Any of you guys still listen to vinyl? I am working on an album and put a lot of effort into doing everything in the analog domain. I want to put it out on vinyl, but I am not sure its possible to get any significant exposure without at least putting it on cd. So just wondering if any of you guys still have turntables and buy new records.
I have a record player at home and I do listen to vinyl. I only buy an album on vinyl if it is something I already know and love, due to the higher price of vinyl.
I listen to Vinyl when I get the chance.
(RIP Gil Scott-Heron)
When I want to sit down and seriously listen to music it’s time for the turntable. It just sounds so much better.
Yes, I also still have my trusty old Telefunken Direct Drive turntable from 1981.
I kept mostly my very favorite music on vinyl. Some Rush, Jean Michel Jarre, Led Zeppelin, Wendy Carlos, etc…
All this music sounds fantastic in my TLX 22/8 Studio Monitor speakers. 
I think the answer can be found in who you’re making the album for.
If your goal is to be heard- to be noticed amongst thousands of other artists- there’s no question it must be released in a format that is most accessible, ie: CD or download.
But if you feel that your music is not adequately described unless played on vinyl, you will feel that you compromised your artistry for accessibility.
That is, you won’t feel like you expressed yourself fully or that others will not hear what you intended for them to hear.
My suggestion is to master it for digital release to see if others appreciate it enough to also buy as vinyl.
If there’s enough interest digitally, a small percentage will pay a premium for it on vinyl too.
But in today’s world, even if you wrote the equal of Dark Side of the Moon, there would be too few exposed to it if only released on vinyl.
As to your question, I do own a turntable.
It’s a Micro Seiki.
It was originally owned by film composer John Williams and given to me by his son Mark.
I rarely use it, but only because it’s inconvenient as compared to mp3s.
I DO think it sounds better than most digital players.
I started collecting vinyl in second grade. That was almost 40 years ago.
Two allowances were enough for me to buy the newest 45 single. Since then my collection has grown to 7,000 records.
They are better than CD’s, but not as portable. I love being able to take CD’s to work and in my car.
It is weird records are making a come back. I thaught they were gone forever after they fell off the face of the earth in the mid 90’s.
The market for new vinyl is way more limited than digital media.
I like how some newer releases on vinyl included a code for a free download. Have your nice cake and eat the other one.
Release vinyl with a digital download and follow up after the vinyl has sold with a digital release or CD.
The record is something I’d rather not have in shuffle mode on an ipod, but I guess if you want exposure its inevitable. From an artistic standpoint, I’d rather do just vinyl not just to ido the continuous signals intact, (I have heard very good digital masters, but the best are from old master tapes mixed analog) but also to kinda force the listeners attention without limiting the shit out of it. The vinyl with download code sounds like a great idea.
I have never cut a master let alone vinyl, so I’m not sure how it will sound. I guess I need to play a lot of gigs to get exposure.
My opinion is that vinyl is the only physical medium that really makes sense these days.
I’d say make music available digitally, since that is what most people use for convenience, then also offer a nice premium vinyl product with nice art for people who like to have something cool to own. A CD is just going to get ripped and tossed in the closet, IMO. Make a small number of vinyl to keep costs low, hand numbered, limited edition, swirly colors or something unique to make it a more desirable.
Just my 2 cents. I don’t buy CDs if I don’t have to. I have too many of them laying around already. I’ll buy a nice record though, because I think they’re cool.
I agree with the above statement.
My father, who’s 73, still has an impressive vinyl collection. And, although my collection is much more limited, I still have my trusty old Telefunken Direct Drive TT.
When I really feel like listening to music, I play myself a vinyl.
But that reminded me that I had made an experiment a while ago. I asked my father if he would participate, and he said sure.
I asked him to choose his personal absolute favorite record in his collection. His vinyl was in extremely good condition. I proceeded to digitize it using our best playback equipment (his turntable) a very high quality sound card (back in the days of my PC), and using 96 khz and 32 bits floating point, down converted back to 44100 Hz 16 bits to create a master CD.
We then did a blind test. I would play, randomly, the same musical piece either from the original vinyl, or its digital copy from the CD. He was surprised that he couldn’t tell which was which. I said it was normal, since the CD had been made from that very same vinyl.
