From "B-Side Records moved 5,000 albums and a neon sign — carefully — to its new State Street location/B-Side Records moved 5,000 albums and a neon sign — carefully — to its new State Street location" (Wisconsin State Journal).
I'm so glad B-Side Records is doing well. We've spent so much lovely time browsing there. Here's a photo I took in 2008:
I hope the new, larger space has as nice a feeling as the old one. And isn't it wonderful that vinyl outsells not only CDs but digital media? Surely, much of it is that people have switched to streaming, and we don't care so much about owning music.
Collecting records used to have something to do with fearing that you'd lose it if you didn't preserve everything you might want to be able to hear at any point in the rest of your life. Now, it must be some kind of treasuring of the object, even though the music itself is easily streamed.
Or are there really a lot of young people who can hear a difference in the sound? Does the audiophile still walk the face of the earth?
There is a Wikipedia article "Audiophile" and it talks about the "audiophile community." I don't know how esoteric that is, but in ordinary life, back in the 70s and 80s, you'd feel pressure to acquire stereo components that wouldn't incur disdain and tempted to overspend to actually impress these imperious people.
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Last year I bought my wife a turntable and we started buying vinyl again. We have 30-40 now and I hope to get more in Buffalo next week at Revolver Records.
It's a version of the placebo effect. Also there are big advantages if you're insensitive brute rather than princess and the pea. That said I do miss the snap crackle and pop. Whenever I hear welcome to the machine I can still hear that skip that my old vinyl had.
What is the big thing with vinyl? 98% of people can't tell the difference between vinyl and good quality digital . The record degrades physically every time the needle is pulled along the groove so there are a limited amount of plays on any disk.
John LGBTQBNY Henry
The "audiophile community" exists and is almost exclusively made up of men who look exactly like the "Comic Book Guy" on the Simpsons.
"Collecting records used to have something to do with fearing that you'd lose it if you didn't preserve everything you might want to be able to hear at any point in the rest of your life."
That era will return, and not just for records.
Also, do any of these vinyl lovers know how bad vinyl records are for the environment?
(sorry, trick question!)
re: Audiophilia.
The best way I can describe it is that some people basically "taste the music" like people who can taste food more or less intensely for a variety of reasons. Within that set of people, some have the wherewithal to be gourmets. There are guys out there who drop unbelievable amounts of cash on an obsessive pursuit. Yes, they are always guys. A lot of it is about recreating the soundstage of a live performance in another space. It is mind bending to recreate the Musikvereinssaal in your listening room and point to where the horns are sitting and know whether the sound is coming from the back or front of the hall.
When this was cutting edge technology, it became a thing. Now AI restoration will soon restore vintage recordings of Enrico Caruso to a point that they will be virtually indistinguishable from something done last week. Except, of course, for the super tasters - we'll hear the processing. The use of autotune makes current pop music unlistenable to me. I'm a super taster, but thank God I don't have absolute pitch. There's a cottage industry structured to extract $ from the remaining addicted audiophiles with the means. Doing so via analog means is fussy, and these folks tend to be fussy. Don't get me started on staring at tube amps in a dark room while listening.
Ask me how I know.
@Althouse wrote: "Or are there really a lot of young people who can hear a difference in the sound? Does the audiophile still walk the face of the earth?"
Many hobbies have returned to visible, interactive technology. This includes the luxury focus of mechanical watches as digital watches are technically superior in every way. This includes collector and custom cars which basically stopped being attractive as in-vehicle computers and plastic parts became common.
Many people like the interaction of seeing and understanding a mechanism.
Audiophile sound quality: get ready for a holy war to end all holy wars. Most people would fail a blind test on records versus digital, and records may have a special sound because of their limitations and quirks. The same thing applies to tube amplifiers -- to some they sound better for being less technical and more harmonic than modern solid state amps. But if you get an extra zing from watching the machine while listening, who cares?
Kind of an ironic name for a store that sells albums. They don’t have a B-side like 45s did. Maybe some enterprising company will bring back the 45RPM single market and revive actual B-side possibilities. Surprising hits of the past started out as B-sides and others (like “I’m in Love with My Car” written by Queen’s drummer) have paid off enormously when the A-sides (in this case “Bohemian Rhapsody”) climbed the charts.
