It never happened before. Wax cylinders never made a comeback. Neither did 78s, 8-tracks, or cassettes, or Beta or VHS. And yet today, twenty-five years after the introduction of the CD, and in the middle of a precipitous drop in CD sales, vinyl records are selling at their highest level in 12 years. In 2006 new LP sales hit their highest figure in ten years, and then nearly doubled the next year. New turntables, cartridges, and phono preamps are being introduced all the time. New turntable companies, brands, and models have emerged in the last dozen years. Some audio icons are offering turntables for the very first time: McIntosh introduced its first-ever turntable in its 60-year existence. Digital pioneer Ayre (they designed one of the very first DVD digital converters) just came out with a turntable. Either of them will set you back about $10,000. Count on another $2-5K for a cartridge and similarly priced phono stage to do either of them justice.
Are they nuts?
But wait! In the early '90s, Grado Labs, holder of around 40 patents in phono cartridge design, was down to two full time employees as demand for their traditional product dwindled to near zero. A switch in product emphasis to headphones kept them alive. Now they offer 19 cartridge models in three quality lines, Prestige, Reference, and Statement, ranging from $60 to $3000. Business is good great!
Of course, LPs will never overtake CDs or downloads, but the vinyl record business has gone mainstream again. For a long time, vinyl aficionados had to make do with used records and the few remasters offered by boutique specialty operations. Today, Sony, Universal, and EMI, which account for around 70% of the record labels out there, offer Legacy, Back in Black, and Capitol Vaults reissues of once hard to find, high quality, affordable new pressings of classics by Miles Davis, The Who, Cat Stevens, Steve Miller, Metallica, The Police, and many, many others. Many artists are releasing their new recordings on vinyl. I picked up the latest from James Taylor, Paul McCartney, Norah Jones, Buddy Guy, Diana Krall, and Charlie Haden on vinyl. I've seen new pressings by the Silversun Pickups, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Christina Aguilera, and many more, especially leading edge and emerging artists. Fred Meyer grocery/department store and electronics giant Best Buy both carry a limited selection of new vinyl.
Currently there are over 250,000 LPs for sale on eBay. High end music vendor Acoustic Sounds has made its mark by offering the most high resolution CDs, HDCDs, XRCDs, SACDs, and DVD-As anywhere. Currently they carry 2,959 SACDs sampled at 2.7 MHz (64 times the CD sampling rate) and 380 DVD-As (24-bit recordings sampled at 88.2 to 176.4 Khz). But they also offer 5,988 new LPs, plus another 4,423 NOS and 9,250 used LPs. that's a total of 19,661 LPs, nearly six times as many LPs as high res digital discs from a vendor that specializes in high quality audio media of all types. With the option of high resolution digital, audiophiles have unequivocally chosen LPs as the high resolution music medium of choice, voting with their wallets.
OK. I get it. Vinyl's back. So what?
Does this remind you of anything else? Like, oh I dunno, TUBES? By the late '70s the tube was all but dead. Solid state electronics had almost completely taken over home audio and dominated instrument amplifiers as well. American tube-makers shut down. Like record-lovers a few years ago, tube aficionados were viewed as stubborn, slightly eccentric Luddites. But companies like Mesa/Boogie stuck to their guns, er, tubes through the dark years. Soon companies built on solid state amplification (e.g., Crate, Pignose) began offering tube amps. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, tubes from Sovtek and Tesla (later JJ) became available and plentiful as well as the ones from China.
In some cases, people were drawn to tubes (or records) because they became retro-cool curiosities. But for most enthusiasts, the old technology offers something its replacement didn't, and a significant minority of customers are willing to put up with the extra expense and higher maintenance of the older technologies to get their more musically expressive, organic-feeling sound, whether it comes from glass or vinyl.
So don't be too baffled by the comeback of the LP. If you play a tube amp, on some level you already understand. Still...
Is LP playback for you?
It's definitely an individual matter.
Do You Hear What I Hear?
People hear differently and they listen differently. People get their enjoyment out of music in different ways. Some listen for the melody, perhaps for vocal phrasing. Others for the beat and slam of the rhythm that propels it. Others listen for harmonies or for the overall sense of ensemble.
Some people will immediately prefer an LP over a CD, even on a $2 garage sale turntable as I did. If you're one of those, you will only make yourself happier if you go analog. Others could hear an LP on a $2000 turntable and wonder what the big deal is. Still others will have that impression at first and then gradually notice the musical treasures offered up by a record player that you just won't get from a CD or mp3.
