Roots Archives Forum

I'll concede the J.A vinyl has got steadily worse, and yes, recycled Elephant Man singles, label and all in the melting pot, must have contributed to the decline.

Regarding oil prices, they pressed thinner singles in the early seventies in the US during the OPEC crisis, they were brittle but the grooves were still deep and they sounded great.

this article is not true, vinyl is alive and well, i hope that someday vinyls make a full comeback and cds become undesirable. of course im only dreaming

In a way Greg, you're right. Vinyl is very much alive and well, albeit in a minority.

Just look at the vinyl listings on ebay, they are huge with lots of the listings ending in a sale. That means someone somewhere wanted that record.

Go also to the turntable section on ebay, you'll see a healthy trade going on in second hand record decks. And although I only live in a small city with a handful of hi-fi outlets, they ALL carry turntables.

You are not dreaming, Greg. The record collector, the turntablist, the vinylisti, they all live on!

yes greg and leggo, in the mainstream music industry(which is close to dead itself) vinyl is pretty dead.

but to collectors and selectors it will always be crucial! i think vinyl buyers will always be in the minority but i'm happy with that, just makes it a bit easier to find killer albums about town before someone else gets to it

The sound quality on Vinyl is much better then anything digital i've ever heard, I own alot of stuff in Mp3 format also and some of the sound quality is just shit.
I thought Vinyl was coming back.

I'm not an expert on musical technology, but this is how I see it. I welcome someone with better technical knowledge to correct me if I am wrong:

Digital music is made up of small steps. Each step is a burst of sound followed by a silence. The silence is a function of the data compression. In other words they have chopped out lots of the music to make the file size smaller.

The higher the sampling rate, the smaller the steps and the more natural the music. If you stuck with really high sampling rates it would be tough to hear that it i digital music.

But most CD players are cheap and nasty with poor sampling rates, CDs are poorly mastered and all MP3s are so full of gaps you could wear them as a string vest, this gap is large enough to be clear to the human ear or brain. And we can 'feel' the missing information even if we can't really hear it.

It's like the pixels in a digital image versus the emulsion of a 'wet' film photograph. Look closely and you can see the blocks.

And the thing I find most amusing, is that the so-called 'better' format of CDs is being widely used in reggae music to distribute recording of old vinyl records!

well said, MP3’s main function is to compress information to make file sizes smaller, and the missing pieces lead to the hollow tinniness of the sound.

It’s worth pointing out that DAB is a particularly weak format, the sound quality isn’t good enough for it to have been adopted as the standard digital radio format

leggo rocker wrote:But most CD players are cheap and nasty with poor sampling rates, CDs are poorly mastered....

Hey Leggo Rocker

This is clearly a reggae issue. I buy a lot of music of which a tiny amount (relatively speaking) is reggae and I can assure you I have (non-reggae) CDs that, soundwise, will knock the spots off of ANY vinyl I have!!!!

Listen to, for example, anything on the ECM label.

That said, and as you know, I do buy a lot of reggae vinyl (I wouldn't dream of, for example buying at EST album of vinyl) and would be more tthan a little upset if vinyl died out.

However as mentioned in previous post I don't think it will. In fact, I think the opposite is true. That is almost die and then have a resurgence.

Then again, as I said before, I am the eternal optimist!

You are right of course, Outside of reggae there are some very well produced CDs that will sound superb in the correct transport.

However, there are also a whole bunch of annoyingly poorly - or cheaply - produced CDs - even outside of reggae music.

leggo rocker wrote:However, there are also a whole bunch of annoyingly poorly - or cheaply - produced CDs - even outside of reggae music.

And, of course, no poorly or cheaply produced vinyl albums!