who are the "they" you refer to? are you grouping a large number of different businesses together?

are you comparing like for like at the same time, or comparing indie releases from before the increase in sales, to the current period?

costs change due to demand. when businesses have a lack of demand they will often lower prices to gain sales, then when demand is higher they can charge more

also indie labels will often have lower costs of creating product and promotion than major labels. cheaper studios, artists paid less, etc, so these things will also reflect in the end price


retailers prices are based on both the cost price and demand, and competition. the most popular chart titles often have a lower profit margin due to competition from other retailers, but they will usually sell high volume at low margin



as I mentioned before, chart titles often retail at lower prices for a reason. record companies often offer deals to retailers so they will stock more and in turn sell more, so the artist charts. with reissues there isn't the same requirement to do this. remember vinyl is a very limited market of only 5% sales, and reissues are often bought by the same fans who already have the album. the albums have proved popularity so don't need to be discounted

Situations like that always remind me of a meeting of senior managers, when a young enthusiastic buyer, was bangin' on about the increase of eighty percent that had been achieved in the ("piddly") sales of one of his products where he'd talked a manager into giving it a disproportional amount of display footage and promotion at the expense of better selling products.

I'll clean up my reply as this is "a family board."

I said; "This all very commendable, but in the end, four-fifths of naff-all, is still naff all."

It's the same with vinyl, it ain't going to be "re-born," yes there's been dramatic increases in sales, but the novelty will soon wear off.
Other methods of listening to music are so much more convenient.

The numbers are still decent for the format. If the Beatles and Pink Floyd can still sell 50,000 copies of one album in the year 2015 then Adele shifting 22,000 vinyl LPs of her album 25 in one week is decent. Apparantly that figure is now over 40,000. No one said it will be the format it once was but it is still decent.

I for one never stopped buying records. I was always a huge singles person. Up until 2010 pretty much the entire top 40 chart was available on 7" or 12" and then the revival started and now very few singles due to the backlog and everything is now albums. The truth is it will never go away. I never understood the Itunes thing, i will never ever pay for a digital file that is available for free online, I'm not the only one but an invisible file is not something you own and listening to music on these cheap little imported plasticy earbuds is certainly not the right way to listen to music.


Anyone telling themselves otherwises is just kidding themselves. The only excuse anyone should have for listening to digital files on a phone or any other digital device is maybe living in a small flat not big enough for a hifi stereo or just lack of cost. Anyone fooling themselves into thinking MP3s and little earbuds and paying 99p for a song that is invisible has my sympathy, what a waste of money and enjoyment and I bet you the artists would tell you that themselves, slogging away months in a recording studio for the end result to be mp3 files and earbuds. Just dissapointing and of course the kids copy from the parents, the kids copy what they are being brought up around so they will grow up not questioning the parents behaviour and think this is the right way and really its just an absolute mess. Grown men and women forking out hundreds for phones and infact you know what, it reminds me of the gripes i have at the cinema, grown men and women standing in line for popcorn and ice cream. It just gets my back up. If i say anymore i'll be here all day but just oooooh, annoying. Then again it's not my money so who am i to judge what people waste their money on.

I keep my vinyl albums in an open-fronted unit beneath the turntable. To play an album, take it out of the unit, take the vinyl out of the sleeve and put it on the turntable, switch on, lower the stylus on to the record and that's it.

To play a CD, it's much the same procedure except the CDs live in a cupboard.

To play a download, switch on TV and switch to AV2, fire up Apple TV box, select the Music app, find the album I want to listen to, click on it, switch on the hi-fi, select the correct input, then switch off the TV again so I can listen to the music without annoying onscreen graphics.

I'm sure there are people who have everything done virtually so they just say "Hey Siri, play Somethin' Else" and as if by magic, Siri says "I found a Simon Ellis in Acton" and rings the local cake shop.

Brilliant

I've some vintage vinyl, some cassettes, a lot of CDs, two vinyl jukeboxes in our summer house at the bottom of the garden,. Two jukebox wall box to adapter/iPod to vintage hif-fi systems. So I've plenty of choices.
For me it's "the nostalgia experience."

I can also choose YouTube on my TV. I've got a memory stick in the side of the TV, with a few thousand mp3s on it. Just have to press Viera Tools on the TV remote and select the music option. Then scroll through the selections, without having to move from my comfortable chair.

"No phones necessary."

"Give me convenience or give me death!"

