A buddy of mine just acquired one of these machines (actually a beta version of a new product that will hopefully enter the market soon), and I've been helping him along the way as we try to get some good records out of it.
It's not easy! It's not like plugging in a printer. There are so many variables to consider (materials, temperatures, pressures, angles, sharpnesses, volumes, phase), magical anti-static solution formulas, airflow, isolation, line control. The margin of error can be as low as 100 microns, and if you screw up, you might break a $200 diamond shank which have to be specially manufactured and imported.
And that's before you even get to the actual audio quality!
Still, it's fun to use and great to have 1-of-a-kind dubplates.
You jest, but R2R is what some audiophiles are generally on about as being the bees knees, and has been getting popular again. I like physical music, but the prices on those is too much. I have heard some really good sounding reels, though I can never shake the feeling that they just have been recorded really, really well, using expensive equipment I can't afford to even rent, and would've sounded the same having been recorded digitally.
That I do and you’re also spot on that it does have a lot of merit as a medium - Les Paul did so much for music by lugging R2R gear around and proving its worth in the studio that his legacy is at the pinnacle of any and all people who, well, love music!
To me there is nothing cooler than a huge reel to reel when it comes to different formats. If I had some free time and space for it I would definitely want to buy one of the giant consoles and then hook up a write head right before the read head so that it can play off any digital source like Spotify but still do it with the huge reels and everything.
I enjoy noise music, I just finished listening to a 20-minute arrhythmic improvisational jazz track with a guy singing in a kind of Simlish. So I can imagine that lower fidelity, or a bad transmission wire, might be part of an enjoyable experience.
On the other hand, apart from the trivial detail of us all living in our own unique problem situations, I'm pretty sure that my preferences are the best and anybody else would be revealed to have stupid ones, if only we could communicate about them. But (speaking of bad transmission wires) detailed communication about ineffable private experiences is patchy at best, so regrettably we have to leave one another in peace to enjoy stuff, and lay off on the backseat driving.
You can still pay for a master and print the vinyl yourself. A 10 track album might cost an extra £10 per track for a vinyl master, but each print of a record is 3x that.
It sounds fun but reminds me of my recent foray into cassette culture where I rediscovered that while I love everything about cassettes and making them, I had forgotten they sound like crap haha.
Unfortunately all the cassette mechanisms (and cassettes themselves) manufactured and sold new today are complete garbage. And the old ones need a lot of (physical) maintenance to get back into spec.
> Those of you who have used analog recording equipment may have just thought to yourselves, "My goodness! That sounds like tape hiss!" Well, it doesn't just sound like tape hiss, it acts like it, too. And if we use a Gaussian dither, then it's mathematically equivalent in every way. It _is_ tape hiss!
> Intuitively, that means we can measure tape hiss, and thus the noise floor of magnetic audio tape, in bits, instead of decibels, in order to put things in a digital perspective. Compact cassettes... (Monty holds up a tape, then glares at it and flips it over in his hand) ... for those of you who are old enough to remember them, could reach as deep as nine bits in perfect conditions, though five to six bits was more typical, especially if it was a recording made on a tape deck.
> That's right - Your mixtapes were only about six bits deep, if you were lucky. The very best professional open-reel tape used in studios could barely hit - any guesses? - 13 bits _with_ advanced noise reduction.
It's not an apples to apples comparison, really. Tape is desirable for its nonlinear (read: saturation) characteristics, and those can't really be measured in a very comparable manner by taking a regular digital domain bit depth analysis and dropping it in the tape world using the background hiss and 0dB as a clamp. It's an OK talking point, but it's easily oversimplified.
Hiss is variable, too. When calculating the low end of the range from the background hiss, do we consider a -80dB hiss above ~2000Hz affecting the "bit depth" more than -80dB hiss below it? The hiss is nowhere near white noise either, so some frequency ranges are more affected than others.
I have to agree that sometimes I do like how tape sounds. A Hearts of Space recording playing in the car with Stephen Hill's mellow voice going as I drive sounds so right. Something about the low fidelity of tape and how everything is kind of smashed together is quite soothing.
This can’t be right. Tape decks with a separate record head allow you to listen to the currently recorded track and quickly switch between the track and source feed. Apart from the hiss, the difference in quality is rather subtle for most people.
Now, whether the store-bought tape from the 90s was recorded well, that’s a different story.
That's actually rude to say and I think my deck was ok and tapes were ok. My deck was a single well Sansui and my tapes were new Maxell tapes. Sure I might eek out some more performance with a Nakamichi deck and chrome tapes that cost $14 a blank or something but it's still going to sound like a cassette deck.
I find some charm in the lo-fi sound, if I wanted hi-fi sound I would just record something digitally for basically free, so I don't see the point of chasing the dragon of ultimate cassette sound quality.
It's not 'rude to say,' it's simply the truth. With good quality metal tapes, and Dolby C, a cassette is going to perform as well as any room you care to listen in. I find most people who complain about cassettes being lo-fi had shit decks.
I believe that, since a recent fire, there is currently only one company that can electroform the masters necessary for mass pressing of records, as opposed to cutting them one at a time. Despite this "craze" we're closer to losing the technology of pressing phonograph records than we've been since it was invented.
I'm kind of vague on the whole lacquer -> father -> mother -> stamper -> record process, and I don't remember which of these steps has supposedly dwindled down to just a single company due to the fire. Googling isn't helping.
Normally "masters" are lacquers, though, so a company that makes their own "masters" still probably outsources the steps after the lacquer and before stamping finished records.
I can confirm, Press On Vinyl makes their own stampers, originally they sent the masters to London and got stampers back but in the last year or so they upgraded the factory and they now do it all in house. Including a mastering studio, if anyone wants to press vinyl please check out kushtybuckrecords.com or pressonvinyl.com (I am the developer of kushtybuckrecords)
Thank you! I clearly didn't have a very good grasp of the situation, and this is definitely what I was thinking of, and it's much less serious than I had thought.
> With the destruction of Apollo Masters, producing lacquer discs fell solely to a small Japanese company, MDC. This caused a significant strain on the industry, as Apollo Masters was responsible for 70-85% of lacquer production.[4][5] As a result of the strain, orders became backlogged and delayed, (...)
> With a decrease in lacquer production, some vinyl pressing plants turned to alternate means of producing records, including direct metal mastering, a costly method of producing records with copper instead of lacquer.
I didn't see any mention of precautions relating to vinyl spall/dust produced by these lathes. As far as I know vinyl is toxic, and I'd expect to see some kind of extraction tube or enclosure if this is being done in a domestic setting.
One of the many secrets of lathe cutting is that these aren't actually PVC, but rather PETG. They actually play nicer and are more durable than pressed PVC records and can have a lower noise floor. On a good day, we can make a cut record that sounds nicer than a pressed one.
Back before CDJs people in the UK used to cut records like this for playing unreleased music in clubs. We referred to the material used for this as "acetate" but I don't know what it was technically. You didn't do it at home though, so maybe the businesses that did it had to have air filters.
We called these records "dubplates" since this practice came from West Indian soundystem culture. I'm sure there are still DJs that do this today.
Acetates are still used in the manufacturing process - even pressed records need to be cut once - but they aren't great as products to send to home-users because they degrade from usage very quickly.
We are also running a soundsystem and mainly cutting for other DJs.
That was my first thought reading this: if these devices spread too far, all the magic will be gone. Dubplates are special not because they are one of a kind, they are special because they are one of a kind while also being so much more exclusive than mixtapes (which can be just as one of a kind, but aren't exclusive at all). Widely available home-cut vinyl might perhaps breed an awesome new culture, but if that happens it will definitely kill the incumbent.
"Vinyl: Maybe it's time we had an intervention" by Benn Jordan.
tl;dw: He puts a VOC meter to a vinyl record and yep they're definitely toxic. Remember, if you smell something, it's going inside your body. That includes "new plastic smell", farts, etc.
