www.vinylrecords.co.uk

VIRGIN MEGASTORE GO BACK TO VINYL

2006-05-31T12:31:00.000+01:00

Virgin Megastores U.K. hopes to “transform the way consumers perceive record stores” by giving “more space than ever … to vinyl records,” reports Tony Glover in The Business.

Yes — vinyl records: !!!

According to Rob Campkin, the head of Music at Virgin Megastores in the U.K., vinyl is now outselling CDs when it comes to the latest records.” He comments: “Up to 70 percent of sales of new releases are vinyl.” According to the British Phonographic Industry, “annual sales of vinyl singles in the U.K. rose sixfold to over 1m, accounting for 14.7 percent of all physical singles sales in 2005, up from 12.2 percent in 2004.” Rob Campkin says “collectability” is one reason for vinyl’s comeback.

He comments: “Vinyl is far more iconic … The record sleeve offers the consumer art work as well as information about the performers and song lyrics.” Adds Roger Daltrey of The Who: “We threw away an art form that was so much more than the record … Sometimes the covers were more important than the music. The more fingerprints you got on it, the more it was a part of you. With a CD, you start with a nice plastic box and end with a scratched plastic box; it has no character whatsoever.” Of course, you can count Roger among those who simply think vinyl sounds better than CDs, too. Vinyl’s comeback cuts across demographics, as younger consumers are buying classic rock albums in vinyl, while older consumers are “increasingly augmenting their collections with LPs from modern artists such as the White Stripes.”

In many cases, consumers are buying both the CDs and the vinyl versions, the former for convenience and the latter for love. Predictably, it’s the major record labels, having sold their souls to CDs decades ago, are slow to jump back into vinyl, the irony of which is not lost on Roger Daltrey, who thinks "it was the switch to CDs that ultimately led to the music labels’ horrendous problems with digital music piracy." Virgin, meanwhile, predicts that digital music downloads "will account for no more than 10 percent of the overall market by 2009 and that the appeal of vinyl will continue to grow to shoppers who want to take home something tangible and lasting." Indeed, Virgin hopes its vinyl strategy will "offer consumers enough added value to head off growing competition from cut-price supermarket CD offers and internet download services." ~ Tim Manners, editor http://reveries.com/

SALES OF VINYL RECORDS MAKING A COMEBACK IN BRITAIN

2005-07-29T23:44:00.000+01:00

Sales of vinyl records making a comeback in Britain - UPI News Service, 07/12/2005

Sales figures from the British Phonographic Industry indicate old-fashioned vinyl records are making a comeback.

British album sales for April to June are up 87.3 percent compared to the same period last year, Sky News reported Tuesday. Nearly 1.4 million records had been sold during the 12-month period ending March 31, a 64-percent increase over the previous year and the best 12-month sales period since 1998, the industry said.

Industry officials say indie and rock fans are buying vinyl in droves, pointing to the success of bands such as The Libertines, Babyshambles, Kaiser Chiefs and Franz Ferdinand.

DJs also remain loyal to the old-school technology, because they allow scratching and mixing

FANS STAY TRUE TO VINYL RECORD FORMAT

2005-06-24T11:22:00.000+01:00

FANS STAY TRUE TO VINYL RECORD FORMAT

The combination of dust and mold keeps Sam Hopkins sneezing. In addition, his shins are hurting from leaning against a table for an extended period of time. This is the third thrift shop he’s been to today, and so far he has found nothing. “You’d be amazed,” says Hopkins. “I travel all over the country and still see the same records by the same artists.” But all the physical ailments are worth it, because eventually he’ll find a rare gem.

Since the age of 14, Hopkins has been passionately interested in collecting vinyl records from all over the world. He is constantly searching for treasures, hitting every used vinyl store he can in order to add to his self-described “moderate” collection of about 900 records.

Hopkins still has compact discs, but that’s only because he couldn’t find those albums on vinyl. Hopkins isn’t alone. There are thousands out there just like him, and many of them are too young to remember hearing Huey Lewis and the News skipping on their parents’ old record players. Those unfamiliar with vinyl records — commonly called LPs — should take a trip downtown to Love Garden, 936 Massachusetts St., where you can find a large quantity of new and used LPs and CDs.

