AH Challenge: Vinyl Remains Dominant

I miss vinyl; it seemed more earthy than digital, everything was there and wasn't microscopic data files some laser would decode via a small computer or whatever, and it would feel good to be off the grid every now and again.

Taking that in mind, I issue this challenge to you, should you choose to accept it: Keep Vinyl/LP's the dominant format.

Before I say anything, I'd like to note that I'm a child of the early 90s so I never experienced the vinyl age. Therefore, take anything I say with a grain of salt. That said, to me it seems like asking this question is kinda like asking "WI flintlocks stay the dominant form of firearm" or "WI floppy disks stay the dominant form of portable data storage". Further audio developments (magnetic tape, CDs, digital audio) are probably going to come about regardless of whether or not people are specifically looking for their audio applications because they are so intertwined with the development of computing and modern technology. I mean, I could maybe see it in a world where technological progress halts after the early 50s, so that audio on magnetic tape never becomes possible for consumer purposes and the digital revolution is killed off before it even starts, but it'd take either an apocalypse or events more unusual than I care to speculate about to bring such a situation into being.

Panzerfaust04 said:

Before I say anything, I'd like to note that I'm a child of the early 90s so I never experienced the vinyl age. Therefore, take anything I say with a grain of salt. That said, to me it seems like asking this question is kinda like asking "WI flintlocks stay the dominant form of firearm" or "WI floppy disks stay the dominant form of portable data storage". Further audio developments (magnetic tape, CDs, digital audio) are probably going to come about regardless of whether or not people are specifically looking for their audio applications because they are so intertwined with the development of computing and modern technology. I mean, I could maybe see it in a world where technological progress halts after the early 50s, so that audio on magnetic tape never becomes possible for consumer purposes and the digital revolution is killed off before it even starts, but it'd take either an apocalypse or events more unusual than I care to speculate about to bring such a situation into being.

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You are correct, I'm a child of the 70's. LPs were already challenged by tapes (8-Track and Cassette) since the 70's, because LPs are not portable. CDs offer more storage, do not have to be flipped, and can be portable. They offer all of the advantages of both LPs and Cassettes, with few drawbacks.

I think OTL is pretty much best case for vinyl, considering that after the hype backlash against CDs they have come back again for the true connoisseur and are still sold in large numbers - which you can't say for other obsolete formats like Laserdisc or five and a quarter inch floppies.

Having said that, I always thought it was weird that optical data storage was invented so early in OTL (the first work on it was done in 1958!). I remember Turtledove in Worldwar had the British experts looking at the Lizard CD-equivalents and thinking they would only have been invented centuries in the future, they're so far removed from what they knew; hard to believe it would only have been 32 years later to reach the OTL CD.

So given that a lot of the work pushing for it was in Japan (where optical data storage has generally always been favoured, at least unless you're Nintendo), perhaps in a TL where Japan was Morganthau'd after WW2, vinyl would last longer just because it would take longer for optical disks to be invented.

Greenlanterncorps said:

They offer all of the advantages of both LPs and Cassettes

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Not entirely true. Vanilla CDs (as opposed to MP3 etc) have less runtime than cassettes and their sound quality is less rich than LPs. Convenience is really what drove their adoption - that and exaggerated early claims about their durability.

Music industry

I could see the music industry trying to suppress tape recorders--after all, anyone can just record off the radio--and that means less in their pocket. Never mind that the technology might have other uses--kill it!!! Buy some congressmen! Stop sending any music to companies that deal with tape! Boycots and other ruthless tactics.

Once one has been stopped, it's easier to stop others.

The problem with vinyl is wear. I grew up as an audiophile during the vinyl age, and even with the best care and best equipment, each playing of a vinyl record degrades it. True, if you never play an LP and store it under cool conditions, it will last longer than a digital copy, but let's get real - few people keep music collections long enough for this to matter. I typically made cassettes of my albums for daily use, and nobody can claim a cassette equals either an LP or CD in terms of clarity, permanence, and fidelity. Combine this with the much larger size of the 33rpm album and the fragility of the playing equipment, and the technological switchover was inevitable. Finally, I never bought into the notion that analog recordings made via physical imprints of sound vibrations were somehow more real and that made them better. I guess communicating via two tin cans connected by a wire is also more "real", but that doesn't make it better sounding than a telephone.