(I think I'll go and play that record now...)

that is only your opinion however. when compared to the total sales of cds or downloads most people would probably say the opposite


that's not the truth at all. that's simply your prediction.


you can play digital downloads on high end equipment, and you can get high definition downloads that can be played on systems that would sound considerably better than your vinyl setup


that's completely wrong, and that's a statement from someone who admits they don't understand itunes


clearly you didn't think this through, but i play digital files on my phone whilst travelling or sometimes at work. it was a complete nightmare trying to set my turntables up to work on the bus and the needles kept jumping all over the place

sometimes these digital devices, including phones, cost over £500


skip back a few years and think of dansettes and old fashioned one speaker AM radios. the systems you mention are possible for considerably higher quality sound than systems of old. i have earbuds that have a retail price higher than many all in one record player/tapedeck/cdplayer/amp/speaker setups from the 80s and 90s. remember artists on stage use inner ear monitors that cost hundreds of pounds. the sound quality can be amazing


best sit down with your pipe and slippers in front of a real fire and read your paper and listen to your wireless

Vinyl is never going to be the most popular format again. It's impractical, expensive and it cannot adapt to the modern world where people can share music instantly without ever owning any physical media.

What vinyl has in its favour is that it's the right format for serious listening. You put on a record and for 20 minutes you do nothing apart from listening to the music. Or maybe you could read a book whilst the music played. That's how vinyl is going to hold on to a small sector of the market, by appealing to people who want a different experience when they listen to music, without the distractions of Facebook or Twitter or someone standing too close on the bus. Reissues like these jazz albums will appeal to that market.

that may be your opinion. but it's not factually correct

I had a conversation with someone not long ago regarding vinyl and digital, and this was with someone who did seek to get the best audio quality by spending reasonable sums of money on equipment. they agreed with my view that what sounded better was subjective, and that technically you can get better quality sound via digital, but they said they liked vinyl due to an irrational mental throught process related to finding the record, taking the record out in it's dustbag, removing the record, putting it on the turntable, dust removal either before or after that, putting a clamp on the record, then turning on the amp and putting the turntable power on and putting the needle on the record, to listen. however you can sit still and listen to music regardless of if it's from record or tape or cd or digital download. likewise you can read a book or do dishes or cleaning or simply not pay much attention. the format is irrelevant

this, as the irrational mental thought process alludes to, is similar to the same thoughts from some people that vinyl is better as it sounds "warmer", but it's not really warmer, the idea of warmer and warmer being good is based on memories of older setups playing vinyl with rolled off high end and muddy bass, or in other words reproduction that sounds less like the master recording than current technology allows

personally I think artifacts that formats like vinyl and tape introduce can be distracting to the music. especially hissing, pops, clicks, rumble and wow and flutter. I want to hear the music as close as possible to the master recording. I understand other people get a mental kick from pops and scratches, but that's got nothing to do with the actual music

Everyone knows vinyl's limitations in terms of portability, ease of use and sharing but it always amazes me how some people can't just let others listen to vinyl if they wish to without going on about the merits of digital over vinyl and insisting the former is superior to the latter.

It is superior, in the same way that digital watches are superior to analogue watches.

In an ideal world, we would all have high-end audio systems that were completely transparent in their reproduction of music, and the sound from the speakers would be indistinguishable from the source. But in the real world, no one has a system like that, so we buy whatever sounds good to our ears. On a well set-up turntable vinyl sounds as good, or even better, than a CD or a digital download. In terms of distortion, frequency response, wow and flutter etc it might not measure anything like as well, but we don't hear statistics, we hear music.

Until the introduction of CDs, hanging on to well played vinyl copies of classic jazz LPs was essential, as even some of the best albums became deleted, or as some of us say, "were made of unobtainium." But in the late eighties a lot of these albums suddenly became available as they were re-issued on CD. I really can't think of a technical reason why a vinyl record should be more preferable than a CD.
I guess it's a personal choice, but I doubt if people of my generation are particularly bothered. I've had "Kind of Blue," on both vinyl and on CD and those tracks I've transferred to mp3.
I checked what was the last vinyl record, I purchased. It was Miles Davis's "Rock n' Roll Band" as I call them, "You're Under Arrest." Sometime in the mid eighties. After that it was all CD albums, though I still occasionally buy vintage 45rpm records.

He obviously had never forgiven his treatment by the NYPD, all those years before.

You could also say that you would get as much nutritional benefit by drinking a sachet of Complan alone in a shed as you would from having a big steak dinner in a nice restaurant surrounded by friends and family. In fact you could say that drinking a Complan alone in a shed is better because it's quicker, cheaper and you wouldn't have all the saturated fat, alcohol and carcinogens that go along with the steak dinner.