So he listened to the rest of the CD for a while, and was very pleased with the results. He even asked me if I could do the same for a few others of his favorites records. I said sure. But while I was in the process of converting them to CD, and since I was doing that in my spare time it took a while, I got a phone call from him. That was about a month later. He told me to stop everything.
I asked him what was wrong ? He told me that, for some unknown reason, he felt that the CD I had made didn’t sound as good anymore… I went to his place, and there was nothing wrong with the CD. It played beautifully. He just said it didn’t sound as good as the first day I had made it. I explained to him that the numbers on the CD didn’t change, it was still an exact copy of his vinyl that he was listening to.
We then completed the experiment. We did another blind test with the original record and the CD played alternately randomly. And this time he could tell, without having any clue other than what he heard, every single time when the CD was playing rather than the original vinyl. Even though the CD was an exact copy of that vinyl.
He was a victim of a controversial phenomenon known listener’s fatigue. There are many interpretations of that phenomenon. But mine is this: the little imperfections on the vinyl, which are changing dynamically every time a vinyl record is played and that had been captured at the time of the digitizing of that record, were “frozen” in time on the CD, that my father had been listening to for a few weeks. They weren’t dynamically changing anymore. The sound wasn’t “organic” in nature anymore. Nothing was ever changing from one play to the next.
My father’s brain had memorized, over time, the exact way the CD was playing each and every time. And he grew tired of that. That’s why he could point it out, each and every time it was played, in the last step of our experiment, whereas the vinyl was playing with ever changing results. And that’s what our brains like to hear: ever changing audio patterns.
I’m convinced that this is also a big part of the appeal of analog synthesizers versus digital ones (ones that produce sounds from digital data).
My two cents on it.
I would be curious to see what would happen if you cut that cd back to vinyl. And although I don’t know if you are an expert at copying vinyl to cd, but usually home burned cd’s are of inferior quality to professionally mastered cds, unless they are burned directly from digital. We kinda had the debate about fatigue on another thread a while.back. Some engineers say that fatigue is a relatively new phenomenon (on media), because of digital and overzealous compression, which hits you hard at first, but then the lack of accent bores and fatigues you quickly. Especially when people are clipping their digital gear to get more loudness.
I think its more than just the imperfections of vinyl, because I listen to tape upwards of 10 hours day and never get fatigue unless its super loud. My view is that the mind and body and the universe all deal with continuous energy, and though digital audio can fool your ears into hearing continuous energy, the waves, energy, and vibrations are synthetic, which the body does not like at least at the subconscious level. My favorite analogy is synthetic vitamins. They will cure you of deficiencies, but have no nutritional value other than that. Listening to a good cd in the same way will sound great if you haven’t listened to it or at least in a while, but gets old quickly, it simply alleviates your music deficiency.
When I bounce to digital from tape for archiving, I’ll listen to the copy and it will sound close to identical the first few minutes, but then switching back and forth from the original, it slowly diverges and sounds more and more different. I can’t mix in the box because I get fatigued after 2-3 passes, and the weird thing is that printing back out to tape from digital does not help much if at all. Once that first conversion is made, there’s no going back.
Maybe I need better converters, but I doubt it. And of course good music that keeps you interested can counteract this effect. Digital may even force you to make better music subconsciously. Who knows. How the hell do people listen to those bitcrushers? Digital distortion sounds like how it feels to sandpaper your balls.
Anyway thanks for the input, ill hopefully be done in a few months, ill let you guys know what I decide to do.
Ear Fatigue 
I think an even MORE interesting experiment would be to use one of those Laser Turntables which reads the part of the groove a stylus could never touch, the deepest portion of the V and see if that would affect the results.
I would have included a digital file with the vinyl popping algorithm.
“.. but usually home burned cd’s are of inferior quality to professionally mastered cds, unless they are burned directly from digital.”
That’s complete rubbish. Perhaps the integrity of the media itself will have a shorter shelf life, and the amount of read errors will inevitably rise. But all CD players, even the cheapest ones, have a complex error correction system known as CIRC. It can replace up to 12,000 missing bits of continuous data with exactly the same missing bits, by complex mathematical calculations.
When this maximum limit is reached, and the system can’t compensate anymore, you hear a glitch. A very short burst of wrong bits that translate to white noise, until valid data is found again. This can happen with a professionally mastered CD as well as a writable CD. With physical dammage like a scratch for example. Or, in the case of writable CD, a loss of opacity of the “ink” over time, that let’s laser light thru where it should not. But I still have some home-made CD from 1996 that still play without any uncorrectable, audible errors.
