Twenty years ago, almost everybody was thinking that vinyl records were a memory of the past because CDs and digital sound had taken the place.
Today however, everybody can notice that vinyl records are back in records shops like FNAC and even in supermarkets. What happened then?
Musical industry promoted CDs in the eighties mostly because it was cheaper to produce. Making vinyl records is a complex task, looking like steel industry with hot vinyl molded in matrix by workers in old fashioned factories.
To the opposite, pressing CDs was very simple and could easily be done by robots.
Music industry made marketing campaigns to convince people to throw away their vinyl records and to replace them by CDs.
They said CDs had a better sound because they were making no noise when they were played. Moreover, a CD can contain one hour of music versus forty minutes on a vinyl record.
CDs will play correctly on a poor audio system; however, vinyl records will play better with good turntable, cell, and needle. Analogic sound is warmer and contains more harmonics than CDs because sound is compressed to spare data.
Music industry earned a lot of money with CDs. But in the 2000’s, people began to convert their CDs in MP3, to share the files on the internet, and the CDs sales collapsed.
So now music industry is back to make vinyl records because of the better sound and because they can not be converted in MP3 !
Hi, I’ve got tones of old vynils but unfortunately my turntable doesn't work anymore, hard to find someone who can fix it.🙄
I really like vinyls records, not only because of the sound's quality, but also because they are beautiful objects. They give a kind of materiality to the music that the other supports (particularly cellephones) cannot offer. But I didn't know the story of the vinyls records, so I found your article very interesting. Thanks a lot !
Sarah
Hi,
I found your post very interesting.
For a long time, I thought that CDs were more recent and had a better sound quality than vinyl. I discovered surprisingly that it was just the encodement system that was different.
The History of music support is as passionate as the writer's support but more contemporary.
I really got into your text, at the transition time between the walkman used to go to school and the revolution of the MP3 players to go to high school and faculty.
I’m curious to find out the others forms that this will take in the future.
Funny story: These last three years I had the occasion to drive an old car with an old music…
Hello Arnaud. Personally I have always kept my old family turntable and my Technics amp. I love to bring out my vinyls to listen to them with my children. But also to buy new ones. For example the double album "Incesticide" by Nirvana for my son's 14th birthday! See you soon! Richard