> This is just my objective opinion based on a whole lotta research... if you're an avid vinyl collector whose pee-pee hurts after watching this video, understand that my pee-pee hurts a whole lot more.
It's a small shop (and another guy who does the "metal plates") with guys from a punk/hardcore background who are running a basement vinyl production. The video includes a nice simulation of cutting the grooves.
I don't understand vinyl itself, but I understand having a hobby that you can't really explain to other people. Mine is throwing car batteries into the ocean.
A cubic kilometre of untainted seawater (pacific island) contains about 3.5g of Pb. A battery contains about 9000g of Pb. So one battery could affect a lot of seawater IF it were to be soluble.
Lead concentrations in offshore waters are ranging from 0.0035 (American Samoa, South Pacific Ocean) to 0.150 pg/L. (Western Mediterranean Sea; Copin-Montegut et al. 1986).
A lead-acid car battery typically contains 16-21 pounds of lead
For comparison: average concentration of 20 mg/kg of soil
It depends who you talk to. Some people feel vinyl “sounds more analog” just because of the format. Some people feel it adds natural saturation. In my opinion what matters most is the recording source. That said, bass frequencies respond very different on vinyl. Because of this, it’s pretty common to make a separate master for digital and vinyl.
FWIW, almost all vinyl records produced today will come from a digital source. Even if the music was recorded directly to tape, there’s very likely a step of getting that audio into the digital domain.
I think the compression format is what people point to when they say that digital music isn’t as full or “analog” sounding, and that would be true for vinyls made from a source that uses the same format, but there’s also the potential to use the raw WAV file which wouldn’t have this issue even if it’s digital.
> I thought the whole point of vinyl was that it maintains analog from recording to playback
That may be one point for some people, but not mine. I have my music on vinyl and that is how I listen to it. Regardless of the quality or analog vs digital or any of that, if I want to own an album, it needs to be available on vinyl for my to purchase. There are albums I want that I cannot purchase today. This is _my_ walled garden.
You still see cassettes used today because of the ease of home distribution, and bridging the gap between those indie music makers and music consumers like myself is something I am looking forward to.
I don't fully understand the cassette thing either to be honest. I've heard something about it being a mix of analog + digital, but I'm not positive the draw. Artists that I enjoy like Atmosphere and The Midnight both release their albums on cassette, though, so I imagine a good number of people enjoying them.
They usually include the digital download as well so maybe it is just a fun way to get the digital music?
Retro cool, fairly sturdy packaging, doesn’t take up much space.
All things that MiniDisc took inspiration from. It added metadata, near-infinite rerecordability, and on-the-fly track division, combination, and rearrangement.
Never took off in the US, more popular in Europe, very popular in Japan. They were expensive and the first device’s encoding chip gave poor results on a battery that could barely record an hour.
- I prefer to own vs rent music
- I prefer physical to digital (albums often come with digital downloads)
- I enjoy listening to full albums
- I enjoy the album art, liner notes, posters, special releases, etc
Not all the music I want to own is available on vinyl, but at the same time, some of the music I listen to is not on streaming services. And some isn't available on CD. Nothing is perfect. I choose vinyl as it provided the best set of trade-offs for how I enjoy music.
When I was a teenager I recorded vinyl, cassette, cd and even music from the radio on reel to reel tapes just because I liked using the Akai reel to reel tape deck my father was no longer using. Everything in it felt just more satisfyingly sturdy and mechanical to use than my other audio devices made with shitty plastics.
Sometimes the ritual matters more than the outright audio quality.
For starters it will outlast your digital content. Also it won’t get deleted if you forget to pay for cloud storage. And your kids can inherit it without breaking into your cloud accounts.
An excellent argument for physical artifacts. I take an archivist’s point of view and digitize my photos and music for convenience then store the original for long term stable preservation. But I keep everything locally, unlike my kids who seem content to rely on an unchanging world where everything will be around forever.
A few years ago, I realized that the use case for CDs no longer held. Vinyl will persist for experience seekers, lossy audio (MP3 et al) for convenience seekers including streaming, but the audiophiles are now being served by FLAC downloads, which can exceed CD quality. If you poke around bandcamp you’ll find many labels selling vinyl with associated 24bit/96k FLAC downloads tossed in as part of the deal.
There is an argument that the loss of dynamic range and other factors in the compression required in mp3 or CD recordings make the latter inferior to vinyl. This was a prolonged debate forty years ago
CDs have better quality than vinyl in every way. If you want the sound of a vinyl, apply the modulation and record the result on a CD.
In practise, popular music recorded on CDs often had poor mastering (see "loudness wars") where the dynamic range was reduced to make the recording sound louder.
Dynamic range compression is not "required", it's a choice of the mastering engineer. You can produce MP3 or CD recordings with higher dynamic range than vinyl if you want to.
Dynamic range compression is often used on most mainstream music because said music is rarely listened in perfect conditions in one's living room. They need to sound decent enough in the street, in a car, on a metro/train during rush hours, in the kitchen while cooking, on the beach, from allkinf of devices from crappy smartphone headphones, phones and computers integrated speakers or cheap bluetooth speakers.
Ideally one would own 2 different recording of the songs they like. One for good listening environments and high quality equipment, one for more hostile environments. Or have devices that apply dynamic range compression on the fly when needed.
Chemical degradation of CDs can occur over time even in a relatively stable environment. Flash memory is also known to be volatile and most people aren't storing data on flash memory in a redundant storage system.
>If you're that worried, use ZFS or something similar.
I'm not personally storing stuff on vinyl, nor am I "worried", although I have bought a few vinyl that are over 50 years old that play perfectly.
For me, I choose vinyl because I had to pick one of those and I really enjoy 1.) listening to full albums 2.) Album art and 3.) That act of collecting something physical.
tl;dr version - because i prefer it. doesn’t make it right. doesn’t make it wrong. makes it what it is.
* i prefer the weightiness of vinyl (although it make moving flat a pain in the arse)
* most of the stuff i buy is limited run stuff that wont exist again, each release i buy is its own thing that wont exist again — even later pressing runs can come out different
* a lot of the time, someone putting out a small limited release is a good signal to me they give a shit about what they’re doing, so i pay attention more to what they’ve done, and i enjoy it more as a result
* i like having a wall shelves filled with vinyl in my flat, i like collecting stuff
* i like putting records on and sitting and listening to them and watching them go round and round on my decks, i like interacting with them, i like the feel of them, they feel more intimate than just plugging a USB in and going through a menu
* i’m forced to listen as the artist intended - ain’t no skip or shuffle button!
* beat matching with vinyl is far more of an art form - there ain’t no magic “sync” button when you’re mixing with vinyl
Ideally you can maintain the analog chain from recording to the listener’s ear, but that really isn’t feasible for a lot of artists today and could also suffer from generational loss through the process. With cutting a record from a digital source you can control the digital to analog conversion rather than relying on the listener’s DAC (usually not high end) and it only costs you one generation of loss. I don’t think it’s a huge deal, but maybe a benefit.
> It is therefore ironic, that most vinyl records that were cut after the late 70s went through at least one round trip of analogue to digital and digital to analogue conversion. This is because a digital delay is almost always used in the cutting process in order to get better cuts.
For me part of the appeal is to have something physical that I truly own and can enjoy without being tracked by algorithm. Blue Note Tone Poets (which are analogue all the way) got me into the hobby but I also buy new records, especially when they are available in a signed version.
I like to think that different things have a ‘substance’ to them, not unlike the nebulous concept of quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
In this sense, the appeal is not just in the tangible record but also in the ritual of listening to it on a turntable. That process of choosing a record to play and then listen to it is quite a deliberate one, and you probably wouldn’t do it if you didn’t intend to appreciate it. It’s a hobby or an enthusiasm you have and there’s an effort involved in curating your record collection.
