The resurgence of vinyl

[jamcg]

Streaming is just so convenient that my thousands of CDs went in to the loft years ago and I ripped most of it in to mp3 so I have all my bootlegs and random stuff on there too. I still really like sitting down and listening to an album from start to finish, reading the liner notes, lyrics etc so about 5 years ago I started buying any new albums from artists I really liked, on vinyl.

I've got a nice set of speakers and an old amp which needs upgrading, but listening to something on CD or vinyl on that or with headphones is something I really enjoy still. Especially when the mixes for streaming services seem to have no subtlety at all - they just seem to turn everything up to 11.

Buys vinyl
Beardy
Tattoos

Hipster doofus alert

Ascender walks into the vinyl shop of correctness, throws a couple of pistol fingers at the regulars by the counter, selects a particularly good copy of Janet Jackson’s Got Till It’s Gone, strolls out to where the birds are singing and the sun shines a little brighter. Ignoring the Spotify zombies and EarPod ghouls to strut to his dominion. An Eames chaired fortress of solitude where the creamy tones of “now why you wanna go and do that love huh” while sipping a rum swizzle.

Dave!

Why wait? Join the AirPod zombies with a set of vintage over ear headphones, oversized because they’re massive not because fashion, pops his vinyl into his Sony ps-f9, and off he goes down the street with his compact vinyl player, the closest thing to a vinyl Walkman

[scotta]

I think we need a vintage hifi thread!

Ive still got the Yamaha and Kenwood amps that i bought in the mid - late 90's. I still use the Yamaha daily in my office. Its great.

(library photo)

[dinny_g]

I still have my Technics amp from back in the day which used to be paired with a set of Jamo D266's but they're long gone. They didn't survive my son's toddling phase when he took great pleasure in pushing the cones in. The Amp's at a mates place who uses it with his 1210's from time to time when the mood takes him...

However, now, my music's entirely from Spotify and a Sonas 5

[Jobbo]

I still have my pristine boxed Sony WM-EX618 cassette Walkman from 1996, wondering if cassettes will ever have a resurgence. People are asking up to £200 for them on eBay now, up from about £70 when I last checked a couple of years ago, but I bet nobody is buying.

[ZedLeg]

I don't have any of my old stuff. My big hi fi fell by the way side about 4 house moves ago and I've used my phone for music for so long that I don't have any of my old mobile players either.

I had some pretty nice sony tape and cd walkmen (walkmans?) back in the day.

[ZedLeg]

I still have my pristine boxed Sony WM-EX618 cassette Walkman from 1996, wondering if cassettes will ever have a resurgence. People are asking up to £200 for them on eBay now, up from about £70 when I last checked a couple of years ago, but I bet nobody is buying.

Tape is coming back as a format but it's mostly just a novelty/collectors thing for bands to sell physical copies of their albums, like coloured vinyls etc.

Magnetic tape is a shit format so I don't see it making a real come back as a listening experience.

[V8Granite]

I still have my pristine boxed Sony WM-EX618 cassette Walkman from 1996, wondering if cassettes will ever have a resurgence. People are asking up to £200 for them on eBay now, up from about £70 when I last checked a couple of years ago, but I bet nobody is buying.

Tape is coming back as a format but it's mostly just a novelty/collectors thing for bands to sell physical copies of their albums, like coloured vinyls etc.

Magnetic tape is a shit format so I don't see it making a real come back as a listening experience.

I’ve made a few mix tapes for the car and it sounds ok but it’s definitely a big drop in quality and also volume before you hear the issues with the recording.

Dave!

[Swervin_Mervin]

I don't have any of my old stuff. My big hi fi fell by the way side about 4 house moves ago and I've used my phone for music for so long that I don't have any of my old mobile players either.

I had some pretty nice sony tape and cd walkmen (walkmans?) back in the day.

Same. I think the last one I had was a Panasonic RQ-SX - one of those that was virtually the size of the tape itself, with a thin metal shell, and an AA battery booster that you had to screw on to one end.

[drcarlos]

One of the things about Tape deck is that they are invariably belt driven with fairly complex drive systems (usually several belts). These things don't age well and the belts stretch (this can be easy to replace as I did on the load tray of my Sony CD player) or melt.
My old Aiwa deck was at my dads and when he passed I retrieved it, it would play a tape but FF or RW wouldn't work. When I stripped it for a deck that didn't have autoreverse or anything fancy it had 3 belts on the drive. When I stripped it to investigate I initially thought there was some black grease on the mech that had gone sticky (like old grease does sometimes) and got everywhere jamming it up but it turned out 2 belts had melted and turned into a black sticky goo which I could only remove with a harsh solvent like brake cleaner!
For the effort to play something that was sonically compromised it wasn't worth it so I gave it away on Facebook to someone who liked to tinker.

[Beany]

Why wait? Join the AirPod zombies with a set of vintage over ear headphones, oversized because they’re massive not because fashion, pops his vinyl into his Sony ps-f9, and off he goes down the street with his compact vinyl player, the closest thing to a vinyl Walkman

Bitch please.

[Jobbo]

Bitch please.

What uncanny timing by Techmoan.

[dinny_g]

Any love for the Mini Disc here ??

