- Thursday, 26 November 2009
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Don't put an idea into Henry VIII's head. It's hard to get it out - Thomas Cromwell
Typo brings back vinyl LPs
A TYPO on an order form turned into a windfall when the Fred Meyer retail chain found itself with shedloads of vinyl long playing records instead of popular beat combo's REM's latest CD-DVD Accelerate.
A store clerk made the cock-up in spring and when the boxes of the big, vinyl discs showed up at several stores some managers stuck them on the shelves for a giggle.
Apparently 20 LPs sold the first day which is good for any record.
As a result Fred Meyer is now testing vinyl sales at 60 of its stores in Oregon, California, Washington and Alaska.
Sales of the Beatles album Abbey Road are doing the best, but musicians from the White Stripes and the Foo Fighters and Pink Floyd are selling pretty well.
Punters think the sound is a lot better, a spokesFred said.
RIAA figures show that LP sales increased more than 36 percent from 2006 to 2007 to more than 1.3 million. ยต
L'Inq
AP
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What?!? Are these people delusional?

But then, these are probably the same people that think that politicians are your friends and you can trust the government.

Oh, and that the Inq is a respectable news journal :)

...You wouldn't want to see how they're made.

I saw a TV show showing how they make LPs these days. The technicians loaded up the blank, arragned the cutting machine, and then tap a few keys ON HIS PC (!) to play back the (probably CD-quality, perhaps MP3...) audio file into the cutter.

"Better sound quality" my ass.

LP sales are up because they play on any turn table and don't install root kits. ;)

Cheers,
John
Vinyl records shouldn't sound better than CDs but all too often they do. Its not the medium, though, its the mastering. I thought this was nonsense until I replaced my copy of "Abbey Road" -- a CD made from a very old piece of vinyl -- with a proper CD. The difference was immediately noticeable, the real CD sounds nasty. You notice it on high quality kit, not so much with earbuds. Since CDs can't distort the sound (although some cheap players are a bit suspect) the conclusion is that they were carelessly mastered. This figures; cutting a vinyl recording requires a lot of TLC, you can't just fire and forget, so what's going on that disc will be what's acceptable to a trained pair of ears.

So don't laugh. A lot of CDs are crap. They shouldn't be, but they are.
The sound difference between CD and vinyl may be questionable, but it is a fact vinyl has no DRM infections...

People who actually listen to the music and has a good [meaning very expensive] sound setup to play LPs never rushed to switch to the oh-so-shiny digital disks or any other form of artificial depiction of a song. The nature is analog.