Kelly Corcoran, a manager at the locally-owned store, says that while the store sells twice as many used CDs as LPs, buyers like LPs in a different way. “CDs have become more and more disposable,” Corcoran says. “Vinyl records are permanent artifacts.” Corcoran adds that CDs have an average life span of 20 years, while LPs, with proper care, can last considerably longer.

Corcoran says more bands are recognizing the importance of having their music pressed on vinyl records, despite the fact that CDs are less expensive to make. “I’d say about 65 to 75 percent of albums on labels get pressed on LP at some point,” says Corcoran. But it does cost more money than the average starving musician can afford.

Acme Vinyl, a vinyl pressing company in Ontario, Canada, charges $1,045 to press and package 300 twelve-inch records. That price is average compared to the approximately 16 other vinyl-pressing companies in the United States and Canada.Dungeon Replication, a smaller pressing company, relies on CD replication as well as vinyl pressing. Mike Yake, manager of the company based in Portland, Ore., says that while the bulk of its business is with CDs, vinyl production has regained some popularity.

He says much of this has to do with a growing hip-hop and DJ culture. “DJing is a growing art form,” says Yake, “so I think vinyl is just going to get more popular.”Justin Riley is a big part of that hip-hop and DJ culture. He has been a DJ for five years and has competed in several DJ competitions. “Back when I started out, you had to buy vinyl if you wanted to be a DJ.” Now, Riley mainly enjoys the analog sound of vinyl. Riley says digital recordings don’t get the full wavelength in the frequency of sound like vinyl records do.

He says that new technology, such as DVD-Audio, is close, but it’s not affordable.Chris Knudsen, El Dorado junior, is not big on mixing and scratching records, but he has recently become infatuated with vinyl. Most of his collection of about 200 records consists of albums from garage and punk bands, and most of them are new. “I’ll buy a new LP the day it’s released,” says Knudsen. “Whereas, if I want a new CD, I can wait months after it comes out because I know it’ll still be out there.”

Knudsen says there are three reasons why he buys vinyl. First, it’s usually cheaper, unless you want to buy new imported records. Another reason is the artwork that comes with vinyl records is bigger. But the most important reason, Knudsen says, is it forces him to listen to the whole album. “I like to punish myself,” says Knudsen. “With a CD, I can always easily skip tracks with the click of a remote. With vinyl, I have to manually lift the needle to change songs, and I’m just too lazy to do that.”People like Knudsen, Riley and Hopkins were raised on CDs. Everyone in their generation had to learn for themselves about vinyl records. Perhaps that’s why they’re the most die-hard fans.

These record fans see vinyl in a different light. “Vinyl records are lasting works of art,” says Hopkins. “The people who sold their old records back in the early ‘90s are kicking themselves for it now.”Playing a record is more than just listening to music for Corcoran, who has a collection of about 1,500 records. “For me, playing a record is like a ceremony,” says Corcoran. “You can see the grooves and spaces where the needle hits the record.

You experience a better-quality analog sound. You can watch the record spin in front of you. You can sit down and listen to the record, and do absolutely nothing else.”Soon Hopkins will return to the thrift shops and used music stores, hoping to find some new records that people have carelessly left behind. No amount of sneezing or shin pain can detract him from his search for a diamond in the rough — a once-discarded record that a new generation is growing to appreciate and treasure.

By Matt Beat http://www.kansan.com/

WILL VINYL EVER DIE?

2004-09-14T02:51:00.000+01:00

Weinheim, GERMANY—While out running errands the other day, I spotted a T-shirt reading: “Vinyl will never die.” A few telling characteristics (gelled hair, Day-Glo trousers, tiny backpack) suggested to me that its wearer was primarily concerned with the longevity of this antiquated medium as it relates to the house or techno music scene, but the declaration has an air of defiant truth regardless of one’s preferred musical genre.

