More info from YOU: From VWestlife: in the UK, there were 185000 pre-recorded cassette tapes sold in 2021, which was the highest since 2003. In the U.S., 343000 cassettes were sold in 2021, almost double compared to 2020 (173000) From SanPandawan San, 2020 Sales Germany: printzblog.com/2021/03/07/allemagne-les-ventes-de-musique-enregistree-progressent-de-9-en-2020/ World music sales report PDF: u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZcyx2VZeSDnLR5pgcmCTyoOKT4k5XSMYgXy
I can't find information about current vs. historic cassette tape sales in the U.S., but in the UK, there were 185000 pre-recorded cassette tapes sold in 2021, which was the highest since 2003. In the U.S., 343000 cassettes were sold in 2021, almost double compared to 2020 (173000).
Excellent content. Love your channel. Last night I remembered a huge box of CD's I had in the attic after moving a few years ago. Listening to them again on my Onkyo C-7030 with Wolfson DAC. Not high end, I know. But it ain't shabby. :)
I would be interested in the share of vintage music vs. new music on vinyl. So far, I had most success with vintage music as it was recorded analogue. For new music (1995 and newer) I prefer to buy the CD most of the time because it's mostly optimized for digital and it's rare it can take advantage of vinyl's sonic features.
I hardly ever buy new vinyl. Bought 3 that have flat out not played . In all my year's buying cds and cassettes. 1 cassette did not play that's in over 40 plus year's
What sonic features on vinyl? The warmth of riding the groove? The pops, crackles and surface noise? The warps which are never bad as long as you can still play it?
The good thing when people buy vinyl albums is that it saves the 2 channel hifi system. It was dying out but is now viable again, both as vintage and newly manufactured equipment.
First of all. I started listening to recorded music in the mid-sixties. From the beginning the quality of vinyl was always an issue. When CDs came along I was quite willing to change over for the sound and convenience. I had about 500 records that I have held on to this day. I never understood those who sold all their records so they could buy CDs. I sold records I didn't like or had tired of. I have almost 400 now and have not sold any in over fifteen years. Now we see people who sold their records, when their value was low, to buy CDs, which were higher then records, are now selling their CDs, at a loss, to buy records, at times at a ridiculous price. In the meantime what started with Napster downloads is now streaming with its 70% of the marketplace. Neither CDs or vinyl have done anything to fight streaming's domination. What you have is CDs and vinyl competing for the remaining 25% -30%. Keep fighting and we'll have streaming at 95%. And the sound of streaming continues to improve and the price of vinyl continues to rise.
A Mr. Ado T replied argumentatively or perhaps with helpful intentions to my comments, saying too big an issue was made by myself about accuracy. First off, talking about accuracy does not mean we don't enjoy the hell out of our stereos. That if we don't feel our sound is perfectly accurate our fun is put off untill we get that perfect accuracy. We are having fun along the way. We are just in constant pursuit, of better and better sound, because getting closer to realism makes our listening experience even more fun and its sheer drama. Plus its a challenge we enjoy Secondly, my discussion which wasn't even meant to be about accuracy, was prompted by repeated provoking by one of these measurements is all important digital worshippers, who can't hear analog is still the most realistic and natural sound. Make no mistake, we are having lots of fun on our journey to better and better sound. But we ARE on a journey. A journey to make the music we love come to life as we have never heard it before.
I do not think it is correct to say that "digital worshippers, who can't hear analog is still the most realistic and natural sound ". Digiphiles - the genuine music lovers - can hear the difference between analog and digital very well indeed. We just do not share your preference for analog. As has been previously mentioned, using your personal preferences as reference is a bad starting point. Instead we should respect what is true and original - the source signal. Analog does a poor job of reproducing the source signal with inherent noise and distortion whereas digital has been audibly transparent for decades. Respect the music and the art, not your own desires!
Let's put an end to this analog vs digital thing Mr Ny. I'm tiring of it. If we had price no object top secret digital playback equipment like Sony has at its main technical facility in Japan, maybe the thinness, lack of warmth, and grain in the sound would not be so apparent. But instead we have what manufacturers give us. Even expensive cd players with cheap parts inside which degrades the sound. A person I knew, not that well, was asked to record Dave Brubeck live on stage, when he came to town. He consulted with someone on the best thing to use for recording the sound. The consultant went on and on telling him how impressive and technologically advanced the digital recording equipment was. It's impressive specs and so forth. He looked at him in the eye and asked him "But how do I get his sound down the best?" What recording method would get his sound down the best?" "That's all I'm concerned with" he said. The other guy looked at him, thought a while and said "Analog reel to reel tape." That's pretty much the consensus of what people with "ears" think. The paper thin thinness that they hear with much digital is not imagined. Instruments in real life have a front AND a back. Which is more apparent and audible with analog. The realistic warmth and beautiful timbre that you really can sink your teeth into with analog is not imagined either. Saying analog captures more accurately is no more subjective than saying digital captures the sound more accurately. In both cases we have to ultimately use our ears, because measuements rarely tell us how something actually sounds. That has been bourne out and mentioned in thousands of audio reviews and concurred pretty much unanimously by all the best audio designers in the world. If they would design equipment by mostly measurement readings, they would produce unlistenable awful sounding equipment. A gizmo may be able to tell us accurately what temperature it is. But no gizmo can tell us if it sounds more like real instrumens as well as our ears. So let's end this robots can evaluate better than humans insanity once and for all. You believe what you want to believe, but you are 180 degrees polar opposite to what the greatest minds of audio believe. Anyone who wants can join you but lets not waste any more of each others time on this nonsense.
@@anadialogNo I didn't mean you. For the last many days I was debating with someone on here going by the name Nyquist. I should have put at least an abbreviation of his name in my text to say who I was talking to.. Sorry. I know you wouldn't be arguing digital being superior over analog, as we all sort of know your views on it. Which I believe is correct. Digital definitely getting better but analog at its best is hard to equal. I don't like to reply to him or anyone I don't know directly, as you never know who you are dealing with. Good channel you have here!
It seems your problem still persists: you are using your personal preferences as reference - and then insisting of course that your preferences are more correct than other preferences. Not a very successful attempt, I am afraid since my or anybody else's opinion is just as valid as yours. You talk a lot about audio professionals and musicians agreeing on this and that. Well, of course you can selectively listen to only those opinions which happen to be the same as yours. The thousands of reviews in audiophile press are essentially worthless because they cater for the analog believers and are never based on controlled blind testing. In addition, most of them share your own fundamental problem: they use their preference as reference - instead of respecting the original sound of music and the creative output of the artists. The accuracy of digital can be easily tested regardless of opinions. No measurements needed. Take any analog master tape and make a digital copy of it. Contrary to what you are claiming the sound will not change at all. It will not become paper thin. If the original analog had "realistic warmth and beautiful timbre that you really can sink your teeth into" they will be on that digital copy, too. The copy will have all the good (and bad) qualities of the original analog master. Whereas you will not be able to do the same with analog. No matter what Dave Brubeck says.
Re: Mr Ny's comments that analog distorts the sound and changes it. That's exactly why a lot of people are heading back to lps, because they can hear digital distortions and aberrations. And those distortions sure do change the sound. For the worse. I actually like digital too because I have very good digital equipment, but analog is a touch more genuine and involving and correct.. Digital does change the sound more with its subtle distortions and electronic signature. Even if the digital read itself was perfect before it goes through a hundred parts inside your cd player, the sound is degraded by each thing it has to go through. Capacitors resistors, transistors etc. The signal from a phono cartridge just goes through the wires inside your tonearm and that's it. No hundred parts the signal has to go through like digital and be converted back to analog. Both Mofi which uses dsd digital and Acoustic Sound which makes almost all analog transfer lps, have a few titles in common they've both done. So people can actually compare. I've yet to hear one credible person say they don"t prefer the all analog pressings. Mr. Ny goes on to say that people are afraid of hearing the true nature of sound so they try to euphonize it with analog. Maybe SOME people buy amps and speakers that are overly warm but that doesn't mean everybody does. We don't have the time or patience for blanket statements like that. People including musicians who are intimately familiar with how their instruments sound and how other instruments sound around them, since they're around music making all day long, for most of their lives, are perceptive enough to hear audible digital distortions and the distortions that a long complex signal path add on top of those. Analog is more of a straight wire with gain than digital with all the things the digital signal has to go through and all the things it has to do to the signal just to get it back to analog at the outputs. Just because audiophiles like a certain sound, doesn't mean that sound is incorrect. Many of them like it more because it sounds more correct. You're not going to convince myself, musicians, audio designers and reviewers that digital is superior. We all know better and have good perception. There's nothing wrong with us.