I never had a CD Walkman but loved my Mini Disc. Small compact, light, never skipped - it was a brilliant bit of kit

[Jobbo]

I was an early Minidisc adopter, though it never replaced tape for me. Got a Sony MD stereo for my Scirocco in the mid-90s but switched back to cassettes and a CD changer in car after that (Puma in 1998). I still have an MD deck at home; I bought a really decent high-end Sony one in about 2005. It's been in its box for about a decade, mind you...

[integrale_evo]

I had a mini disk player at uni, ~1999. I dug it out recently as it’s a nice period accessory for the compact. Battery is dead as expected, but even with the mains adapter I’d just stops and errors out at the toc-read point and won’t play

I guess portable mp3 players started coming out soon after and killed it off pretty quickly.

[dinny_g]

It was re-writable CD’s that really killed it but yeah, MP3’s we’re the final nail.

Mine’s in a box somewhere but last time I fired it up (about 5 years ago) it worked fine

[JonMad]

I have a few records inc the odd picture disc in the loft together with some cassettes, VHS videos, amp (Arcam), CD player (Technics) and speakers (Mission, I think). And VHS recorder.

I don't have a record player though. I think about getting one now and again but never have. I've got some of my Mum's 78s up there as well.

The amp is this one. Smaller than the Technics CD player I sat it on (same width, not as deep)
https://www.hifiengine.com/manual_libra ... ha-2.shtml#


Maybe I should drag it all out of the loft to educate the kids and enjoy a few CDs again. We were at a National Trust place at the weekend and they had some vinyl in their bookshop. Daughter's comment, 'what's that black CD?'

[Jobbo]

I had an Arcam Alpha amp like that about 30 years ago. It was really good, though since I had upgradeitis I changed it many times over the years. Even had a later model Alpha bought in about 2000; might have sold that on here in fact, prob 2007/08.

[scotta]

I was an early Minidisc adopted, though it never replaced tape for me. Got a Sony MD stereo for my Scirocco in the mid-90s but switched back to cassettes and a CD changer in car after that (Puma in 1998). I still have an MD deck at home; I bought a really decent high-end Sony one in about 2005. It's been in its box for about a decade, mind you...

Same. I’ve got a fairly decent Yamaha unit in the attic.

[GG.]

No no no no no.

I’m not interested in fannying around with big vinyl discs that wear out and sound worse after every play. It was ALWAYS such a compromised format, with dynamic range compressed to prevent playing problems - the sonic possibilities on digital recordings unhindered by this constraint sound massively better to my ears.

I get pissed off even listening to older stuff on Spotify - masters having been created with the constraints of vinyl absolutely present; and songs sound thin and weedy. Kick drums in the past thudded lightly, where today they thump with genuine punch & energy.

Vinyl shminyl.

Woah there cowboy!

Dynamic range was not compressed to solve playing ‘problems’ per se but to save space on an LP and then reversed using RIAA curves in the phono amp on the way back out. Just in the same way as digital formats use sampling to save file size and throw away a lot of the information in the sine wave being sampled…

Anyway the benefits of LP are not in dynamic range, nor longevity I admit, but in a certain organic quality to the sound. Admittedly some of that can be criticised as euphonics are therefore not ‘accurate’ but the ‘accurate’ digital playback sounds less realistic - the ultimate contradiction!

As with most stuff it is reliant on having a certain quality of kit to hear the difference. Playback on my system sounds quantifiably better via vinyl than it does streaming via Tidal at master quality. Admittedly you can improve on that significantly in the digital front end by better file quality and hard storage rather than streaming but vinyl will still be more pleasing to listen to.

The most interesting example (more an analogue v digital than vinyl v digital) I’ve come across recently is now stunningly good the John Williams Star Wars soundtrack was on the original films when it was recorded on master tape versus later digital scores in the newer prequels and sequels. The fascinating thing is that is via Disney plus and streamed - demonstrating that not just analogue playback is better but analogue recording as well and that is preserved even through digital conversion…

The interesting thing is that if I played you (blindfolded) a new record on my turntable you wouldn’t say ‘oh listen to that terrible sounding record with no dynamics’ - you’d likely think you were listening to digital as there is an equivalently low noise floor.

[Jobbo]

Dynamic range was not compressed to solve playing ‘problems’ per se but to save space on an LP and then reversed using RIAA curves in the phono amp on the way back out. Just in the same way as digital formats use sampling to save file size and throw away a lot of the information in the sine wave being sampled…

Dynamic range of vinyl is physically limited, so the compression does prevent playing problems: it stops the needle jumping out of the groove.

Sampling is not compression to save file size - you’re thinking of MP3, ATRAC etc. Take a look at the theory of sampled music at CD quality; it isn’t just 44,100 discrete values per second, it is a continuous waveform.

You can use a valve amp with a CD player or streamer if you want euphonic distortion. It’s trivially easy to get an objectively better output from your source than vinyl gives you. So don’t conflate the pleasure of handling and using vinyl with it being ‘better’; that debate was done in the 80s and 90s to death. The fact that many people still prefer vinyl is entirely on subjective grounds, but it’s not justified on any objective measure so if you can get your head round that you can have better music reproduction more easily and cheaply. Win!