Do you know what it's called? I fancy a go

it's called vinly for some strange reason. currently it's free

https://www.izotope.com/en/products/...ruments/vinyl/

Can you choose between, "mint, very good, good, or fair,?"

Awww...I'd need some audio editing software to plug it into which I don't have.

Shame, it would have been fun.

yes, effectively you can. not listed in the same wording but you can change all sorts of settings to emulate good and bad records and good and bad decks. there's a whole host of settings


there are plenty of free options if you google

I'll have a look...could be fun

For those of a certain age, it would add a bit of nostalgia.

For my fellow enthusiasts, part of the enjoyment of owning jukeboxes (apart from keepin' the things goin), is the experience of putting a coin in the slot, scanning the title cards and selecting a record.

Then feeling the buttons click home as you depress them, hearing the whirring of the carousel and the "clang" as the latch solenoid disengages the depressed buttons.

Then it's the noise of the gripper arm as it places the record on the turntable. You then hear the amplifier mute come off as the stylus hits the track- in area of the record.

Finally the anticipation as you hear the tone arm tracks in before your selection begins.
I guess the two 12" and two" 8" speakers and a powerful amplifier add to the experience too.

years ago before ipod type capability I fancied having an old classic jukebox but now see no point at all. there were all these cheap ones you could get that looked similar to the classic designs but more plasticky and tacky I thought and defeated the purpose really. similarly I liked the idea of the 100/200 disc cd players so you could jump to most things with a few clicks, but having used one in practice it wasn't half as good as I expected. the jukebox might be nice to look at if you were loaded and had a big house with space to put stuff like that, but I'd rather use the PC to play any track I wanted in seconds, and without all the side effects of vinyl. all the things you mention about clicks and whirrs and waiting is what I dislike

I like vinyl but I only buy reissue singles - 7", 10" or 12" - that contain music that isn't available on CD along with the occasional album that may not get a CD release.

While it is far more aesthetically pleasing than CD a combination of factors are off-putting.

1. Sleeves need careful handling and they damage easily in the post. It can be far harder to find a near mint sleeve than an unplayed copy of a record.

2. The relative cost new. A £5 CD could cost me £20+ on double vinyl.

3. Running time. Reissues with bonus tracks often include these only on the CD format due to space constraints.

4. Pressing faults / noisy pressings / warps etc. I get less faulty CDs.

5. Deterioration of sound quality. CDs either play properly or don't.

6. The crazy prices of original pressings. I'd rather get a heap of records and/or CDs for £200 - not just the one.

7. Records that look good but play like crap. Issues like skimming / cue burn etc.

8. The fact that so much can only be bought online, often with expensive postage costs and from outside the EU.

9. CDs being a far easier source for a digital rip.

They aren't for everyone.
You need to have a basic idea as to how to maintain a vintage vinyl jukebox, otherwise the costs can be extremely expensive. But maintaining them is half the pleasure.

If I just want to listen to music, there's a stick in the side of the TV in my den with a few thousand mp3s on it and I can play any, using the TV remote, without even leaving my chair.

if they are reissues then surely most of this stuff had a cd release previously?


that's just subjective. some may prefer the shiny look of a cd


many reasons to which i prefer cd to vinly. something i meant to point out earlier was the ticking time bomb of all these records being bought around now by people destroying them on those shitty cheapo turntables, and then they end up in the second hand market and people buying them and ending up with destroyed vinly. they may look on the surface to be fine, but knackered when played back

i spend enough time maintaining/upgrading my computers to want to add anything else. if i ended up a multi millionaire it may be nice to have an old one in a corner in a music room with 50s rock n roll singles but i doubt i would use it. i'd rather have the latest hi tech setup with tablet pc controls etc

Bought my other half a retro record player for his birthday.

Got all his Beatles' original vinyls out, handed down to him from his dad.

Such an enjoyable weekend listening to all of them.

Each to their own, it's all about the 'experience' for us.

Hmm..

It seems to have gone a bit quiet on the vinyl front, has the novelty already worn of for new young enthusiasts?

Now that's weird, because HMV just announced that next week is "vinyl week" where they'll be selling a range of exclusive vinyl editions of recent and classic albums. Also there are frequently new turntables coming on to the market and I get emails every week from various record shops listing the week's new releases.

Hopefully it's just that the hype has worn off and people are buying records because they want to listen to them, not because it's fashionable.

True.
But for decades there's always been new turntables being produced,
despite the low quantities of new vinyl being issued.
Most of these turntables like the rest of the kit, being at the "high end," out of reach of the average new enthusiast. There's also a demand for vintage turntables and cartridges, but only amongst the relatively small number of long-term vinyl enthusiasts.
They even have vintage cartridges rebuilt.

I subscribe to an audio board and people are always posting about their newest vinyl related bit of kit they've bought.

hopefully. tape cassette is the new nonsense for folk who don't know better. even more wow and flutter and distortion and tapes being chewed up, stretched and snapped

it's been interesting reading elsewhere when someone who hasn't a clue asks about one of those suitcard vinly destroyers and gets recommendations on what to get instead and then realise they don't want to spend money on buying an amp and speakers on top of the decent turntable, or that it's the plastic blue tooth speaker that cost £20 in aldi that's the reason their music sounds crap

i saw one guy buy a reasonable rega turntable, speakers and a pre-amp, blowing his full budget. he didn't buy a power/integrated amp of course so had to take it all back and start again

Interesting article here about the claims made for vinyl and how it supposedly sounds better than CD

http://www.laweekly.com/music/why-cd...-vinyl-5352162

The vinyl resurgence is all about reconnecting with the music. Having a product that is tangible to hold and look at. Whether the music quality is better or worse than digital formats is sort of irrelevant, its just that the 'vinyl sound' has a more warm and welcoming feel.

