Posted on 09/07/2019 9:08:03 AM PDT by fidelis
Sales of vinyl records have enjoyed constant growth in recent years. At the same time, CD sales are in a nosedive. Last year, the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) mid-year report suggested that CD sales were declining three times as fast as vinyl sales were growing. In February, the RIAA reported that vinyl sales accounted for more than a third of the revenue coming from physical releases.
This trend continues in RIAA’s 2019 mid-year report, which came out on Thursday. Vinyl records earned $224.1 million (on 8.6 million units) in the first half of 2019, closing in on the $247.9 million (on 18.6 million units) generated by CD sales. Vinyl revenue grew by 12.8% in the second half of 2018 and 12.9% in the first six months of 2019, while the revenue from CDs barely budged. If these trends hold, records will soon be generating more money than compact discs.
(Excerpt) Read more at rollingstone.com ...
They make for great skeets......PULL!
Where do you even buy CDs these days?
Spotify/iTunes etc. is for in the car (they all have the blue tooth thing that plugs into the cigarette lighter in their cars), vinyl is for listening at home.
Our teenage kids love records and are each building their collections. I’m the one who uses Spotify at home with the Amazon echo.
Ridiculous. How are they going to distribute all those AOL memberships, hmm?
I buy from LA-LA Land Records and Screen Archive Classics.
I wish Peaches would come back, I loved that place.
My records are in decent shape. Keeping good them requires a real good cartridge/.needle. And worry about if it has gone bad. One bad play and it’s shot. .so I rarely to ever play them.
My music is on iTunes on my computer, phone and a few USB drives. The computer is plugged into my amp. I use the thumb drives in the car or I use Bluetooth from my phone to whatever takes Bluetooth.
Vinyl is a pain in the butt. Guess that’s why I only have a little over 300 of them (still).
> That is surprising!
Maybe not, as the same is true for me. I've lost a lot of my high-end frequencies, too much playing loud rock-n-roll in bands over the years. And I'm 67 and male, so my high-end is shot by default anyway.
As a result I can't hear the high-freq quantization noise of digital recordings (unless they're low sampling rate). But I can hear the difference in how transistors vs tubes reproduce loud sounds, since they approach their power limits differently. Transistors tend to "clip", tubes tend to "round", and it sounds quite different.
“CDs have no place today. Vinyl remains the preferred format for audiophiles. For the overwhelming majority of us who just want to listen to music, streaming services and digital downloading are vast improvements over the CD model.”
CD’s are superior to vinyls. Most streaming is not worth playing on a good system except for casual background listening.
Yes the sampling rate has improved since the first CDs. Digital is, for me, the way to go.
It never left. A lot of artists still use tape and transfer it to digital for the deep sound.
This is strictly a US hipster thing. You don’t see it overseas. Its also ridiculous. Why would you go out of your way to adopt thoroughly outdated technology? Do you go out in the morning to crank start your model T also?
Go to eBay and price some good-condition old school hi fi equipment.
For high fidelity sound quality, vinyl has always been superior to CD. You'll find very few who would argue differently. And while CDs were once superior to digital music, which early on was compressed and thin-sounding, streaming digital fidelity has vastly improved over the years, as have audio systems adapted to play streaming music.
I'm streaming Pandora in my garage as I type this, over a simple LG bookshelf stereo and it sounds great! Clear stereo sound with solid bass response.
Some of the best musical and sound quality digital files I’ve heard I made myself by ripping vinyl. Seems kind of ironic.
I do miss the great album art on the old LPs
You just tell me when turntables start coming back with tube amps to plug in. Pioneer or Marantz will be fine.
Most music from the past decades have original masters and mothers available. That and original tapes. Those that survived in pristine condition can make excellent digital copies.
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