Audiophile was definitely a thing. College dorm rooms had to have speakers bigger than your bed. The amp (and of course the separate pre-amp: so you could pretend to re-shape the signal one octave at a time) were the size and weight of an engine block and threw off even more heat: KEF, Marantz, JBL, Boston Acoustics, Technics — everybody bickered over the purity and power of their constellation of noise making gear. It was vitally important to impress your date with a claim that THD (RMS) was below 0.0001 whatever, as you placed the needle in the groove with the reverence of a priest preparing the Eucharist, and out poured the soul-stirring chords of…Gordon Lightfoot.
In 2017 Randy Newman was going through a new box set of his albums--all vinyl and re-mastered. He asked his long-time producer if it is true that analog sounds better, something is lost in digital, and Lenny Waronker said "100 per cent." I don't think I can get a hyperlink to work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dxIXqzIjUk.
I never got into the elaborate "control box" for a stereo, getting every adjustment just right, but I bought some pretty good speakers in the 70s which I still use. Each box has a small speaker on top, a big one on the bottom. Bass presence?
I'm retired now, and I saved every single vinyl album I ever purchased since high school. Hundreds of them. Things sure do go round and round.
Relying on digital music or books is relying on the companies that make the media available. I buy digital music too, but I download everything to my own devices.
To get an idea of the audiophile community, visit a high-end audio show like Axpona - held every spring in the Chicago area. You'll see speakers costing 100K/pair, turntables at 50K, amplifiers at 40-70K, etc. Don't get me started on the absurd cost of cables! I use Monoprice cables and they work just fine.
Audiophiles are nothing more than deluded fools. So called "golden ears" can't actually hear the distinctions they claim to hear. What a racket.
What is the big thing with vinyl?
A modern turntable linked via Bluetooth to a surround sound system, neither of which cost us more than $400, has richer clearer sound even at high volume, undistorted pure music with bass that you can feel. No dedicated stereo system I’ve ever owned came close to how these set-ups sound now. Not since I worked in radio and could listen to super high end equipment reproduce the sound in the booth has music been so clear. It revived our habit of listening to whole albums. If my wife or I had kept the 45s we had as kids we’d play those too.
"Collecting records used to have something to do with fearing that you'd lose it if you didn't preserve everything you might want to be able to hear at any point in the rest of your life. Now, it must be some kind of treasuring of the object, even though the music itself is easily streamed."
Pfft. Streaming services lose licensing rights and they sometimes choose for other reasons to remove songs or artists from their platforms. If you treasure any specific media, you are well advised to own a physical copy of said media, whether it's books, music, film, or anything else.
Mezzrow: "Yes, they are always guys."
The 2008 post of mine where I first displayed that photo is "Shopping for music recordings... why are all the shoppers male?": "I followed my 2 sons into B-Side Records, which was full of shoppers. I counted 15, all men. When did music shopping become such a heavily male activity?"
I remember having to tape quarters on the arm of the turntable so that it wouldn't bounce. Other times I could adjust it properly, but at key moments in a Genesis riff, you wanted the arm to stay put.
There was an audiophile community back in the 70s as well. They would hang out in the stereo shops in East Lansing or, even more, find a catalog company that only audiophiles would know about, to order their equipment. I remember one guy who clearly came from money, had a beautiful Bang and Olufsen set up. And yes, the sound was amazing, as was the design of the product. I'd wanted one for years but could never talk myself into spending that much when my ears would not have been able to tell the difference. For me it was about the style of the product anyway- the design. Anyway, I dumped my vinyl years ago and see no reason to spend on that sort of thing now. Streaming is just fine for my ears these days.
Generally speaking, chicks listen passively to the radio and dudes go buy the disc. Top 40 ain’t driven by male listeners, retail music is.
Band and Olufson. MacIntosh. Harmon Kardon. Technics. Sansui. Kenwood.
Days gone by.
Lately, post-pandemic, you have to go online to get a CD player. I was surprised that a vintage music store could sell me a record player, but not a CD player.