Even if we were to plug our ears to the bluster of its romantic champions or the sober head-shaking of its practical detractors, vinyl can still be said to have a sort of enduring magic to it, and it’s hard to imagine records disappearing in the cold and passive way that the cassette was superseded by the compact disc, or the way that the CD is now slowly being supplanted by the Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio (DVD-A).

This magic of vinyl is something that goes missing in today’s sterile world of ones and zeroes, and perhaps this niggling lack explains—at least in part—why, for example, LPs are such sought-after items on eBay, and why the audiophile Mosaic label always releases its remastered jazz sets on high-quality vinyl in addition to CD, not to mention the fact that the vinyl pressing invariably sells out before the other. If the compact disc were truly superior in every way, it would be commercial suicide for a small company like Mosaic to put out a painstakingly remastered limited edition set on a delicate, restricted, outmoded medium. And only certifiable lunatics and incorrigible nostalgia buffs would waste time bidding for them online.

Over the past two weeks, during which time I made the coincidental sighting of the T-shirt, I’ve been engaged in the rather peculiar and time-consuming task of cleaning my records. This process involves the removing the dust from the record with a carbon fiber brush, spraying the disc with Windex, wiping it down with a soft cloth, and then letting the stylus dig the remaining trapped oil and grime from the grooves.

(With CDs I normally use a soft cloth and Pledge, if I do it at all.)

This means I have to play the records from start to finish for a thorough cleaning, which means I can’t stray too far from my record player (sans automatic tone arm), which—not to put too fine a point on it—means I consider myself more or less bound to the seventy square meters of my apartment for the thirty minutes it takes for a side to finish.
Which naturally begs the question: Why?

For starters, the cleaning process gives me a great excuse for listening to my entire collection of records one by one, especially those which have been gathering literal and figurative dust. Much of the time this results in discoveries and rediscoveries, like the nascent symphonic ideas that appear in Schubert’s Moments Musicaux (Alfred Brendel playing), or the twisted nonsensically poetic lyrics (“freeze your blood and then stab it into me”) on Modest Mouse’s Night on the Sun EP, or just how stunning Antonio Carlos Jobim’s overlooked Stone Flower can be, or how expertly Miles renders the “Saeta” on Sketches of Spain. Or that somebody somewhere surreptitiously switched my disc of the Philadelphia Orchestra/ Ormandy performing Tchaikovsky with a disc of Haydn symphonies. Their loss.

Still, I suspect that the reason for my cleaning ritual is also one of the main reasons behind vinyl’s decline in popularity. The format asks a lot more of its listener than CDs or even 8-tracks; wax cylinders notwithstanding, records are the physical manifestation of inconvenience. A mere slip of a fingernail while taking a record out of its slipcover can ruin it. So can a prematurely worn stylus or an out-of-balance tone arm. The playback apparatus even favors a handedness: southpaws like me have to learn to work with their right. Storage is a big issue too.
A rise or drop of a few degrees in temperature can warp them irrevocably, and stacking LPs on top of one another is the same as slowly squeezing the music out of them.

The payoff, however, is that the responsibility of ownership makes the reward of listening all the greater. The medium enhances the music. The greater care and attention a record requires means that the work it contains takes on a special quality. In turn, every vinyl album I own, whether it’s indie rock, classical or jazz, takes on the same fragile beauty as an Old Master painting or a Ming vase: for all their sonic and emotive dynamism, those horns and guitars and drums can’t withstand the force of a stray fingernail. A violin concerto can be destroyed by heat.
Likewise, it suddenly becomes apparent how necessary each part of the music is to the pristine whole. Not a millisecond can be sacrificed to dirt or dust without losing something essential, just as a fleck of paint falling from a Vermeer will lose the fluid effect of pouring milk or the light shining off an earring. One of the things that makes art—all forms of art—so precious is its physical transience. The sheer durability and convenience of CDs causes us to forget that sometimes.