Again there are many wrong conclusions - stemming from the basic error of using subjective preferences as reference. This is the faulty logic: "I prefer A over B. Therefore B must have some technical problem in it". People may go back to lps because they like the sound of them. But the conclusion that this is because of digital distortions or "electronic signature" is of course quite mistaken and baseless. Our current scientific understanding about analog and digital signals does not support this idea at all. No amount of speculation about simplicity vs complexity or about the different abilities of the listeners is going to change this. Again: all this is trivially easy to test. You can make an audibly indistinguishable copy of the analog original with digital. But you cannot make an audibly indistinguishable copy of the original analog with analog. Preferences have nothing to do with this fact.
Funny how some people without state of the art turntables and cartridges absolutistically proclaim cds to be the champs for sound. That multi thousand dollar phono cartridge you don't have is a much higher quality sound reproducer than even the best $1,000 or under cartridges. In fact, a whole different experience. Someone mentioned cassettes are no fuss. They often jam, get duller sounding, develop dropouts, they sometimes snap or that little piece of felt that the head presses the tape against falls off. I would say we have still not come up with the perfect storage medium. As far as longevity, cd is best; the pits don't degrade from the laser playing it like vinyl grooves degrade from a diamond physically plowing through it enough times. The more I modify my cassette deck, the more I think maybe their isn't quite as much advantage in sheer clarity between cds and cassettes. Cds have such a showy sound compared to tape. You almost have to pro rate cassette some clarity. A more natural way with air and space, analog still has digital beat along with timbre that draws you in more. Listening to great cd playback quality like mine can get you to think.the sound is perfectly natural, until you switch to tape, and then you realize it is just a bit artificial and hyped yet, compared to tape and analog in general, including lps. For purity and such a direct sound, cd's might have the kind of sound we hoped for when half speed mastered lps started coming out in the late 1970s. Half speed mastering does lower distortion. People were fuming with rage when it was discovered that Mofi was using digital, that the Original Master Recording band on the top of the cover didn't mean pure analog anymore, but what about half speed mastering? That OMR label also meant half speed mastered. Perhaps an even more important thing than if a digital step is involved. Has half speed mastering silently slipped out of the picture? Silently sneaked off stage without anyone noticing? Is it too much trouble to half speed master anymore? Actually half speed mastering was used by London records on its FFSS Blueback classical records starting in the late 1950s. Did the process disappear for decades until Mofi brought it back in the late 1970s? Or was it sometimes used in between. Perhaps someone using it and not mentioning it because it would require a lot of technical explanation. There are some amplifiers that get really hot but sound really pure that don't mention they are Class A. And has half speed mastering disappeared again? There is still just something more likeable and special about the sound of analog. Even though digital sound is highly likeable also. So likeable, that it often takes a return to analog listening to realize that it's still the one that is a little more special to the soul.
Is it normal to hear the song faintly in the groove before the record starts to play or does this mean my needle isn't aligned correctly? And this happens on every record.
That is so-called tape print-through. When the tape is stored usually with its tails in the magnetization of the portion of tape below passes ro the one above, hence at the beginning of a record or during silent passages you are going to hear what is about to arrive from the real recording.
Nice analysis even if I don't agree on everything. The lack of quality vinyl systems does trigger reverence for CDs. And now that I have a state-of-the-art CD player (soon ro be revealed) I can confirm that LP is just more engaging and satisfying and true ro the recording IMO.
Interestingly, taking one of the most respected Half Speed mastering sources, Abbey Road, quite honestly on my system I have not been very impressed lately with some of their releases. The 1st US pressing of Tommy sounds better. And, a couple of other recent releases just honestly have not sounded that great. I think I'm beginning to lose faith in the Half Speed mastering process. However, find the TH-cam video by the Audio Analyst where he interviews the owner of Positive Feedback David Robinson about Quad DSD mastering and it will indeed blow your mind (I'm talking to you too Guido 😊) I'll give you a taste... David said that he and Chad (of all people) and another Audio luminary did blind tests, and *NONE* of them, not *ONCE* could tell the difference between the original analog master tapes and Quad DSD copies. Needless to say, Chad was somewhat bemused by the situation... As a matter of fact, David said that 'These guys at Abbey Road should get off their @sses and dump the PCM format they are using and go to Quad DSD' 😁
Love the graphs. Digital downloads ruined the sale of physical media, sadly. Now if you can include the number of illegal downloads, it would be interesting. Hope you follow up so we can see how LPs did in 2022 due to inflation. I was there in the late 60s buying LPs right along until the CD hit the market. It was a wild time, a fun time. Now, can you come up with the number of LP/CD sales that reflect people buying 60s through 80s music? Seems many people love the older music, like the music I listened to in the distant past.
Hi all, got a question, do you think cassette will start to sell well as vinyl did? IMHO, cassette started out for speech recording and ended up to be a quite evolved media, Nakamichi decks, Tandberg as well as Revox and many other brands, not forgetting tape formulations by Maxell, TDK and Sony, just to mention a few. I think this particular media deserves to resurge and keep evolving for years to come. Thanks for your comments about the subject. Best regards.
As explained in a few videos of mine, we are lacking player, recorders and quality tapes (apart from type 1) si this is greatly slowing growth...here is where I go more in depth on this specific topic: th-cam.com/video/63CU_Fzv1jk/w-d-xo.html
I think looking at vinyl singles might also be interesting. People definitely bought them, at least here in Europe. They don't seem to be a thing now but they used to be relevant to music sales.
I don't get the overlap system, tape looks smaller than lps, then later looked taller than cd, Wich dwarfs LPs. Once overlapped it's had to visualize what was underneath, a side by side may be required for my tiny brain.🤓
I have purchased several expensive DACs and they don't quite sound right to me so I went back to vinyl and boom the aliveness and dimensionally came back. I don't think DACs are quite up to sound quality of well cut vinyl just yet. I am sure this will change very soon but IMO consumer grade digital is not as good. My opinion might very well be wrong as I have not heard the Chord high end Dave DAC yet.
You need to start looking inside the box. DACs sound different, depending on their build. Just buying black boxes blindly won't give you the sound you want.
I know this is not sales but... i tried to use Google trends to compare searches over time for both CDs and vinyl LPs worldwide, but here's the problem. Every country calls CDs, CDs. But in when it comes to vinyl LPs,... Germans call them "Schallplatten", the French call them "disques vinyles" the Bulgarians call them "vinilovi plochi" and the Italians call them "dischi in vinile"... and so on... So what term do you search for to compare? This info is not easy to get once you look outside the English speaking world.
I still buy CDs and SACDs… and mostly records, what a question. But! the most problems in sound and quality of the product I have with the new records/LPs. And that‘s boring 🤬
I got a reply to my previous post which struck me a little strange. The guy said vinyl cannot reproduce the source accurately and only digital can, and that I was using my own subjectiveness, in his words as a reference. Can you say mind pretzel? With something like that you don't know where to even start. Of course everything on here is an opinion based on what sounds accurate to our own ears. No sin in that. And our ears are indeed our hearing apparatus, and that's what we, as human beings use to hear. My reference as to what is accurate, is the sound of live instruments (unamplified of course). I play acoustic guitar and a few other instruments and I know what a guitar sounds like; the sounds it does and does not make. Ditto with the other instruments and my knowing just what sounds they make and don't. As for digital being more accurate; based on what I hear. No. Analog is more complex in timbre, doesn't have any lack of warmth and doesn't sound as spotlit and telegraphed as digital. Digital is great, but it's just a little mechanical sounding compared to the continuity and natural flow of analog. It also has some problem with reproducing air and space accurately. Although it does "pretty well" in that way. Digital Cds actually have missing frequencies that are used for filtering. Is missing frequencies accurate? Not going to waste my time arguing with people like this. You like what you like, I like what I like. But my like is based on my superior familiarity of just how instruments sound. Your average accomplished musician has spent thousands of hours listening to the instrument he plays and practices. If an accomplished guitar player or pianist, thinks analog sounds more like the instrument that he knows oh so well, there isn't any machine in the world that's going to tell him any different. If the gizmo says digital sounds better, then his ears, and the machine hear differently, the ONLY important thing to him is his own perception. If the measuring machine says something to the contrary, any intelligent person isn't going to doubt what he's been hearing from his instrument during 20,000 hours of practicing. He simply realizes that the machines measurements and how his hearing perceives things is different. He knows the machine isn't seeing the whole picture like his perception can. Something is missing in it's equation. And his perception is the only thing that even matters anyhow. Also measuring gurus must assume measuring devices are perfect. Even if they were, it would take a whole new science to examine how that translates to how our ears perceive sound. It would be a boring science too. These people that put measuring devices first, must anxiously look forward to the day. The day when everything is a robot.
Most audiophiles flatter themselves by thinking they know how instruments really sound. But claims like this can easily be tested of course. Take an analog signal and make a digital copy of it: the copy will sound identical to the original. Then do an analog copy of the signal : it will sound different, no matter how much you may prefer the end result. Analog cannot preserve the qualities of the analog while digital can. And that is really all there is to it.
Sides up. Forget all the "accuracy" argument, it's so boring. It's just musical entertainment. It's whatever people enjoy. Arguing over which format is more accurate is of minor importance. Concerning one's self with even the smallest of details is pathetic.
