this or that situation. More than once his posts have even stated explicitly that what he did was in his opinion a best practice that was not consistently followed by others in the industry.

So to my eyes, most of atmasphere's posts are evidence for what he has done, and what he thinks or wishes would be (or would have been) industry standard practice, but were not.

My overall impression is that he wants to remind us that the LP-format manufacturing system has theoretical capabilities that are not as bad as sometimes stated, when all the stars align. That is, if absolutely best practice is employed at every single step:-

1. The vinyl master tape has minimal adjustments from the studio master (rarely the case: it makes too much work for step 2), and
2. The real-time operator gain control of the cutting lathe is done by an absolute master technician, highly focused on the job of riding the fine line of minimal compression, dynamic peaks that won't overload the best carts (totally ignoring the pretty bad carts with poor tracking limits that the vast majority of non-audiophile record player buyers will own), and getting a commercially viable number of minutes of music on a side, and willing to get it wrong and have to start over because there is no margin for error in this quest for perfection. (This would almost never happen in any commercial operation with dollars in mind), and
3. The best possible vinyl quality and record formulation (eg thickness, weight) is used, and
4. The first few vinyl samples off the press are microscopically examined and one sample chosen with the least pressing artefacts (ignoring the fact that most vinyl with be coming off a press that has has already printed thousands of records and is showing obvious wear degradation), then ...
5. Yes then, the quality that is available in those grooves themselves can measure really quite well. Atmasphere's main claims end at this (idealised) point. Of course, that (theoretical) quality will start to disappear as soon as we play it on a record player, even a good one, which will still have a non-flat frequency response, channel separation that is poor at some frequencies and modest at best, a rarely-perfectly-aligned cartridge (master technician knowledge and skills required), non-linear tonearm distortion hovering around audible levels, skating distortion that even pulls the stylus out of equilibrium position, and don't get me started on dust and static.

And yet even that is with this perfect, idealised set of grooves. The real grooves in general practice don't meet conditions 1,2,3 or 4 above, not even close.

Talking about this idealised, shall I say potential, scenario, is like singing the praises of vinyl heaven while living in the reality of vinyl hell. Doing so makes one look irrelevant.

And that's with a good record player as described in 5 above.

One horrendous thing about vinyl in practice is how far away from the idealised experience is the typical experience.

Let's consider the median person (in terms of sound quality) who listens to vinyl at home. So, 50% of people playing records globally have better sound quality than this person, and 50% have worse quality. What would the player typically be? I would suggest a $150 Crosley unit or equivalent, 5 years old, with the original cartridge that has never been adjusted, misaligned on a tonearm that has no skating adjustment, on a not-very-flat surface, with a stylus that has possibly never been cleaned and may be quite worn. And the records get an occasional wipe with a rag, if anything, and might even spend some time in the open on a nearby shelf.

The gap, between the typical record owner's experience described above, and the (pure, perfect, definitely not forever) potential of vinyl, is so horrendous that it is completely unacceptable in today's world, if overall sound quality is a priority.

Contrast that gap with the gap in sound quality experienced by the median digital music consumer, compared to what was on the master tape used for the release. In general terms, the gap is tiny, perhaps completely inaudible. Both the source material and the player are effectively audibly transparent. And the sample consistency is close to 100%. Compare that to vinyl. It's a revolution and a revelation.

The tragedy, on top of the above mentioned tragedies, is that our median record listener, described above, is being told that records deliver the best sound quality, and has no idea about any 'gap', and thinks it applies to his/her experience at home, and passes on the message.

Oh, did I mention that the median person's record catalog is half sourced from record fairs and second hand stores? Shall I describe 'the gap' between those records and the pure perfect ideal pristine format potential? It's not even a joke any more, right? And yet, our equivalent person who listens to digital, buys second hand and gets, almost every time, identical-to-ideal sound quality.