None of this philosophical approach to record collecting has prevented the medium from being regarded as passé. Not that I mind entirely. At a flea market recently, I came across some gum-chewing teenagers eager to clear out several milk crates of records. Lord knows how they got a hold of them, but it was a stack of pants-wetting finds—Ella singing in Berlin (the set where she forgets the words to “Mack the Knife”), von Karajan conducting Beethoven’s Fifth, Placido Domingo in Verdi’s Rigoletto (Guilini conducting)—in impeccable condition. They wondered if ten euros ($12) was too much to ask. The speed with which I reached for my wallet assured them it wasn’t.

Despite what the hardline pragmatists and technophiles might argue, I don’t browse flea markets and eBay in search of records for reasons of nostalgia. Precisely the opposite. I buy them because the hand I have in a record’s preservation brings me closer to the music; because they subtly prompt me to consider what goes into a work of art and what should be treated as such; and because ultimately this keeps the recordings fresh as well as timeless.

Contrary to the appealing slogan on that T-shirt, I know vinyl will die eventually. So will I. Everything around us will someday crumble and decay and vanish. But right now, when it matters most, vinyl is still here. It’s survived the introduction and proliferation of more advanced recording formats, and I have a feeling it will continue to do so for the reasons I have just named (and many I’ve no doubt overlooked), all of which add up to some untranslatable allure. And the way to discover that allure is through a little extra care.

By E.J. Iannelli RAW STORY COLUMNIST
Originally published by The Raw Story, http://www.rawstory.com

CD SOUND: A CLOSER LOOK AT THE TRUTH

2004-09-14T01:44:00.000+01:00

"The people who designed today's CD standard twenty years ago knew that vinyl LP's offered superior sound, and had no qualms about saying so"

It didn't have to be like this. But as it stands now, many of the popular CD's you buy aren't made to sound like what the artist created in the studio.People in the music business know that roughly 70% of the time, CD's are played on boom boxes, portable CD players, and car stereos. So it should really come as no surprise that most CD's are made with this market in mind. It makes perfect business sense. But does it make musical sense, especially for those who listen to music on high quality home stereos? To answer that, we first need to get a basic idea of some things that happen to the final mix that comes out of the studio. As you'll see, the various ways that the music gets doctored often amount to radical surgery being performed on the artists' studio sound.

The core of the problem is that producers and labels want their artists' CD's to sound as loud as possible on a typical boom box (even when the volume control isn't set very high) so the CD grabs your attention when you put it in and push "play". So when the mix is finished and the recording goes to the mastering house for final preparation, the pressure is usually on the mastering engineers to make this happen. Of course, if they were to record the music at a very high level and nothing else were done, then much of the sound would distort badly whenever the louder parts of the music came through. To help avoid that, engineers use compressors and limiters on the music, "squeezing" it into a narrow volume range. (Compression is also used in studio on individual tracks like bass guitar, vocal, drums, etc., as well as some on the overall mix. But here we're referring to additional compression that's added after the final studio mix is done.)

Now, since the needles on the control panel barely move while the song plays, engineers are free to crank up the recording levels without worrying about overload. From the early 90's onward, this kind of treatment has been applied like a sledgehammer to many popular music CD's. And when compression is overused like this, the sound that was recorded and mixed in the studio is completely squashed. You aren't hearing the band's studio sound, you're hearing a pale imitation.

But wait--there's more. When compression is used, one other result is that some of the treble gets chopped out of the music. So as a patch, engineers will compensate by adding certain parts of the treble back in with an equalizer. But while the treble that was lost was only lost during musical peaks or transients, the added-back treble is there all the time. Moreover, since the ear is very sensitive to certain high frequency ranges, engineers know that by adding even more treble boost in those ranges they can further boost the apparent loudness of the music, so of course, they do. Also, low bass (not just subsonic junk) often gets cut, since bass eats so much power and the low stuff is impossible for boom boxes and portable players to deal with anyway.

So back to our question: What do all these things have to do with serving the music? Nothing. What does it have to do with marketing CD's to boom box owners? Everything. All of this gets done at the behest of producers (and usually the artists), because making CD's that sound as loud as possible and also as bright and catchy as possible on 70% of the equipment that plays them is good business. So from a dollars and sense standpoint, you can't blame them. But making CD's that sound more like the studio mix--for those people who have the high quality home stereos that can do justice to that mix--is not a priority. Talk about tyranny of the majority; that 30% "minority" still translates into millions of music buyers, all of whom are forced to live with a product that often times sounds bad on their systems.

