Can anyone explain the vinyl renaissance?

[Count Dacula]

Subwoofers were barely even available in the home audio consumer market in the 1970s. And most consumers had no exposure to deep and loud bass until they saw a movie like Earthquake (1974) or went to discos a few years later.

How old are you, anyway?

I'm on the knife's edge of GenX, making that experience even more acute, with most family members starting upwards of a year earlier. They like their guitar & Safety Rock and think Boomer stuff like Acapella, Be-Bop, hamburger stands, neon champagne glasses and a limo ride to Atlantic City are cool. The Late Boomers are in an aesthetic black hole where they don't have what it takes to break away from old styles, but they do not fully participate in them either. Disco was the beginning of the end of that. We had MTV but most 1980's artists are Boomers themselves, adding a layer of weird.

I hope Confusion didn't scare everyone off. I'm pretty sure I can win some people over to this side.
So, what am I missing without vinyl...? Are we comfortable with a little bass...?

 

[Count Dacula]

I'm still not sure if we're reaching....

Best selling 12 inch single of all time, New Order. Factory Records lost money on every copy due to the deluxe sleeve, etc. See 24HRPP movie. This is exactly why it all should be mentioned here. Like I said, club DJs saved vinyl.

An indie label releases Blue Monday, the biggest selling 12-inch single ever

March 1983: Number 27 in our series of the 50 key events in the history of indie music

www.theguardian.com

 

[Sal1950]

Enjoy your Stantons if you still have them

Nope, nothing left. I sold it all off with the TT and everything vinyl related a couple decades back. I should have held on a bit longer, that stuffs all going for double what I got for it then. Folks are paying a crapload of money for 20-30 yo needles with dried up suspensions and all the rest. The foolishness that goes on in vinyland is beyond belief. ROTFLMAO
Taking off the dust brushes was always the first thing I did, despite their (and Shure's) claims to the contrary. I also found the TOTL Stantons and Shures tracked best right at 1.25g. I'm still a bit surprised neither company has jumped on the vinyl fad and re-manufactured some of their best stuff. I'm guessing the audiophool mediums total love for MC's keeps them scared off ???

 

[krabapple]

Maybe this is semantics. But "guessing" to me, implies "guessing what was there in the first place' The exciter is doing nothing of the sort. It is simply adding/changing stuff. Basically an effects box. Perhaps very clever in terms of the effect it creates. But still totally unrelated to the information that has been discarded.

But not totally unrelated to the information that's still there. They are harmonics synthesized from the remaining lower frequency content. Which is the sole link between a harmonics-based 'exciter' output to the discarded content. Upper harmonics of the content surely were a component of the discarded content. To that extent , upper harmonics added by the exciter are a guess at the harmonic content of the discarded audio. But a harmonic synthesizer can't know the true profile of that original upper harmonic content, nor has it any basis to 'guess' at any nonharmonic content that was there too. Hence the impossibility of accurate re-creation.

As for AI part isolation and remixing, crude versions are already available to the public, including websites one can upload a track to for such processing, though Peter Jackson;s purpose built software for the Beatles project is leagues beyond that

 

[Galliardist]

I'm on the knife's edge of GenX, making that experience even more acute, with most family members starting upwards of a year earlier. They like their guitar & Safety Rock and think Boomer stuff like Acapella, Be-Bop, hamburger stands, neon champagne glasses and a limo ride to Atlantic City are cool. The Late Boomers are in an aesthetic black hole where they don't have what it takes to break away from old styles, but they do not fully participate in them either. Disco was the beginning of the end of that. We had MTV but most 1980's artists are Boomers themselves, adding a layer of weird.

I hope Confusion didn't scare everyone off. I'm pretty sure I can win some people over to this side.
So, what am I missing without vinyl...? Are we comfortable with a little bass...?

Sorry, are you arguing that 12" vinyl has "better bass" than digital? And you're arguing that with New Order tracks? Sure, there's quantity there, but the lowest bass sounds on DSOTM are lower than those on these 12" singles. (There's a reason for that. On the dance floor if you want people to feel the music, you need that power in the 75-100Hz range. Very low bass can still be effective, bass drops stand out these days, but the real action is so often that little bit higher up.)