I compare that to the process of opening up Spotify of Apple Music where most of that intentionality is stripped away. It serves a totally different purpose as a passive activity, not unlike leaving the radio on in the background, rather than an occasion you’d take time to enjoy.
In my imagination I just picture those scenes in the Bosch TV show where he puts on a classic jazz record, with the view of LA sprawling into the distance in the background. And it wouldn’t be a vibe if he just said ‘Alexa play smooth jazz.’
I might be totally wrong, but I won't be surprised if even commercial vinyls by modern artists come from digital masters. Surely mosts big studios have moved on from tape based systems by now?
Is it that you did not realise that specialist equipment is needed to cut a record? (That is you thought the equipment is more commonplace?)
Or is it that you didn’t realised that the equipment is available to be purchased for home use? (That is you thought the equipment is less commonplace?)
I remember there was a Soviet practice of cutting records into old XRays (called "ribs") as a way to bootleg them. I think those cutting machines were made from retrofitted old phonographs.
For black market uses, the consumers was probably willing to bear dreadful audio quality. For a modern aficionado, the quality must be good enough to give some justification for the endeavor.
Truth be told, compared to industrial record production this is pretty mild. This is a very cool project though, and I'm sure plenty of people will love it. Getting vinyl runs done used to be a massive chore, now you can, at least in theory, be like oh I now want that one.
I guess that is one way to get a premade, high-displacement, powerful enough voice coil in an easy to mount package at a normal speaker impedance. Genius.
I don't see the appeal of spending $5000 to slowly etch vinyl away manually. If this really is a "craze", it exemplifies to me how those watching influencers get hypnotoaded into pursuing hobbies that have huge upfront costs.
If a record nets $10 per, and you etch 20 records per week, the hobby pays for itself within a year. If your business happens to grow, you could buy another machine and make more records.
If your business happens to not grow, the capital outlay is less than $10,000.
Seems reasonable, especially if you otherwise have an affinity for vinyl or create your own music.
That's $10 per, then the buyer needs to pay for shipping, and then taxes. So we're now at least $20 for your etch-a-sketch vinyl.
Before I bought one of these, I insist on being able to play the vinyl and hear it first. So that means you have to be local to me. There are way too many mastering decisions that need to be made correctly for vinyl to sound good. And no, that does not mean being able to take something from your iTunes library mastered for your shitty earbuds.
I do not trust some hobbyist to get any of that right to the point of me willing to pay $10. However, if someone with actual experience with mastering had one of these then I'd be interested, but that dubplate will be way more expensive than $10. A pricetag of $10 tells me the person doing it has no clue about anything involved and has priced themselves too cheap. A person with experience would go broke from the time involved to make any money at $10.
Also, 20 records per week? JeebusChristo that's ambitious. Your sales team would kill your margins at $10 per. Because if you're trying to sell and make the vinyl all by your lonesome, just take the money you were going to invest in getting set up and light it on fire. It'll be faster and much less heartache.
Sorry.. but a sales team for 20 album sales a week? That's just what regular artists making a living do. Small labels too, majority of which are one-person operations. At $20 a pop (cheap these days) that's $20k a year in sales, which is doable if you're promoting releases and gigging actively in a local scene. Majority of small runs go into local shops and get sold at merch boots at shows, not sold b2c in a web shop where it needs to be shipped somewhere else. Many don't have bar codes, so they can't get on Amazon.
But more importantly, people working in the music industry are excited about these developments. I think you as well should be, given you're a self-professed vinyl lover. All this means more development in cutting heads (the current ones cost tens of thousands!), in lathe equipment for master cutting, and more modern equipment and capable engineers working at pressing plants, many of which have had trouble hiring younger people. It also means more development in materials engineering for vinyl, biodegradable materials being a new movement.
If my wildly estimated pricing is accurate, the break even point is 555 records sold. BandCamp looks to be about $4 per EP (and you'd get maybe $3 of that), so this may be a conservative estimate.
Getting a hundred records pressed is well upwards of a grand just for the records. More than that, not a single soul has ever gotten into releasing small run physical albums for the money. If you have two million, and want one million, start a record label.
Your stitled manner loses the nuance of the phrase. Your phrasing makes it sound like you're telling an investor it's going to require $2mil, where the more common phrasing is more of a reality check for a dreamer thinking it's a money making idea. It's only weird if you have no love for well crafted phrases
This whole unhealthy obsession with form over substance (music) really is peak 21th century materialism. Sony's and Philips' engineers must be turning in their graves.
Disregarding the hipster crowd, so many of these "fiddlers" also have such a laughably mundane and insipid taste clashing strongly with their proffered love for music that an outside viewer can't help but raise an eyebrow; I mean, when your musical world is made of Steely Dan, Diana Krall, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, etc...
It's just the man equivalent of collecting porcelain figurines, but with an ad hoc rationalization (it really sounds better!) to protect the ego. Related to Gear Acquisition Syndrome.
People easily overlook the most important part to me of playing vinyl, and get distracted by the "it sounds better" conversation. To me, it is the physicalness of holding the vinyl, watching/reading the grooves, setting the needle, lifting the needle, rinse/repeat for each track you want to listen (assuming using singles). There's much more satisfaction when you're actively doing things to keep the music playing (even if not a DJing) rather than clicking some infinite stream where you just tune out of even paying attention to the music. Playing vinyl forces your attention. That's when you start to become a real music nerd type by learning which cut of the release a song was on, which side of the vinyl, etc.
That might not be what most people care about, and that's fine. They have infinite streaming available for those that just need background noise. But to write vinyl off as a gear acquisition syndrome just screams to me someone doesn't really get it and wants to find a way to mock someone else
CD packaging with jewel cases was a major step down in experience because of size and also because of the inconvenience of getting the booklets out of the case; good CD packaging experiences were exceedingly rare.
Art for streaming is a different medium altogether, as it is behind a screen but potentially dynamic; it can achieve new things, but can't replicate the LP experience any more than photographs can reproduce sculptures.
The Black Crowes Southern Harmony and Musical Companion is the size of a jewel case, but cardboard like an LP cover, and folds out to reveal an extra six segments as well as front and back covers. (Five have pictures, the other one holds the CD.) So that's a good effort, but fundamentally LPs are a more satisfying size for looking at.
That sounds too easy, real music nerd types carve their own vinyls at home. Realer music nerds build machines that carve vinyls. Realerer music nerds work in mines that supply metal (no pun intended) for those machine parts etc. And I'm just a wanker with Spotify and rate your music that accelerated my
taste and education in music 1000x times.
Those are details not improving the music itself; even if cool auxiliary aspects, sometimes. You can listen to full albums intently even when using a digital system. In fact, do you truly care if you have to be physically constrained into doing so?
I'll sound very smug, but so be it: this is a trap very easy to fall in. Are you a "proper" christian if you only are because you fear hell? Do you care about software freedom if you had to be spoonfed baby duck software that looks and feels just like Windows to switch?
Nothing I said implied improving the music, so I have no idea why you're trying to make the connection. The point I was making is that vinyl is about the medium. The physical nature of constantly changing the record means you're more involved.
I specifically said that claiming it to be a "better sound" is not what I like about vinyl.
So to be very smug, your second graph is absolutely pointless since you've missed the point of the comment you replied
Sorry there’s nuance missing here, I might personally not have any records, but I understand how some people must enjoy it and I can’t judge them.
This reads more like ‘not for me, not for thee’ syndrome.
Fair point and maybe I can contribute, as I get the hostility in the tone. It’s in the inherent contradiction of the justification of the pursuit, from a music appreciation standpoint. Vinyl does not sound better, and many of the legacy artists mentioned didn’t record great quality (sounding) material in the modern era. It’s most definitely a “splurge” of wastefulness under a decidedly erroneous claim.