"Take an analog signal and make a digital copy of it: the copy will sound identical to the original" Haha, good laught. Maybe with DSD1024 ... but we are not there yet.
@@booom4849 We are quite there. Vinyl is an inherently low res medium. 32 khz sampling rate and 12 bits would probably be enough. In 1984 already Linn's Ivor S. Tiefenbrun was unable to hear the presence of an early Sony PCM-F1 converter in an all- Linn/Naim playback chain. Of course the result of the test was no great surprise to anybody knowledgeable about digital audio. But audiophiles - who generally speaking do not really understand digital - will continue to believe in big marketing numbers. In ten years time we will have DSD32768 or DSD65536. And it will not be enough, of course because the whole cult is based on magical thinking and placebo.
@@davidgardiner4720 The same here in Austria, I sell vinyl on record shows and when I talk to dealer about CD´s they say business is good. The problem for me as a seller is that there is not much profit in CD´s so I don't sell them.
That would consist solely of vinyl, a small portion of cassette and 8 track, and probably some reel to reel in there as well. There were no CD’s, streaming was a term not even invented yet, and there was no digital music available for purchase. By far the largest category would be vinyl. In the earlier part of the range you mention, I’m sure vinyl singles would have been bigger than albums.
In many parts of the Third World, cassettes lasted far longer against cd's than in the Developed countries. Evn now they are still widely used in certain areas.
When you showed the cassette numbers, were they just pre-recorded ones or were blanks included as well? I presume just the former. A great video. Many thanks.
@@johnmarchington3146 Indeed it would (impossible to know exact figures anyway). As it would be to include CD-R copies, of which there were so many in the first decade of this century.
If you were gonna buy an album and could only get it in a CD format or an LP format which would you choose? And lets add that both are mastered beautifully to their optimum level. Which one would you buy?
I think that Covid would have stifled the sales in 2020 as many physical stores closed and even mail order was subdued. Therefor therefore the jump in 2021 possibly only shows a bit of a recovery.
interesting info, looks like the year 2000/2001 was the turning point for the music industry of physical formats, both units and revenue went into a downward spiral after that...Huge revenues in recent years now coming from the paid subscription services.
@@babylemonade2868 Hey, taping was big for over 20 years. Though it's true you did not grab as massive quantities of stuff that way as with MP3 sharing (you paid for the blank media and your choices were basically your family and friends' records) it was no slouch.
It's all relative to what you have and how you're using it; this digital vs analog thing. You might prefer a good $600 cd player over a vintage $200 Kenwood turntable with an old Shure M91ed phono cartridge on it. The budget M91ed actually had a faster rise time (transient response) than their top of the line at the time, the Shure V15 III. The III has become somewhat of a legend among vintage audiophiles with JICO and other companies making advanced higher quality styluses for it.. But put that $200 Kenwood turntable on a good heavy stand with a good isolation base underneath it. Replace the rubber mat with a more advanced one and replace the magnetic cartridge with an entry level $400 moving coil cartridge and see if you still like the $600 cd player better for sound. You probably won't. Of course guys like me use far better equipment than that These guys who try really hard to get us to believe that digital is superior and analog changes the sound and loses all this sound quality,;they don't realize that some of us have good reel to reel tape recorders. More than one. When we make a tape from a tape there's not any notable audible difference between the original and the copy. Maybe just a barely discernible increase in background hiss, only audible in a close A/B comparison. If we continued to make a copy from a copy, at some point the original does sound obviously better. But what home consumer does that? These masters of BS don't realize that we can easily do the experiment in our own living room. They also don't realize that we have factory prerecorded tapes by artists that are well recorded and obviously have way better signal quality than any cd or lp we have ever heard. Some of the Mercury and RCA early stereo reel tape recordings have an openness and wealth of detail and such palpability & dynamics that they are totally in a class of their own, compared to digital.. Even 5 figure digital playback systems.
Reel to reel's superiority is another myth perpetuated by audiophiles. Once again subjective preferences are erroneously used as reference. Truth is every measurable parameter in R2R is worse than with digital. Now, you may like the inaccuracies of reel to reel - many people do - but the truth still stands: you can make an audibly indistinguishable copy of the analog original with digital. But you cannot make an audibly indistinguishable copy of the original analog with analog.
The CD and to some extent the cassette had years of fantastic sales with a decent percentage coming from people, like myself that bought the same albums that I already owned. The CD because in the early days CD players cost a bit of money, so you might as well get your moneys worth type of thinking. Then the cassette for the car as it took a few years before CD players started to make it's way into the automotive world. At least from what I can remember. So yeah those high sales are probably from suckers...I mean customers like me buying the same music on multiple formats.
Spending serious money on a prerecorded cassette of an album you already owned? No, not really, I guess few people did that, you typically taped your record on a blank to listen to it outside your home. If you happened to find the album on cassette in a bargain bin for very cheap, like not much more than a blank would cost, then maybe you'd buy it.
Probably as good a measure of sound quality as anything, is when listening to a system or type of source, "does it sound weird?" Real unamplified instruments never sound weird. Full of character and color and complexity of sound, but never weird. In my continuace of modifying my equipment to improve the sound quality, when I first play an evaluative recording, after I did some modifying work inside my equipment, I often don't know why I like the sound better, often I can't describe what's better, it just sounds less weird for lack of a better word. Even when I thought it sounded just fine before. Distortion, even a little bit of it, causes timbres to sound slightly odd. Something you only notice after you do the work and make the improvement. Even very small amounts of grain, edge and electronic sounds are audible to the experienced discerning ear. When you play something back and it has less of that, it at first asserts itself as simply more of a relaxed listen and the sound is less weird. Not that it was weird before, but slightly more free of something that you can now hear shouldn't have been there. That was not part of the instruments sound; but was an electronic sound. I have heard one reviewer describe such sound with the adjective "friendly." That's a good word for it I think. Welcoming and more alluring would also be other words for it. It is so cool to do a mod, put on a recording and hear the improvement and even though the work was hard, delicate surgery, the work is over and your sound is now going to have those new special qualities you can hear from now on. Like exploring a hidden cave or something, but it's not a cave but what was on the master tape that you're exploring. Or at least getting closer and closer to the master tape. Capably hearing into the music more and more. For all we know we might be holding master tape quality in our hand, if we ever perfect our playback quality As our long term modding progresses we wonder if anyone else out there can hear so far into the music. There are other amateurs out there exploring new ground like ourself, and perhaps going where maybe no one has gone before. There are discoveries to be possibly made, even by. Average Joes, if your attention to detail is good enough. There are many instances of stars in the night sky discovered by amateur astronomers with their modest backyard telescopes. They are verified and then charted, sometimes named after the backyard astronomer who made the discovery and given an NGC number. You don't have to have a degree to discover new things or come up with things that no one has ever thought of before. It's a lot more fun and rewarding than throwing huge sums of money at it. It's all about the music, but equipment that can unravel the musical fabric in a way we never heard before and let us hear further in is sheer drama.
The problem with this approach is that you are using your subjective preferences as reference. But the point of digital is that it can reproduce the source signal - weird or not - faithfully - whereas vinyl cannot. The other problem of course is that we have no common accepted definition for "weird".
@@nyquist5190 Subjective reference is the point what matters and the only way to identify lies. Digital (PCM) can reproduce the source signal faithfully, my ass.
@@booom4849 Nope. Subjectivity only tells you what you personally prefer. Of course there is nothing wrong with preferring the sound of vinyl. But if we want to hear the purity and original soul of the original analog creation as uncontaminated as possible, digital is the way to go. If you have any respect for music recordings as art, choose digital.
After telling Nyquist to stop bothering me already, several times now, and "You go your opinionated way and I'll go mine"; he persists and just replied again. Accusing me of using my own preference as a reference. Imagine that! Accusing someone who is a musician, who uses acoustical instruments as a reference, of using their likes as a reference. Amazing!! His numb accusation couldn't be directed at a worse person. Someone like me, who is surrounded by real musical instruments all day, who has an innate familiarity with how they sound, from playing and hearing them thousands of different times. Incredulous indeed! Take a good reel to reel deck and the best cd player you can find. Find a well recorded reel tape and a well recorded cd. Play a reel tape and turn the treble up on your amp until it is treble emphasized; around 3 o'clock on the dial. The reel tape will sound bright but not harsh. Now try the same thing with the cd. Ghastly !!! I will guarantee you that the cd will sound harsh. Not just treble emphasized, but harsh and in fact unlistenable. Boosting the treble serves as a magnifying glass and test for distortion. For those who do not have "ears".And while most analog distortion if there is any, is listenable; digital distortions are particularly harsh. There are no soft digital distortions. They are stingy to the ears. So once again Mr. Nyquist you have made a fool of yourself and please go your way and I'll go mine.