What's more, I'd argue that a lot of the best music of the early 1980s is driven by bass playing clean and fast, and with very few and sometimes no low bass notes, and playing in the upper registers of the instrument - whether jazz funk, or bands like Simple Minds and Level 42. True deep bass is rare.

More true deep bass in Prog, more true bass in 1970s electronica and the early years of disco, even. Even in those forms, it's pretty rare. But there's no need to preach to Boomers about bass, and no new special argument for 12" vinyl these days, seriously. "Proper bass" as we know it today in the home, became workable for most only in the digital era.

As for being stuck in old styles, maybe: I sort of recognise myself there, though I listen to new artists that build on those old styles in different ways happily. There's less harm in listening to old styles than old technology - and I really mean at the speaker end more than vinyl with that comment before you hammer me for saying that

 

[Galliardist]

Mostly they seem to be talking about saturation - adding harmonic distortion. Can alter the sound but obviously have nothing to do with the actual information that has been already discarded..

You might want to consider AAC with spectral replication here (also referred to as spectral band replication). The basis for this as I remember it - been a couple of years - is that the harmonic structure of different types of music is similar across a musical form , so you can enhance limited bandwidth by adding back a pattern based on the musical content and form.

Hello, DAB+ in Sydney. Stations use just this form of compression, including ABC Classic FM. My first night with a DAB+ radio, I listened to a few minutes of a concert broadcast by a classical guitarist whose sound I happen to know well. The sound was the worst mangling I've ever come across. The sound was nothing like his playing. Not much like any classical guitar, in fact. A quick switch to FM restored a somewhat noisy but very recognisable sound. I investigated to find out what was going on, and found about this compression method - and it goes really bad if you use the wrong replication type for the music. Still, DAB+ went by the board when it seems that 128k MP3 is a more reliable bet!

It takes a LOT to make a sound completely unrecognisable. Vinyl doesn't come close.

 

[deweydm]

Correct, I'm interested in playing back the highest quality music source available.
I lost all interest TT's after owning my first CD,

Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms 1985 Warner
My God, what a revelation that first playing was.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Analyzed: Brothers In Arms / Artist: Dire Straits
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DR Peak RMS Duration Title [codec]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DR20 -0.00 dB -22.32 dB 5:12 01 - So Far Away [flac]
DR19 -0.00 dB -22.10 dB 8:25 02 - Money For Nothing [flac]
DR13 -5.95 dB -22.26 dB 4:12 03 - Walk Of Life [flac]
DR14 -7.78 dB -25.43 dB 6:33 04 - Your Latest Trick [flac]
DR13 -12.70 dB -29.28 dB 8:31 05 - Why Worry [flac]
DR17 -2.43 dB -24.16 dB 6:58 06 - Ride Across The River [flac]
DR14 -2.18 dB -22.97 dB 4:40 07 - The Man's Too Strong [flac]
DR18 -0.00 dB -20.96 dB 3:39 08 - One World [flac]
DR15 -4.00 dB -24.67 dB 6:54 09 - Brothers In Arms [flac]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Number of files: 9
Official DR value: DR16

Sampling rate: 44100 Hz
Average bitrate: 691kbs
Bits per sample: 16 bit

Dr14 T.meter 1.0.16


I've been doing things like that since the 1970s and have a vague idea on proper loading.


Now that's a fact !!! LOL

It drives me crazy that newer rock and roll records are rarely mastered nearly as well on CD. Spoon’s Lucifer On The Sofa, for example. Only digital playback of that available that isn’t mastered for listening in the car appears to be the spatial audio version. I’d collect more new CD’s if they weren’t so often overly compressed garbage. (Always on the lookout for rock and roll on used CDs from the eighties and early nineties.)

 

[Multicore]

It drives me crazy that newer rock and roll records are rarely mastered nearly as well on CD.

Yeah. When people buy the LP in order to get better dynamic range than the digital, as some do for valid, measurable technical reasons, you know we're in a strange inversion.

 

[deweydm]

Yeah. When people buy the LP in order to get better dynamic range than the digital, as some do for valid, measurable technical reasons, you know we're in a strange inversion.

Subjectively, the Spoon - Lucifer On The Sofa LP and the Atmos version on Apple Music (using an ATV4K and 5.1.2 surround set up to playback the latter) both sound fantastic compared to the brick walled stereo stream.