Old tech reminds me too much of childhood or adolescent mistakes. Scratching records. Tapes breaking or getting tangled up, or just not playing. Typewriter keys bunching up, letters not aligned, smudgy fingers from the ribbon. Photos crooked, overexposed or underexposed. Felt tip pens drying out. Fountain pens leaking. And I suppose I should add having more broken CD players than CDs. Things are a bit easier now. We don't see the flubs and don't feel as responsible for them.
"Audiophiles are nothing more than deluded fools. So called "golden ears" can't actually hear the distinctions they claim to hear. What a racket."
Or so you say, because you can't hear the subtleties audiophiles do. Your inability to hear them doesn't mean those distinctions aren't there or that others can't hear them.
I am a mid-level $ audiophile. Here is the deal. There are three different listening experiences, of which 2 try to emulate vinyl. Vinyl is analog and everything else is digital trying to be analog. Analog is better because digital is like a ladder in which the sound can only appear on each step. Analog is like a ramp that allows an infinite location for the sound. That might not be scientifically correct but it's the best analogy.
There are two digital sources. CD's and streaming. CD sound used to be better than streaming but there are now streaming services (Qobuz, Deezer, etc) that stream in a CD format with no degradation. Streaming can now be close to CD quality.
Both of those digital sources can be run through a DAC ( digital to analog converter) that tries to turn the digital signal into an analog sound. It helps and can get awfully close to an analog feel but it's not quite the same.
Vinyl through a good system has a 3 dimensional feel to it that is hard to duplicate.
For those who say it's a placebo and all in the mind, you are wrong. Like food, wine, art, sports, etc. there are some sensory experience that some people can get and others can't or some people who don't want to try. Just because you don't get it, don't knock people who do. Tonight is a Bill Evans album after dinner with bourbon followed by Allman Brothers Live at Fillmore.
There are a few people with so-called "Golden Ears" who can tell the difference between, say, 18- and 12-gauge speaker wire, but they are a small minority of the Audiophiles. Most guys are more 'stereophile' than audiophile (me included). Kind of the difference between someone with a nicely stocked wine cellar and someone who spends hundreds or thousands of dollars on individual bottles and keeps them in a climate-controlled room.
I still have a bunch of LPs from my youth (and CDs from not-so-youth) and I've acquired some lately, but hardly ever buy them anymore. There's no comparison with digital: analog simply doesn't reproduce with the accuracy of digital. Some people do, in fact, prefer the sound of LPs which is due to those limitations (a "warmer" quality is how most describe it). Sometimes, I do like to break out an LP and listen to it as it was back then for nostalgia purposes, but if I really want to hear the music clearly and cleanly, I get a proper digital recording. By that I mean either a new recording or a re-master for digital. Early CDs got something of a bad rap because when they first came out record companies just plopped the old master -- which was done for the dominant format, the LP -- onto a CD and they sounded like crap because the CD was revealing all the limitations of the old vinyl master.
Most of the time I stream or use iTunes, FWIW. I mean, I can search Amazon Music and play almost any album or artist that I don't have without having to go out and buy the album.
When you consider how compressed .mp3's are, and then that many (most?) people listen through their earbuds; and you compare THAT, to the dynamic range of vinyl combined with large speakers (AND the acoustics of an actual room)... It's Easy to see(hear!) why people say vinyl is better.
Of course, while i'm typing this; i'm looking at my Fender Twin Reverb with its 40 year old 6L6's and i'm Sad, that i didn't buy spare tubes back when RCA was still in business
Bang
I'll guess that more men obsess about musical purity for the same reason more men play electric guitar. Electronics is a separate skill set, and I don't think it interests as many women.
My son buys vinyl. He also prefers old VHS copies of movies. For him it's about purity and getting closer to the original construction. He enjoys the tactile quality and the messy ritual. Digital is clean, which can separate you from the creative process. Or at least, I think that's what he'd say.
My mother had hundreds of albums, including the ones bands would sell in the bar where they were playing. She had gems from groups performing in little dive clubs in San Francisco in the late '50s. My God, I wish I'd kept those.
