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Can anyone explain the vinyl renaissance?

fpitas

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yarly.jpg
 

Peterinvan

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One plus for young vinyl buyers... they may discover the pleasure of sitting down and listening to side one, turn over, and listen to the other side.

40 plus minutes of dedicated listening is better than 40 hours of multitasking listening.
 

fpitas

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One plus for young vinyl buyers... they may discover the pleasure of sitting down and listening to side one, turn over, and listen to the other side.

40 plus minutes of dedicated listening is better than 40 hours of multitasking listening.
Oh yeah, we were talking about vinyl. This appears to have turned into a meme and cartoon thread :D
 

levimax

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The switch from LP to CD had a lot of consequeces for popular music.... not all of them good. Two 18 minute sides of a 36 minute album some how suited popular music in many cases. When CD's first came out they were expensive, $50 each in todays dollars, and people got mad if they were only "half full" so artists started trying to "fill up" the 70 min CD's with what inevitably was "filler" material. So rather than 2 - 18 minute sides of mostly good songs with a little filler you ended up with 50+ min of mostly filler material with a few good songs. Then later the loudness wars hit CDs.

While none of this makes LP's "better" technically it is part of the reason for their charm which keeps them alive long after many would have expected.
 

Robin L

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One plus for young vinyl buyers... they may discover the pleasure of sitting down and listening to side one, turn over, and listen to the other side.

40 plus minutes of dedicated listening is better than 40 hours of multitasking listening.
I was playing LPs while reading back in the seventies, this is a bogus argument.
 

Robin L

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The switch from LP to CD had a lot of consequeces for popular music.... not all of them good. Two 18 minute sides of a 36 minute album some how suited popular music in many cases. When CD's first came out they were expensive, $50 each in todays dollars, and people got mad if they were only "half full" so artists started trying to "fill up" the 70 min CD's with what inevitably was "filler" material. So rather than 2 - 18 minute sides of mostly good songs with a little filler you ended up with 50+ min of mostly filler material with a few good songs. Then later the loudness wars hit CDs.

While none of this makes LP's "better" technically it is part of the reason for their charm which keeps them alive long after many would have expected.
Another bogus argument, as bloat began in the LP era with releases like the Clash's "Sandinista" and numerous "Live" sets. Bloat is at a maximum now, what with vintage acts (like the Beatles) milking the vaults for all they're worth.
 

levimax

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Another bogus argument, as bloat began in the LP era with releases like the Clash's "Sandinista" and numerous "Live" sets. Bloat is at a maximum now, what with vintage acts (like the Beatles) milking the vaults for all they're worth.
I don't think it is a bogus argument... Live albums have always been long and about selling units without any new material and "Sandinista" was an exception driven by the artist. I'm talking about consumer dissatisfaction with "half full" CD's which no doubt caused the length of the average popular studio release to increase in the 80's and 90's. Even today if you search the thrifts for old CD's many (most maybe) are "best of" compilations because it was hard to sell a 36 minute CD even of a "famous" old album.
 

MattHooper

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Vinyl's continual rise, and a common skeptical reaction:

2007 - "It's just a passing fad..."
2008 - "It's just a passing fad..."
2009 - "It's just a passing fad..."
2010 - "It's just a passing fad..."
2011 - "It's just a passing fad..."
2012 -"It's just a passing fad..."
2013 - "It's just a passing fad..."
2014 - "It's just a passing fad..."
2015 - "It's just a passing fad..."
2016 - "It's just a passing fad..."
2017 - "It's just a passing fad..."
2018 - "It's just a passing fad..."
2019 - "It's just a passing fad..."
2020 - "It's just a passing fad..."
2021 - "It's just a passing fad..."
2022 - "It's just a passing fad..."

16 years later...

"fad"...you keep using that word...

:)
 

atmasphere

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10dB difference between the DAC noise floor, or 10dB difference between a non-perfect preamp? Because the noise floor of digital should be at least 50dB below even an ideal LP. Ambient noise of the room is a fair point, though - right now I live by a busy road and even with the window closed I'd have to absolutely *crank* my stereo to start noticing LP surface noise above the background street noise. Put on headphones, though, and it's immediately obvious.
The noise floor of the 'ideal LP' is about -80-85 db, within spitting range of Redbook. Quieter than the electronics to amplify it. The only pressing plant capable of this noise floor seems to be QRP in Salinas, KS.
You are confusing test pressing with mass production.
No- I'm confusing a run of LPs we did for a project, which was mass production, with, well, mass production. Since I mastered the LP I was able to compare the LPs against direct lathe cuts. FWIW I've seen tests that were mass produced- 100 copies. I'm not saying the LP is superior. I'm just saying that there's a lot of misinformation about how bad it is, because people confuse their personal experience as being the same as the media itself.
 

Frgirard

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Propaganda .
If you were knowledgeable you would know that summing stereo to mono results in an electronic comb filtering.
 

atmasphere

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If you were knowledgeable you would know that summing stereo to mono results in an electronic comb filtering.
:facepalm: Bass summing is something that only happens for a few milliseconds if its used at all... We never used it in our mastering operation, even when we encountered out of phase bass. By your reckoning, people with a single sub have the same problem, right? Of course, in any normal size room the bass is entirely reverberant before you can even tell what it is.
 

SuicideSquid

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The noise floor of the 'ideal LP' is about -80-85 db, within spitting range of Redbook. Quieter than the electronics to amplify it. The only pressing plant capable of this noise floor seems to be QRP in Salinas, KS.

Can you provide a citation for this?

I've never seen a noise floor for vinyl quoted below the mid -30s, which stands to reason given that you're physically dragging a needle across a surface.
 

Robin L

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Can you provide a citation for this?

I've never seen a noise floor for vinyl quoted below the mid -30s, which stands to reason given that you're physically dragging a needle across a surface.
More like dragging a rock through an ever-shrinking groove.
 

danadam

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The noise floor of the 'ideal LP' is about -80-85 db, within spitting range of Redbook.
Can you provide a citation for this?

I've never seen a noise floor for vinyl quoted below the mid -30s, which stands to reason given that you're physically dragging a needle across a surface.
-30s what? He was talking dBFS equivalent, I presume? If you also meant dBFS, then I'd say "come on, let's not exaggerate in the other direction.".

Or did you mean +30s dBSPL? But then how do you even compare the two?
 

fpitas

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I'm still of the opinion that groove noise is one of the attractions of vinyl. It covers up small sonic imperfections in the recording and playback chain (IMD, crossover distortion etc) and makes the musical background less "dark".
 

kapelli

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For me I think people just want to be trendy and have a point to discuss with others. Purely from audio perspective it's lot more costly with much worse sound quality, which may be however attractive to the ears. And it's doing good for audiophile community, gaining new customers, shops can live, audio journalists have topic to write on and so on...
 

Sal1950

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Purely from audio perspective it's lot more costly with much worse sound quality,
That is the bottom line.
I'll never understand throwing $.02 at it, until I at least already owned the very best speakers made.
 
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