The very real possibility that vinyl will outlive CD - T or F?

^donut so very very otm on that last point (and the first one too!)

My friend Rick in Pennsyltucky e-mails me weekly about the new old 8-tracks he's found. He's a scrounger of southeast Pennsy's antique-and-scrap marts were they must still be plentiful. He even knows which color casings are the best between the gray and the red. One series was fabricated with superior glue and is therefore now less likely to split when put into a player after decades of sitting in a box in the garage somewhere.

Now there's an eccentric article waiting to be written.

Actually...

http://www.amazon.com/Wrong-Theyre-Right-Russ-Forster/dp/B0009ZE95I

(Though that movie doesn't deal with lots of the details George's friend Rick knows about, obviously.)

Mackro how are you selling your stuff? Let ILM know if it's on Amazon/eBay.

It won't be on Amazon nor eBay. Rev called for first crack at it.. after that, whatever Jive Time Records wants from it.

Oh man...vinyl v CDs...it's about as exciting as arguing about operating systems. I can only have this discussion with so many people in life before I'm like, 'Yeah, yeah, opinions 4 me, I get it..."

And, really, nothing will really outlive anything.

At least until you get a format that is able to give you the sound quality of a wav-file, in no more bytes than an mp3-file, then the CD is needed. Because of sound quality.

a format that is able to give you the sound quality of a wav-file, in no more bytes than an mp3-file

that is mathematically impossible. but storage and bandwidth are always getting larger/faster/cheaper.

that is mathematically impossible.

they said that about hotel rooms in a taco, but by golly they made them!

in my imagination at least

<3

Young vinyl collectors said digital technology had made it easy for anyone — even parents — to acquire vast, esoteric music collections.

You'd be forgiven for thinking so (OK?).. However..

d/l sites live on the "If you like Kaiser Chiefs, we recommend" or "based on your last 10 d/l tracks/albums, how about..." which negates the esoteric.

As opposed to flicking through a bunch of old LPs and risking £2 or less on something that looks strange/different.

Geir, you're overestimating the importance of sound quality to the majority of the music buying public. People who are in high school and middle school now have grown up with mp3s, and the lower sound quality they provide. For most of them 128 kbps probably sounds about right, which is more than a little bit scary. A ringtone is an acceptable way of listening to music. In the larger scheme of things here, sound quality means less and less. This whole vinyl resurgence is getting blown a little out of proportion, if you ask me.

The Box Set (CDs) is the Archival format

The LP is the Hardback bound format

Deluxe CD is the hardback 'special' format

Normal CD is the 'paperback' format.

Downloading is the

sorry, got bored.

xpost

Re the 8-track movie. I had never even heard of it and it's never been shown on cable in the last few years, far as I can tell. 8-track was definitely inferior in sound to vinyl. And it was very susceptible to stretching which introduced a lot of wow and flutter.

I had an eight track in the car and my brother had a DELUXE console in his room. The idea with deluxe was to buy 8-track blanks and record to them. We tried this was a live broadcast of Robin Trower on FM radio around '73-'74. Believe it or not, the console came with two microphones and you were supposed to line them up with your broadcast source. If it was from the radio, your two stereo speakers.

The idea was good but the results weren't. The fidelity was poor and if anyone talked in the room during the broadcast, the compression built into the circuit made for an interesting interjection of voice over. It might have been better for live recording but we never tried it.

I'm sure 8-track sound is/was superior to MP3. The tapes, when they worked right consistantly, were very enjoyable.

One of the problems associated with its age, and Rick relates this all the time, is the sudden snapping of it in the car deck. No the problem is opposite, there elasticity is all gone. His solution is to keep scrounging for replacements. Apparently there's a bottomless pit of them left over if you know where to look.

It's definitely never going to rise beyond this level. The format's age-related problems make it way too brittle.

Downloading is the... E-book format!

Whatever, dudes. Everything dies in the end. Time destroys everything, maaaaan.

I'm sure 8-track sound is/was superior to MP3.

Really? I find that hard to believe (as someone who was first introduced to Rumours on 8-track).

My friend swears by it. I'm not at all fond of Mp3-encoded music, though. Most of the stuff I downloaded and burned to disc -- and it was a lot at one point, I never play anymore. Actually, it's just waiting to be thrown out.

But -- really -- taste and my experience also figure into it. It was simply a pain-in-the-ass to make old DD&THK recordings Internet ready. And at one point I just said, the hell with it. MP3 just messed up so many things in the stereo image and high and low ends, making things harsh where it wasn't supposed to be...

In any case, there's an 8-track site which explains everything you'd ever want to know about the format, called 8 Track Heaven, which suffered from problems associated with tech decisions made or not made during development and continued support. But 8-track simply WAS THE WAY to listen to recorded pop music in the car in the Seventies. At that point, cassettes just weren't up to snuff.

One thing you don't have with MP3 which everyone had with 8-track was crosstalk. No matter your diligence, your player would eventually succumb to misalignment and you'd either live with it or have to take it in for realignment, a hassle.

There’s more to be said for the poor distribution and un-ease of access to records/cd's back in the day than anything regarding the vinyl format in & of itself making it more “meaningful”. My music budget at that age was allowances, cruddy jobs, and x-mas/b-day money. Hopefully I’d find an occasional bootleg at a record fair a couple times a year & be ecstatic about that. National Record Mart (R.I.H.) was the only place you could buy new music growing up and they were clueless about anything outside the top 20. So whatever you DID manage to get your hands on, you had to play more by default.