PERFECT SOUND FOREVER, OR GLASS IN THE DISPOSAL...?

Here's one way you can demonstrate all this to yourself very clearly:

It's Friday, the end of a long week. You glance across the room at your stereo and say to yourself, "Let's have some fun..!" At times like this, do you ever feel like popping in a CD and really turning it up? Well, if you do and you have a quality home stereo system, your ears will likely start to rebel as the kind of surgery engineers have been performing on the music now feels like surgery on your ear drums. This is because at higher volumes, your ears are even more sensitive to all of this over-engineering, and the sound becomes REALLY harsh. What kind of sound are we talking about? Turn on your garbage disposal. Now, pour in a bucket of broken glass. (Of course, you don't need to listen at high volumes to hear this effect; we just wanted to use the most 'glaring' example.)

As already stated, this pronounced over-engineering is mostly a 90's phenomenon. (Today it's worse than ever; ask any engineer from a big mastering house and they'll tell you.) So what about CD's made in the 80's? Well, these earlier CD's suffer from a different set of problems. For one, the quality of digital equipment was much lower in the 80's. Early digital gear just couldn't capture the music as accurately as today's equipment can. A dry, overly bright sound was common even on good production jobs, and low-level detail didn't come through well at all. In addition, the digitized signal wasn't always handled carefully as it made its way step by step through the recording and production process, partly because it was thought that with digitized signals you didn't have to worry. (In practice, you do.) As a result, the signal would become further degraded. Lastly, the source tapes used were usually not the best available, particularly when record labels were in a rush just to "get the stuff out" on CD. Unfortunately, this can still happen today. Even with CD's (new or old) that are engineered well, some of the bright, hard digital sound usually remains. Vinyl simply delivers a fuller, more natural and more complete sound.

So if you hadn't realized it by now, the hype behind "Perfect Sound Forever" has never matched reality. But don't blame the techies who came up with the CD standard. These designers knew back then that the CD wasn't really all that, sound-wise, when compared to good vinyl LP's. "Wait a minute," you're probably saying. "The people who created the CD said what??" You read correctly: The people who designed today's CD standard twenty years ago knew that vinyl LP's offered superior sound, and had no qualms about saying so. This is because at the time, CD's were primarily targeted at the market share then owned by pre-recorded cassettes, whose convenience and portability led to strong sales despite sound quality that was markedly inferior to vinyl LP's. So who came up with "Perfect Sound Forever"? You guessed it--the marketers. Have you spotted a trend yet?

While we're on the subject of digital versus analog, you might also have thought that your favorite artists were all recording in digital by now, since CD's themselves are digital. After all, it's Y2K, right? Everything is digital these days....

Is that your final answer? Just checking. Because more often than not, the music that you see coming out of the big studios is recorded and mixed onto analog tape, even to this day. Analog has a richer, more lifelike sound, and when analog tape is pushed to its limits, artists generally feel the sound is more appealing that that made by digital equipment. Just listen to what Courtney Love said recently:

"I don't care what anybody says about digital recordings. At this point they're good for dance music, but try listening to a warm guitar tone on them. They suck for what I do."

1 1 excerpted from her speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference, given in New York; May 16, 2000

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THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED - THE DIGITAL DISASTER

2004-09-13T21:45:00.000+01:00

Recently it was reported that sales of recorded music were at an all time low, and few seem to be able to predict entirely why this might be the case. It is true that many now download it free from the Internet with apparent ease, which may partly explain the reason. It is also true that many youngsters (who are traditionally the mainstay of the record-buying public) now have many other distractions in their lives such as mobile phones and computer games that 20 years ago would not have interfered with their listening to music.

Many youngsters are simply no longer obsessed and excited with music as they were a generation ago, and indeed many are into the artists of yesteryear such as Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, The Doors and Pink Floyd etc. Why is there also a proliferation of tribute bands covering Bryan Adams and Meat Loaf to Yes and Abba.