Have you listened to vinyl on a good system? I have trouble believing anybody who says this has ever listened to a decent record on a decent stereo.
Not all vinyl sounds better in my system. Some really is crap. But when I directly compare, and all other things are equal (or seem to be), vinyl normally sounds better than digital.
This is more often true of more recent records, too, though some of Deutsche Grammophone's Archive Production records from even the 50s sound astonishingly good.
I understand that objectively vinyl doesn't measure as well as CD, but I'll be damned if it doesn't sound better. My partner thinks it does, too, and she has no patience for audiophile nonsense.
> though some of Deutsche Grammophone's Archive Production records from even the 50s sound astonishingly good.
For what it is, i.e. a rock being dragged through a groove. But I'm very surprised to see this used as example, since orchestral music is the worst case scenario for vinyl: the reduced dynamic range makes good reproduction of those peaks simply impossible (labels like BIS would never have been able to engineer their magic such as on this CD - see the warning on the cover - https://www.discogs.com/release/16832175-Carl-Nielsen-Gothen...) and the surface noise really impacts the quieter moments.
Don't get me wrong, some CDs were brickwalled while the corresponding LP got a way saner master (e.g. Celtic Frost's Monotheist), but with similar masters, CD simply always wins as a medium. In this case, I digitize the LP while its surface wear is at its lowest.
Very excellent citation and explanation - one of my main attractions to drum & bass over the years has been the amazing capitalization upon dynamic range possible with modern systems. Why would I listen to Sub Focus on vinyl when the corresponding digital file (even 320 kbps - not to even mention “lossless” being somewhat possible) does not suffer from physical interface complications? I’m glad you brought up mastering and the “loudness wars” who CB is absolutely great reading for those interested in audiophile related endeavors!
Sound being a highly subjective term, I will grant vinyl can sound “warmer” on an A/B test but it does not sound “better” as a standing point. Every system “colors” sound to a certain degree - a la Beats headphones artificially enhancing the bass profile to suit market fit - but when talking quality, no, vinyl is still a problematic medium. Source: 20 years of audio production spanning tape to modern tools, and opinions based on experience and qualitative analysis where possible.
Yes I see what you mean, with hobbies sometimes better costs is equal to better quality (probably not in a linear sense). Records are not that, but ig there’s other examples like old cars that fit the same profile.
Really the root question might be, what is better quality? There’s definitely a quality of experience with physical media that there isn’t an analog to in the digital world. I’m sure there are other examples on both sides.
I'd say the whole Baroque movement in the 17th century was form over substance too but not necessarily linked to our definition of materialism. At least they knew how to play instruments back then...
I now see that I didn't understood your comment. Yeah, the vinyl form was interesting back then (because it was cheap) but it sounds like shit to me now. But you see this everywhere a company sees a trend and exploit it: anime figures, nostalgia, ... You can't do anything about it anyway, I gave up on that a long time ago. I draw the line where the whole music itself is disconnected from what you are trying to achieve (treating it as fast food, buying manga in Japanese without being able to read Japanese, any kind of collecting that you don't have the skills to experience...)
One last thing though. You can have better music than all the CDs in the world if you are looking for a private or concert experience. It all depends on what you seek. Woodstock guys thought they would change the world (and they did in their own way), and the Beatles got their own spiritual/mystical experience in India (which George Harrison used to add the sitar in some songs).
I never experienced that but some people do enjoy it, and it's fine as long as it's not a temporary obsession (but that's still my debatable opinion).
I remember my aunt saying that she went to a Santana concert in the 70s. She only remembered that "there was a lot of smoke in the room." Did it change her forever? Maybe not, only she knows. But even single experiences can have long-lasting effects that, I'm sure, we'll never be capable of sharing fully.
I was about to criticize your comment for unnecessary mean-spiritedness, but then I remembered that I don't have the moral high ground.
I once stayed with wealthy tech CEO whose had a very expensive MacIntosh-based stereo, plus some rather expensive looking speakers. His musical library? Grateful Dead, Chicago, Neil Young.
The guy gets the enjoy what he enjoys. More power to him. I just can't imagine spending so much for, musically, so very, very little.
The Dead, at least, were a band that absolutely pushed the limits of sound engineering in concerts as well as encouraging incredibly elaborate concert recording setups. The wall of sound, and the entire culture of high quality live recordings by 3rd parties is a huge part of their popularity.
Why wouldn’t you want to listen to them on a nice system?
What it comes down to is that for a lot of people, operating and owning certain equipment is what gives them joy. You see this in a lot, maybe all, of hobbies and pleasure. It’s like the guy who spends $1k on a 3d printer to make trinkets that you can buy at the dollar store.
Idk it seems fairly normal to have a hobby (eg photography, 3d printing, espresso) where you are able to spend thousands. The main issue is that I'm not sure it's easy to get into pressing vinyl - what's the starter kit price?
I think the appeal is having audio you made or sourced on a medium that is normally reserved for record manufacturers doing a large volume production run...
A buddy of mine just acquired one of these machines (actually a beta version of a new product that will hopefully enter the market soon), and I've been helping him along the way as we try to get some good records out of it.
It's not easy! It's not like plugging in a printer. There are so many variables to consider (materials, temperatures, pressures, angles, sharpnesses, volumes, phase), magical anti-static solution formulas, airflow, isolation, line control. The margin of error can be as low as 100 microns, and if you screw up, you might break a $200 diamond shank which have to be specially manufactured and imported.
And that's before you even get to the actual audio quality!
Still, it's fun to use and great to have 1-of-a-kind dubplates.
Knowing what I learned about vinyl mastering back when I was DJing in college... There's about to be a whole lot of shitty records out there.
Agreed, and that’s why I’m sitting this one out and instead pouring all my investment capital into the next craze, reel-to-reel machines!
You jest, but R2R is what some audiophiles are generally on about as being the bees knees, and has been getting popular again. I like physical music, but the prices on those is too much. I have heard some really good sounding reels, though I can never shake the feeling that they just have been recorded really, really well, using expensive equipment I can't afford to even rent, and would've sounded the same having been recorded digitally.
That I do and you’re also spot on that it does have a lot of merit as a medium - Les Paul did so much for music by lugging R2R gear around and proving its worth in the studio that his legacy is at the pinnacle of any and all people who, well, love music!
Could do worse than investing in some reels in this climate. At least they're fungible.
To me there is nothing cooler than a huge reel to reel when it comes to different formats. If I had some free time and space for it I would definitely want to buy one of the giant consoles and then hook up a write head right before the read head so that it can play off any digital source like Spotify but still do it with the huge reels and everything.
Why wouldn’t you just use the reel like a visual-only scroll bar for stylish physical feedback on play progress?
Either way, the physical media in your imagined setup, and what you are playing, have no special relationship.
No need to use it like a bad transmission wire. If it can’t transmit across time (storage) it is not a real “reel” anyway.
I enjoy noise music, I just finished listening to a 20-minute arrhythmic improvisational jazz track with a guy singing in a kind of Simlish. So I can imagine that lower fidelity, or a bad transmission wire, might be part of an enjoyable experience.
On the other hand, apart from the trivial detail of us all living in our own unique problem situations, I'm pretty sure that my preferences are the best and anybody else would be revealed to have stupid ones, if only we could communicate about them. But (speaking of bad transmission wires) detailed communication about ineffable private experiences is patchy at best, so regrettably we have to leave one another in peace to enjoy stuff, and lay off on the backseat driving.
Touché!
Weird!
You can still pay for a master and print the vinyl yourself. A 10 track album might cost an extra £10 per track for a vinyl master, but each print of a record is 3x that.
Professional mastering costs considerably more than 10 quids per track, and vinyl mastering, to my point, is a niche and somewhat arcane skill set.
