Why has the vinyl-revival been so successful?

Music
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I just wanted to get other forum members’ opinions on this.

Without a doubt, the black-stuff is back :cd:

DG, Abbey Road and MoFi (to name but a few) are all reinvesting/reinvigorating their vinyl mastering facilities, and pressing-plants apparently can’t keep up with consumer demand.

Has the world gone crazy? Vinyl is noisy, technically-limited (compared to digital), and bloody expensive to boot.

Why, oh why, won’t this revival ‘run out of steam’? I speak as someone who has been, and continues to be heavily invested in vinyl. I treasure my vinyl collection, and have probably added about twenty-titles to it in the last month alone.

But it’s an archaic format that belongs in the last century, with replay equipment that was devised a generation ago.

Vinyl has been a niche-format for the last thirty-years, since the ascendancy of CD in the mid-nineties.

I can understand the ‘novelty’ factor of spinning a piece of plastic navigated by a diamond stylus, but why isn’t this novelty ‘wearing off’?

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Because people want a physical representation to touch and hold. Same reason why NFTs did not get just laughed at.

Plus sometimes putting on an LP puts one into the mood, and occasionally it sounds better too

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This…

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Well, why hasn’t it worn off for you? Why do you treasure your vinyl collection?

My theory is that (1) people are nuts. And that (2) the vaunted SQ isn’t really all that important.

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I’m being ‘devils-advocate’. Does it really sound better?

Digital replay is at its zenith now. And it’s cheap to boot. To achieve comparable playback quality from vinyl takes effort, dedication and money :money_mouth_face:

Why bother?

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Hi-res is not an answer to vinyl because hi-res is not an answer to anything. As the OP said, it has nothing to do with quality per se, although, as the article explains, you can abuse digital in ways you can’t vinyl.

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I didn’t say that it’s cheaper :wink: I have a quite fine digital setup and don’t listen to vinyl much, but recently I put a record onto my P10 and was a bit blown away by how nice that sounded.

Note: I am not speaking about what has objectively higher fidelity

Anyway, that’s just a side issue for people with really good vinyl setups. For the vast majority the vinyl resurgence is IMHO about the first thing I mentioned

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Problematic article there:

…here we have a solid example of why many people buy vinyl records in order to access a less dynamically compressed master.

And two paras earlier:

Roon reports DR5 for both the 24bit/44.1kHz digital download and the 16bit/44.1kHz vinyl rip.

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I’m the one asking the ‘question’ Bill :wink:

I know my own ‘reasons’ for being so irrational, but I just wondered what the community as a whole thought on this subject.

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I like the phrasing “reasons for being irrational”. I think that explains it all.

I have a case in my family: my son recently asked me for a new release on cassette.

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That’s completely hilarious :rofl:

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I’m not surprised that an art form also includes the material used to express it

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Perhaps that explains why I obliged him. It’s partly my fault; I still own a cassette deck, a turntable and a reel-to-reel.

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So will a work of art sound ‘better’ from a cassette, rather than from a digital stream?

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No, but it will sound as intended. A piano sounds “better” than a harpsichord, but some prefer to play baroque pieces on the latter.

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To you! Don’t state that as a fact, but as your subjective opinion.

To me a harpsichord sounds different than a piano, but every bit as good…

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Of course. A piano is a superior instrument from a technical aspect.

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I disagree. A piano sounds different to a harpsichord, not ‘better’.

And every instrument has its place.

For example, Ronald Brautigam decided to record his latest cycle of Beethoven’s piano concertos on a pianoforte.

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Is it ‘better’ than his previous cycle with the The Norrköping Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Parrott? No, IMO. Just ‘different’.

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I think it’s a juxtaposition of two factors; baby boomers that grew up with vinyl now have the money and time to go back to something they remember fondly, and millennials have adopted vinyl as an ironic and archaic hobby.

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Again, I agree. I was looking at it from a technical aspect only. I personally like the sound of harpsichord. Anyway, the piano-harpsichord comparison is quite dissimilar to the vinyl-digital comparison, so I guess I should have found a better analogy.

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