Perhaps one reason for these things could be the ubiquitous digitalization of recorded music. Compact discs seemed to be the pinnacle of recorded music when they hit the scene over 20 years ago. They seem to sound better on first hearing, and the sound is clean, sterile and has no 'clicks' or 'pops'. CDs were more user-friendly than their awkward vinyl counterparts- smaller, taking up less space, playable in the car, ability to plan track order, repeat, program, and of course the music lasted about an hour (more than 20 minutes when you had to change it as with vinyl). CDs seemed to be the answer to the record industry's prayers. Furthermore, it was alleged that they would not degrade and that they were indestructible.

However, the music was digitalized and apart from a few technical boffins, those who were not technically minded never had a clue as to what this meant. It was actually sold as a great advancement in recorded music. So, what is it? Well, the sounds of the music are reconstructed out of digital numbers spat out of a digital converter, rather like the microdots of a digital photograph, seemingly a good reproduction of the music.Yet music is not digitalized when heard live from a symphony orchestra, rock band or jazz musician, and was never meant to be. Before digitalization, when music was recorded in analogue fashion, recorded music sounded vibrant, expansive and exciting. Not everyone agrees with this sentiment so maybe it's only those who have a discerning musical ear or those who remember being really stimulated by recorded music before the digital age who see the point. Those below the age of, say 25 would not have grown up with recorded music in this format.

So, maybe it is to do with subtle brain functioning that some can tell there's a difference between CD and vinyl, or to be more precise, between analogue and digital. Or is it due to auditory acuity? Some individuals refute that anyone can tell the difference between the two, yet other people seem to know instinctively which they prefer. I wouldn't say I could tell every time but after several plays I know which recording I am tired of and which I want to hear a hundred times. I have albums of Steely Dan, Chick Corea, Prefab Sprout, Springsteen and Joni Mitchell which I never grow tired of, yet CDs by these same very artists seem dull and tiresome after 4 or 5 plays.

Neil Young describes digitalized music as "sensory deprivation with no titillation ..….. like torture". He has been recording music for over 30 years so is in a good position to judge. Elton John also recognizes the superiority of "analogue" music over the digitalized versions, "having greater emotion". Young states that the age of the CD (digital) will, in the future come to be known as the "dark age" of music.

If digitalization is responsible in part, for the fact that youngsters (and other age groups) feel generally less excited or euphoric about music than youngsters did a generation ago, then it could indirectly be the reason that so few artists and bands are making a profound impact that the rock dinosaurs did, and taking over the mantle of the music giants of yesteryear such as Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Genesis and countless others. And is this the reason for the proliferation of tribute bands over the past ten years? Who had ever heard of a tribute band in the 1980s? .

What has brought about the upsurge of rap music in the past 10 to 15 years? Could this be due to the fact that the aggression and spirit of the lyrics are more important and make up for the bland digitalized reproduction? Was digitalization partly the raison d'etre for rap? No disrespect to rap artists, but are the quickly rapped words creating the excitement to compensate for the one-dimensional state of digital recordings? What would be better than to hear Tupac, Ice T. or Eminem recorded on analogue? I've no doubt it would sound truly magical.

Simon Cowell said on the Jonathon Ross programme on 6th June 2003 that "there's too much blandness in music nowadays", whilst Jonathon bemoaned that there were too many cover versions. He failed to comment that a great many cover versions seem to derive from the pre-digital era. But why should this be? It cannot be due to a lack of songwriting talent, or that we are in a state of pathological nostalgia. There certainly isn't a lack of talented producers and technological wizardry has never been greater.

I am now as tired of buying CDs as I am of listening to them, and refute that it's because I'm older or don't have the time to devote to listening to music. For one old git like me, digitalization kills music stone dead. It is music with the heart and soul ripped out of it and counter-instinctive. It is genetically-modified music. It is throwaway music for the throwaway age.

Mark Hughe s ( Website Visitor to http://www.vinylrecords.co.uk )