In blind A/B tests only gross differences in equipment are discernible. Oxygen free copper? Forget about it. Power conditioners? Nope. By far the greatest source of distortion lies in the final stage of reproduction, the physical speaker system. Spending significant money on speakers can be a very worthwhile investment if you value good sound. All the signal processing from recording to speaker can be accomplished equally well by a huge range of products covering a vast range of prices. This is not to say that all amplifiers and other components are equal to one another. Some are crap, but many are sufficiently good to be indistinguishable.
I've got more than a passing familiarity with the audiophile scene, and I've spent some silly money myself in the past. I just haven't spent it on speaker wire... That is because I'm not a complete moron.
The comparison to wine is certainly an apt one.
Lloyd W. Robertson said...
In 2017 Randy Newman was going through a new box set of his albums--all vinyl
this made me re-rewatch Randy's I Love LA video... Los Angeles USED TO BE a great place.. Sad
Vinyl, CDs, etc. are just newfangled crap. As a true audiophile, I only listen to Edison cylinders on a windup Victrola.
AA: "When did music shopping become such a heavily male activity?"
If women were ever a major factor browsing in record stores in the 60s and 70s I would have noticed. They never were - they would shop like guys. Come in, buy what they wanted and leave. I would be flipping through old classical and jazz cutouts with comic book guy while they came in, bought, and left. I think it's about being obsessive with things and finding the special thing, much like pickers do driving through the countryside.
My guess (and it is only that) is that it is a indication of some characteristic on the fatter tail of some imagined bell curve that simply expresses much more in males. Perhaps another expression of the interest in things v people narrative. It's facile, but my gut says this is more correct than some belief in a simple blank slate.
Old and slow said...
By far the greatest source of distortion lies in the final stage of reproduction, the physical speaker system. Spending significant money on speakers can be a very worthwhile investment
it's funny how often this is true. My $900 flyrod casts MUCH better than my $100 one did..
BUT; Most of that is because of the $90 flyline i put on it (compared to the $20 line on the other).
However.. my Helios flyrod Does LOOK far cooler (AND has a 25 year unlimited warranty*)
Of course, my HL Leonard rod from the 1920's is a Little More Cooler, but now i'm just bragging
unlimited warranty* which, i've used 4 times in 12 years
I once asked a professional music critic how much I should spend on a stereo system. He said I should buy decent but not-too-expensive equipment, and spend most of my money on music.
Maybe the kick up in vinyl listening was influenced by the series "Bosch" on Amazon. The moodiness of the show's main character seemed to go well with the West Coast Jazz stylings used. I think there was a discussion in one episode between Harry and his daughter, Maddie, regarding her puzzlement over his choice of vinyl over more modern alternatives.
I remember finding a cache of old 78s in the basement when I was a kid. I thought they were the coolest thing, and desperately wanted to listen to them. I played them on the family turntable (a big no-no) and while it wasn't great, I loved the mono sound with the snicks and snaps. It was a form of time travel for me, listening to Bing Crosby and Al Jolson. The needle didn't fare so well, not surprisingly.
There are two stores (that I know of) on my side of SF, and they do a brisk business. One is mainly vinyl but also resells CDs and cassettes. The other, just down the block from me, is exclusively vinyl. I've wanted to drop in and take a look, but the owner/manager is still militant about face masks (this is SF, after all) so no bueno.
In 1976/77, my then husband insisted that we get rid of albums that we weren't listening to and I was wrong to keep clinging to this household clutter. I vividly remember him saying "You're never going to listen to this again!" as he waved about "Are You Experienced?"
Audiophiles usually seem to me to be more interested in sounds and technology than music. Personally I have nothing of the tech-head in my makeup and I haven't compared vinyl with CD with streaming in any serious way--I just use whatever is current, or not as the case may be--I haven't downloaded any music whatever and listen to my CDs or the radio only.
(Youtube lately.)
I still have the few dozen vinyl albums my wife and I amassed, including the Time-Life Complete Beethoven I bought over many years but a lot of which has never been spun--CDs and all their advantages swept the field as far as my recreational listening. I keep thinking I'll take them in to one of our many vintage outlets and see what I'm offered, and for that matter my son has some vinylphile friends with money . . .