I said an _extra_ £10.
I've just recorded an album and had it's being mastered this week. We're paying £60/track for mastering, and an extra £10/track for vinyl mastering.,
Fair enough, I misread your comment.
It sounds fun but reminds me of my recent foray into cassette culture where I rediscovered that while I love everything about cassettes and making them, I had forgotten they sound like crap haha.
I’m currently into making CDs.
With decent equipment, cassettes sound fantastic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVoSQP2yUYA
Unfortunately all the cassette mechanisms (and cassettes themselves) manufactured and sold new today are complete garbage. And the old ones need a lot of (physical) maintenance to get back into spec.
I saw an estimate a while ago that cassettes have like 3-5 bit depth equivalent on average.
https://youtu.be/UqiBJbREUgU?t=628
Digital Show & Tell from Monty at Xiph
> Those of you who have used analog recording equipment may have just thought to yourselves, "My goodness! That sounds like tape hiss!" Well, it doesn't just sound like tape hiss, it acts like it, too. And if we use a Gaussian dither, then it's mathematically equivalent in every way. It _is_ tape hiss!
> Intuitively, that means we can measure tape hiss, and thus the noise floor of magnetic audio tape, in bits, instead of decibels, in order to put things in a digital perspective. Compact cassettes... (Monty holds up a tape, then glares at it and flips it over in his hand) ... for those of you who are old enough to remember them, could reach as deep as nine bits in perfect conditions, though five to six bits was more typical, especially if it was a recording made on a tape deck.
> That's right - Your mixtapes were only about six bits deep, if you were lucky. The very best professional open-reel tape used in studios could barely hit - any guesses? - 13 bits _with_ advanced noise reduction.
It's not an apples to apples comparison, really. Tape is desirable for its nonlinear (read: saturation) characteristics, and those can't really be measured in a very comparable manner by taking a regular digital domain bit depth analysis and dropping it in the tape world using the background hiss and 0dB as a clamp. It's an OK talking point, but it's easily oversimplified.
Hiss is variable, too. When calculating the low end of the range from the background hiss, do we consider a -80dB hiss above ~2000Hz affecting the "bit depth" more than -80dB hiss below it? The hiss is nowhere near white noise either, so some frequency ranges are more affected than others.
I have to agree that sometimes I do like how tape sounds. A Hearts of Space recording playing in the car with Stephen Hill's mellow voice going as I drive sounds so right. Something about the low fidelity of tape and how everything is kind of smashed together is quite soothing.
This can’t be right. Tape decks with a separate record head allow you to listen to the currently recorded track and quickly switch between the track and source feed. Apart from the hiss, the difference in quality is rather subtle for most people.
Now, whether the store-bought tape from the 90s was recorded well, that’s a different story.
Good quality cassettes sound great, as good as CDs. You probably just had a shitty deck and shitty tapes.
That's actually rude to say and I think my deck was ok and tapes were ok. My deck was a single well Sansui and my tapes were new Maxell tapes. Sure I might eek out some more performance with a Nakamichi deck and chrome tapes that cost $14 a blank or something but it's still going to sound like a cassette deck.
https://audiochrome.blogspot.com/2020/12/cassette-tape-measu...
I find some charm in the lo-fi sound, if I wanted hi-fi sound I would just record something digitally for basically free, so I don't see the point of chasing the dragon of ultimate cassette sound quality.
It's not 'rude to say,' it's simply the truth. With good quality metal tapes, and Dolby C, a cassette is going to perform as well as any room you care to listen in. I find most people who complain about cassettes being lo-fi had shit decks.
Reading this it sounds like an early 3d printer, where you’d have to manually align stuff and make sure its nicely flat and all that.
All in all great fun though!
Your buddy might like https://www.tokyodawn.net/tdr-simulathe-cut/ which simulates the vinyl grooves on your computer.
I believe that, since a recent fire, there is currently only one company that can electroform the masters necessary for mass pressing of records, as opposed to cutting them one at a time. Despite this "craze" we're closer to losing the technology of pressing phonograph records than we've been since it was invented.
Press on Vinyl are able to make there own masters. Can you clarify what you mean?
I'm kind of vague on the whole lacquer -> father -> mother -> stamper -> record process, and I don't remember which of these steps has supposedly dwindled down to just a single company due to the fire. Googling isn't helping.
Normally "masters" are lacquers, though, so a company that makes their own "masters" still probably outsources the steps after the lacquer and before stamping finished records.
I can confirm, Press On Vinyl makes their own stampers, originally they sent the masters to London and got stampers back but in the last year or so they upgraded the factory and they now do it all in house. Including a mastering studio, if anyone wants to press vinyl please check out kushtybuckrecords.com or pressonvinyl.com (I am the developer of kushtybuckrecords)
What fire?
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43221756.
There's some detail in the Apollo Masters wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Masters_Corporation_fir...
Thank you! I clearly didn't have a very good grasp of the situation, and this is definitely what I was thinking of, and it's much less serious than I had thought.
> With the destruction of Apollo Masters, producing lacquer discs fell solely to a small Japanese company, MDC. This caused a significant strain on the industry, as Apollo Masters was responsible for 70-85% of lacquer production.[4][5] As a result of the strain, orders became backlogged and delayed, (...)
> With a decrease in lacquer production, some vinyl pressing plants turned to alternate means of producing records, including direct metal mastering, a costly method of producing records with copper instead of lacquer.
Swan's Death Records could make their own masters too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_the_Paradise, sorry for being kinda off-topic)
I didn't see any mention of precautions relating to vinyl spall/dust produced by these lathes. As far as I know vinyl is toxic, and I'd expect to see some kind of extraction tube or enclosure if this is being done in a domestic setting.
One of the many secrets of lathe cutting is that these aren't actually PVC, but rather PETG. They actually play nicer and are more durable than pressed PVC records and can have a lower noise floor. On a good day, we can make a cut record that sounds nicer than a pressed one.
Back before CDJs people in the UK used to cut records like this for playing unreleased music in clubs. We referred to the material used for this as "acetate" but I don't know what it was technically. You didn't do it at home though, so maybe the businesses that did it had to have air filters.
We called these records "dubplates" since this practice came from West Indian soundystem culture. I'm sure there are still DJs that do this today.
Acetates are still used in the manufacturing process - even pressed records need to be cut once - but they aren't great as products to send to home-users because they degrade from usage very quickly.
We are also running a soundsystem and mainly cutting for other DJs.
Records are cool!
Nitrocellulose lacquer on a substrate, says Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetate_disc
That was my first thought reading this: if these devices spread too far, all the magic will be gone. Dubplates are special not because they are one of a kind, they are special because they are one of a kind while also being so much more exclusive than mixtapes (which can be just as one of a kind, but aren't exclusive at all). Widely available home-cut vinyl might perhaps breed an awesome new culture, but if that happens it will definitely kill the incumbent.
You right. This practice lives on in dubstep and soundsystem music in general.
I guess you'd really have to get your bed leveling dialed in perfectly to 3d print a record
edit:
ok I googled it: 3d printed playable record: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM7hwAuXqCE
1. yes it's possible - using some kind of resin printing method, not FDM.
2. no it doesn't sound very good.
> As far as I know vinyl is toxic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ2czFuIYmQ&pp=ygURYmVubiBqb...
"Vinyl: Maybe it's time we had an intervention" by Benn Jordan.
tl;dw: He puts a VOC meter to a vinyl record and yep they're definitely toxic. Remember, if you smell something, it's going inside your body. That includes "new plastic smell", farts, etc.
> This is just my objective opinion based on a whole lotta research... if you're an avid vinyl collector whose pee-pee hurts after watching this video, understand that my pee-pee hurts a whole lot more.