But there is absolutely, definitely no difference in the digital data content between professionally mastered CD and a home-made writable one, when their source of data is the same.
“…and though digital audio can fool your ears into hearing continuous energy, the waves, energy, and vibrations are synthetic, which the body does not like at least at the subconscious level.”
Again, misconceptions about recorded audio energy. All recorded sounds on all forms of media, be it magnetic, or the physical movement of a needle, or numbers converted back to analog via precision resistor networks, are ALL synthetic. Moreover, they are all reproduced with synthetic means, via electro-mechanical devices known as audio speakers.
As for continuous (audio) energy, I seriously doubt that our brains can perceive sound as slices of energy, instead of a continuous stream, when played back at 88200 slices per second (stereo) by digital apparatus.
Because once the digital data is converted to an analog signal, at that much higher rate than our hearing can perceive, it has the exact same effect on our ears, than a visual illusion for our eyes.
EDIT Especially when most CD players perform what is known as interpolation (oversampling) which raise that sampling playback rate even much higher !
I strongly believe that it’s much more a question of the redundancy of exactly the same audio energy, each and every time a CD is played, that has a much more profound effect on listener’s fatigue. In fact, in this case, it should be called listener’s boredom. Our brain is striving for new things and always on the lookout for new patterns, visual or auditory, to identify and to recognize. But when it recognizes the absolute exact same pattern over and over it gets bored over time.
Hmmm, that’s very interesting indeed !! I wonder what would be the outcome of that 
Because, technically and theoritically, it should sound much closer to the last times it was played. Although there would still be some random factors likes platter speed variations, disc centering pitch variations. Which could also be present in a digitized version, but static instead of random and dynamic.
Unfortunately, I don’t have access to a contactless laser turntable …
Alien, I agree a cd will sound exactly the same if its burned from digital, like I said. You are talking about converting the analog signal from vinyl, which is a totally different ballgame, unless you happen to have 200k worth of mastering/monitoring equipment, the cd is not going to be anywhere near the caliber of a good mastering house. Unless you are a wizard or something I don’t know.
I didn’t say that the brain necessarily interprets digital audio as discrete, but the vibrations are altered and the body and subconscious reacts differently to synthetic stimuli. Magnetic energy and electrical energy are very much intertwined, and are both responsible for the same force, so conversion between the two is vastly different from encoding audio into only the constituent parts of energy that we can explain. I am not saying tape or vinyl is more “transparent” than digital, though it could be argued for some sources it is, just that we are able to interpret stimuli in the form that occurs in the natural world and our own bodies better than what I call “synthetic”. You can define it however you want, that’s just a word I assigned to it.
Anyway, these things aren’t the same for everyone, I am sure some can listen to the same cd over and over without getting fatigued. And yes boredom, however one defines it, is part of if not exactly what ear fatigue is. For me, whether its completely psychological (most of any artform is), or whether its my equipment or what, digital audio while a great thing when done right, is significantly fatiguing, even at high sample/bitrates.
BTW, oversampling doesn’t improve resolution, it just allows for a better filter to be used. It has been argued by some scientists that 44.1khz, 16 bit is as good as digital audio can get, though some converters run better at higher sample rates just by design. I don’t necessarily agree with the notion, and my converters sound better at higher sample rates/bitrate, but I can see how this could be true. I have not heard any high sample rate file that was drastically better than a cd.
And I have heard conversion at 44.1k 16bit that sounded better than 192k sampled with an inferior converter. Converter chips have progressed so quickly that they are basically homogenous. Super high end boutique converter sets will use the same chips as much cheaper ones. It all about the design of the analog circuitry of the converter that makes it higher quality.
I understand, and agree with some of your arguments, while I tend to disagree with some others.
I guess we could go on, and on, about the merits, and downfalls, of one recording system over the other…
But I’m sure we will agree on one thing: digitally produced, or reproduced music is static and sterile, meaning that there’s nothing “organic”, or dynamic, about it. Even though digital has a vastly superior dynamic range, this has nothing to do with dynamic, and lively music reproduction which is available with conventional analog type recording, and playback methods.