The problem with vinyl lasting is that eventually someone is going to invent a new technology. That's the case with everything. Once a new technology comes out that is also more convenient, the people who stick to the older format will mostly consist of audiophiles and people with nostalgia from it. That's not a suitable market share to keep vinyl dominant.

You could have some sort of POD that sets technological progress overall back somehow, but that's really more of a stall than anything.

A more interesting idea was if vinyl became more associated with the Alternative music subculture (When I say alternative, I mean more as an alternative to mainstream music overall than a specific genre like "Alternative Rock"). Already, a lot of the vinyl releases seem to be from more Indie-ish bands who do-it-for-the-art. If vinyl releases become more associated with alternative music, then that could create a bigger subculture of people who prefer to buy vinyl releases. Buying the vinyl might become a mark of a "true fan".

However, one big problem with this is that most unsigned bands who haven't made it big yet won't have the ability to create the vinyl record (One thing about new technology is that it makes things easier for more people to contribute to culture). Another problem is that much of the people who listen to more Indie stuff are younger people who seem eager to embrace new technologies.

To be honest, it's not really possible to keep any technology from dying out once it becomes obsolete. Sure, if the newer technology isn't more convenient than the older one, the older one has a good chance of staying. But once a newer technology comes out that is easier to use than the older technology, and that tech manages to do good in the market, then there really isn't any way to stop it from dying out. Yes, you've all made arguements about how they have better sound quality and all that. But really, do the vast majority of people know or care about those properties of vinyl? Would they even notice them? What they do notice is that CDs are the more conivienient format, and to them, that makes them better than vinyl. The most that vinyl could hope for would be life as a less popular alternative to a select niche.

Vinyl wear is certainly an issue. WI someone came up with a better material that still produced the same organic sound? Already happened several times before, e.g. when vinyl itself replaced lacquer for records.

Thande said:

Vinyl wear is certainly an issue. WI someone came up with a better material that still produced the same organic sound? Already happened several times before, e.g. when vinyl itself replaced lacquer for records.

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Yeah, something to alleviate vinyl wear would be a good boost. But really, without some sort of portability, it's still too cumbersome and inconvenient to survive.

I think vinyl did as well as it could in OTL, to be honest.

Yup, by the time I was old enough to have a music player in the 80s I wanted nothing to do with vinyl. People who had record players mostly did so because they bought it years back and didn't want to throw them out. Sure some eccentrics say vinyl has better audio quality than cassette, but they were also totally impractical to me.

The Hi-Fi cassettes offered good enough quality. Tapes have the useful feature of recording. That means you can borrow your friend's tapes, copy their music and play it in your car. I can do things like study a foreign language, record my own voice to practice singing, presentations, or listen to old tapes of children's stories in my father's voice.

Vinyl in my time was used when your parents threw a house party, but all the cool kids carried boom boxes.

tallwingedgoat said:

Yup, by the time I was old enough to have a music player in the 80s I wanted nothing to do with vinyl. People who had record players mostly did so because they bought it years back and didn't want to throw them out. Sure some eccentrics say vinyl has better audio quality than cassette, but they were also totally impractical to me.

The Hi-Fi cassettes offered good enough quality. Tapes have the useful feature of recording. That means you can borrow your friend's tapes, copy their music and play it in your car. I can do things like study a foreign language, record my own voice to practice singing, presentations, or listen to old tapes of children's stories in my father's voice.

Vinyl in my time was used when your parents threw a house party, but all the cool kids carried boom boxes.

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Just hard to drag the record player/amp and speakers onto the school bus to play Zep and Sabbath tunes on the way to and from school, let alone the skipping

Greenlanterncorps said:

You are correct, I'm a child of the 70's. LPs were already challenged by tapes (8-Track and Cassette) since the 70's, because LPs are not portable. CDs offer more storage, do not have to be flipped, and can be portable. They offer all of the advantages of both LPs and Cassettes, with few drawbacks.