If you are interested in vinyl take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJjkSDObblY
It's a small shop (and another guy who does the "metal plates") with guys from a punk/hardcore background who are running a basement vinyl production. The video includes a nice simulation of cutting the grooves.
I don't understand vinyl itself, but I understand having a hobby that you can't really explain to other people. Mine is throwing car batteries into the ocean.
Your hobby is polluting the local area with highly toxic material? Dang man, that's evil
A cubic kilometre of untainted seawater (pacific island) contains about 3.5g of Pb. A battery contains about 9000g of Pb. So one battery could affect a lot of seawater IF it were to be soluble.
Very important habitat restoration for electric eels, actually.
[dead]
The fascination with home recording on disc is not new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42037367
What's the point in cutting vinyl from a digital source? Fashion?
I thought the whole point of vinyl was that it maintains analog from recording to playback
It depends who you talk to. Some people feel vinyl “sounds more analog” just because of the format. Some people feel it adds natural saturation. In my opinion what matters most is the recording source. That said, bass frequencies respond very different on vinyl. Because of this, it’s pretty common to make a separate master for digital and vinyl.
FWIW, almost all vinyl records produced today will come from a digital source. Even if the music was recorded directly to tape, there’s very likely a step of getting that audio into the digital domain.
I think the compression format is what people point to when they say that digital music isn’t as full or “analog” sounding, and that would be true for vinyls made from a source that uses the same format, but there’s also the potential to use the raw WAV file which wouldn’t have this issue even if it’s digital.
> I thought the whole point of vinyl was that it maintains analog from recording to playback
That may be one point for some people, but not mine. I have my music on vinyl and that is how I listen to it. Regardless of the quality or analog vs digital or any of that, if I want to own an album, it needs to be available on vinyl for my to purchase. There are albums I want that I cannot purchase today. This is _my_ walled garden.
You still see cassettes used today because of the ease of home distribution, and bridging the gap between those indie music makers and music consumers like myself is something I am looking forward to.
> You still see cassettes used today because of the ease of home distribution
That can't be the reason, USB sticks are much easier to get/make/distribute
I don't fully understand the cassette thing either to be honest. I've heard something about it being a mix of analog + digital, but I'm not positive the draw. Artists that I enjoy like Atmosphere and The Midnight both release their albums on cassette, though, so I imagine a good number of people enjoying them.
They usually include the digital download as well so maybe it is just a fun way to get the digital music?
Retro cool, fairly sturdy packaging, doesn’t take up much space.
All things that MiniDisc took inspiration from. It added metadata, near-infinite rerecordability, and on-the-fly track division, combination, and rearrangement.
Never took off in the US, more popular in Europe, very popular in Japan. They were expensive and the first device’s encoding chip gave poor results on a battery that could barely record an hour.
there is more chance your cassette is readable 20years from now (mine are) than data in a single solid state memory device so there is that.
So, what is your point for owning vinyls?
Listening to music?
When I was a teenager I recorded vinyl, cassette, cd and even music from the radio on reel to reel tapes just because I liked using the Akai reel to reel tape deck my father was no longer using. Everything in it felt just more satisfyingly sturdy and mechanical to use than my other audio devices made with shitty plastics.
Sometimes the ritual matters more than the outright audio quality.
> I have my music on vinyl and that is how I listen to it.
If I’m reading this right, he owns vinyl music recordings for the purpose of playing back music.
For starters it will outlast your digital content. Also it won’t get deleted if you forget to pay for cloud storage. And your kids can inherit it without breaking into your cloud accounts.
An excellent argument for physical artifacts. I take an archivist’s point of view and digitize my photos and music for convenience then store the original for long term stable preservation. But I keep everything locally, unlike my kids who seem content to rely on an unchanging world where everything will be around forever.
A few years ago, I realized that the use case for CDs no longer held. Vinyl will persist for experience seekers, lossy audio (MP3 et al) for convenience seekers including streaming, but the audiophiles are now being served by FLAC downloads, which can exceed CD quality. If you poke around bandcamp you’ll find many labels selling vinyl with associated 24bit/96k FLAC downloads tossed in as part of the deal.
but why a vinyl instead of a cd? or a mp3 on an iphone/sdcard/hard drive?
There is an argument that the loss of dynamic range and other factors in the compression required in mp3 or CD recordings make the latter inferior to vinyl. This was a prolonged debate forty years ago
CDs have better quality than vinyl in every way. If you want the sound of a vinyl, apply the modulation and record the result on a CD.
In practise, popular music recorded on CDs often had poor mastering (see "loudness wars") where the dynamic range was reduced to make the recording sound louder.
> CDs have better quality than vinyl in every way.
that’s an entirely subjective statement which critically hangs on what “quality” means to the audience.
i don’t agree, but then i’m not limiting myself to define quality in terms of how some signal reproduces sounds.
That's why some deaf people feel superior
huh?
Deaf culture, presumably.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture
"Refuge from the grinding frustrations of the hearing world", appreciation of the quality of no sounds, sort of like John Cage's 4'33" but quieter.
Dynamic range compression is not "required", it's a choice of the mastering engineer. You can produce MP3 or CD recordings with higher dynamic range than vinyl if you want to.
This is the reason why classical music CDs (and radio) usually sound much quieter. More dynamic range.
Dynamic range compression is often used on most mainstream music because said music is rarely listened in perfect conditions in one's living room. They need to sound decent enough in the street, in a car, on a metro/train during rush hours, in the kitchen while cooking, on the beach, from allkinf of devices from crappy smartphone headphones, phones and computers integrated speakers or cheap bluetooth speakers.
Ideally one would own 2 different recording of the songs they like. One for good listening environments and high quality equipment, one for more hostile environments. Or have devices that apply dynamic range compression on the fly when needed.
>but why a vinyl instead of a cd? or a mp3 on an iphone/sdcard/hard drive
There's no bit corruption with vinyl like with digital storage formats or disk rot like with cds.
If you store files properly they won't corrupt. If you're that worried, use ZFS or something similar.
>If you store files properly they won't corrupt.
Chemical degradation of CDs can occur over time even in a relatively stable environment. Flash memory is also known to be volatile and most people aren't storing data on flash memory in a redundant storage system.
>If you're that worried, use ZFS or something similar.
I'm not personally storing stuff on vinyl, nor am I "worried", although I have bought a few vinyl that are over 50 years old that play perfectly.
For me, I choose vinyl because I had to pick one of those and I really enjoy 1.) listening to full albums 2.) Album art and 3.) That act of collecting something physical.
not the parent.
tl;dr version - because i prefer it. doesn’t make it right. doesn’t make it wrong. makes it what it is.
* i prefer the weightiness of vinyl (although it make moving flat a pain in the arse)
* most of the stuff i buy is limited run stuff that wont exist again, each release i buy is its own thing that wont exist again — even later pressing runs can come out different
* a lot of the time, someone putting out a small limited release is a good signal to me they give a shit about what they’re doing, so i pay attention more to what they’ve done, and i enjoy it more as a result
* i like having a wall shelves filled with vinyl in my flat, i like collecting stuff
* i like putting records on and sitting and listening to them and watching them go round and round on my decks, i like interacting with them, i like the feel of them, they feel more intimate than just plugging a USB in and going through a menu
* i’m forced to listen as the artist intended - ain’t no skip or shuffle button!
* beat matching with vinyl is far more of an art form - there ain’t no magic “sync” button when you’re mixing with vinyl
* i think it sounds better
* it’s the hobby i picked and i enjoy it
Ideally you can maintain the analog chain from recording to the listener’s ear, but that really isn’t feasible for a lot of artists today and could also suffer from generational loss through the process. With cutting a record from a digital source you can control the digital to analog conversion rather than relying on the listener’s DAC (usually not high end) and it only costs you one generation of loss. I don’t think it’s a huge deal, but maybe a benefit.