One of my good friends was a hardcore audio techhead and managed a store back in the 70s. He spent more money on equipment in a year than I have spent in my lifetime. His Magnaplaners(?) could shake the neighborhood, that's for sure, and he designed the sound system my wife and I used for our first 10-15 years. Since then it's just been mid-range component by component.
The comparison with oenophilia seems apt to me, at least to the extent that I'm blind to the appeal in both cases.
(And I've been told I have perfect pitch--by Mr. Gaston Taylor, the band teacher, as he berated me for being a lazy lad in 7th grade. It's a fair cop.)
Well, did you? De-vinyl and/or listen to Jimi's record again?
A curious public waits!
Vinyl can sound better. It seems more "Warm" if that makes sense. unfortunately, its so much easier just to put on the headphones and click on Computer or notepad than go find the old record player and put on 33 1/3.
I can remember when CD's came out and everyone was donating the LP's to the Library and Goodwill. Nobody wanted those ancient LPs and they could be had for a song.
I don't see any "vinyl" in the nostalgic photo?
In the age of streaming, I still have the fear of losing what I'm interested in and buy physical media (but not vinyl). The further your tastes wander from the mainstream, the greater the risk that it becomes financially untenable for that content to be hosted.
The Criterion Channel is great, but this is its third streaming home in less than 10 years. Every future merger is going to put it at risk, and I worry about Criterion's fiscal health every time they have a flash 50 percent off sale.
And classical music is pretty well dead in the US. SiriusXM with all of its satellite music channels has only 1 for classical music--1 for over 500 years of music.
“And isn't it wonderful that vinyl outsells not only CDs but digital media?” Umm, why? Records are costly, they wear out and they need careful handling. Further, they have very audible artifacts (pops and clicks), a limited dynamic range, and the sound quality degrades as the needle spirals toward the center as this is a constant-angular-velocity media, and therefore the linear velocity decreases. Although I would have to agree that a record will sound better than an over-compressed CD (or other digital source).
“Analog is like a ramp that allows an infinite location for the sound. That might not be scientifically correct but it's the best analogy.” Well no, it’s not: there’s no real difference here. It’s true that digital is quantised (for example, a CD offers 65,356 different levels). Which, when converted back to analog, essentially adds a small amount of noise to the original signal (“quantisation noise”). But analog recordings are not noise-free either, as all analog recording methods inevitably add some noise to the original signal. The difference is that by adding more bits per sample one can reduce quantisation noise as a linear function of cost (a golden-ears might prefer music sampled at 24 bits per sample). Whereas reducing analog noise has diminishing returns, as the cost of each increment in reduced noise is high and just keeps getting higher as one seeks further noise reduction. And, no, the analog output of a CD is not a stair-step.
Which is to say, there is no essential difference between the limited signal-to-noise ratio on an all-analog source and the quantisation noise produced by a CD.
Nonetheless a record (unlike a digital file) is a physical artifact, it’s got plenty of room for cover art, and some who do play them seem to enjoy the ritual of cleaning dust off the stylus and carefully placing it on the record.
Then again, some record buyers apparently never actually play their records but just collect and display them.
"Well, did you? De-vinyl and/or listen to Jimi's record again?"
I still have it and lots of other vinyl that's over 50 years old.
"I don't see any "vinyl" in the nostalgic photo?"
Right, because that was 2008 and the shift to emphasis on vinyl hadn't happened yet. There was some vinyl in the store then, I believe, but it was mainly CDs.
Will anyone ever be "nostalgic" for CDs?
I do feel a little nostalgic when I slip a CD into the rarely used slot in my dashboard -- and it's been years since I've put different CDs in the changer cassette that's tucked away inside the backseat armrest.
"And classical music is pretty well dead in the US. SiriusXM with all of its satellite music channels has only 1 for classical music--1 for over 500 years of music."
Even if you like classical music, do you like it in the car, with all that other noise happening?
Classical music in the car?
Depends on the setting and the music. On a road trip I can crank up the volume so that even soft chamber music sounds great, though long distance favors big loud works.
Around town with stop-and-go traffic the radio stays on most of the time--classical (mostly), and I have a good rotation of my own CDs. I can't listen to the CDs I get from the campus and public libraries, as the security strips often interfere with getting them out of the slot.
CDs: some people love them.
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