Why vinyl?

Regardless of the content of the articles, the thing that poped out at me, was that the anti-vinyl article was written in 2006, whereas the pro-vinyl article was written, a year later, in 2007. Apparently as time goes by, things are getting better for vinyl, and worse for CD.

As far as the content of the articles, I disagree with both of them. In the first article, obviously this guy is out of touch, as the current vinyl boom is not being driven by us audiophiles, (we are way too few in number, IMHO), but instead is being driven by the college crowd, who, for some reason, (hopefully, because they sound better than CDs!), have determined that vinyl is worth buying, and hence the industry is now producing it in greater numbers than they have for the past decade. And in the second article, personally, I think CDs will remain the industry standard means of distributing music in a non-downloadable format. (At least for the near future, until something cheaper and smaller come along anyway.)

My two cents worth anyway.

I am into vinyl and believe it to be better, for all the well-known reasons, but there are serious quality control issues with vinyl - my sense is that there are more 'weak links' between a good master and a good LP than between the master and a CD. there is some seriously bad sounding new vinyl out there, so it's important that there are forums like audiogon where people can discuss these matters and warn each other of the junk. I have bought great sounding LPs that were just low-price, indie rock (bonnie prince billy's 'master and everyone') as well as overpriced 'audiophile' LPs (waterlily's Imrat Khan doing 'Ajmer') that are pretty much unlistenable.

the generalization that one is better than the other breaks down when you compare specific recordings. both have instances of winners and losers. having both formats in a stereo simply gives you choice, and the ability to find music which is exclusive to one or the other. as an artform, the long player, be it cd or lp, is fun to collect, and each have their place.

Musicslug is right to some degree. However, there have always been quality control issues - both on LP and on CD. Why would we have Mofi reissues of standard LP's if the originals were perfect? Many, many CD's are poorly mastered. Some of mine are only playable on the truck system - i.e. Cher's Greatest Hits (OK; I have no taste).

to me, the hallmark of either a good CD system or a good vinyl system is that I can hear what's reproduced - and that includes a poor sound stage, compression of the music signal, and the subway rumbling under the church the baroque quartet was recorded in.

Just my two cents,

People who buy, listen too and cherish good vinyl in the end could not care any less about the ones who must stand on some soapbox to cry "Vinyl is Dead!" I mean why bother? You want your lossy MP3, iPod cr*p? Good, go listen to it. Lossy digital formats are perfectly acceptable for casual listening and for personal listening through ear-buds. On this, the ear-bud thing it's funny at how much some will spend on the ear-buds to listen to generally poor quality lossy music. But I digress, I listen to MP3 on my personal player, it's fine, ok and I don't expect much from it. But I'd never use an iPod or other MP3 player on my home system. Sorry but I want to enjoy the performance even my well designed but modest home system can give. I did not plow hard earned money into said system to plug it with audio output from cr*ppy lossy music sound. Even the CD is borderline HiFi to me, acceptable, enjoyable but not the be all and end all of recorded sound, just a good alternative to my LP's.

Back to vinyl. It is not only the fact that it is generally a better sounding format, more human, more emotional and more real so to speak than all but maybe the best mastered music played on highest quality digital disc players but it's also about the the journey... From finding LP's you like, to staring at the big beautiful covers, looking at liner notes and then the cool black disc. Those are sound waves you see cut into vinyl and nothing else gives you that. Clean it up and put it on a nice turntable and system and you will have 40+ minutes of simple relaxing pleasure. Unlike digital media CD, HD and flash based. you want to listen to each song on vinyl as its too much a hassle to skip tracks. You soon get into the groove so to speak and maybe learn to appreciate other songs on the album that do not get much or any airplay. With CD's and other digital media it's too easy to just skip forward. Look at many young kids using MP3 etc. and watch them often skip through track after track not even listening to the whole song at times. I mean what gives?

So vinyl especially the LP gives you glorious cover art, nice liners, nice and cool looking discs. You can get a plug and play turntable or you can others to tweak till your heart's content. You can shop for new and used vinyl to build up huge physical (ie: unlike non-physical digital flash or HD libraries) libraries quite cheaply. You do not have to worry about future format incompatibility as hard drives may. You don't have to worry about the loss of all your hard drive or flash media music files being corrupted or lost. You do not have to open your computer to scroll through endless menus to find music. With vinyl and even the CD it's just look through your physical collection.

I am a vinyl fan but I too still enjoy having my CD player and CD's. I am also looking at getting back into audio cassettes, not just for the fun of recording and more so preserving my favourite vinyl onto analogue cassettes. I can and do do this with my stand alone CD recorder but this is a digital copy. I am toying with bringing back a cassette deck into my system for the fun of analog preservation. But also to allow me to exploit another used audio market, 2nd hand audio cassettes.

So in conclusion it's comical at how the digital geeks want to denigrate vinyl they even want to denigrate the digital CD but they are yelling into the wind because in reality those who like and want vinyl aren't listening nor do they really care. The lossy music recording freaks who care not to learn how to enjoy the simple pleasure and quality of sound a well recorded and produced music has but only want some priding ability to say "I have 500Gigs of music on a hard drive." "Yeah 25,000 songs, blah, blah, blah." as if it is some special thing. They miss out the art of of learning to develop skills of serious music listening and the associated pleasure of it. To simply sit down, relax and TO LISTEN! This is these geeks loss. So be it then.