 

[Sal1950]

It drives me crazy that newer rock and roll records are rarely mastered nearly as well on CD. Spoon’s Lucifer On The Sofa, for example. Only digital playback of that available that isn’t mastered for listening in the car appears to be the spatial audio version. I’d collect more new CD’s if they weren’t so often overly compressed garbage. (Always on the lookout for rock and roll on used CDs from the eighties and early nineties.)

There's much truth to what you say.
The engineers committed to spatial (Atmos) like Steven Wilson and Alan Parsons are all outspoken
opponents of heavy compression and will have nothing to do with it.

 

[egellings]

These folks been hitting the opiate pipe too much. LOL
My keyboard has 88 keys ???

How many keys does a grand piano have? I've never been around one to count 'em.

 

[Sal1950]

How many keys does a grand piano have? I've never been around one to count 'em.

?? In the US or UK ?

 

[egellings]

Naw, I was just curious and suprised as to why you were finding them "too dull/laid back to me now".
I've been out of the market for so long but back in the day I found expensive MC's like my Dynavetor Rudy and Supex 900 Super to be a bit too bright and edgy though capable of exposing excellent inner detail. In the end I always found myself gravitating back to TOTL Stanton's like my 881S and 681EEE and their ability to track at low pressures, etc.
In the end that's a big part of what I hate about vinyl, everything does sound different. The needles and their loading, the preamps-prepreamps and settings for MM or MC, everything is all over the place with no standard to even know what's coming out of the grooves is even flat to the master tape.
At least the Stantons came in a sexy walnut box with a individual test calibration file.

The boxes make nice little stashes.

 

[Sal1950]

The boxes make nice little stashes.

Hush, don't tell em where to look!

 

[Robin L]

How many keys does a grand piano have? I've never been around one to count 'em.

88 is standard. There are some pianos with addition bass keys, as I recall. Bosendorfer is the best-known company to offer pianos with additional keys.

 

[egellings]

What type of needles were/are you fav poison, MM, MC ?


So much music, so little time.
With vinyl the "fiddling" is constant and never ends.
Just to play a "record" requires like 5 minutes of fiddling having to get the record on the table, clean it. clean the needle. set the tonearm in position and lower it. Then jump up to raise the arm, flip to the other side and go thru the whole ritual all over again. I'm getting tired just thinking about it. LOL

Cactus needles for me

It’s coming. The AI servers will fry the planet, but we’ll have perfect music. With occasional hallucinations.

What will hallucinate-us or the equipment or all of the above?

 

[egellings]

Hush, don't tell em where to look!

Oops! Sorry. My thoopid.

 

[egellings]

Sorry, are you arguing that 12" vinyl has "better bass" than digital? And you're arguing that with New Order tracks? Sure, there's quantity there, but the lowest bass sounds on DSOTM are lower than those on these 12" singles. (There's a reason for that. On the dance floor if you want people to feel the music, you need that power in the 75-100Hz range. Very low bass can still be effective, bass drops stand out these days, but the real action is so often that little bit higher up.)

What's more, I'd argue that a lot of the best music of the early 1980s is driven by bass playing clean and fast, and with very few and sometimes no low bass notes, and playing in the upper registers of the instrument - whether jazz funk, or bands like Simple Minds and Level 42. True deep bass is rare.

More true deep bass in Prog, more true bass in 1970s electronica and the early years of disco, even. Even in those forms, it's pretty rare. But there's no need to preach to Boomers about bass, and no new special argument for 12" vinyl these days, seriously. "Proper bass" as we know it today in the home, became workable for most only in the digital era.

As for being stuck in old styles, maybe: I sort of recognise myself there, though I listen to new artists that build on those old styles in different ways happily. There's less harm in listening to old styles than old technology - and I really mean at the speaker end more than vinyl with that comment before you hammer me for saying that

My favorite deep bass demo is the dreaded Telarc bass drum.

 

[egellings]

?? In the US or UK ?

US for me. How many do U.K. ones have, too? I was unaware of a difference.

 

[Sal1950]

US for me. How many do U.K. ones have, too? I was unaware of a difference.

I'm not sure, I heard something about the EU union charging taxes on a per-key basis.