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New Car Radios....a sorry state.
- Thread starter BruceB
- Start date
Vinyl was not dropped for another decade, really. While CDs began taking a big share of music sales in the later 80's, downloads did not become a big thing until the later 90's and even then the record companies had not figured out how to stop piracy and make money from digital.
And still, today, the sales of vinyl is tiny. Walmart still sells radios, too. When is the last time the average person bought a radio? Vinyl is worth a couple of bins of albums, but it is less than 1% of what it was in its peak period.
And a lot of vinyl comes with a code to download the album too.
From this article, here's a chart showing the total 2023 sales of physical media as well as streaming, digital downloads and synch (music synched from a computer):
Of that 11% "physical" the graph does not show how much is for vinyl and how much is for CDs. I am guessing that the bulk of the physical sales figure is made up of CD sales, not molded plastic.
The article mentions that vinyl outsold CDs last year and the number of cassettes sold were 500,000. Some bands/artists release limited edition cassettes, and St. Vincent even released her album "Daddy's Home" on 8 track!
That is interesting. I would not have guessed that vinyl made up a significant portion of sales. I wonder how that figure looks for different main types of music.
I've bought vinyl before, but only if it had tracks I couldn't get on streaming at the time. An example is "Smile" by Brian Wilson has instrumental tracks that aren't on Spotify.
I'm learning something new. What types of turntables or players are being bought for vinyl?
Project is a company that is doing very well
Good quality and affordable
I think your comment still holds up David. A small percentage of consumers under 60 may still buy vinyl as a form of collecting, not because it's a preferred way of listening to music. I'd be willing to bet that in normal use, they stream their favorite music via smartphone.
Of course, back in the day, the only way you could hear music was by radio or buying the vinyl. That in itself is an indicator that vinyl for the masses will never be a thing again.
When I was working for a vendor for Walmart up until about a year ago one of my tasks was to service the music section. Vinyl was definitely selling better than CDs, and that is where most new releases were sold. Since I've changed jobs the CD section has been cut back and possibly cut out in some stores. DVDs are also being cut back in some stores.
On record players Walmart is selling a lot of Crosley type players, but they also had a low priced Audio Technica turntable that can be plugged into an amplifier or amplified speakers.
On record players Walmart is selling a lot of Crosley type players, but they also had a low priced Audio Technica turntable that can be plugged into an amplifier or amplified speakers.
The reality is you won't get the superior vinyl sound if you keep listening to the record over and over.
What!? If you listen to a cheap Crosley "record player" from Walmart that may be true
But in a quality turntable properly set up repeated play is not a problem.
I have records I bought in 1960 that still sound great.
I thought over time playing them over and over would make them not sound good any more.
Otherwise, where did we get the idea CDs sound better?
Even at radio stations that played 45's using less-than-delicate heavier tone arms, a vinyl recording could last over a thousand plays with no audible degradation. In fact, the only cases where we saw noticeable degradation we when a cut was physically scratched or from "cue burn" where repeated forward and backward cuing was done to get the cut "cued up" and ready for a perfect start.
Cuing consists of forward and backwards manual movement of the turntable to get the stylus the right fraction of a turn ahead of the audio. Neither the stylus nor the disk like being pushed over and over again back and forth, and it wears the stylus and degrades the vinyl record. But this is not a consumer problem. Most radio stations... before cart machines... got multiple copies from the labels. In small markets, we'd often hear cue burn because the station could not afford to buy multiple copies of every song.
If you had actually been in a radio station in the 50's and 60s and even a few that played from vinyl in the 70's, you would have seen this happening.
Some believe that the digital CD system, which is identical to the original final mix, sounds better. An analog system is inherently lossy with there being multiple generations and degradations between the master and the copy that is made into the stamper for a record factory.
There are lots of $200-ish models out there with built-in preamps and USB outputs.
Here at home, the 16 year old uses the turntable in our family room. At her new apartment in the city, we got the 21 year old this as a housewarming gift:
AT-SB727
Designed with portability in mind and available in three unique colors, the Sound Burger offers a retro aesthetic mixed with modern updates. Ideal for parties, compact living spaces, or picnics, t ...
www.audio-technica.com
I suspect given VChimp's reputation for scratch mixing, his experience could be valid.
Getting back on topic.
My 2023 Lincoln Nautilus' AM and FM sound fine. When I play WAV files on the USB stick it just sings.
The processing of the FM I used to work is crap, the current engineer still thinks being the loudest thing on the dial is still important. No wonder their numbers have them in 8th place and they were number one for decades.
My 2023 Lincoln Nautilus' AM and FM sound fine. When I play WAV files on the USB stick it just sings.
The processing of the FM I used to work is crap, the current engineer still thinks being the loudest thing on the dial is still important. No wonder their numbers have them in 8th place and they were number one for decades.
Oldsters, eh? Well, you're correct in the main. But I see this in a more fundamental way. Imagine a new great depression taking everything but canned spam, beans, and possum soup off the average person's table. Then after everyone acclimated to those things, the economy began looking up, and someone said, "I predict that not long from now, steak and eggs and pizza and hamburgers will make a popular comeback." Well, you can't label that kind of prediction over the top. A comeback to those would be inevitable, because good food is fundamental to human nature. In my book, the love of good sound when listening to good music is also fundamental to us; it can't remain lost on people at large, like it is now, forever. And, with this now happening so prolifically among the youth:
... that inevitable comeback I'm speaking of may now be the next stop on the line. So, I'm going to stick by my instincts on this one. We're going through another pocket transistor and tabletop radio phase, and there's light at the end of this tunnel. If I'm wrong, well, it won't be the end of the world -- it'll just be the end of enjoyable music listening.
Hey, look at that. I don't just see old fashioned record players at https://www.project-audio.com/, but zoomer-compatible Hi-Fi amps and speakers, what with their hip, svelte form factors, their visually uncluttered modern designs, their fancy high wattage figures, and their network streaming and bluetooth whatchamajiggers integrated. Dagnabbit, I'll tell you what, this smells an awful lot like the 50s hi-fi revolution's early adopter phase, consarnit. Can you see those whippersnappers of fybush's asking Dad to buy them some, so they can play those funny plastic doohickeys in their rooms like we did in the good old days?
To borrow a phrase from the last depression, I see green shoots.
It's refreshing to know 24% of those sales are still physical. (Downloads become physical locally after they're finished.) Ever since I read about this happening (and the many examples since), I realized things like streaming would never substitute ownership, and would forever be a monthly-rented convenience. I know some people will only stream from here on out, but some people never buy any form of insurance either.
Just as how we, once upon a time, bought vinyl but made cassettes of them for the car and walkman.
True, and speaking for myself, I never meant to imply that vinyl would surge completely back to its original market primacy. However, it was worth citing vinyl as an example of something people imagined would never come back at all. Other things in that "gone forever" category can come back too, and for those with low impedance values to their convenience factors, they can blow up to former or near-former levels in popularity. Dubbing hundreds of records to cassettes and carrying around crates of them in the car is gone forever. But a "set it [up] and forget it" amplifier and speaker installation that rewards you, effortlessly, time and again, every time you want to cast your phone to its bluetooth input (or throw one of those vinyls on its companion turntable)? That can actually go big again.
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