> It is therefore ironic, that most vinyl records that were cut after the late 70s went through at least one round trip of analogue to digital and digital to analogue conversion. This is because a digital delay is almost always used in the cutting process in order to get better cuts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM7sI7GZPbk
For me part of the appeal is to have something physical that I truly own and can enjoy without being tracked by algorithm. Blue Note Tone Poets (which are analogue all the way) got me into the hobby but I also buy new records, especially when they are available in a signed version.
I like to think that different things have a ‘substance’ to them, not unlike the nebulous concept of quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
In this sense, the appeal is not just in the tangible record but also in the ritual of listening to it on a turntable. That process of choosing a record to play and then listen to it is quite a deliberate one, and you probably wouldn’t do it if you didn’t intend to appreciate it. It’s a hobby or an enthusiasm you have and there’s an effort involved in curating your record collection.
I compare that to the process of opening up Spotify of Apple Music where most of that intentionality is stripped away. It serves a totally different purpose as a passive activity, not unlike leaving the radio on in the background, rather than an occasion you’d take time to enjoy.
In my imagination I just picture those scenes in the Bosch TV show where he puts on a classic jazz record, with the view of LA sprawling into the distance in the background. And it wouldn’t be a vibe if he just said ‘Alexa play smooth jazz.’
I might be totally wrong, but I won't be surprised if even commercial vinyls by modern artists come from digital masters. Surely mosts big studios have moved on from tape based systems by now?
My point exactly. Modern vinyl records are simply a fashion object.
See Richard Houghten https://www.richardhoughten.com/
The holograms are very cool
Anyone have one and can give personal use details?
I didn’t realize there was such special equipment needed to cut a record at home.
I’m confused about how you mean by your sentence.
Is it that you did not realise that specialist equipment is needed to cut a record? (That is you thought the equipment is more commonplace?)
Or is it that you didn’t realised that the equipment is available to be purchased for home use? (That is you thought the equipment is less commonplace?)
> specialist equipment is needed to cut a record
I remember there was a Soviet practice of cutting records into old XRays (called "ribs") as a way to bootleg them. I think those cutting machines were made from retrofitted old phonographs.
"Bone records" (https://www.npr.org/2016/01/09/462289635/bones-and-grooves-w...).
For black market uses, the consumers was probably willing to bear dreadful audio quality. For a modern aficionado, the quality must be good enough to give some justification for the endeavor.
Truth be told, compared to industrial record production this is pretty mild. This is a very cool project though, and I'm sure plenty of people will love it. Getting vinyl runs done used to be a massive chore, now you can, at least in theory, be like oh I now want that one.
Buy a CD burner and make your own CDs! Much easier.
I'm almost positive I've seen those drivers that are being used on the cutting head before...
They look like.... yeah:
Waterproof audio transducers, make by a company called PQN and designed for hot tub sound systems.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/174285036157
I guess that is one way to get a premade, high-displacement, powerful enough voice coil in an easy to mount package at a normal speaker impedance. Genius.
Next they'll record on to tape and burn CD-Rs!
I don't see the appeal of spending $5000 to slowly etch vinyl away manually. If this really is a "craze", it exemplifies to me how those watching influencers get hypnotoaded into pursuing hobbies that have huge upfront costs.
If a record nets $10 per, and you etch 20 records per week, the hobby pays for itself within a year. If your business happens to grow, you could buy another machine and make more records.
If your business happens to not grow, the capital outlay is less than $10,000.
Seems reasonable, especially if you otherwise have an affinity for vinyl or create your own music.
That's $10 per, then the buyer needs to pay for shipping, and then taxes. So we're now at least $20 for your etch-a-sketch vinyl.
Before I bought one of these, I insist on being able to play the vinyl and hear it first. So that means you have to be local to me. There are way too many mastering decisions that need to be made correctly for vinyl to sound good. And no, that does not mean being able to take something from your iTunes library mastered for your shitty earbuds.
I do not trust some hobbyist to get any of that right to the point of me willing to pay $10. However, if someone with actual experience with mastering had one of these then I'd be interested, but that dubplate will be way more expensive than $10. A pricetag of $10 tells me the person doing it has no clue about anything involved and has priced themselves too cheap. A person with experience would go broke from the time involved to make any money at $10.
Also, 20 records per week? JeebusChristo that's ambitious. Your sales team would kill your margins at $10 per. Because if you're trying to sell and make the vinyl all by your lonesome, just take the money you were going to invest in getting set up and light it on fire. It'll be faster and much less heartache.
The vocabulary term "net" means profit after expenses. Certainly the retail price would be higher.
hobbies are spending money irrationally for joys or pleasures of the act of doing that hobby, no always about a business plan, do you have any?
I'm not the one that came up with the idea of selling 20 etched vinyls per week at $10 each concept.
Sorry.. but a sales team for 20 album sales a week? That's just what regular artists making a living do. Small labels too, majority of which are one-person operations. At $20 a pop (cheap these days) that's $20k a year in sales, which is doable if you're promoting releases and gigging actively in a local scene. Majority of small runs go into local shops and get sold at merch boots at shows, not sold b2c in a web shop where it needs to be shipped somewhere else. Many don't have bar codes, so they can't get on Amazon.
But more importantly, people working in the music industry are excited about these developments. I think you as well should be, given you're a self-professed vinyl lover. All this means more development in cutting heads (the current ones cost tens of thousands!), in lathe equipment for master cutting, and more modern equipment and capable engineers working at pressing plants, many of which have had trouble hiring younger people. It also means more development in materials engineering for vinyl, biodegradable materials being a new movement.
That's $10 more than you can get for selling your recording in digital format online.
Bitcoin mining was also a hobby that paid for itself within a year. And tulip farming...
That sounds like a job not a hobby.
Getting a hundred records pressed is well upwards of a grand just for the records. More than that, not a single soul has ever gotten into releasing small run physical albums for the money. If you have two million, and want one million, start a record label.
> If you have two million, and want one million, start a record label.
That's the most tortured version of that phrase that I've ever seen.
"If you want to make $1 million with a record label, start with $2 million" is the typical way to use the phrase.
Perhaps it didn't cross your mind that I expressed it in a stilted manner on purpose? What a weird thing to get hung up on anyway
Your stitled manner loses the nuance of the phrase. Your phrasing makes it sound like you're telling an investor it's going to require $2mil, where the more common phrasing is more of a reality check for a dreamer thinking it's a money making idea. It's only weird if you have no love for well crafted phrases
OK...
This whole unhealthy obsession with form over substance (music) really is peak 21th century materialism. Sony's and Philips' engineers must be turning in their graves.
Disregarding the hipster crowd, so many of these "fiddlers" also have such a laughably mundane and insipid taste clashing strongly with their proffered love for music that an outside viewer can't help but raise an eyebrow; I mean, when your musical world is made of Steely Dan, Diana Krall, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, etc...
It's just the man equivalent of collecting porcelain figurines, but with an ad hoc rationalization (it really sounds better!) to protect the ego. Related to Gear Acquisition Syndrome.
People easily overlook the most important part to me of playing vinyl, and get distracted by the "it sounds better" conversation. To me, it is the physicalness of holding the vinyl, watching/reading the grooves, setting the needle, lifting the needle, rinse/repeat for each track you want to listen (assuming using singles). There's much more satisfaction when you're actively doing things to keep the music playing (even if not a DJing) rather than clicking some infinite stream where you just tune out of even paying attention to the music. Playing vinyl forces your attention. That's when you start to become a real music nerd type by learning which cut of the release a song was on, which side of the vinyl, etc.
That might not be what most people care about, and that's fine. They have infinite streaming available for those that just need background noise. But to write vinyl off as a gear acquisition syndrome just screams to me someone doesn't really get it and wants to find a way to mock someone else
Album art for 12-inch LPs is fabulous.
