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Disk Makers Re-opens Their Vinyl Pressing Plant


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I don't see it happening. I collect vinyl, but it's a small market. Unless you collect used for cheap music at a reasonable price like I do, new vinyl is overpriced and not superior to well mastered CDs, WAV, FLAC, and other lossless audio files. I only own a few 180 gram vinyl albums because they're more expensive than CDs, they often come with defects, and I've never heard one that sounded superior to its CD counterpart.

 

I used to be in denial about physical media dying, but it's definitely going away. There's a nostalgia/audiophile community for sure, but they're slowly catching on.

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Next thing you will be telling me is that Polaroid is making film again. Dan
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They're selling a surprising number of record players and vinyl has certainly been a hipster affectation for at least a decade. I've known more than a few people releasing 'keepsake' vinyl along with a download code for digital versions.

 

Next time you're in Target, check out the turntables and record player systems. That's up from zero not all that long ago.

 

That said, for gosh sake, it's a medium that was made obsolete 20 to 30 years ago. It's a spectacularly flawed medium by modern standards, as noted above (and I have around 1200 LPs and 200 singles). I mean, the fidelity degrades significantly as the disk sides progress, for gosh sake​! How lame is that? biggrin.gif

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I wonder how many engineers around who remember how to do good vinyl mixes. Many of the digital mixes you hear today probably wouldn't survive the process without major cutting issues or being unlistenable in that format without major remixes. It was fine going from LP mixes to CD's because of the added headroom, but reversing that process is a whole different ball game. I think allot of songs by bands would wind up sounding like an old Victrola.

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I wonder how many engineers around who remember how to do good vinyl mixes. Many of the digital mixes you hear today probably wouldn't survive the process without major cutting issues or being unlistenable in that format without major remixes. It was fine going from LP mixes to CD's because of the added headroom' date=' but reversing that process is a whole different ball game. I think allot of songs by bands would wind up sounding like an old Victrola.[/quote']

 

There are plenty of engineers, producers, and musicians left who still know how to mix for vinyl, but what's the point?

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I wonder how many engineers around who remember how to do good vinyl mixes. Many of the digital mixes you hear today probably wouldn't survive the process without major cutting issues or being unlistenable in that format without major remixes.

 

Well, this is where real mastering came in. You made the mix sound as good as you could, about the only rule being to keep the bass in the center and keep the dynamic range reasonable for the noise floor of the phonograph record - which was usually no problem since you'd be working to keep everything above the noise floor of tape.

 

The mastering engineer would make tweaks to keep the cutter from jumping out of the groove and compensate for the difference in frequency response between the outer and inner grooves. A lot of that stuff is automated in the cutting lathe, and they were cutting masters from digital sources for a long time by the time CDs came out, so they no longer need the white leader in between songs to make the bands.

 

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