If you are "all about the music", then digital is literally the only sensible choice. To choose vinyl is to be "all about the gear". And that's fun, if all the above drama excites you, and circumventing it obsesses you. But it is what it is.

cheers

 

[Robin L]

Someone asked for guidance on a tube-boosted MC preamp. My reply was this...

Anachronism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

View attachment 383900

I don't think he "got it"

A "tube boosted MC preamp" would not be an anachronism. There were tube preamps used with moving coil cartridges as moving coil cartridges have been with us for a long time. Back when that was a thing, the MC cartridge was usually connected to a step-up transformer. Turntables with built-in phono preamps and Bluetooth? That's an anachronism. Cybernetic steampunk tech. Not to mention turntables with built-in ADCs for transcribing LPs to digital media. I thought the point was the "pure" analog sound. But of course, LPs are as much a fashion statement these days as anything else.

 

[Count Dacula]

A "tube boosted MC preamp" would not be an anachronism. There were tube preamps used with moving coil cartridges as moving coil cartridges have been with us for a long time. Back when that was a thing, the MC cartridge was usually connected to a step-up transformer. Turntables with built-in phono preamps and Bluetooth? That's an anachronism. Cybernetic steampunk tech. Not to mention turntables with built-in ADCs for transcribing LPs to digital media. I thought the point was the "pure" analog sound. But of course, LPs are as much a fashion statement these days as anything else.

"Back when that was a thing...."

 

[Robin L]

"Back when that was a thing...."

When you get right down to it, LPs and LP reproducing gear are anachronisms.

 

[deweydm]

When you get right down to it, LPs and LP reproducing gear are anachronisms.

Still curious to see if interest in, usage of LPs goes the way of player piano rolls or persists more, like radio. It’s not that notable that some people still listen to the radio, and my guess is that, eventually, it won’t be notable that a minority of people also still regularly collect and listen to LPs.

 

[Count Dacula]

Radios have a high degree of functionality, and their users are not seeking out alternatives anyway.

 

[Count Dacula]

When you get right down to it, LPs and LP reproducing gear are anachronisms.

With the exception of when a certain record or recording becomes the de facto master example. A One of One jazz record is already in it's ideal form(mat), and discussions of it's relative merits are moot. Just like any "DDD" recording from 1990 onwards. Sure you create different masters for different formats, especially preparing it for a lathe, but why would you enter an analogue domain to later reproduce something mastered in digital format to begin with?

 

[deweydm]

Radios have a high degree of functionality, and their users are not seeking out alternatives anyway.

But still, listening to the radio, seems sorta anachronistic to me. I’d ask everyone I know under thirty what their favorite radio station is, but I’d expect only blank stares.

 

[Robin L]

But still, listening to the radio, seems sorta anachronistic to me. I’d ask everyone I know under thirty what their favorite radio station is, but I’d expect only blank stares.

Just about everyone under thirty would be streaming. It's hard finding a good broadcast signal these days.

 

[Count Dacula]

As someone who studied H&SS, I always take note of the centralized nature of broadcast media. In itself the medium dictates a stratified top-down arrangement.

Totally the same when you consider recorded media in general. The re-creation of a play is a form of playback, just like reading a novel or watching a good TV show that tells you something about life. The difference being how people become "format snobs", whereas I didn't care for Dad's Broadway or stage dramas, nor the novels they were inspired by. I might not sit still for the uber-War of the Worlds radio broadcast either. No they are not a higher art form because it's a classic or whatever, it's just the media is different when I can laugh at George Costanza instead of Fiddler on the Roof.

Here, people become snobs over some nasty Hobgoblin screeching thinking it's legit cool, when I might just skip it for a nice digital version.

 

[EJ3]

Just about everyone under thirty would be streaming. It's hard finding a good broadcast signal these days.

Do you have a good antenna?

 

[Robin L]

Do you have a good antenna?

Didn't used to matter. Radio was a portable music source back in the day, just as streaming on smartphones is today. Apples to apples. Now fewer of the stations worth hearing have any kind of signal strength. I can get radio stations on my computer if I want to. But in any case, I've already moved on.