Part of that is pure nostalgia.

As is this.

It ain't vinyl, but there's something about it, for me and many others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atNmUD-ryIE

Back in the day we knew that for a vinyl system you needed to split the budget three ways - turntable, amp and speakers each getting roughly the same proportion. One of the problems with "reviving" vinyl is that people no longer think in terms of a matched system. They have a computer with a music library, so they might buy some speaker to play it through. They have a phone that can sync to their music library so they might buy some headphones, or a bluetooth speaker. That's not system-building, it's accessorising.

One problem with that is that your music sounds different every time you play it: lots of bass on your active speakers, tinny on your earbuds, tiny on your bluetooth speaker. At least with vinyl, once you've set the system up properly it sounds good every time. Even if you can only listen to it in one room.

i had a discussion with a few people regarding vinly, and one guy who knows his stuff about good quality hifi acknowleded that digital audio is usually better sound quality than vinly, however he preferred listening to vinly as he would make the effort to put the record on, sit with the sleeve, and get up and turn the record over midway through, and pay more attention to the music

knowing that as a collector he would have most stuff on cd and vinly, i said why don't you play the cd and just sit with the record sleeve and put the record on the turntable, spinning round, and just listen to the music. or just play the cd and listen to it. so you get the nostalgic values along with the superior sound quality

there is perhaps something in it that a record needs more attention than a cd. you can stick a cd on and press play and listen for 82 solid minutes of music without needing to go to the player. you can set it to repeat and play longer, or play random, or skip tracks with a remote control. there's a lot more convenience. you can leave the cd playing at the end of the night whilst in bed and it will safely stop without damaging anything, but on many turntables you can't just leave the record endlessly in the run out groove without wearing your stylus, and of course you can only hear the first side of the record. so you can more easily leave a cd on whilst doing other things, and not actively listening, and do it for longer than 20 minutes without needing to go back to the record to flip it over etc

usually when i see people asking about vinly systems, who clearly don't have a clue, the first thing i explain is the importance of the amp and speaker setup, and 9 times out of 10 they will tell me they are playing music from a bluetooth speaker dock or similar item, that after a quick google shows it's basically a peice of overpriced plastic crap. theres no stereo seperation, it's impossible to get any serious volume levels. some of the dearer ones may go "loud" but that's in regards to awful distorted unpleasant sound, whereas i can play my systems at levels that litereally sound like you are in a club or gig without breaking a sweat or disorting or sounding uncomfortable

sometimes people tell me they wasted considerably sums on some of the high end sound docks, whereas the could have got a much better and amp and speaker combo from richer sounds. but then sometimes after explaining everything, and the space it takes up, inclusing speaker placement, they deciede they don't want so much stuff taking up space in their house, and unfortunately go buy one of those plastic suitcase vinly destroyers instead, and post crappying iphone videos on facebook

even getting a decent pair of headphones and perhaps a headphone amp and connecting to a laptop and playing cd rips can provide considerably better quality sound than one of those things

sometimes when people ask and i know it's unlikely to be right for them i just post pictures of my vinly setups which take up crazy space, and leave boxes of records underneath. that usually puts the women off straight away and most guys realise the wife won't have that in her house

Tell me about it, I'm fortunate that I can have a room dedicated to my musical and audio interests.

Vinyl is very "tactile" you have to be "involved." Many of the younger generations couldn't be assed to go to the trouble of selecting albums and tracks to play. For them music needs to be "immediately accessible" and the technology now is there to satisfy that demand.

Mind you I do have a memory stick in the TV in that room with no end of mp3s on it that I can play through the TV soundbar or my vintage tuner/amp and speakers. But I rarely use it.

i have the majority of my music on HDD's (and backed up fully) so i cn just think of a track or artist and play it from my computers to my hifi systems

i also dj from laptop, and having been a dj for many years, i can tell you that carrying a single 12x12 case of records was backbreaking even when younger and fitter, and trying to do that with 2 cases was impossible unless you were made of muscles. of course as time went on trolley cases came into being, but i think i left vinly for cd back then, and that was a boon as 200 cds in a case was much lighter and let me have much more music, and with cd burners i could take a copy of my music and not worry about losing or scratching discs. now it's a laptop and controller, far more music available to me and easy to carry. if something pops into my mind whilst playing i can just search and play

the tactileness of vinly when djing with records was nice, and there was more skill involved in beatmatching manually, but with dj decks having auto bmp it meant instead of spending time matching the beats you could use the time to find other things to play or make a more interesting mix, and that's even moreso on the laptop. of course you can use serato and time coded vinly but unless you are a scratch dj or want to make it look like you are doing more than playing on a laptop, it's not necessary. the laptop may make things look simple, but it's the choice of tracks that work well by following the current track that is the skill. anyone can play hit track after hit and get people dancing, but when it's done well it's like the difference between a greggs pastie and a first rate meal