In a digital age, vinyl albums are making a comeback

Los Angeles Times / latimes.com ^ | April 26, 2009 | By August Brown

[thecodont]

Neil Schield knows the grim state of the music business as well as anyone; last May, he was laid off from a company at the vanguard of digital music distribution.

But this month, Schield began an unlikely second act: He opened a brick-and-mortar record store in Echo Park, with racks of tasteful inventory carrying price tags as high as $100 -- all presumed liabilities in an age when "digital" and "free" seem to rule the day. For added chutzpah, Schield's shop, Origami Vinyl, exclusively stocks new vinyl LPs, presumed not long ago to be as dead as eight-track tapes.

Moreover, Origami is just one of at least three such shops opening in L.A. this spring; the others are Vacation in Los Feliz and Little Radio, a downtown storefront operated by an Internet radio station and concert promoter. The small boom is the result of a commercial rediscovery and appreciation of vinyl records among collectors and more casual audiences.

"Sometimes I wonder, 'What am I doing?' " Schield said. But "it's the only corner of the physical music business that's growing."

[thecodont]

Some of us are analog people in a digital world. :-)

[library user]

If anyone’s seen vinyl go for a higher price than this on eBay, let me know.

http://www.popsike.com/Devy-ERLIH-autograph-BACH-violin-solo-3-LP-Ads/4074069134.html

[NavyCanDo]

I remember hearing George Harrison interviewed not long before he died, and saying he would never switch to CD’s. Said the sound is just too clean and crisp. Just doesn't sound the same as listening to an LP which he much preferred listening to, even with the occasional pops and hisses.

[period end of story]

Vinyl, and 8-track: what could be better?

[Island Girl]

My favorite Sarah Vaughan vinyl, Sarah Vaughan w/ Michel Legrand, isn’t even available on CD. I have converted it, but I’m afraid to play my original. Young people today have no comprehension of how real music is supposed to sound. You tell them that compressed music sounds like s*^t and they give you that funny, vacant look.....

[colinhester]

....and some of us still use tube amplification to listen to the vinyl. I’ve got 25 or so valves in the chain and about 15,000 albums; life is good......C

[SIDENET]

Combine vinyl records with new, high-end vacuum tube electronics for a really nice, rich sound.

You can spend some big bucks doing it, too.

[RegulatorCountry]

Vinyl albums have a life and a physical presence that other formats don’t seem to be able to replicate. Analog sound is warm and, what, buttery? Lacking the correct vocabulary, here. Placing a favorite album on a turntable, the care and the sheer reality of it, is almost like a ritual. Not surprised that people are returning to it. When everything’s electronic, the whole tactile sensory thing looks for reward. I was in a business recently, that had it’s offices in a restored, old department store, with the vacuum tube message delivery system ... ffsssssst-pop, like a bank drive-through writ large. It worked, and it was just fascinating. Brass tubes running everywhere, some sections exposed, looking like some wild pipe organ that took off and grew like vines.

[ansel12]

$ 4300.00 for record is a lot, what is it about?

[ansel12]

I didn’t mean what the record is about, what is the story behind this price?

[Welsh Rabbit]

I am a die-hard vinyl enthusiast, and always hated the over produced soullessness of CDs, and also the clutter they caused in my car. But I must admit, I’m really enjoying MP3s. It’s really cool to be able to carry around hundreds of albums and thousands of songs in your pocket. I almost have every song I’ve ever owned on my MP3 player. But still, vinyl sounds better and there will always be those very special records that will never make the conversion to a digital format. Good riddance, CDs.

[scott says]

MP3’s are great for convenience and the ability to load up a tiny player with hours of music but the quality generally sucks.
I hate the compressed digital sound and always prefer the full lossless experience.
I cannot listen to mp3’s...it just sounds horrible to me. Most people are tone deaf and probably cannot hear the difference anyway.
There really is something special about vinyl played on a high end analog equipment, and also most cds sound like crap. I am always disappointed in “remastered” cds, they usually never compare to the original. You would think that it would not be so hard to put out an original recording “ as is”, but they always seem to mess it up. I have a huge music collection and my very favorite stuff is "bootleg" recordings of my favorite bands, LIVE field recordings done with high end equipment can produce some really incredible results, the ambiance and experience can be really spectacular----something a crappy mp3 on a tiny portable player could never convey, but I digress ;)

[Welsh Rabbit]

Don’t get me wrong; I agree that vinyl is always better, but I really don’t think that CDs are any better than MP3s, and in real life, you usually can’t be around a turntable when you need music the most. Most of us have to resign to the fact that we can’t always hear every recording in the most optimum way. That’s just the way it’s always been.

[scott says]

Absolutely. I am old school and a dinosaur. The thing that really blows is the today's cd releases are barley better than mp3’s, most are so poorly “remastered” that they sound like crap. It really is a shame.
I actually take LPs and put them on CDR myself to get the full sound. The commercially released cds are so messed up that they sound horrible to me.
How come the major labels cannot put them out without messing them up?
It really is annoying.

[raccoonradio]

>>I actually take LPs and put them on CDR myself to get the full sound

As an example, here’s a YouTube vid I did taking the video from the Hanna Barbera series Cattanooga Cats (late 60s) which had some really good music...and syncing the original
song from the original vinyl album—now, I don’t have that album but someone did and posted the album online and it sounds very nice, even when transferred to .mp3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRGLf6BP-Zk

As someone noted:
“Amazing! The Cats sound so crystal clear. It sounds like the song was recorded last week. Thank you for the fine job.”

I don’t have a turntable anymore, but a friend does and
recently I picked up 2 old LPs for free, one by Peter Nero and one by Roger Williams, as I knew a friend in California who enjoyed that type of music. I had a friend locally who does have a turntable convert them to a CD-R and I mailed my friend who’s
the Nero/Williams fan the CDs—and after a very quick listen the fidelity sounded pretty good for 2 records which I literally picked up at a “swap shack” at a landfill on
Cape Cod!

[Caesar Soze]

Vinyls predating the loudness war may sound better than digital counterparts. But given the same master, ceteris paribus, digital is superior in practically every way. There are people who grew up on vinyl and consider its characteristic distortion to be euphonic, and more power to them, but Red Book provides higher fidelity sound. In addition to the better fidelity, digital is durable. It doesn't get dirty, it doesn't fall apart as you use it, and you can copy it N times without any degradation in quality. It's also self-correcting when there are minor errors, checksummable, and fairly player-agnostic.

And 99% of people who complain about MP3s are performing sighted tests and suffering from the placebo effect or parroting what they read in a magazine--usually an interview with an aging rocker, who lost much of his hearing years ago. With the exception of a few cases like cymbals or harpsichords, LAME's output is indistinguishable from its input for most people. Newer codecs are even better.

Lurk at Hydrogen Audio and free yourself from the big, black disks! Keep the sleeves, though. LP artwork rocks.

[knarf]

"You can spend some big bucks doing it, too."

It has always (could have) been expensive.

My sister and ex brother in law had a surround sound apartment everywhere they went .. HUGE speakers, amps and a bunch of stuff I had no idea about ... but phenominal sound. I REALLY loved to get high with them.

They moved a lot.

[central_va]

Vinyl, and 8-track: what could be better?

A six pack and a '68 Firebird?

[Roccus]

Having ferite magnet speakers goes a long way in “improving” the sound also. Today’s speakers just don’t sound as good.

[NoControllingLegalAuthority]

This all appears to be a search for a time long passed and a civilization “Gone With the Wind.”