CD packaging with jewel cases was a major step down in experience because of size and also because of the inconvenience of getting the booklets out of the case; good CD packaging experiences were exceedingly rare.
Art for streaming is a different medium altogether, as it is behind a screen but potentially dynamic; it can achieve new things, but can't replicate the LP experience any more than photographs can reproduce sculptures.
The Black Crowes Southern Harmony and Musical Companion is the size of a jewel case, but cardboard like an LP cover, and folds out to reveal an extra six segments as well as front and back covers. (Five have pictures, the other one holds the CD.) So that's a good effort, but fundamentally LPs are a more satisfying size for looking at.
That sounds too easy, real music nerd types carve their own vinyls at home. Realer music nerds build machines that carve vinyls. Realerer music nerds work in mines that supply metal (no pun intended) for those machine parts etc. And I'm just a wanker with Spotify and rate your music that accelerated my taste and education in music 1000x times.
Those are details not improving the music itself; even if cool auxiliary aspects, sometimes. You can listen to full albums intently even when using a digital system. In fact, do you truly care if you have to be physically constrained into doing so?
I'll sound very smug, but so be it: this is a trap very easy to fall in. Are you a "proper" christian if you only are because you fear hell? Do you care about software freedom if you had to be spoonfed baby duck software that looks and feels just like Windows to switch?
Nothing I said implied improving the music, so I have no idea why you're trying to make the connection. The point I was making is that vinyl is about the medium. The physical nature of constantly changing the record means you're more involved.
I specifically said that claiming it to be a "better sound" is not what I like about vinyl.
So to be very smug, your second graph is absolutely pointless since you've missed the point of the comment you replied
No, I didn't miss anything. If you need to be forced by a physical routine to be "involved", do you truly care about music? Why?
Sorry there’s nuance missing here, I might personally not have any records, but I understand how some people must enjoy it and I can’t judge them. This reads more like ‘not for me, not for thee’ syndrome.
Fair point and maybe I can contribute, as I get the hostility in the tone. It’s in the inherent contradiction of the justification of the pursuit, from a music appreciation standpoint. Vinyl does not sound better, and many of the legacy artists mentioned didn’t record great quality (sounding) material in the modern era. It’s most definitely a “splurge” of wastefulness under a decidedly erroneous claim.
> Vinyl does not sound better
Have you listened to vinyl on a good system? I have trouble believing anybody who says this has ever listened to a decent record on a decent stereo.
Not all vinyl sounds better in my system. Some really is crap. But when I directly compare, and all other things are equal (or seem to be), vinyl normally sounds better than digital.
This is more often true of more recent records, too, though some of Deutsche Grammophone's Archive Production records from even the 50s sound astonishingly good.
I understand that objectively vinyl doesn't measure as well as CD, but I'll be damned if it doesn't sound better. My partner thinks it does, too, and she has no patience for audiophile nonsense.
> though some of Deutsche Grammophone's Archive Production records from even the 50s sound astonishingly good.
For what it is, i.e. a rock being dragged through a groove. But I'm very surprised to see this used as example, since orchestral music is the worst case scenario for vinyl: the reduced dynamic range makes good reproduction of those peaks simply impossible (labels like BIS would never have been able to engineer their magic such as on this CD - see the warning on the cover - https://www.discogs.com/release/16832175-Carl-Nielsen-Gothen...) and the surface noise really impacts the quieter moments.
Don't get me wrong, some CDs were brickwalled while the corresponding LP got a way saner master (e.g. Celtic Frost's Monotheist), but with similar masters, CD simply always wins as a medium. In this case, I digitize the LP while its surface wear is at its lowest.
Very excellent citation and explanation - one of my main attractions to drum & bass over the years has been the amazing capitalization upon dynamic range possible with modern systems. Why would I listen to Sub Focus on vinyl when the corresponding digital file (even 320 kbps - not to even mention “lossless” being somewhat possible) does not suffer from physical interface complications? I’m glad you brought up mastering and the “loudness wars” who CB is absolutely great reading for those interested in audiophile related endeavors!
Sound being a highly subjective term, I will grant vinyl can sound “warmer” on an A/B test but it does not sound “better” as a standing point. Every system “colors” sound to a certain degree - a la Beats headphones artificially enhancing the bass profile to suit market fit - but when talking quality, no, vinyl is still a problematic medium. Source: 20 years of audio production spanning tape to modern tools, and opinions based on experience and qualitative analysis where possible.
Yes I see what you mean, with hobbies sometimes better costs is equal to better quality (probably not in a linear sense). Records are not that, but ig there’s other examples like old cars that fit the same profile. Really the root question might be, what is better quality? There’s definitely a quality of experience with physical media that there isn’t an analog to in the digital world. I’m sure there are other examples on both sides.
I'd say the whole Baroque movement in the 17th century was form over substance too but not necessarily linked to our definition of materialism. At least they knew how to play instruments back then...
I now see that I didn't understood your comment. Yeah, the vinyl form was interesting back then (because it was cheap) but it sounds like shit to me now. But you see this everywhere a company sees a trend and exploit it: anime figures, nostalgia, ... You can't do anything about it anyway, I gave up on that a long time ago. I draw the line where the whole music itself is disconnected from what you are trying to achieve (treating it as fast food, buying manga in Japanese without being able to read Japanese, any kind of collecting that you don't have the skills to experience...)
One last thing though. You can have better music than all the CDs in the world if you are looking for a private or concert experience. It all depends on what you seek. Woodstock guys thought they would change the world (and they did in their own way), and the Beatles got their own spiritual/mystical experience in India (which George Harrison used to add the sitar in some songs).
You’re way overthinking it.
I go to a show. There’s maybe 50 people in a dark, dingy room. I want to support the band so I buy a shirt and a record from the merch table.
Sometimes I’m right by the record store so I stop and browse. I see an LP for an album I like, either used or new. I buy it.
Now I have a stack of records. I go home and play records. I still use Spotify.
I never experienced that but some people do enjoy it, and it's fine as long as it's not a temporary obsession (but that's still my debatable opinion).
I remember my aunt saying that she went to a Santana concert in the 70s. She only remembered that "there was a lot of smoke in the room." Did it change her forever? Maybe not, only she knows. But even single experiences can have long-lasting effects that, I'm sure, we'll never be capable of sharing fully.
I was about to criticize your comment for unnecessary mean-spiritedness, but then I remembered that I don't have the moral high ground.
I once stayed with wealthy tech CEO whose had a very expensive MacIntosh-based stereo, plus some rather expensive looking speakers. His musical library? Grateful Dead, Chicago, Neil Young.
The guy gets the enjoy what he enjoys. More power to him. I just can't imagine spending so much for, musically, so very, very little.
The Dead, at least, were a band that absolutely pushed the limits of sound engineering in concerts as well as encouraging incredibly elaborate concert recording setups. The wall of sound, and the entire culture of high quality live recordings by 3rd parties is a huge part of their popularity.
Why wouldn’t you want to listen to them on a nice system?
That's a good point. I withdraw my criticism and admit my error.
> Why wouldn’t you want to listen to them on a nice system?
They just aren't my cup of tea.
Gotcha.
What it comes down to is that for a lot of people, operating and owning certain equipment is what gives them joy. You see this in a lot, maybe all, of hobbies and pleasure. It’s like the guy who spends $1k on a 3d printer to make trinkets that you can buy at the dollar store.
Idk it seems fairly normal to have a hobby (eg photography, 3d printing, espresso) where you are able to spend thousands. The main issue is that I'm not sure it's easy to get into pressing vinyl - what's the starter kit price?
I think the appeal is having audio you made or sourced on a medium that is normally reserved for record manufacturers doing a large volume production run...
Ya when I clicked I was hoping it would be under £400
[dead]