[mbriant]

Quote:

Quantegy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday and hopes a restructuring will eventually revive its operations. But its future is uncertain, inasmuch as demand also is dwindling for its videotape. The news has set off a frantic scramble in the music industry as producers and studios seek to secure as much Quantegy tape as possible. By the middle of last week, most suppliers around the country had sold out their entire stocks of reel-to-reel audio tape.

I can't help but think that now the fear of God has been put into those who prefer analog tape, Quantegy will somehow re-emerge from the ashes and will be viable because they will be able to charge much more for their now acknowledged rare niche product. Everyone will simply have to accept a sudden large price increase....something that wouldn't have flown had not the scare of no supply at all been put into everyone.

 

[Aman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by memepool Actually you are completely and utterly wrong. If you check out the British Phonographic Industry figures for music sales for instance,you will find that it's all those "computer generated drum beats" which have kept the record pressing plants running. DJ's who play what is broadly termed "dance music" (including rap, hip-hop, techno, house, drum and bass...etc..etc) account for 90% of the record buying public. Hip Hop / Rap (nomenclature distinction is tenuous) is the biggest selling musical form in America today, perhaps only seriously challenged by Country and Western. Those "talented rock groups" from the 70's are now the music industry executives controling the music press and generally running the industry they created into the ground by their complete lack of understanding of technological advancements like Napster.

I'm sure the average 15-year old kid who buys a rap album is going to buy an LP of it.

Let's compare for a second. How many DJ's in the world that actually give record companies a good gain in profit? Thousands? How many music listeners are there in the world that give billions of dollars to CD-producing record companies every year? Millions... hundreds of millions.

It is ridiculous to try to prove your point by using DJs who scratch with vinyl. There are simply not enough of them in this world to justify!

What are you, twelve years old? If you knew anything, you'd know that we don't WANT or NEED "technologically-advanced" recording methods, because they LOWER the quality of the music, and they lower the quality of the expectations of the performer. That's why the "bubblegum pop" of the seventies was The Monkeys, and the "bubblegum pop" of today is Britney Spears, and a huge mess of horrible, duking gangs who scream offensive lyrics into a microphone, and then try to make it pass as "music".

It's turned music-listening and record collection from a hobby to a way of impressing people. Today, the average kid with 5,000 songs on his/her iPod is praised because they spent their lives double-clicking on every possible MP3 they searched for in P2P programs. These people simply have an iPod for the fad, the huge collection of lossy, highly-compressed music as means to show off.

People now don't have to show any INTEREST in music to actually look like a music professional. One can just have 5000 songs on an iPod, not having to baby any audio equipment or take care of their records. They are letting a valuable hobby and a very delicate way of art to be turned into a capitalist-america corperal profit joke.

This all came from digital music.

And don't think I'm some "old-timer" from the hippy era. I'm 19 years old, attend MIT, and am a programmer for Gentoo Linux. I am hardly what you would consider "technologically inefficient". I like seeing advances in technology where it APPLIES. Rich, warm music doesn't deserve to be turned into lifeless junk.

 

[aeriyn]

Whoa...

I don't see anything wrong with digital recording as a technology, but I definitely see something wrong with how the average American CD is recorded. I buy largely Japanese/Asian mastered CDs and they are noticeably better than common American popular albums. They are often less compressed, recorded from analog masters (Aikawa Nanase records her music ONLY on tape, never on hard drives, I can just make out the tape hiss in the background) and are generally very well-mastered.

I've got a few "popular" albums from america (and a bunch of more obscure stuff which is fairly well recorded) and I can tell you that the Japanese masters are just so much better.

When an American producer like Quantegy goes out of business, it just makes it that much harder for recording studios to record analog masters and it takes away an industry from the US which will probably end up going to China. I really hate to see them go, and not just for their product, but because they were the last producer of a product in the country. With their departure, we no longer have that industry, and that weakens our economy.

