Vinyl Lives!

I think the last time I bought a record on vinyl was about 1987.  A long time ago anyway.  You' think that CD's would have killed that format off.  And now with iPods, you'd expect they would have absolutely no chance!  Well you'd be wrong.  The market for vinyl records has actually grown and more people are starting to release their music on vinyl and CD.

So which sounds better?  Well, that's a hard one to answer.  You see they both have their good points.  Vinyl is a natural analogue medium.  The frequencies laid in to the grooves on the record are real, physical beings.  CD is a representation of that, but it is clean, oh so clean.

Check out the graph from how stuff works.  You can see that a CD see's only portions of the entire waveform.  Everything can only be a one or a zero.  It does take forty four thousand snapshots per second, but is that enough?

It can only represent that snapshot as a series of one's and zero's to a value of 16536.  So it does have some limitations.  Having said that, has anyone complained other than audiophiles??

We have recorded music in much higher sample/bit rates in our studio.  There is no question it does sound better.  At our last mastering session with mastering god Don Bartley, he even said that at last it's getting to a point where he can't pick the difference between analogue and digital recordings.  But we're talking about 24bit/96K recordings.  You won't be hearing that at home for a while (if ever).

There are some technical factors which limit vinyl.  For instance, as you get closer to the centre of the record, distortion increases.  You can't be too heavy with the bass frequencies as they take much more space, limiting the amount of music you can fit on the record.  It is also best to put your quiet songs at the inside of the record and your loud ones at the outside.  Some pressings are done on light weight vinyl which work as well and the last point is of course they're easy to scratch and dust is a problem.

But, technically speaking, the vinyl record is a much better representation of the sound than CD.  Also, it's pretty well accepted that vinyl sounds warmer than CD.

Now the question is, who is using vinyl?

Mostly it is dance music, and Hip Hop. It's coming from independent record companies.  Vinyl sales are accounting for some 20% per release in these smaller companies.  It seems dance music users prefer the sound of vinyl.  I have to say I find it a bit of a paradox considering that dance music mostly comes from samples, that is, music sampled at CD rates, then edited together.  But I'm not a dance music expert.  Also dance music being so bass heavy reduces record time from about 24 minutes to around 16 minutes.

A lot of these releases are now packaging a CD with the vinyl as they are aware that the younger iPod generation require their music to be portable as well.

According to Neilsen Soundscan, about 1.2 million vinyl records were sold in 2004 -- not overwhelming considering total CD sales approached 767 million that year. But that number is skewed because most vinyl records are sold by small independent stores and labels, and their sales are not reflected in Soundscan data.

The other area that is attracting a vinyl audience is jazz.  Modern jazz acts are releasing their music on vinyl as well.  And there is a huge trade in old jazz records from the 50's and 60's.  These records are also prized by Hip Hop and dance music artists, as great places to sample drums and riffs to create new tunes.

And then someone thought, "Why not combine vinyl and CD technology?"  So enters the ELP Laser Turntable.  A device that uses five lasers to read the sound from a standard vinyl record.  Apparently, this thing sounds great.  It is an

analogue device, just uses lasers instead of a needle. It can read warped records as well, which is pretty amazing.

But this is an audiophile machine.  At a cost of US$15000, not everyone will have one in the home.  Although, as of the end of 2005, they had sold over one thousand units.

So there you go folks.  If you want serious sound, buy an ELP and pull out your old vinyl records.  You'll hear things you've never heard before.