I know which one I'd prefer though.

but who is doing this? it appears you are reading one thing and interpreting it incorrectly and jumping to the wrong conclusion. that's perhaps why you may prefer one thing over another

some people may want to ride in a new warm car with a smooth ride, others may want to drive about in an old cold car that has a bumpy ride. it's peoples choice

there's many technical reasons why a cd can be better than vinly, from sound quality, size, durability, etc. the laser doesn't damage the cd whilst playing, whilst a turntable can damage the vinyl permanently whilst playing. you don't have the same wow and flutter, no pops and clicks etc

you could say anything you want, but it doesn't mean it makes any sense or is relevant to the topic

with music however, many people prefer to listen to it in the best possible sound, and enjoy hearing it in the best possible sound. and things like taking records out of sleeves, and pops and clicks and hissing and rumble and all these other things vinyl playback adds to the sound that's not present on the original recording are often considered detrimental. so to some, the high definition clear sound would be the premium way of listening by far, and more enjoyable by far

i wonder how many people who blab on an on about vinyl being better or their preferred choice actually have a decent setup at home to hear high definition audio properly, along with a decent turntable setup, so they could actually compare like for like. i have 3 turntables and two high definition setups in different rooms so i speak from experience

If you have three turntables and you get pops and clicks and rumble and wow and flutter then you bought the wrong equipment. It's well known that some turntables have better speed accuracy, and some cartridges cope with worn records better than others.

What you say is true to an extent, but any damage to the surface to a record will be transmitted via the stylus and cartridge to the amplifier. You can reduce the effect of this, but you can't actually completely cut it out, whatever you do will affect the overall reproduction.

Vinyl has its own charms. Part of the "jukebox experience" for we enthusiasts, is depositing coins in the machine, the physical act of pressing the selector buttons, the "ding" of the latch solenoid after making your choice, the whirring of the record carousel, the sound of the gripper arm placing the record on the turntable, the sound of the amplifier mute coming off and then the anticipation as you hear the needle tracking in before the music begins.
In fact, in some sophisticated modern systems, where mp3s are played instead of vinyl, the "track-in noise" can be added to enhance the experience.

I've got a couple of modern albums where the crackle of vinyl has been sampled from old records, looped and added to the mix. It's a bit annoying to be honest, though the music is good.

that's not true. recently I listened to a system that was worth about 12 grand, the turntable was about £2.5k alone. a record goes on and straight away pops and clicks, you could tell with your eyes closed it was a record being played. after that a cd was played on a player that wasn't cheap by any means, but cost less than the turntable. no pops and clicks, just the music and sounded much better in my opinion

"buying the wrong equipment" is just a nonsense statement. I don't have thousands of pounds to spend on a laser turntable or one of the high end fifteen grand turntables. I buy equipment within my means. I could have bought a fifteen grand turntable, but then I would say that was the wrong equipment as it would be OTT for myself. it still wouldn't stop pops and clicks anyways

I subscribe to a few USA audio message boards and they have "show us yours" threads, where you can view some really expensive setups, used to play vinyl.

If you're going to send that sort of money, you're bound to convince yourself that you will have a much better experience, than with anything that plays CDs.

You've missed or ignored my point. You don't have to spend a fortune to get good sound from vinyl, but you need to choose your system carefully. If you audition components you can optimise the sound of the system by matching the cartridge to the turntable, the turntable to the phono stage, the phono stage to the amp and the amp to the speakers.

I have old records that pop and click and I have new records that are quiet pressings with no scratches. By listening to different cartridges I've found the set-up that tracks the old albums with the fewest pops and clicks and plays the new ones with the most engaging sound. I'm not saying you couldn't tell the difference between a system playing vinyl and the same system playing a CD, but I would suggest that a well-chosen system would bring out the best in both formats and minimise the difference in quality. It would still all hinge on how well-mastered the discs were, vinyl or digital.

My setup is a very good setup but the one thing I will say is this, people talk about hiss and pops and clicks from vinyl. The only records I have that do that are second hand ones. I'd go as far as saying every record I have bought new from the shops still plays the same today as it did then, it's all about how you take care of them. I've got records from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago and even last week that play with complete silence. No surface noise. It really is all about how you take care of them.

What you say is true.

But the "killer" for vinyl is a worn stylus. From the day you first use it, it will be starting to wear. It's about when you replace it and how well the replacement sits in the cartridge, even the slightest deviation of the angle of attack from true can have a unnoticed but long term detrimental affect on your records. But that's only to be expected with "vintage technology."