Now, all you need is access to the net and now you can download overnight what it would take me 10 years to get without leaving your jammies and wake up to them the next day! I honestly don’t know if I would love music as much if I grew up now as opposed to then. Maybe the waiting is the best part?!?

the thing that people (like me!) should do well to remember is that there's research suggesting that no matter what your listening habits are when you're young, the stuff you listen to in your youth is always gonna be the stuff that hits you hardest - for neurological/brain chemistry reasons, not nature-of-the-market-during-that-time reasons

all that said, I still do think that it's hardly reactionary to say "the journey itself is as important as the destination," and to note that the age of instant-gratification shortens all journeys & strongly privileges the destination

i don't think easier access to music has made me love it any less

No,i don't think i love it any less, more like Eddie Murphy in Raw being offered a cracker in the after starving for weeks.. "MMMMM is that a Ritz, that's not regular cracker, oh yes thats a Ritz, good good good..." When there's less of it around, you tend to replay what little you have more is all.

i meant-cracker after starving, i need to proofread more damnit!

"The Box Set (CDs) is the Archival format

The LP is the Hardback bound format

Deluxe CD is the hardback 'special' format

Normal CD is the 'paperback' format.

Downloading is the" free newspaper?

right now in l.a. there must be dungeons full of acoustic mathmaticians and industrial scientest types chained to their desks being whipped raw by frenzied record execs screaming "twice as expensive and 100 times better sounding than cds, and totally unclonable! hurrry up goddamnit!!!!" while foaming at the mouth

there's research suggesting that no matter what your listening habits are when you're young, the stuff you listen to in your youth is always gonna be the stuff that hits you hardest

I'd like to see this research. Cuz Ghislain Poirier is hitting me pretty damn hard right now and I haven't been "youth" for quite some time now.

And while JD's "Value in hard work, builds character, etc." probably has some sort of truth to it, I'm not 100% certain of the character that may have been built up in me from years of paging through dusty vinyl and dealing with record store swellheads and going to record conventions and trying not to look excited by that rare ass Little Nell single and having some jerk say "you can be my fingers" and then look at every record I was looking at over my shoulder ("yeah, yeah, that's the band Rick James was in...keep going") instead of waiting for me to get done with that row of records* just like I did VERY patiently when I saw a dude skip slooooooowly past a copy of Godz 2 (which sucked anyway, Lester Bangs!) and reminding the "music sucks today" hippie for literally years to bring Hoboken Saturday Night to his store so I could fuckin buy it (even though I'm sure it would've been as hideously water-damaged as the West End 12"s he was selling for $5 a pop**), etc.

If blogspot could do away with that noise, then I'll forgo hard work (besides there is SOME work involved in finding music on the internet).

* So hell yeah, I went waaay slower forcing dude to flee.

** Never got it from him either, the fucker.

I've still never heard The Disposals (assuming there's something to hear) and Disturbed Furniture.

"yes I am an asshole and yes it sucks that any douchebag can hear Great White Wonder without having to do any groundwork"

GWW is the example here, is it not? A lot of think pieces on Napster mentioned either that or "I'm Not There" to demonstrate how P2Ps democratized record searching. And I bet if we could access search data from Napster's early days, we'd find that "I'm Not There" was indeed one of the first things people searched for (and thus it's no surprise we now have Todd Haynes' film/sdtk).

But GWW speaks to a social history of access and distribution and buzz behind vinyl vs. CD vs. mp3, e.g. who heard "I'm Not There" before Napster and how?

Geir, you're overestimating the importance of sound quality to the majority of the music buying public. People who are in high school and middle school now have grown up with mp3s, and the lower sound quality they provide. For most of them 128 kbps probably sounds about right, which is more than a little bit scary. A ringtone is an acceptable way of listening to music. In the larger scheme of things here, sound quality means less and less. This whole vinyl resurgence is getting blown a little out of proportion, if you ask me.

To be a bit Hegelian: An action will always cause a reaction, and the other way round. Things aren't going to stay like that. Mobile phone sound quality will get better, and the kids will be more interested in sound quality. Surely, we were when growing up in the 80s, why should today's kids be unable when we weren't?

Regarding people caring about sound quality: look at how many people are using apple ear buds or something similar, and then listening to them in loud subways (or another big elephant in the room that annoys me: while people are essentially driving steamrollers over piles of final scratch in the street, I've gone to clubs where half the detail of the music is lost to people talking. Sure if it's Mp3's it's unacceptable, but when you have to put your head up to the speaker, at already tinnitus inducing levels (thank God for earplugs)not to mention bass cranked to the point where you can't even hear kickdrums, just abstract blurs of low-frequency gargle. ugh!). People don't really care, not to mention that on cheap headphones/speakers, there honestly isn't much difference between 192kbs and wav, and certainly not on the subway.

*Sure if it's Mp3's it's unacceptable, but when you have to put your head up to the speaker, at already tinnitus inducing levels (thank God for earplugs, and don't get me started on bass cranked to the point where you can't even hear kickdrums, just abstract blurs of low-frequency gargle. ugh!) it's alright). People don't really care, not to mention that on cheap headphones/speakers, there honestly isn't much difference between 192kbs and wav, and certainly not on the subway.

P.S. I buy and am a fan of vinyl.

I just wish i would see someone write a piece praising the cd like they do vinyl. I came in on the cusp of the mass market push to CD, so, that's where i'm comfortably familiar. Hard to beat a properly sourced and mastered cd imho. Long live tha' silver!!!

There's probably a better thread than this to post this link on, but anyway:
http://www.thevinylfactory.com/vinyl-factory-news/catalogue-album-sales-overtake-new-releases-2015/

Back catalogue sales in US eclipsed new release sales last year. Presumably attributable, at least in part, to the vinyl revival.

Didn't back-cat CDs manage this feat also?

Maybe its just the legacy of THE format of 20C music up till the last decade, followed by a bad taste in the mouth when CDs were massively overpriced. And yes, the bass always sounds better on vinyl.