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Sound Burger: Vintage Portable Turntable

NHBL said:

I could see the music industry trying to suppress tape recorders--after all, anyone can just record off the radio--and that means less in their pocket. Never mind that the technology might have other uses--kill it!!! Buy some congressmen! Stop sending any music to companies that deal with tape! Boycots and other ruthless tactics.

Once one has been stopped, it's easier to stop others.

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Well, there's already reel-to-reel recorders and wire recorders.

Did anyone else read "Vinyl" and "Dominant" in the title and think this was gonna be a discussion on alternative fashion?

Bump. Why? 'cause I can, and I am the Norton.

Thande said:

Vinyl wear is certainly an issue. WI someone came up with a better material that still produced the same organic sound? Already happened several times before, e.g. when vinyl itself replaced lacquer for records.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable

Essentially, rather than a needle, a laser would be used to play the vinyl. This would mean no wear, and so vinyl records could theoretically last forever.

Problem was, they were and are (I think) expensive, and by the time they came out, they had to compete with CD's, which was a laser war the older format couldn't win. They also have the problem, I think, of not being able to play any color but black vinyl.
However, if those problems could be taken care of, the cost cut down to something reasonable, and CD's delayed, I think it could have helped.

But I agree the problem vinyl faced was portability. Certainly the portable radio was around for quite a while, and during the age of vinyl, and that filled a niche for a long time, but by the time of portable music storage devices, something which could offer the functionality of vinyl -or greater functionality- and reasonable sound quality was probably always going to be a major competitor to vinyl if not something which rendered it obsolete. 8-Track kinda started that, although it was very limited itself (I don't believe it had the ability to fast forward or rewind, and the sound quality was booty), Cassette stood on an even playing field, and CD knocked it out of the park and proved a superior sound quality (granted, I'm not a fan of the digital format; some CD's are too crisp, and feel like a knife stabbing my ear. The "fatness" of sound is something I find desirable, and CD's have taken notice of it and tried to do it since their initial introduction).

However, we've kinda gone to the zenith with portable. It got tinier, and tinier, and tinier, until now it's just microscopic bits of data in iPods; we don't need CD's and Cassettes to put into our Walkmen's or whatever. And that's why vinyl is coming back in a big way, even if just as a niche; music storage no longer needs to be portable because we've reached the zenith of portable, and we don't need anything but the players to store them. Maybe if that leap of portable music to pure data were made sooner it could have saved vinyl.
Some of you may say that should kill any music storage format, but I'd point to vinyl now as proof that that isn't true; there's portability, but then again there is also music as an experience; something to sit down and listen to.

Another problem with laser turntables is that they hiss and pop if there's any dust on the record (and there will be dust), as they convert exactly what they pick up, and without a needle they can't push dust out of the way. And yes, they're expensive.

stateless_englishman said:

Another problem with laser turntables is that they hiss and pop if there's any dust on the record (and there will be dust), as they convert exactly what they pick up, and without a needle they can't push dust out of the way. And yes, they're expensive.

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That is a problem as well, yes. But I do think I heard of a way to clean the dust off sans needle play.

Emperor Norton I said:

I miss vinyl; it seemed more earthy than digital, everything was there and wasn't microscopic data files some laser would decode via a small computer or whatever, and it would feel good to be off the grid every now and again.

Taking that in mind, I issue this challenge to you, should you choose to accept it: Keep Vinyl/LP's the dominant format.

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No WW-I and WW-II,and no Cold War.
Tecnology is more slow,and now at end of 2010 is at level of 1970 in OTL.
So,enjoy your vinyl, but there is a little problem......
Without world wars,in this ATL dominant music is....Valtz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpc5sTkvZXg

HUAHHAAAAAAAHHHHAHHHHHHAHHHA!!!!!

Mad Bad Rabbit said:

Did anyone else read "Vinyl" and "Dominant" in the title and think this was gonna be a discussion on alternative fashion?

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Yes. It's probably the prison world where the Reality Police dump their worst criminals.