How much longer will vinyl last as a viable medium?

Vinyl hasn't been a properly viable medium for decades now and is still a niche market. Why on earth though, would you take a carefully made pristene digital master and put it through compression and filtering just to carve a groove in an acetate and then press vinyl using often old pressing machinery is totally beyond me.

There are facilities specialising in 'preparing' digital or top analogue master material for vinyl cutting and believe me, a lot of music is removed so it can be done and it was always thus, looking at the settings written on master tape boxes from the 60's... I just don't understand it, sorry!

Record companies can make money on small scale vinyl now, but there were disturbing reports about collectors buying the stuff and never playing them.

I play both records & cds.

CDs are handy, dont need to flip em every 20 mins, but vinyl sounds better to me.

Not in the slightest bit interested in a format I have no physical contact with ie...flac mp3 downloads etc.

if you look at the sales figures for vinyl then they are up on what they used to be but nothing like what they were in the 1970s. Even by the early '80s the majority of people were buying albums on compact cassette, not vinyl. Vinyl has not become 'mass market' again, it just sells a little more now than it did 20 years ago. Which was next to nothing.


CD sales are dropping like a stone, too. The trend is away from physical media, doesn't matter what sort of physical media. Youngsters I know see no point in owning a physical copy of any music. For them the sound quality argument is between listening through their smartphone speaker, or using a 'dock'. Obvs both are a pile of shite compared to a proper hi-fi system but since they have never heard a proper hi-fi system they have no point of reference. I'm convinced a lot of them, especially those approaching 30 who have a bit of cash, would want a proper system if they heard one. But where are they going to hear one?


Back in the day you'd go to a mate's and his dad would have a decent system. Or at college there would always be at least a few kids with proper hi-fi. So one way or another you'd be exposed to better sound. But we are 30 years on from those days. There's 50 people in the office I work in and I'm the only one with a decent sound system.

I’ve only tried Apple lossless but it was still behind CD for me. That’s either from a laptop through a DAC or from an iPod/Wadia 170i to a DAC. At first it seemed good, but in the long term it sounded more and more coarse.

Personally I like the physical medium anyway, plus I hate computers, so I won’t be going down the streaming route. The idea of having music on tap (Spotify) removes any desire for me. It stops it being special. I think there’s a lot of pleasure to be had in looking through your colllection and choosing something. I did download Spotify and used it once fir about 5 minutes. A complete turn off I’m afraid.

I wonder how you’d have got on with a linear tracker. The tracking is noticeably good and the more expensive Yechnics ones sound good to me.

another thing for me after listening to music 8 hours a day since 1981 i'm tired of it..
have radio 2 on all day at work..
when i get home i want peace n quiet nowadays..

40 Winks - would that be what I call a 'power nap'?

I agree. Vinyl needs engineering to work, which either costs money or means being really smart in finding older kit that was well engineered. Then there are arms, carts and phono stages......

People underestimate the importance of the phono stage. Most range from crap to adequate. Good ones cost proper money. Even a budget cart will sound good through a good phono stage.

That's really my big issue with vinyl, there are so many variables and to get them all right you have to start chucking proper money at it even if you are buying second-hand. Even if one is wrong, or not up to snuff, the whole shebang falls over.

Interesting post, Dave. I think I’m on that journey you describe so well. I just don’t have the appetite for anything with glare or hardness. I think it might be a testosterone thing as well as hearing.

If CD doesn't sound as good consistently, I believe there's something wrong with the playback system. Apologies, but regular long term experience of master tape copies years ago kind of brought about this viewpoint once CD players began to sort themselves out in the late 80's (there was a huge gulf between pro DACs and their domestic counterparts for some time and say, the basic Sony 1610 A-D-A system as used in mastering suites was way above most domestic players, being basically inaudible if inserted in a preamp's tape loop as an A-D-A and out). the early digital editors caused the damage until the late 80's but even then, modern playback devices seem to make the best of these early transfers and CD's I bought in 1985 sound better than ever!

Digital mastering of analogue source tapes should be inaudible and, if a digital editor was kept away, this was true even in the early 80's Sony PCM 1610 days.

What screws up any digital mastering (I was told by an experienced mastering engineer friend at Decca and shown, before they packed up and were absorbed into the parent company), is the operator doing the work. SOME old material does need gentle eq doing and maybe subtle noise removal so it sounds better on today's better playback gear. I also understand the 'loudness war' is over, so hopefully common sense will prevail now?

Remember the first four Beatles CD's? Everyone complained they sounded too toppy and no bass, yet George Martin claimed what you heard was how the tapes actually are in raw form! On a more traditional larger speaker these discs sound just fine, but not on the squeakers most audiophools use these days, so the later remasters were eq'd to high heaven (in the analogue domain too, adding loads of extra phase shifts no doubt) and do sound more 'human' for it, especially as Paul's bass is better heard now, but the current remasters aren't quite the same as the originals I gather.

Just my thoughts. Just remembering tales told me of tape edits failing while being fast wound to the beginning. My pal had to literally clamp both hands on the fast winding tape spools to stop the tape spilling everywhere - took the skin off too I gather..... Having to increase tension between the heads to 'play' a slightly wrinkled portion of tape back properly - and so on and so on.

Just been listening to two decks. It still does more for me than CD. I hope it does endure.