Interestingly enough, you are suggesting a test which has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Somehow I get the impression that you might not have really grasped the basic concepts of sound reproduction. The reel to reel vs cd test you are suggesting is just odd.
Mr digital responded again. He may have deficiency for ears, but musicians obviously know how their instruments sound, spending so much of their life playing them, and to them analog does a better impersonation than digital. Saying they're "flattering themselves" to know how their instruments sound is like saying you need a measurement to recognize your mother. He must be flattering himself to think he knows it all. You can measure everything about a cake; except how good it tastes. If people like this had any importance, perhaps a study should be done as to why they have such a psychological yearning to reduce this beautiful world, including beautiful music to measurements. 0 and 1s must be like God to them,. Reality doesn't matter to them, only what's on paper. They discount peoples hearing and perception, when that's the ONLY important thing. They also disregard the opinions of the best minds in audio history and.all the audio reviewers who all mention from time to time in their reviews that the measurement results don't correspond with how this piece actually sounds. That it not only doesn't tell the whole story; it tells a completely different story. Mesurements and some peoples minds are primitive. We don't understand everything yet and don't even have a measurement for some important things like clarity. The most respected designers design equipment based on ear first, paper second. As it should be, realizing this.They are SMART people, and we have great sound because of their efforts. Let these 0 and 1 worshippers live in their boring fantasy worlds full of absolutistic statements. Who cares what they think really. The world will keep turning and passing them by.
Surely there are some musicians who feel that analog does "better impersonation" than digital. The basic error here - again - is that they are using their personal preferences as reference. Measurements are not done to determine what sounds good, since good is a subjective appraisal of sound. However, measurements are used to determine what a system, format or device does to the sound. Many audiophiles obviously do not understand this difference since they are so fixated on the idea of personal pleasure. It can be determined beyond any shadow of a doubt that with 0s and 1s you can preserve and reproduce the original analog qualities of the original sound much more faithfully than with any known analog method. Analog methods inevitably distort and change the sound, digital methods much less. This is the very reason the classical music recording industry welcomed digital with open arms more than 40 years ago. Obviously quite a few audiophiles do not have any respect for the purity of original music or the artists' creative output - since they deliberately want to make the sound more pleasing to them with analog methods. They are perhaps so afraid of the true sound of music that it has to be sugarcoated with analog distortions to make it more palatable. I think it is precisely this group and the manufacturers catering for them that the world is about pass by: the overwhelming majority of all music recording is done digitally and 95% of the music sales is digital. The numbers do not lie.
@@nyquist5190 Again such a BS comment from you. You talk about elitism and you speak as an arrogant one without any back up. Digital just distorts the signal as much as analogue does, but in a way our ears like less. Maybe DSD does the trick to have less distortion, but low-res PCM (including 192 kHz) has so high distortion, it's not even funny. The music industry is on the wrong path adapting to it, preserving digital distortion as long as the data rates stay low.
It seems vinyl sales have replaced only a tiny portion of the declined cd sales during the last two decades. Analog music reproduction (vinyl) only has about 5% of the music market. With 95 % market share digital is the clear winner. The numbers do not lie. People have rightfully voted with their wallets for the superior sound quality of digital against the analog distortions of the past.
@@anadialog Sure, convenience is one aspect. But your claim that it is only about convenience is not supported by evidence at all. I think it is precisely the thinly disguised elitism that will eventually kill the vinyl fad. Dubious science and statistics are actually doing a disservice to vinyl culture.
@@nyquist5190 If there were quad DSD distribution formats or higher, we could talk about replacing vinyl, but there are not. Vinyl just sounds so much better than current streaming and will gain market share as long as the digital options remain low-res.
@@booom4849 Sure, you might prefer the sound of vinyl. But it is trivially easy to demonstrate that even current lossy streaming formats are able to reproduce the original analog signal more faithfully than any vinyl player at any price. Even your Iphone is capable of this.
Streaming will nuke those results. Most people stream music one way or another. Basically very few people actually buy physical media these days. It's sad but sadly it happens.
C'mon guys.... personal opinions are fine but nothing sounds better than vinyl on a good set up... I say that, and most of the people in the business say that.
They may say that of course but surely the music buying public has the final say in this. 95% of the music buying public is using digital - either cds, downloads of streaming. And half of the vinyl buyers do not actually listen to the records they buy.
Streaming killed the digital sales. So artists seem to be looking for something to sell. I think that is what is driving slowly the cassette sales. Vinyls are expensive, players are expensive and they aren't very movable. Cassettes were big in the past because they were no-fuss system. You might have a proper home deck for making mixtapes and making copies of Vinyls or CDs or friends cassette, but mostly you clipped your walkman to your belt, maybe a second cassette into a pocket and that was it. At the end you threw the cassettes to a drawer and nothing happened to them. No fussing with changing needles, cleaning records, careful handling etc. Vinyls sell currently, but many use them strictly as display items and you can't sell one to casual fan because of the cost. Covid proved to many artists that they do need to be able to actually make sales, to have financial stability. Now they are looking for anything that might stick. It's either return to old formats or NFTs.
The grasp of sound or a sane argument is what is beyond you Mr Nyquist. It doesn't matter if its a reel tape deck vs. a cd. Sound is sound and distortion is distortion. All digital distortions are hard or harsh. That's one reason why analog is preferred by the best audiophiles including the one who owns this channel. Re: reel tape vs. Cd with treble boosted. Maybe 2 horses shouldn't be allowed to run in the same race unless they are exactly the same color according to your logic. Saying that musicians who think analog is more genuine, don't know the sound of their instruments just shows how beyond the star system your thoughts are. Saying someone who has sound quality beyond anything most audiophiles have ever heard, doesn't have a "grasp of sound" is beyond Pluto's orbit also. Your "argument" is getting more and more thin. I'd rather just do what I'm doing instead of being bothered by you. For the last time; I hope !!
The LP fad will fade once people realize they've been duped by people claiming records sound better than cds. CDs are still superior to records and record players. No its not "vinyl' they are records. Crappy records. They are just taking advantage of dumb kids that must think because records are bigger than Cds they sound better. It's just not true. CDs sound better than records. And are superior in every way. If you enjoy collecting them fine. But don't claim they sound better.
True but studios don't master CDs to take advantage of their full dynic range, so a lot of time the vinyl ends up sounding better in that regard. If done right in the mastering, CD would absolutely crush vinyl every time.
Damn right! Vinyl, Records, Tubes are NOT Hi-Fi. 15 or 30 inch/s R2R tapes, high resolution streaming, original DSD recordings are HiFi. This doesn't mean that HiFi sounds better...it just means that it is high fidelity.
I play both and I find the recording quality is was matters. Some vinyl kicks digital and some new hi res sound better than vinyl. That being said a quality vinyl setup will sound more natural than CDs.
That’s your view. But, who are you? Pro mastering engineers think different. Look for Bernie Grundman, one of the finest mastering engineers of our time, about that topic
![ANA[DIA]LOG](http://yt3.ggpht.com/50CpmGNilS8aoMlarZVhI_GxRDoZdbj4ZgwCMZXg-Rq2PrEvCytlE6RVyLUrNY-rwE_sAlZ1Zw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
More info from YOU:
From VWestlife: in the UK, there were 185000 pre-recorded cassette tapes sold in 2021, which was the highest since 2003. In the U.S., 343000 cassettes were sold in 2021, almost double compared to 2020 (173000)
From SanPandawan San, 2020 Sales Germany: printzblog.com/2021/03/07/allemagne-les-ventes-de-musique-enregistree-progressent-de-9-en-2020/
World music sales report PDF: u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZcyx2VZeSDnLR5pgcmCTyoOKT4k5XSMYgXy
YOUR PDF IS A WORK ART !
Being buying and supporting the CD format for so long. Since 1988. Won't ever stop purchasing them.
And that's good of you, I will say. Best part is you can get a lot of inexpensive albums on CD these days, specially in the used market.
I can't find information about current vs. historic cassette tape sales in the U.S., but in the UK, there were 185000 pre-recorded cassette tapes sold in 2021, which was the highest since 2003. In the U.S., 343000 cassettes were sold in 2021, almost double compared to 2020 (173000).
Great info, thanks! I will add it in the video description.
Vinyl, CD and streaming, in that order for me. 😉
Happy listening to all, from Scotland 🏴🎶🎶
Jim 🏴🙂
Idem!
Exactly ! Analogue, analogue to digital, than digital
Excellent content. Love your channel. Last night I remembered a huge box of CD's I had in the attic after moving a few years ago. Listening to them again on my Onkyo C-7030 with Wolfson DAC. Not high end, I know. But it ain't shabby. :)
Nice!
I would be interested in the share of vintage music vs. new music on vinyl. So far, I had most success with vintage music as it was recorded analogue. For new music (1995 and newer) I prefer to buy the CD most of the time because it's mostly optimized for digital and it's rare it can take advantage of vinyl's sonic features.
Totally agree! And very important advantage is you can make your own playlist with cdrs. To top it try the gold cdrs.
