Not enough pretty lights

[threemonkeys]

Seems I'm out of touch with trends again. Just yesterday I decided that my turntable could be put away in storage. I'm sure I haven't played any music on vinyl for at least a year. Anything I want to listen to is available to me in other, more convenient, formats.

So along comes this article going on about turntables being back in fashion. More particularly they are making a comeback in the domestic scene rather than just being the DJ equipment that has been the case for years.

It could just be a puff piece driven by an importer trying to create business or it could be me missing yet another trend. Not that either matters much to me but I am curious. Are turntables really making a comeback?

Comments

[beagl.livejournal.com]

If you were selling music, and people persisted in downloading it for free, you'd kind of want to encourage people to get it in a form that they *had* to buy. Like a record.

Of course, it means you have to start arguing that vinyl is better than CD/MP3 but some people have been practicing those arguments for the last 20 years anyway. :-)

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, I remember all those quality of music arguments. Most of those who put them forward are now getting older and (like me) losing the sharp edge on their hearing anyway.

Interesting that back in the days of vinyl, copying of records onto compact cassette was very widespread.

[paul-ewins.livejournal.com]

I got one for last year's birthday. I have a stack of vinyl that I don't expect to see on CD any time soon so it made sense. The turntables are cheaper than ever, AU$60 - $140 for the low end and Audiophile starting at around $350. That is cheaper in actual dollar terms than I would have paid twenty years ago, never mind inflation.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

I too have a stack of vinyl that doesnt exist anywhere on CD - mostly stuff from local independent labels. Thats why I've held on to the turntable for this long. However, in my case, I found that I just wasn't listening to it anymore. I had thought of ripping some key ones to mp3 as there is some pretty nifty software around that recognises track breaks etc, but in the end I just decided to pack the turntable away as surface space is at a premium in my place.

[lobelet.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure they ever went away as far as I was concerned -- mine (ancient beast that it is) still sits happily atop my stereo stack. However its major use recently has been as an aid towards digitising my LP collection; a project that has taken something on the order of two and a half years (on and off) but which is now pretty much complete.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons for keeping mine around as long as I did was because I thought I would use it for that digitising. But I never have. I still have the device, but it is now buried in a cupboard. So the option still exists, it will just take more work.

[lobelet.livejournal.com]

It's certainly a long project; but I'm happy that I've done it. There's a couple of albums I really ought to get round to re-doing because I wasn't too pleased with the final result; but mostly it was very successful.

What special equipment did you buy? I just bought a cable (Dick Smith's finest!) which connected the headphone socket on the amplifier to the microphone input jack on my computer and then fed the signal into a sound capture program. Then I tweaked the .wav file that it produced.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

I didn't actually do any remember - the "device" I'm referring to is the turntable itself. I have done capture from cassettes where I just fed the line-out of the cassette deck into the line-in of the sound card and used some capture/edit software.

[lobelet.livejournal.com]

Ah -- mea culpa. I misunderstood.