Is vinyl dead ?

Vader, I apologize if my comment was hurtful. I would edit or withdraw it if I could, since it was uncivil. Mea culpa.

Let's start again with something we both agree on: our analog devices need protection from digital ones. Doesn't this tell us something? Can we learn from this?

Music is sound. Sound is analog. Digitizing analog waveforms to store them compels us to to un-digitize them later to hear them. No process now in use does that without changing the waveforms in ways that humans can hear. Our ears are so sensitive to variations in analog waveforms that the only acceptable sampling rate is infinity, ie, the waveforms themselves. Everything less that's been tried to date is audibly different, ie, audibly inaccurate.

If our goal is the accurate storage and reproduction of analog waveforms, an all-analog chain is the only currently available process that gives us a fighting chance. Obviously system iteration will matter, but if we violate this basic fact we'll have no chance of achieving accurate reproduction.

This is not to say that I don't listen to CD's. I do, sometimes for convenience like TWL, sometimes because no analog copy is available like Newbee. But CD's don't play real music, they play a low resolution facsimile of it. Despite a pretty decent system only half my CD's are listenable. Many literally hurt my ears, and even the best of them cannot match a decent LP.

YMMV of course, but that's what I hear and I think that's why I hear it. Sorry once again if I was harsh.

Hey, Psychoanimal, call me anything you wish, but at least spell my pseudonym correctly. It's Newbee - not newbie - and FYI I haven't been one for a while. I passed my BS test a long time ago. :-)

Vinyl is not dead, but I hope that one day soon it is put out of its misery. Dragging a small rock with a wire attached to it through a concoction of semi-solid oil and then amplifying the resulting electrical signal by a factor of 2000x is a primitive system worthy of a Rube Goldberg award. It's nearly as bad an engineering design as the 4 stroke internal combustion engine (the piston comes to a dead stop TWICE each power phase). Vinyl should not be declare totally dead until engineers and designers have exhausted all practical, and even some unpractical, refinements in vinyl mastering and turntable/tonearm/cartridge design. I don't think we are at that endpoint, yet. However, it's clear to me that any significant future advances (as opposed to refinements) in sound reproduction will be in the high sample rate digital arena.

Regarding the concept of death in general, check out the Showtime series "Dead Like Me". It's interesting to say the least. Also, as John Garfield so accurately stated way back in a 1947 film: Everybody dies! What's so special about vinyl that it's supposed to live forever.

That's a good point, Onhwy61. I agree it is an archaic medium. I am anxiously awaiting for the technology that can surpass it.

Dougdeacon, Apology accepted.
I never ment to get into the old pissing match between digital and vinyl. The sound quality was not what this thread was about. The thread is discussing the decline of popularity on vinyl, and i simply added my observations to reinforce this theory.

Vader