I'm neither a digital nor an analog proponent; they are different roads to the same destination. Neither one is necessarily better. With proper care, a digital master could sound just as good as an analog one--the problem is, these digital masters rarely get the proper care. Analog seems to be largely idiot-proof when it comes to getting the best possible sound quality for the format.

 

[3lusiv3]

Digital and analogue both have there place, depending on situation and should be able to coexist. Both have there advantages and disadvantages but i feel that in a lot of cases the digital side has a greater capacity to become something great in the future.

 

[breez]

Quote:

Originally Posted by memepool The audible Full Frequency Range of 15hz-22khz and the theoretical range which goes beyond this, which it has been demonstrated many times is produced by musical instruments, is the most obviously quantifiable reason which can be shown mathematically to explain why to the majority of people given the chance to make a comparison between a recording reproduced by vinyl and compact disc, favour the former.

When comparing vinyl vs. CD there are many differences besides the FR. To this day I haven't read about or heard about a study that has shown that the so-called ultrasonic sounds are perceivable by humans (only this variable, not the bazillion others that exist between CD and vinyl). Therefore, by any reasoning and logic the preference of vinyl cannot be explained by this difference in FR (with current knowledge, maybe we'll know more in the future).

 

[memepool]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aman How many DJ's in the world that actually give record companies a good gain in profit? Thousands? How many music listeners are there in the world that give billions of dollars to CD-producing record companies every year? Millions... hundreds of millions. It is ridiculous to try to prove your point by using DJs who scratch with vinyl. There are simply not enough of them in this world to justify! What are you, twelve years old? If you knew anything, you'd know that we don't WANT or NEED "technologically-advanced" recording methods, because they LOWER the quality of the music, and they lower the quality of the expectations of the performer.

Perhaps this will inform some of your unfounded suppositions.

Jan/Mar2003 Jan/Mar2004 % Change2003-04

7” Singles Value £138 £204 +47.8%
12” Singles Value £3,202 £2,733 -14.6%
Cass Singles Value £418 £0 -100.0%
CD Singles Value £12,401 £8,420 -32.1%
Total Singles Value £16,159 £11,357 -29.7%



Here are the results comparing the last few years for singles sales by format in the UK market which is the 3rd or 4th largest world market. This doesn't include mp3 downloads which are currently averaging 500,000 per week and mobile phone ringtones which are currently in the process of being given their own chart. Another obvious factor is the end of tape cassette single production. Overall therefore the 30% shrinkage in the market is offset by these factors.

Notable though is the 50% growth in 7" single sales driven by a resurging fashion for the format and by the fact that it provides an entry into the business for "technologically" minded performers who hope the level of professionalism required to produce a record will increase their chances of gaining exposure, perhaps through being played by a club / radio DJ.

This offsets the decline in 12" singles , showing the vinyl format as a whole is pretty stable and confirming that if you want your new music to be taken seriously, vinyl is increasingly percieved as a means to that end not just in the Dance and Hip Hop scenes but in the wider independent music scene generally.

In the market as a whole roughly 1 in 4 singles sales are now on Vinyl. Its not just working DJ's who are responsible but a wider aspiration amongst those "average 15 year olds" who might have once bought electric guitars to create music and experience music through the medium of vinyl. So although tools like Steinbergs Reason make it very easy for anyone to sit down and knock out a tune, vinyl is the lingua franca of those who are serious about it.

Of course the singles market only accounts for about 1/10 of overall music sales when you take Albums into account, but it's the most important area as it's where most of the marketing spend is allocated in an effort to promote album sales.

Increasing use of downloads by music buyers shows the singles market remains verty strong but will the way in which this new technology is used to integate into the business model as a whole is very much a moot point.

 

[3lusiv3]

Aman, you're suggestion that certain music genres are responsible for the downfall of analogue just doesn't seem to hold in my mind. Music is being produced to sound good on cheap sound systems, such as bad car stereos, and being played from radio. This is the reason for the compression on CD's. I don't think it has anything to do with genre.