I hardly ever buy new vinyl. Bought 3 that have flat out not played . In all my year's buying cds and cassettes. 1 cassette did not play that's in over 40 plus year's
What sonic features on vinyl? The warmth of riding the groove? The pops, crackles and surface noise? The warps which are never bad as long as you can still play it?
@@davidhagedorn5009 These are sonic disadvantages. The advantages are more precise signal than digital, more real-life.
I just love CDs. Love em, love em, love em and still buying them :)
The good thing when people buy vinyl albums is that it saves the 2 channel hifi system. It was dying out but is now viable again, both as vintage and newly manufactured equipment.
First of all. I started listening to recorded music in the mid-sixties. From the beginning the quality of vinyl was always an issue. When CDs came along I was quite willing to change over for the sound and convenience. I had about 500 records that I have held on to this day. I never understood those who sold all their records so they could buy CDs. I sold records I didn't like or had tired of. I have almost 400 now and have not sold any in over fifteen years. Now we see people who sold their records, when their value was low, to buy CDs, which were higher then records, are now selling their CDs, at a loss, to buy records, at times at a ridiculous price. In the meantime what started with Napster downloads is now streaming with its 70% of the marketplace. Neither CDs or vinyl have done anything to fight streaming's domination. What you have is CDs and vinyl competing for the remaining 25% -30%. Keep fighting and we'll have streaming at 95%. And the sound of streaming continues to improve and the price of vinyl continues to rise.
A Mr. Ado T replied argumentatively or perhaps with helpful intentions to my comments, saying too big an issue was made by myself about accuracy. First off, talking about accuracy does not mean we don't enjoy the hell out of our stereos. That if we don't feel our sound is perfectly accurate our fun is put off untill we get that perfect accuracy. We are having fun along the way. We are just in constant pursuit, of better and better sound, because getting closer to realism makes our listening experience even more fun and its sheer drama. Plus its a challenge we enjoy
Secondly, my discussion which wasn't even meant to be about accuracy, was prompted by repeated provoking by one of these measurements is all important digital worshippers, who can't hear analog is still the most realistic and natural sound. Make no mistake, we are having lots of fun on our journey to better and better sound. But we ARE on a journey. A journey to make the music we love come to life as we have never heard it before.
I do not think it is correct to say that "digital worshippers, who can't hear analog is still the most realistic and natural sound ". Digiphiles - the genuine music lovers - can hear the difference between analog and digital very well indeed. We just do not share your preference for analog.
As has been previously mentioned, using your personal preferences as reference is a bad starting point. Instead we should respect what is true and original - the source signal. Analog does a poor job of reproducing the source signal with inherent noise and distortion whereas digital has been audibly transparent for decades. Respect the music and the art, not your own desires!
Let's put an end to this analog vs digital thing Mr Ny. I'm tiring of it. If we had price no object top secret digital playback equipment like Sony has at its main technical facility in Japan, maybe the thinness, lack of warmth, and grain in the sound would not be so apparent. But instead we have what manufacturers give us. Even expensive cd players with cheap parts inside which degrades the sound. A person I knew, not that well, was asked to record Dave Brubeck live on stage, when he came to town. He consulted with someone on the best thing to use for recording the sound. The consultant went on and on telling him how impressive and technologically advanced the digital recording equipment was. It's impressive specs and so forth. He looked at him in the eye and asked him "But how do I get his sound down the best?" What recording method would get his sound down the best?" "That's all I'm concerned with" he said. The other guy looked at him, thought a while and said "Analog reel to reel tape." That's pretty much the consensus of what people with "ears" think. The paper thin thinness that they hear with much digital is not imagined. Instruments in real life have a front AND a back. Which is more apparent and audible with analog. The realistic warmth and beautiful timbre that you really can sink your teeth into with analog is not imagined either. Saying analog captures more accurately is no more subjective than saying digital captures the sound more accurately. In both cases we have to ultimately use our ears, because measuements rarely tell us how something actually sounds. That has been bourne out and mentioned in thousands of audio reviews and concurred pretty much unanimously by all the best audio designers in the world. If they would design equipment by mostly measurement readings, they would produce unlistenable awful sounding equipment. A gizmo may be able to tell us accurately what temperature it is. But no gizmo can tell us if it sounds more like real instrumens as well as our ears. So let's end this robots can evaluate better than humans insanity once and for all. You believe what you want to believe, but you are 180 degrees polar opposite to what the greatest minds of audio believe. Anyone who wants can join you but lets not waste any more of each others time on this nonsense.
I don't know if you are referring to me but this video was just about presenting sales data...thanks for sharing that story!
@@anadialogNo I didn't mean you. For the last many days I was debating with someone on here going by the name Nyquist. I should have put at least an abbreviation of his name in my text to say who I was talking to.. Sorry. I know you wouldn't be arguing digital being superior over analog, as we all sort of know your views on it. Which I believe is correct. Digital definitely getting better but analog at its best is hard to equal. I don't like to reply to him or anyone I don't know directly, as you never know who you are dealing with. Good channel you have here!
It seems your problem still persists: you are using your personal preferences as reference - and then insisting of course that your preferences are more correct than other preferences. Not a very successful attempt, I am afraid since my or anybody else's opinion is just as valid as yours.
You talk a lot about audio professionals and musicians agreeing on this and that. Well, of course you can selectively listen to only those opinions which happen to be the same as yours. The thousands of reviews in audiophile press are essentially worthless because they cater for the analog believers and are never based on controlled blind testing. In addition, most of them share your own fundamental problem: they use their preference as reference - instead of respecting the original sound of music and the creative output of the artists.
The accuracy of digital can be easily tested regardless of opinions. No measurements needed. Take any analog master tape and make a digital copy of it. Contrary to what you are claiming the sound will not change at all. It will not become paper thin. If the original analog had "realistic warmth and beautiful timbre that you really can sink your teeth into" they will be on that digital copy, too. The copy will have all the good (and bad) qualities of the original analog master. Whereas you will not be able to do the same with analog. No matter what Dave Brubeck says.
Re: Mr Ny's comments that analog distorts the sound and changes it. That's exactly why a lot of people are heading back to lps, because they can hear digital distortions and aberrations. And those distortions sure do change the sound. For the worse. I actually like digital too because I have very good digital equipment, but analog is a touch more genuine and involving and correct.. Digital does change the sound more with its subtle distortions and electronic signature. Even if the digital read itself was perfect before it goes through a hundred parts inside your cd player, the sound is degraded by each thing it has to go through. Capacitors resistors, transistors etc. The signal from a phono cartridge just goes through the wires inside your tonearm and that's it. No hundred parts the signal has to go through like digital and be converted back to analog. Both Mofi which uses dsd digital and Acoustic Sound which makes almost all analog transfer lps, have a few titles in common they've both done. So people can actually compare. I've yet to hear one credible person say they don"t prefer the all analog pressings.
Mr. Ny goes on to say that people are afraid of hearing the true nature of sound so they try to euphonize it with analog. Maybe SOME people buy amps and speakers that are overly warm but that doesn't mean everybody does. We don't have the time or patience for blanket statements like that. People including musicians who are intimately familiar with how their instruments sound and how other instruments sound around them, since they're around music making all day long, for most of their lives, are perceptive enough to hear audible digital distortions and the distortions that a long complex signal path add on top of those. Analog is more of a straight wire with gain than digital with all the things the digital signal has to go through and all the things it has to do to the signal just to get it back to analog at the outputs. Just because audiophiles like a certain sound, doesn't mean that sound is incorrect. Many of them like it more because it sounds more correct. You're not going to convince myself, musicians, audio designers and reviewers that digital is superior. We all know better and have good perception. There's nothing wrong with us.
Again there are many wrong conclusions - stemming from the basic error of using subjective preferences as reference. This is the faulty logic: "I prefer A over B. Therefore B must have some technical problem in it". People may go back to lps because they like the sound of them. But the conclusion that this is because of digital distortions or "electronic signature" is of course quite mistaken and baseless. Our current scientific understanding about analog and digital signals does not support this idea at all. No amount of speculation about simplicity vs complexity or about the different abilities of the listeners is going to change this. Again: all this is trivially easy to test. You can make an audibly indistinguishable copy of the analog original with digital. But you cannot make an audibly indistinguishable copy of the original analog with analog. Preferences have nothing to do with this fact.
Funny how some people without state of the art turntables and cartridges absolutistically proclaim cds to be the champs for sound. That multi thousand dollar phono cartridge you don't have is a much higher quality sound reproducer than even the best $1,000 or under cartridges. In fact, a whole different experience. Someone mentioned cassettes are no fuss. They often jam, get duller sounding, develop dropouts, they sometimes snap or that little piece of felt that the head presses the tape against falls off. I would say we have still not come up with the perfect storage medium. As far as longevity, cd is best; the pits don't degrade from the laser playing it like vinyl grooves degrade from a diamond physically plowing through it enough times. The more I modify my cassette deck, the more I think maybe their isn't quite as much advantage in sheer clarity between cds and cassettes. Cds have such a showy sound compared to tape. You almost have to pro rate cassette some clarity. A more natural way with air and space, analog still has digital beat along with timbre that draws you in more. Listening to great cd playback quality like mine can get you to think.the sound is perfectly natural, until you switch to tape, and then you realize it is just a bit artificial and hyped yet, compared to tape and analog in general, including lps.