But one thing I remember from the old days when LPs were the music medium: records made us feel good. It didn't have to be state of the art. Every party back then had a stack of records going, and some people listened, some danced, some talked, but there was an awareness and involvement with the music. Even when it was being played on a cheap-ass record changer.
If you get more thrill out of dynamic slam to the exclusion of expressiveness and inner detail, you'll probably prefer digital. CDs are recorded with a 16-bit word length. While this enables a dynamic range of around 100 dB, the dynamic gradations in between aren't particularly subtle. 16 bits limits amplitude changes to 65,536 (64K) finite increments. By contrast LPs have dynamic shadings at the molecular level. If dynamic nuance helps you connect with the music, you'll probably like LPs. If surface noise or the occasional tick or pop drives you up a wall, stick to digital. For me, I can put up with the occasional shuffle or cough at a concert for the live experience, and I'm more than willing to listen through a little noise from time to time for the analog listening experience.
I've got a pile of old records and nothin' to play 'em on. What do I do?
That depends on what you want to do. There are a lot of ways to enjoy LPs:
You can just enjoy what you have hanging around the house, or what you can pick up at the thrift stores for fun. After all, you can get whole albums for the price of a single song download.
You can seek out special masterings and pressings that reveal recordings as you've never heard before.
You can toss those records on a garage sale turntable just to have some way to play them.
You can seek out the best turntable and cartridge you can afford and set it up meticulously to--on one hand--enjoy the relaxed, organic presentation and--on the other hand--explore the nuances and details of how the music was made.
In other words it's up to you.
For me, this second time around (I'd gone 20 years listening to digital only), I started with a $2 garage sale turntable and a few LPs I still had, and was shocked at how easily I connected to the music. Within the week I bought an $80 cartridge, and within another couple of weeks I spend $500 on a new turntable (down from $700) and $100 on another cartridge. I've since upgraded some things on the turntable and upgraded the cartridge, turntable mat, and phono stage so I have about $1K in it altogether. For me the expense has been well worth it because i get a connection to the music I hadn't felt in years. I thought I was just getting old, but it turned out that I'd grown accustomed to a level of artist-listener connection that comes easily to analog LP that my digital library and playback systems could not deliver.
Well, originally I was going to expound on what makes analog appealing to some and not to others, and perhaps give a run down of some record players at different budgets, but at this point I'd rather you ask the questions than me just guess at what you're interested in.
Question
JohnnyB
It never happened before. Wax cylinders never made a comeback. Neither did 78s, 8-tracks, or cassettes, or Beta or VHS. And yet today, twenty-five years after the introduction of the CD, and in the middle of a precipitous drop in CD sales, vinyl records are selling at their highest level in 12 years. In 2006 new LP sales hit their highest figure in ten years, and then nearly doubled the next year. New turntables, cartridges, and phono preamps are being introduced all the time. New turntable companies, brands, and models have emerged in the last dozen years. Some audio icons are offering turntables for the very first time: McIntosh introduced its first-ever turntable in its 60-year existence. Digital pioneer Ayre (they designed one of the very first DVD digital converters) just came out with a turntable. Either of them will set you back about $10,000. Count on another $2-5K for a cartridge and similarly priced phono stage to do either of them justice.
Are they nuts?
But wait! In the early '90s, Grado Labs, holder of around 40 patents in phono cartridge design, was down to two full time employees as demand for their traditional product dwindled to near zero. A switch in product emphasis to headphones kept them alive. Now they offer 19 cartridge models in three quality lines, Prestige, Reference, and Statement, ranging from $60 to $3000. Business is good great!
Of course, LPs will never overtake CDs or downloads, but the vinyl record business has gone mainstream again. For a long time, vinyl aficionados had to make do with used records and the few remasters offered by boutique specialty operations. Today, Sony, Universal, and EMI, which account for around 70% of the record labels out there, offer Legacy, Back in Black, and Capitol Vaults reissues of once hard to find, high quality, affordable new pressings of classics by Miles Davis, The Who, Cat Stevens, Steve Miller, Metallica, The Police, and many, many others. Many artists are releasing their new recordings on vinyl. I picked up the latest from James Taylor, Paul McCartney, Norah Jones, Buddy Guy, Diana Krall, and Charlie Haden on vinyl. I've seen new pressings by the Silversun Pickups, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Christina Aguilera, and many more, especially leading edge and emerging artists. Fred Meyer grocery/department store and electronics giant Best Buy both carry a limited selection of new vinyl.
