Music gurus...

[crestofwaves]

I knew that if I asked here, one of you who knows music can answer.  Why are people returning to vinyl?  How are those recordings better?

[Wayne Goodwin]

Maybe because of their growing up and their roots . I never cared much about music till the. Cassette came out . AM car radioes wer all we had . If someone had AM and F M radio we felt they were special .

[frenchy]

well i think its got a lot to do with nostalgia but i also think that if you've dropped a few grand into your home stereo  system then you'd want the best source to play your music from .. truth be known i don't think most people can really hear the difference between a well mixed cd and a vinyl album except that the cd will sound ... uhh .. lemme see if i can describe this right .. cleaner .. i'd say it sounds more .. antiseptic .. like someone came along and cleaned up everything with clorox or somethin .. and the thing about vinyl and tape was that it was analog and analog has a certain amount of harmonic distortion that when you listen to it actually becomes part of the music and when thats all cleaned up it makes you feel like somethin is missin ..but again for the most part most people can't really hear the difference .. especially if they have a sound system that they got at walmart or target .. and i'm not bein snobbish here when i say that .. i might be a little bit biased because when everybody else was dumpin their albums down at goodwill i was goin down there and buyin em .. i'll admit that .. but i'll be honest when i say that most people don't really value music to go to the lengths to buy a really good stereo amplifier and speakers .. and i'm not pokin fun or lookin down on them .. its just not that important to em .. and thats ok .. i don't drive a real nice car or dress all that great either .. we all have our priorities .. i will admit that i think some people will buy a vinyl album because of the snob appeal as if it gives em some kinda street cred or somethin but i'll also admit that i love old albums for the cover art .. i've never been the type to appreciate art like the kind they hang in museums .. just wasn't my thing all that much .. but sometimes when i'd listen to an album and hold that cover while it was playin it would have an effect on me .. kinda like the way a certain smell will just bring you back to a place and time .. full size albums ( some of them anyway ) are modern art for the masses .. some are suitable for framing .. and that is also one of the reasons for the resurgence in my opinion .. just look at a cd and try to read the linear notes .. you can't .. i was one of the last holdouts to get a cd player and i only did it when they said they weren't gonna issue warren zevons new album on vinyl .. grrrrr.. so they forced me into it .. otherwise i woulda just stuck with vinyl .. when everybody was tellin me how much better cd's sounded i was the one holdout in the room sayin no they don't .. i thought cd's were just a way to get twice as much money and cut their overhead too cause albums bein made of vinyl are made from petrolium and you know what the price of oil was doin .. and then to print up an album cover ?? all the ink and printin costs ?? when cd's came out albums were about 6 bucks .. and a cd was about 16 bucks ..and it cost em way less than half to make one ..  do the math and tell me why they promoted cd's so hard as the better choice when in fact they really weren't ?? i have a set of infiniti speakers that cost over 400 dollars in 1974 .. and i still have them .. had to have them reconed once tho .. the humidity in florida eats the surrounds right up so i had em redo them with with rubber surrounds .. problem solved.. i have an old marantz receiver from about the same time and it cost about the same .. the on off switch busted so i set it for on and i turn everything on and off with a power strip .. and i have a newer ( 95 or so ) sherwood receiver hooked up together with the marantz along with some pioneer mini speakers for the back channels and a pioneer center channel speaker .. and i'm sure i could spend a lot more if i thought i needed to but what i have works great .. if i was to turn it up past halfway you could hear it 2 blocks away .. but no need to do that .. anyway my point was if you really wanna hear the difference between vinyl and cd's then you need to hear em side by side on a good system .. and truth be told cd;s don't sound terrible , but if you listen closely you can hear the lack of warmth compared to an album on vinyl ..its not an astounding difference mind you now .. but its there .. but if all you have is cd's don't fret .. its not the end of the world .. its still music .. listen and enjoy ..   i'm sure problem will have somethin to add cause he listens to a lot of music too.. digital is where we are now .. in a few years i'm sure they'll come up with a way to make em sound better .. one such system is pono but at the moment its kinda expensive .. but then when dvd's came out they were expensive too compared to vcr's .. time marches on . one step up and 2 steps back .. hope that helped explain it for ya cresty ..      

[Shadowman]

Might be a big conspiracy. Someone with clout in the industry, empitied all the thrift shops and second hand stores, cleaned up at auctions and onlines sales sites, and now re-selling the works at considerable profit, and maybe they own the means of production putting out the new reproductions and having the factories pumping them out working overtime. Half the people that lived through the era when they were originally popular have a hard time hearing with a hearing aid, so to that market, at least, not the sound, but like french says, nostalgia.

[Snagg]

Depends If you have a $200.00 system from WalMart, you won't be able to hear a difference. Same if you only have badly-manufactured pre-digital vinyl - RCA, home of the Kinks, David Bowie and Elvis Presley (to name a few), was notorious for how crappy their wafer-thin wax sounded and how quickly it deteriorated.

Spend upwards of a grand or two, on a good turntable, amp and speakers - Yeah, you can tell a difference. CD's are "brighter", with more range and better separation; Vinyl, though has a depth to it that digital lacks (I hate the phrase most used by vinyl hounds - "Warmth".) Vinyl doesn't necessarily sound "better", but there are differences - Certain things, like acoustic instruments, reggae and the human voice, just sound better on vinyl; Orchestras, electronic music and full bands, things that need a lot of production and arrangements to sound full but not muddy, fare better with digital.

Now, an old, old vinyl album that's been carefully digitally remastered onto 180 gram (or better) vinyl, and you're hearing it on a good system - Wow. A good remastering can introduce you to sounds and details that you never even knew were on the original album; Indeed, they may literally have NOT been on the original album in the first place, due to technological shortcomings back then.

Plus....I just prefer the album artwork to be, well, album-sized. A few years back, I bought the remastered CD editions of a band I like, and the engineers did a GREAT job of cleaning up the sound; However, they also faithfully reproduced the original artwork, except at CD scale - The original liner notes were small to begin with, but they looked like baby ant tracks by the time they fit into a CD booklet.

[crestofwaves]

I heard it had to do with the depth of sound and the richness.  I love any kind of music except jazz where everyone does his own thing.  Too abstract for my simple brain--like abstract art or poetry that is so esoteric, I can't figure out what the writer is saying.