LPs on vinyl have been around even when CDs threatened to sweep them away, but renewed interest in vinyl promises to again put them in the spotlight. It looked like vinyl discs in general were going down for the third time when CDs came along and threatened to destroy them.
What a long way we have come since those days when CDs first appeared in record stores and seemed to reign, before MP3 files hit the market. Now, we’re taking a giant jump forward into the past, it would seem, as vinyl recordings find a new audience and have become the quickest growing audio format.
So if you’re wondering how this all came about, you’re not alone, because a lot of people assumed that once these modern formats became common, they owned the market. But music lovers can be a hard to track bunch, and one format becoming ubiquitous might be enough reason to rebel against it and celebrate another.
Much like cassette tapes, the once popular format that also seemed to disappear with the CD’s introduction, vinyl has been embraced by the alternative music audience. You may favor your Bob Dylan vinyl over the same disc presented in other formats for reasons of your own, or because you possess a turntable but no CD player.
If you’ve done a side-by-side check of vinyl recordings vs. CDs or digital files, you might conclude that the vinyl recordings sound warmer than do the ones captured on digital media. Cassette tapes were simply blown away in the sound quality department when CDs came along, but the same is not true for vinyl recordings, which many serious collectors and listeners feel are superior to digital recordings.
Aside from sound quality, CDs developed a noise-free recording format that promised pristine playback quality that keeps consistent for the life of the disc. Vinyl discs are noisy compared with CDs, which maintain an icy silence between cuts and never play surface noise from dust or scratches.
Considered a disadvantage by some, a certain amount of background noise is actually welcome with collectors of various genres of vintage music such as blues or folk. Without the background hiss, vintage record collectors proclaim, the LP lacks a certain amount of character and sounds bland, as do recordings in digital formats.
Some collectors prefer White Stripes vinyl while others may lean toward Lightnin’ Hopkins discs, but in either case, the experience will be poles apart from what you’d hear on CD. When disc jockeys spin LP-sized singles as they spin discs, it’s because they can grip them more easily than the smaller-sized CDs.
You’ll discover lots of vintage recordings that never made it onto CD when you search through vinyl LPs, which is reason enough for collectors to remain with vinyl.
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