Steven Jobs liked Vinyl Records.Ipod ,not so much

CD's the standard of music are going to go out of production this year, (for the most part)
MP3's are the new king
"All Hail The New King"

If you don't understand Vinyl do you understand Either?

 

Fans of legendary Irish rocker Rory Gallagher can finally throw away those worn out tore-up vinyl records of their much revered guitar hero. Or hang them on the wall of their “Rory Shrines.â€

To mark the 40th anniversary of Rory’s first solo album Sony Music has announced that they are releasing the guitar slinger’s first six solo albums on CD, and glorious vinyl. CD Digipak and digital downloads of these six re-mastered albums were just made available to the Gallagher faithful while the vinyl offerings are set to be released on February 20th.

http://www.rockcellarmagazine.com/2012/02/01/rory-gallaghers-first-and-best-6-records-re-released/

 

While vinyl business is picking up, sales trends indicate dangers for the CD, the format that squeezed vinyl into the back corners of record stores years ago. Nielsen SoundScan says CD sales declined 5.7 percent to 223.5 million albums last year. While CDs are still the most popular format for music sales, it is declining while digital downloads jumped 20 percent to 103.1 million albums.

As digital downloads draw customers away from CDs, they can boost sales of vinyl albums, said Matt Lunsford, a co-founder of Polyvinyl Records, which is the company that Xiu Xiu records with. About six years ago, the Champaign, Ill.-based company started including digital download codes with each vinyl album sold. “That seems to be the ultimate way of experiencing the record,†Lunsford says. “It allows people to have the best attributes of digital and vinyl.’’

The vinyl price premium at Polyvinyl isn’t huge. Xiu Xiu will soon release its new album, “Always,’’ in a 180-gram translucent pink vinyl edition with two posters for $14, pre-ordered. With plain black vinyl, the album is $12. The MP3 alone is $8.

Other labels have adopted the combined format. United Record Pressing’s Millar said most new vinyl releases now come with a digital download component.

Which leaves CDs the odd man out. Millar’s view is that the CD can’t compete for compactness with digital collections on MP3 players. And they aren’t as involving as a vinyl album with full-sized art and liner notes.

Ah yes, the liner notes. That’s one reason Millar predicts that vinyl will always have a place in the hearts of die-hard music fans.

"I started buying vinyl again after I got my first MP3 player,†says the 35-year-old. Once I could fit all my music in the palm of my hand, I thought: 'Do I need [the CDs]?' What I wanted was the artwork, the liner notes and the best sound.''

http://m.cnbc.com/us_news/46203564

 

Another interesting effect of recording and broadcasting methods is the influence it has on how music should sound. When the radio stations started compressing to make stations sound louder, kids wanted their records to sound like the music they heard on the radio. This forced the recording people to compress records for loudness. Once the records were compressed for loudness, the fans wanted the live groups to sound like the records they bought. As a consequence, the live groups introduced realtime compression to live performances and the cycle continued.

Basically people are nuts.

Tom

 

It's funny how the digital enthusiasts tend to present lengthy treatises to support their viewpoint.

Meanwhile, the analog folks just sit back and enjoy the music.

There's a beautiful ritual associated with listening to vinyl on a good system. iPods and whatnot have nothing to do with that, unfortunately.

 

I don't believe there is any such thing as a 128 bit recording, because there are no 128 bit ADCs (analog to digital converters). That far far exceeds the accuracy of the best physical measurements ever made. Of anything!

Perhaps you are confusing this with the 128 kbps bit streams of some music compression formats?

 

I'm a bit of an audiophile: my surround system rivals most movie theaters. I have collections of CDs, vinyl, mp3s, and even SACDs. Of all those formats, SACD has the potential to have the greatest resolution because it's uncompressed and has a higher bandwith then CD. I do have a few Bach recordings on SACD that are my main reference in great recordings (especially a Bach toccatas in a cathedral with 4 huge pipe organs). However, I have a Mozart recording on SACD. It sounds great, but I don't like the conductor as much as Neville Marriner. My CD player upconverts CD to 192khz and can sound great. With a good SACD, I mainly hear more soundstage. Even though the SACD technically is better on paper, Marriner's interpretation is more moving to me...so even though it might not have quite the same "technical" superiority of SACD, the artists make the music more involving to me. MP3 formats have gotten better, but I wonder if sound engineers have compressed their mixing the way they did with early CDs. I only download pop albums that I might just save on my ipod. If it's an album that I really want, I'll by on CD.

Tom's original post hits the nail on the head: mastering means everything. Having a nice audio system brings out the inherent flaws in a bad master. Many classical titles have been recorded in DSD for the last decade: as long as the sound engineer is not compressing the recording in trying to mix, then it will sound better then lossy mp3 or vinyl. With classical music, I collect CDs and SACDs. With rock, I've found that many titles from the 70s and 80s sound better on the vinyl editions over the CD editions. One of the aspects, from what I've heard from sound engineers, is that early CDs were mastered from tape. Barring differences with early analogue to PCM conversion, many engineers would take out midranges where tape hiss would be. Many rock mixers also try raising the levels...which makes the music sound loud and hot, but it also compresses the tonal range. I have a somewhat neutral phono cartridge/ pre-amp...so with many titles from the 70s, I find that I can buy a used LP for less then a mp3 album. With an appropriate cleaning and sealing, the LP does sound better then the CD or mp3 (because it was not overmixed).