For purity and such a direct sound, cd's might have the kind of sound we hoped for when half speed mastered lps started coming out in the late 1970s. Half speed mastering does lower distortion. People were fuming with rage when it was discovered that Mofi was using digital, that the Original Master Recording band on the top of the cover didn't mean pure analog anymore, but what about half speed mastering? That OMR label also meant half speed mastered. Perhaps an even more important thing than if a digital step is involved. Has half speed mastering silently slipped out of the picture? Silently sneaked off stage without anyone noticing? Is it too much trouble to half speed master anymore? Actually half speed mastering was used by London records on its FFSS Blueback classical records starting in the late 1950s. Did the process disappear for decades until Mofi brought it back in the late 1970s? Or was it sometimes used in between. Perhaps someone using it and not mentioning it because it would require a lot of technical explanation. There are some amplifiers that get really hot but sound really pure that don't mention they are Class A. And has half speed mastering disappeared again? There is still just something more likeable and special about the sound of analog. Even though digital sound is highly likeable also. So likeable, that it often takes a return to analog listening to realize that it's still the one that is a little more special to the soul.
Is it normal to hear the song faintly in the groove before the record starts to play or does this mean my needle isn't aligned correctly? And this happens on every record.
That is so-called tape print-through. When the tape is stored usually with its tails in the magnetization of the portion of tape below passes ro the one above, hence at the beginning of a record or during silent passages you are going to hear what is about to arrive from the real recording.
Nice analysis even if I don't agree on everything. The lack of quality vinyl systems does trigger reverence for CDs. And now that I have a state-of-the-art CD player (soon ro be revealed) I can confirm that LP is just more engaging and satisfying and true ro the recording IMO.
@@anadialog DAMN STRAIGHT! All music begins as Analog...
Interestingly, taking one of the most respected Half Speed mastering sources, Abbey Road, quite honestly on my system I have not been very impressed lately with some of their releases. The 1st US pressing of Tommy sounds better. And, a couple of other recent releases just honestly have not sounded that great. I think I'm beginning to lose faith in the Half Speed mastering process. However, find the TH-cam video by the Audio Analyst where he interviews the owner of Positive Feedback David Robinson about Quad DSD mastering and it will indeed blow your mind (I'm talking to you too Guido 😊) I'll give you a taste... David said that he and Chad (of all people) and another Audio luminary did blind tests, and *NONE* of them, not *ONCE* could tell the difference between the original analog master tapes and Quad DSD copies. Needless to say, Chad was somewhat bemused by the situation...
As a matter of fact, David said that 'These guys at Abbey Road should get off their @sses and dump the PCM format they are using and go to Quad DSD' 😁
Love the graphs. Digital downloads ruined the sale of physical media, sadly. Now if you can include the number of illegal downloads, it would be interesting.
Hope you follow up so we can see how LPs did in 2022 due to inflation.
I was there in the late 60s buying LPs right along until the CD hit the market. It was a wild time, a fun time.
Now, can you come up with the number of LP/CD sales that reflect people buying 60s through 80s music? Seems many people love the older music, like the music I listened to in the distant past.
Hi all, got a question, do you think cassette will start to sell well as vinyl did? IMHO, cassette started out for speech recording and ended up to be a quite evolved media, Nakamichi decks, Tandberg as well as Revox and many other brands, not forgetting tape formulations by Maxell, TDK and Sony, just to mention a few. I think this particular media deserves to resurge and keep evolving for years to come. Thanks for your comments about the subject. Best regards.
As explained in a few videos of mine, we are lacking player, recorders and quality tapes (apart from type 1) si this is greatly slowing growth...here is where I go more in depth on this specific topic: th-cam.com/video/63CU_Fzv1jk/w-d-xo.html
I think looking at vinyl singles might also be interesting. People definitely bought them, at least here in Europe. They don't seem to be a thing now but they used to be relevant to music sales.
I did try to turn them on before filming but wasn't that huge of a change...in any case, yes, it's part of the game like CD singles...
Key data missing is US sales of used cd and vinyl. Last 2 years I bought many used cd than new ones.(40 new, 30 used)
I don't get the overlap system, tape looks smaller than lps, then later looked taller than cd, Wich dwarfs LPs.
Once overlapped it's had to visualize what was underneath, a side by side may be required for my tiny brain.🤓
Proportions change but respectively so one group from another seem quite different but looked at separately they make sense...but less impact
I have purchased several expensive DACs and they don't quite sound right to me so I went back to vinyl and boom the aliveness and dimensionally came back. I don't think DACs are quite up to sound quality of well cut vinyl just yet. I am sure this will change very soon but IMO consumer grade digital is not as good. My opinion might very well be wrong as I have not heard the Chord high end Dave DAC yet.
You need to start looking inside the box. DACs sound different, depending on their build. Just buying black boxes blindly won't give you the sound you want.
HERE GUIDO 🤗 TO SUPPORT YOUR CHANNEL …let the fun begin 😊💚💚💚
Molto molto interessante!! Neanche io pensavo che i cd avessero venduto COSÌ TANTO!!!! Incredibile....
I know this is not sales but... i tried to use Google trends to compare searches over time for both CDs and vinyl LPs worldwide, but here's the problem. Every country calls CDs, CDs. But in when it comes to vinyl LPs,... Germans call them "Schallplatten", the French call them "disques vinyles" the Bulgarians call them "vinilovi plochi" and the Italians call them "dischi in vinile"... and so on... So what term do you search for to compare? This info is not easy to get once you look outside the English speaking world.
True...
Any data on reel to reel (recorded) tapes?
Not that I know of...
Only the rich can afford that stuff.
And two of the most successful formats in history were invented by Philips in Holand .
Indeed!
I still buy CDs and SACDs… and mostly records, what a question. But! the most problems in sound and quality of the product I have with the new records/LPs. And that‘s boring 🤬
long live vinyl
I got a reply to my previous post which struck me a little strange. The guy said vinyl cannot reproduce the source accurately and only digital can, and that I was using my own subjectiveness, in his words as a reference. Can you say mind pretzel? With something like that you don't know where to even start.
Of course everything on here is an opinion based on what sounds accurate to our own ears. No sin in that. And our ears are indeed our hearing apparatus, and that's what we, as human beings use to hear. My reference as to what is accurate, is the sound of live instruments (unamplified of course). I play acoustic guitar and a few other instruments and I know what a guitar sounds like; the sounds it does and does not make. Ditto with the other instruments and my knowing just what sounds they make and don't. As for digital being more accurate; based on what I hear. No. Analog is more complex in timbre, doesn't have any lack of warmth and doesn't sound as spotlit and telegraphed as digital. Digital is great, but it's just a little mechanical sounding compared to the continuity and natural flow of analog. It also has some problem with reproducing air and space accurately. Although it does "pretty well" in that way. Digital Cds actually have missing frequencies that are used for filtering. Is missing frequencies accurate? Not going to waste my time arguing with people like this. You like what you like, I like what I like.
But my like is based on my superior familiarity of just how instruments sound. Your average accomplished musician has spent thousands of hours listening to the instrument he plays and practices. If an accomplished guitar player or pianist, thinks analog sounds more like the instrument that he knows oh so well, there isn't any machine in the world that's going to tell him any different. If the gizmo says digital sounds better, then his ears, and the machine hear differently, the ONLY important thing to him is his own perception. If the measuring machine says something to the contrary, any intelligent person isn't going to doubt what he's been hearing from his instrument during 20,000 hours of practicing. He simply realizes that the machines measurements and how his hearing perceives things is different. He knows the machine isn't seeing the whole picture like his perception can. Something is missing in it's equation. And his perception is the only thing that even matters anyhow. Also measuring gurus must assume measuring devices are perfect. Even if they were, it would take a whole new science to examine how that translates to how our ears perceive sound. It would be a boring science too. These people that put measuring devices first, must anxiously look forward to the day. The day when everything is a robot.
Most audiophiles flatter themselves by thinking they know how instruments really sound. But claims like this can easily be tested of course. Take an analog signal and make a digital copy of it: the copy will sound identical to the original. Then do an analog copy of the signal : it will sound different, no matter how much you may prefer the end result. Analog cannot preserve the qualities of the analog while digital can. And that is really all there is to it.
Sides up. Forget all the "accuracy" argument, it's so boring. It's just musical entertainment. It's whatever people enjoy. Arguing over which format is more accurate is of minor importance. Concerning one's self with even the smallest of details is pathetic.