 

[markl]

Quote:

When comparing vinyl vs. CD there are many differences besides the FR. To this day I haven't read about or heard about a study that has shown that the so-called ultrasonic sounds are perceivable by humans (only this variable, not the bazillion others that exist between CD and vinyl). Therefore, by any reasoning and logic the preference of vinyl cannot be explained by this difference in FR (with current knowledge, maybe we'll know more in the future).

I don't have any links but I have read about studies that show how the presence of ultrasonic sounds in audio playback affect the way we perceive the remaining sounds in the audible range. In other words, no, you can't hear the actual ultrasonic sounds, but you can hear the effect of their presence on the sounds you do hear. It's a psycho-acoustic effect.

 

[memepool]

Quote:

Originally Posted by markl I don't have any links but I have read about studies that show how the presence of ultrasonic sounds in audio playback affect the way we perceive the remaining sounds in the audible range. In other words, no, you can't hear the actual ultrasonic sounds, but you can hear the effect of their presence on the sounds you do hear. It's a psycho-acoustic effect.

All frequencies both audible and inaudible have a psycho acoustic effect so this isn't a particularly useful distinction as far as I can see.

A common one also unavailable to CD listeners are the lowest notes of a really big church organ. This produces bass below 20hz as in this recent experiment reported by the BBC.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3087674.stm

This is not describing a 'psychoacoustic effect' in the sense that it's something beyond our perception which influences our perceptions, its describing a physical sensation.

 

[Leporello]

Quote:

Originally Posted by memepool A common one also unavailable to CD listeners are the lowest notes of a really big church organ.

Why should they be unavailable to CD listeners? There is nothing in CD technology (or digital in general) that prevents frequencies from 1 to 20 Hz from being reproduced correctly.


Regards,

L.

 

[Aman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Leporello Why should they be unavailable to CD listeners? There is nothing in CD technology (or digital in general) that prevents frequencies from 1 to 20 Hz from being reproduced correctly. Regards, L.

I thought CDs could only go down to ~20hz? And I thought that was a "theoretical" measurement. I think that's what they CAN be, I doubt most are recorded well enough to be this way.

 

[Publius]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aman I thought CDs could only go down to ~20hz? And I thought that was a "theoretical" measurement. I think that's what they CAN be, I doubt most are recorded well enough to be this way.

CDs are PCM. PCM goes down to 0hz.

Why does everybody get the impression that CDs have a cutoff frequency at the low end? If anything, vinyl does, not CD. I swear we've had this exact conversation at least once before.

 

[Eagle_Driver]

Quote:

Originally Posted by memepool A common one also unavailable to CD listeners are the lowest notes of a really big church organ. This produces bass below 20hz as in this recent experiment reported by the BBC. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3087674.stm

Actually, the lowest notes of a big church organ are unavailable to most listeners - digital or analog. In the case of analog, either the signal gets over-saturated (tape), or the grooves or the playback apparatus could not handle such high modulations required of them (vinyl). In the case of digital, that's the limitation with most op-amps in the analog domain. The extremely low bass demands far more power than the mid-bass and the treble - and even astronomically expensive digital equipment tends to economize on those op-amps.

 

[Leporello]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aman I thought CDs could only go down to ~20hz? And I thought that was a "theoretical" measurement. I think that's what they CAN be, I doubt most are recorded well enough to be this way.

You may be partially right. While no theoretical considerations limit the reproduction to 20 Hz, very few recordings actually go even that low.

Funny, I was under the impression that the lowest note in church organs is 'C' at 32 Hz.


Regards,

L.

 

[Ferbose]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Leporello Funny, I was under the impression that the lowest note in church organs is 'C' at 32 Hz.

I recall church organs go down to 16 Hz. And some people can only hear 22 Hz. This implies a few notes can be infrasonic.