I will continue to buy CDs as I like having a hard copy. Just as with blu-rays, I don't care for digital downloads. I watch netflix streaming, but if it's a movie that I really want to get into, I want blu-ray. The audio is phenominal, and the HD video is better to boot too. Luckily more concerts are coming out on BD as well. If studios decide to ditch CDs, then I'll be buying more BD concerts just to add my vote for quality source material.

 

Yeah, the HD audio found on some BDs (and PCM masters) is 24bit/192khz audio. SACD is another format that's DSD (instead of PCM)...Sony seems to have been able to corner the DSD market over PCM with classical recordings.

DSD is such a different format, it's 1bit/2.44mhz

 

I have a very nice. 5.1 system at home. I love listening to movies and music with it. With Blu-ray audio, you can get incredible movie theater-quality sound. My current favorite is Master and Commander, the movie where Russel Crowe plays a British sea captain. When the canon balls burst, it sounds like the house is being destroyed, it's really incredibly good. I'm going to get Super8 on Blu-ray next, it's reputed to have a phenomenal 7.1 high bitrate audio track.

 

I hope that sigma-delta converter is running in the MHz range, not mHz range.

In my world, 1 mHz (millihertz) equals 1 MHz (megahertz) divided by a billion. And the old test and measurement company did produce some analyzer products that understood both.

 

And another difference between vinyl and digital aficionados is revealed.

 

Obviously it is...

 

My neighbor worked for Next back in the days when Steve Jobs was banished from Apple. I got to borrow a prototype Next machine for a week while my neighbor was on a business trip (Steve would have had a cow if he'd known!).

Anyway, while the supposed target consumer for Next was the education market, what I found on the machine was a desktop version of a jukebox. The hard disk was full of recordings, probably from Steve's record collection. The Next machine was way overpriced for the education market, but it was a fantastic electronic jukebox. When the memory technology for the iPod arrived, Steve already had many years of tinkering with an electronic jukebox, er, iPod.

 

The Time magazine issue on Jobs had a double page photo of him in his living room which had no furniture. Just one big lamp, and a stereo system on the floor with two tower speakers and several vinyl records lying nearby where Steve was sitting on the wood floor reading something.

It is a striking photo that reveals much about Jobs the minimalist and music fan. I believe the inventor of the iPod would want to make digitized music sound as good as his analog system. The Apple lossless format is a step in that direction. It would be interesting to know what future format Neil Young was talking about.

 

Back to the OP

http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/neil-youngs-plan-to-make-digital-music-sound-20-times-better/#

 

Those cannon shots were recorded on an artillery range not far from where I live:

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Grayling"]Camp Grayling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]


Tom

 

Pinto Girl brings up an interesting point: listening enjoyment isn't just a function of high fidelity. Many people enjoy the ritual and nostalgia of older technology, and often people acquire a taste for the inherent distortions. Kodachrome film is a good example of good inherent distortion. Kodachrome produced heavily saturated colors: skies were bluer than blue, reds burned into your eyes. People liked that, even if it was a distortion of reality.

Likewise with vinyl and tube amplifiers. Vinyl playback and tube amplifiers introduce a lot of distortion, but for many people it is a pleasant sort of distortion. Most phono cartridges and equalization filters produce a softer sort of sound. Tube amplifiers generate even harmonics, which sound full and harmonious. It's still distortion, but of a pleasant sort.

Any good digital system could be programmed to produce exactly the same distortions, so the sound could be identical, but still you wouldn't have the nostalgia and ritual. Beauty is in the eye, or in this case, ear of the beholder.

Tom

 

My ears are not good enough to tell the difference in sound quality, but I certainly heard all the scratches and skips as my vinyl records deteriorated because:

Ahhh, the ritual of dropping the needle onto the record because I'm such a klutz. Errrmm, guess I'll stick with CDs and my iPod.

 

Sounds to me from the posts here that people that like vinyl do so entirely because of nostalgia. Why else would you want to listen to something with hisses, clicks and pops, and even brag about the pops?
People say it's warmer feeling, that's probably because it doesn't have pure silence like a digital system can. Kind of like TVs, where pure black is kind of a recent thing.

I haven't gotten that far in his book yet, but early on there's several references to a large collection of Dylan bootlegs, which he and Steve Wozniak stored electronically (they couldn't afford to buy all that music, plus some of the live concerts probably weren't available). No reference to vinyl. As I recall, Wozniak preferred a higher compression method, and stored more music on a device, while Jobs preferred higher fidelity.

It's interesting that Jobs was into bootleg versions of music as a youngster (much like I had hundreds of pirated copies of Apple II games as a kid, because I couldn't afford to actually buy a tenth of them), but today Apple has some of the strictest safeguards against pirating music and such, some of them that hamper legitimate uses.

 

I found that amusing, as well. The reason that so many people had Dillon bootlegs wasn't because they couldn't afford them but rather because they were recordings of his live sets.

One of Steve's rationals for the pricing of iTunes songs at only 99 cents each was that if it was cheap enough people wouldn't steal it.

I think the book is an excellent read. I'm sad that I've finished it. It left me wanting more.