"Take an analog signal and make a digital copy of it: the copy will sound identical to the original"
Haha, good laught. Maybe with DSD1024 ... but we are not there yet.
@@booom4849 We are quite there. Vinyl is an inherently low res medium. 32 khz sampling rate and 12 bits would probably be enough. In 1984 already Linn's Ivor S. Tiefenbrun was unable to hear the presence of an early Sony PCM-F1 converter in an all- Linn/Naim playback chain. Of course the result of the test was no great surprise to anybody knowledgeable about digital audio. But audiophiles - who generally speaking do not really understand digital - will continue to believe in big marketing numbers. In ten years time we will have DSD32768 or DSD65536. And it will not be enough, of course because the whole cult is based on magical thinking and placebo.
@@nyquist5190 bla bla bla It's just entertainment dear .
All this does not include used vinyl, it would look totally different.
Yep I always try to get a used original rather than the reissue
The market in used CDs is pretty healthy,at least here in the UK. Low cost and lower risk, especially important in our Brexit wrecked economy.
@@davidgardiner4720 The same here in Austria, I sell vinyl on record shows and when I talk to dealer about CD´s they say business is good. The problem for me as a seller is that there is not much profit in CD´s so I don't sell them.
@@davidgardiner4720 thats the new world order wrecking economys around the world order out of chaos
True but that is quite difficult to monitor!
i would like to see from 1955-1975
That would consist solely of vinyl, a small portion of cassette and 8 track, and probably some reel to reel in there as well. There were no CD’s, streaming was a term not even invented yet, and there was no digital music available for purchase.
By far the largest category would be vinyl. In the earlier part of the range you mention, I’m sure vinyl singles would have been bigger than albums.
In many parts of the Third World, cassettes lasted far longer against cd's than in the Developed countries. Evn now they are still widely used in certain areas.
True!
yes! it is a phenomenon !
When you showed the cassette numbers, were they just pre-recorded ones or were blanks included as well? I presume just the former. A great video. Many thanks.
It's the RIAA so I bet its only pre recorded
@@CatIsBack25 I think it would be an unfair comparison otherwise
I wrote that in the video...prerecorded!
@@johnmarchington3146 Indeed it would (impossible to know exact figures anyway). As it would be to include CD-R copies, of which there were so many in the first decade of this century.
@@anadialog Sorry, I must have missed that
If you were gonna buy an album and could only get it in a CD format or an LP format which would you choose? And lets add that both are mastered beautifully to their optimum level. Which one would you buy?
CD I don't like scratches and pops I like clean sounding music.
CD , of course...
LP
If I lke entire album most likely LP. If not then cd. Burn it on my ultradisc cdr and I it comes either 90% close to a good mastered vinyl or better.
Obviously tape (if available), then vinyl!
I think that Covid would have stifled the sales in 2020 as many physical stores closed and even mail order was subdued. Therefor therefore the jump in 2021 possibly only shows a bit of a recovery.
interesting info, looks like the year 2000/2001 was the turning point for the music industry of physical formats, both units and revenue went into a downward spiral after that...Huge revenues in recent years now coming from the paid subscription services.
Around the time Napster and all those music sharing programs came out. Interesting how people were happy to pay for music until they could steal it.
@@babylemonade2868 Hey, taping was big for over 20 years. Though it's true you did not grab as massive quantities of stuff that way as with MP3 sharing (you paid for the blank media and your choices were basically your family and friends' records) it was no slouch.
It's all relative to what you have and how you're using it; this digital vs analog thing. You might prefer a good $600 cd player over a vintage $200 Kenwood turntable with an old Shure M91ed phono cartridge on it. The budget M91ed actually had a faster rise time (transient response) than their top of the line at the time, the Shure V15 III. The III has become somewhat of a legend among vintage audiophiles with JICO and other companies making advanced higher quality styluses for it.. But put that $200 Kenwood turntable on a good heavy stand with a good isolation base underneath it. Replace the rubber mat with a more advanced one and replace the magnetic cartridge with an entry level $400 moving coil cartridge and see if you still like the $600 cd player better for sound. You probably won't. Of course guys like me use far better equipment than that
These guys who try really hard to get us to believe that digital is superior and analog changes the sound and loses all this sound quality,;they don't realize that some of us have good reel to reel tape recorders. More than one. When we make a tape from a tape there's not any notable audible difference between the original and the copy. Maybe just a barely discernible increase in background hiss, only audible in a close A/B comparison. If we continued to make a copy from a copy, at some point the original does sound obviously better. But what home consumer does that? These masters of BS don't realize that we can easily do the experiment in our own living room. They also don't realize that we have factory prerecorded tapes by artists that are well recorded and obviously have way better signal quality than any cd or lp we have ever heard. Some of the Mercury and RCA early stereo reel tape recordings have an openness and wealth of detail and such palpability & dynamics that they are totally in a class of their own, compared to digital.. Even 5 figure digital playback systems.
Reel to reel's superiority is another myth perpetuated by audiophiles. Once again subjective preferences are erroneously used as reference. Truth is every measurable parameter in R2R is worse than with digital. Now, you may like the inaccuracies of reel to reel - many people do - but the truth still stands: you can make an audibly indistinguishable copy of the analog original with digital. But you cannot make an audibly indistinguishable copy of the original analog with analog.
The CD and to some extent the cassette had years of fantastic sales with a decent percentage coming from people, like myself that bought the same albums that I already owned. The CD because in the early days CD players cost a bit of money, so you might as well get your moneys worth type of thinking. Then the cassette for the car as it took a few years before CD players started to make it's way into the automotive world. At least from what I can remember. So yeah those high sales are probably from suckers...I mean customers like me buying the same music on multiple formats.
Spending serious money on a prerecorded cassette of an album you already owned? No, not really, I guess few people did that, you typically taped your record on a blank to listen to it outside your home. If you happened to find the album on cassette in a bargain bin for very cheap, like not much more than a blank would cost, then maybe you'd buy it.
Probably as good a measure of sound quality as anything, is when listening to a system or type of source, "does it sound weird?" Real unamplified instruments never sound weird. Full of character and color and complexity of sound, but never weird. In my continuace of modifying my equipment to improve the sound quality, when I first play an evaluative recording, after I did some modifying work inside my equipment, I often don't know why I like the sound better, often I can't describe what's better, it just sounds less weird for lack of a better word. Even when I thought it sounded just fine before. Distortion, even a little bit of it, causes timbres to sound slightly odd. Something you only notice after you do the work and make the improvement. Even very small amounts of grain, edge and electronic sounds are audible to the experienced discerning ear. When you play something back and it has less of that, it at first asserts itself as simply more of a relaxed listen and the sound is less weird. Not that it was weird before, but slightly more free of something that you can now hear shouldn't have been there. That was not part of the instruments sound; but was an electronic sound. I have heard one reviewer describe such sound with the adjective "friendly." That's a good word for it I think. Welcoming and more alluring would also be other words for it.
It is so cool to do a mod, put on a recording and hear the improvement and even though the work was hard, delicate surgery, the work is over and your sound is now going to have those new special qualities you can hear from now on. Like exploring a hidden cave or something, but it's not a cave but what was on the master tape that you're exploring. Or at least getting closer and closer to the master tape. Capably hearing into the music more and more. For all we know we might be holding master tape quality in our hand, if we ever perfect our playback quality As our long term modding progresses we wonder if anyone else out there can hear so far into the music. There are other amateurs out there exploring new ground like ourself, and perhaps going where maybe no one has gone before. There are discoveries to be possibly made, even by. Average Joes, if your attention to detail is good enough. There are many instances of stars in the night sky discovered by amateur astronomers with their modest backyard telescopes. They are verified and then charted, sometimes named after the backyard astronomer who made the discovery and given an NGC number. You don't have to have a degree to discover new things or come up with things that no one has ever thought of before. It's a lot more fun and rewarding than throwing huge sums of money at it. It's all about the music, but equipment that can unravel the musical fabric in a way we never heard before and let us hear further in is sheer drama.
The problem with this approach is that you are using your subjective preferences as reference. But the point of digital is that it can reproduce the source signal - weird or not - faithfully - whereas vinyl cannot. The other problem of course is that we have no common accepted definition for "weird".
@@nyquist5190 Subjective reference is the point what matters and the only way to identify lies. Digital (PCM) can reproduce the source signal faithfully, my ass.
@@booom4849 Nope. Subjectivity only tells you what you personally prefer. Of course there is nothing wrong with preferring the sound of vinyl. But if we want to hear the purity and original soul of the original analog creation as uncontaminated as possible, digital is the way to go. If you have any respect for music recordings as art, choose digital.
@@nyquist5190 That's your subjective screwed opinion. Stop spreading misinformation.
