Vinyl or number - what to choose for listening

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

In the digital audio era, music has depreciated. Today, the musicians' years of work are equal to a couple of minutes of torrent client work or a few cents per track on iTunes. But it may be quite different.

The past 2014 was an amazing year for the 21st century: vinyl records set a sales record. All over the world have been sold 8 million retro carriers … Jack White's record has sold 75 thousand copies. Moreover, amid declining sales of physical media and an increasing share of streaming services in the music market, vinyl's share has remained unchanged at 2% of total industry revenue. What's the secret?

One could associate this with the race for sound quality: against the background of the popularity of lossless audio formats, someone said that vinyl records have even better sound quality, and everyone rushed to buy them. Is it so? Unlikely.

Is the distribution of vinyl yet another new generation fashion trend? Perhaps because the most popular records are dominated by fresh releases from contemporary indie artists.

Why it happens? Records are bulky, inconvenient and expensive in comparison with any analog media. The average cost of a record in Russia is from 600 to 2,500 wooden ones. However, this does not prevent the distribution of not only vinyl editions of foreign performers, but also re-editions of Russian bands. The fans swept away the vinyl collection of Kuryokhin's and Popular Mechanics's recordings in a matter of days. Almost all fairly large performers are actively republished, including Civil Defense, and these remastered recordings of the mid-eighties are clearly not worth expecting an increase in quality when transferred to vinyl.

Most likely, many see a much more original reason.

With the music industry's transition to digital media - first in the form of downloadable tracks and then streaming services - the problem of finding and acquiring new works equaled the problem of paying for Internet access. The price of many years of work was a couple of minutes of torrent client work or a few cents in iTunes.

Despite the fact that the digital age has given many people access to exactly the kind of music they like, things are not so simple. The negative effect of the wide distribution of digitized music cannot even brighten up the possibility of a simple and effective independent promotion of young bands. What happened is that music has depreciated dramatically. Today, most of the albums are listened to track-by-track, in separate pieces. For many performers, this approach is adequate. But do not forget about the whole musical works, released under a single cover and united by a common concept.

This is where vinyl shows its magic. It is not only the ideal second-hand book-like way of collecting music. Listening to records is a completely different way that creates a different immersive experience than just listening to high quality types on high quality equipment.

Hi-res audio does not necessarily have a different effect than normal audio. The disc immediately makes you distract from everything else, concentrate on yourself, albeit a little. To play a record, you need to do a few physical manipulations: get up, get an envelope from the shelf, take out a record, put it on, turn on the audio system. To reproduce, you need to spend some kind of effort. Also, you cannot change the track on a record. At least at the first listening. You have to listen in full. A lot of albums only benefit from this. A person gradually gets used to unfamiliar sounds, and if they do not cause rejection in him, the music becomes closer, has a greater impact.

Thus, it would be worth calling the main reason for the revival of vinyl is a person's desire to be at one with music, to return a certain mystery of listening. The disc is closer to the concert than any other audio recording. Inconvenience turns into magic. Buying new vinyl is a good excuse to gather friends and listen to music.