Currently there are over 250,000 LPs for sale on eBay. High end music vendor Acoustic Sounds has made its mark by offering the most high resolution CDs, HDCDs, XRCDs, SACDs, and DVD-As anywhere. Currently they carry 2,959 SACDs sampled at 2.7 MHz (64 times the CD sampling rate) and 380 DVD-As (24-bit recordings sampled at 88.2 to 176.4 Khz). But they also offer 5,988 new LPs, plus another 4,423 NOS and 9,250 used LPs. that's a total of 19,661 LPs, nearly six times as many LPs as high res digital discs from a vendor that specializes in high quality audio media of all types. With the option of high resolution digital, audiophiles have unequivocally chosen LPs as the high resolution music medium of choice, voting with their wallets.
OK. I get it. Vinyl's back. So what?
Does this remind you of anything else? Like, oh I dunno, TUBES? By the late '70s the tube was all but dead. Solid state electronics had almost completely taken over home audio and dominated instrument amplifiers as well. American tube-makers shut down. Like record-lovers a few years ago, tube aficionados were viewed as stubborn, slightly eccentric Luddites. But companies like Mesa/Boogie stuck to their guns, er, tubes through the dark years. Soon companies built on solid state amplification (e.g., Crate, Pignose) began offering tube amps. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, tubes from Sovtek and Tesla (later JJ) became available and plentiful as well as the ones from China.
In some cases, people were drawn to tubes (or records) because they became retro-cool curiosities. But for most enthusiasts, the old technology offers something its replacement didn't, and a significant minority of customers are willing to put up with the extra expense and higher maintenance of the older technologies to get their more musically expressive, organic-feeling sound, whether it comes from glass or vinyl.
So don't be too baffled by the comeback of the LP. If you play a tube amp, on some level you already understand. Still...
Is LP playback for you?
It's definitely an individual matter.
Do You Hear What I Hear?
People hear differently and they listen differently. People get their enjoyment out of music in different ways. Some listen for the melody, perhaps for vocal phrasing. Others for the beat and slam of the rhythm that propels it. Others listen for harmonies or for the overall sense of ensemble.
Some people will immediately prefer an LP over a CD, even on a $2 garage sale turntable as I did. If you're one of those, you will only make yourself happier if you go analog. Others could hear an LP on a $2000 turntable and wonder what the big deal is. Still others will have that impression at first and then gradually notice the musical treasures offered up by a record player that you just won't get from a CD or mp3.
But one thing I remember from the old days when LPs were the music medium: records made us feel good. It didn't have to be state of the art. Every party back then had a stack of records going, and some people listened, some danced, some talked, but there was an awareness and involvement with the music. Even when it was being played on a cheap-ass record changer.
If you get more thrill out of dynamic slam to the exclusion of expressiveness and inner detail, you'll probably prefer digital. CDs are recorded with a 16-bit word length. While this enables a dynamic range of around 100 dB, the dynamic gradations in between aren't particularly subtle. 16 bits limits amplitude changes to 65,536 (64K) finite increments. By contrast LPs have dynamic shadings at the molecular level. If dynamic nuance helps you connect with the music, you'll probably like LPs. If surface noise or the occasional tick or pop drives you up a wall, stick to digital. For me, I can put up with the occasional shuffle or cough at a concert for the live experience, and I'm more than willing to listen through a little noise from time to time for the analog listening experience.
I've got a pile of old records and nothin' to play 'em on. What do I do?
That depends on what you want to do. There are a lot of ways to enjoy LPs:
In other words it's up to you.
For me, this second time around (I'd gone 20 years listening to digital only), I started with a $2 garage sale turntable and a few LPs I still had, and was shocked at how easily I connected to the music. Within the week I bought an $80 cartridge, and within another couple of weeks I spend $500 on a new turntable (down from $700) and $100 on another cartridge. I've since upgraded some things on the turntable and upgraded the cartridge, turntable mat, and phono stage so I have about $1K in it altogether. For me the expense has been well worth it because i get a connection to the music I hadn't felt in years. I thought I was just getting old, but it turned out that I'd grown accustomed to a level of artist-listener connection that comes easily to analog LP that my digital library and playback systems could not deliver.
Well, originally I was going to expound on what makes analog appealing to some and not to others, and perhaps give a run down of some record players at different budgets, but at this point I'd rather you ask the questions than me just guess at what you're interested in.
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