After telling Nyquist to stop bothering me already, several times now, and "You go your opinionated way and I'll go mine"; he persists and just replied again. Accusing me of using my own preference as a reference. Imagine that! Accusing someone who is a musician, who uses acoustical instruments as a reference, of using their likes as a reference. Amazing!! His numb accusation couldn't be directed at a worse person. Someone like me, who is surrounded by real musical instruments all day, who has an innate familiarity with how they sound, from playing and hearing them thousands of different times. Incredulous indeed! Take a good reel to reel deck and the best cd player you can find. Find a well recorded reel tape and a well recorded cd. Play a reel tape and turn the treble up on your amp until it is treble emphasized; around 3 o'clock on the dial. The reel tape will sound bright but not harsh. Now try the same thing with the cd. Ghastly !!! I will guarantee you that the cd will sound harsh. Not just treble emphasized, but harsh and in fact unlistenable. Boosting the treble serves as a magnifying glass and test for distortion. For those who do not have "ears".And while most analog distortion if there is any, is listenable; digital distortions are particularly harsh. There are no soft digital distortions. They are stingy to the ears. So once again Mr. Nyquist you have made a fool of yourself and please go your way and I'll go mine.
Interestingly enough, you are suggesting a test which has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Somehow I get the impression that you might not have really grasped the basic concepts of sound reproduction. The reel to reel vs cd test you are suggesting is just odd.
As you can see, it's not all true to say the CD "killed" the LP, the real killer was the Cassette.
Are you still using the Washi slipmat?
I sold the Technics and the mat long time ago
@@anadialog oh wow. What are you using for a mat / table now?
Mr digital responded again. He may have deficiency for ears, but musicians obviously know how their instruments sound, spending so much of their life playing them, and to them analog does a better impersonation than digital. Saying they're "flattering themselves" to know how their instruments sound is like saying you need a measurement to recognize your mother. He must be flattering himself to think he knows it all. You can measure everything about a cake; except how good it tastes. If people like this had any importance, perhaps a study should be done as to why they have such a psychological yearning to reduce this beautiful world, including beautiful music to measurements. 0 and 1s must be like God to them,. Reality doesn't matter to them, only what's on paper. They discount peoples hearing and perception, when that's the ONLY important thing. They also disregard the opinions of the best minds in audio history and.all the audio reviewers who all mention from time to time in their reviews that the measurement results don't correspond with how this piece actually sounds. That it not only doesn't tell the whole story; it tells a completely different story. Mesurements and some peoples minds are primitive. We don't understand everything yet and don't even have a measurement for some important things like clarity. The most respected designers design equipment based on ear first, paper second. As it should be, realizing this.They are SMART people, and we have great sound because of their efforts. Let these 0 and 1 worshippers live in their boring fantasy worlds full of absolutistic statements. Who cares what they think really. The world will keep turning and passing them by.
Surely there are some musicians who feel that analog does "better impersonation" than digital. The basic error here - again - is that they are using their personal preferences as reference. Measurements are not done to determine what sounds good, since good is a subjective appraisal of sound. However, measurements are used to determine what a system, format or device does to the sound. Many audiophiles obviously do not understand this difference since they are so fixated on the idea of personal pleasure.
It can be determined beyond any shadow of a doubt that with 0s and 1s you can preserve and reproduce the original analog qualities of the original sound much more faithfully than with any known analog method. Analog methods inevitably distort and change the sound, digital methods much less. This is the very reason the classical music recording industry welcomed digital with open arms more than 40 years ago.
Obviously quite a few audiophiles do not have any respect for the purity of original music or the artists' creative output - since they deliberately want to make the sound more pleasing to them with analog methods. They are perhaps so afraid of the true sound of music that it has to be sugarcoated with analog distortions to make it more palatable. I think it is precisely this group and the manufacturers catering for them that the world is about pass by: the overwhelming majority of all music recording is done digitally and 95% of the music sales is digital. The numbers do not lie.
@@nyquist5190 Again such a BS comment from you. You talk about elitism and you speak as an arrogant one without any back up. Digital just distorts the signal as much as analogue does, but in a way our ears like less. Maybe DSD does the trick to have less distortion, but low-res PCM (including 192 kHz) has so high distortion, it's not even funny. The music industry is on the wrong path adapting to it, preserving digital distortion as long as the data rates stay low.
Cds were more made for tv and dvd player
Cassette were more made for a boombox
Viynl was more made for a recorde player
It seems vinyl sales have replaced only a tiny portion of the declined cd sales during the last two decades. Analog music reproduction (vinyl) only has about 5% of the music market. With 95 % market share digital is the clear winner. The numbers do not lie. People have rightfully voted with their wallets for the superior sound quality of digital against the analog distortions of the past.
I wish it was a vote/matter of quality....forbthe mass it's always and only about CONVENIENCE
@@anadialog Sure, convenience is one aspect. But your claim that it is only about convenience is not supported by evidence at all. I think it is precisely the thinly disguised elitism that will eventually kill the vinyl fad. Dubious science and statistics are actually doing a disservice to vinyl culture.
@@nyquist5190 If there were quad DSD distribution formats or higher, we could talk about replacing vinyl, but there are not. Vinyl just sounds so much better than current streaming and will gain market share as long as the digital options remain low-res.
@@booom4849 Sure, you might prefer the sound of vinyl. But it is trivially easy to demonstrate that even current lossy streaming formats are able to reproduce the original analog signal more faithfully than any vinyl player at any price. Even your Iphone is capable of this.
@@nyquist5190 It's easy to demonstrate that they are not, what the fuck are you talking about. Stop spreading misinformation.
Streaming will nuke those results. Most people stream music one way or another. Basically very few people actually buy physical media these days.
It's sad but sadly it happens.
C'mon guys.... personal opinions are fine but nothing sounds better than vinyl on a good set up...
I say that, and most of the people in the business say that.
They may say that of course but surely the music buying public has the final say in this. 95% of the music buying public is using digital - either cds, downloads of streaming. And half of the vinyl buyers do not actually listen to the records they buy.
@@nyquist5190 it is surely easier and cheaper. But it is not a critic from me. I suggest everybody to dig into the vinyl.
Not true cds are better not even close. Plus new vinyls are horrible. Older vinyl is great. But still not in same league as cds.
Streaming killed the digital sales. So artists seem to be looking for something to sell. I think that is what is driving slowly the cassette sales. Vinyls are expensive, players are expensive and they aren't very movable. Cassettes were big in the past because they were no-fuss system. You might have a proper home deck for making mixtapes and making copies of Vinyls or CDs or friends cassette, but mostly you clipped your walkman to your belt, maybe a second cassette into a pocket and that was it. At the end you threw the cassettes to a drawer and nothing happened to them. No fussing with changing needles, cleaning records, careful handling etc. Vinyls sell currently, but many use them strictly as display items and you can't sell one to casual fan because of the cost. Covid proved to many artists that they do need to be able to actually make sales, to have financial stability. Now they are looking for anything that might stick. It's either return to old formats or NFTs.
The grasp of sound or a sane argument is what is beyond you Mr Nyquist. It doesn't matter if its a reel tape deck vs. a cd. Sound is sound and distortion is distortion. All digital distortions are hard or harsh. That's one reason why analog is preferred by the best audiophiles including the one who owns this channel. Re: reel tape vs. Cd with treble boosted. Maybe 2 horses shouldn't be allowed to run in the same race unless they are exactly the same color according to your logic. Saying that musicians who think analog is more genuine, don't know the sound of their instruments just shows how beyond the star system your thoughts are. Saying someone who has sound quality beyond anything most audiophiles have ever heard, doesn't have a "grasp of sound" is beyond Pluto's orbit also. Your "argument" is getting more and more thin. I'd rather just do what I'm doing instead of being bothered by you. For the last time; I hope !!
People still buy Cassettes ?
There is a strong comeback. Here is one of my videos on this topic that explains a little the situation: th-cam.com/video/0P3DwL72ylk/w-d-xo.html
The LP fad will fade once people realize they've been duped by people claiming records sound better than cds. CDs are still superior to records and record players. No its not "vinyl' they are records. Crappy records. They are just taking advantage of dumb kids that must think because records are bigger than Cds they sound better. It's just not true. CDs sound better than records. And are superior in every way. If you enjoy collecting them fine. But don't claim they sound better.
I disagree but see your point. I think people also like the manuel aspect of vinyl compared to digital.
True but studios don't master CDs to take advantage of their full dynic range, so a lot of time the vinyl ends up sounding better in that regard. If done right in the mastering, CD would absolutely crush vinyl every time.
Damn right! Vinyl, Records, Tubes are NOT Hi-Fi. 15 or 30 inch/s R2R tapes, high resolution streaming, original DSD recordings are HiFi. This doesn't mean that HiFi sounds better...it just means that it is high fidelity.
I play both and I find the recording quality is was matters. Some vinyl kicks digital and some new hi res sound better than vinyl. That being said a quality vinyl setup will sound more natural than CDs.
That’s your view. But, who are you? Pro mastering engineers think different. Look for Bernie Grundman, one of the finest mastering engineers of our time, about that topic
Развели лохов на винил!🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