According to a Wired article, vinyl is going to bring upon the death of CD’s. Now I’m a music purist and all, but this just sounds ridiculous. The article makes great points about how vinyl can have better sound and all that because of the push to make CD’s louder through audio compression. The reasoning behind doing so is that people are stupid and loud music obviously sounds better. Since you can’t compress anything on vinyl, you get the original sound. Other arguments involve the album cover artwork and liner notes.
While I do agree with the thing about loud music, I don’t buy anything this article is saying. First, vinyl is huge. CD’s are at least somewhat portable, though not as portable as MP3′s. The article mentions an indie band in San Francisco that is planning on releasing their new album as MP3 and vinyl only, no CD (those crazy hippies out there). Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. First, most people, even a lot of music purists and audiophiles, don’t have a turntable. Second, a decent turntable costs quite a bit of money, while most component CD players perform about the same so long as you have a decent receiver and speakers (though I’m sure an audiophile will reply to this and argue otherwise) and so long it’s not the cheapest CD player you could find.
Now let’s say that vinyl sales are on the rise (which they claim they are), very few bands in the grand scheme of things are releasing anything on vinyl, making it a very moot point. There also some inherent flaws with vinyl, such as warping and scratching. A CD can be scratched and most people won’t notice it (they tend not to warp unless exposed to extreme heat). Vinyl, when scratched, is quite noticeable by everybody. There’s that noticeable hiss and the skipping depending on how scratched it is.
Finally, there seems to be this need from technophiles to put an end to the CD. I don’t know why there’s this need, the CD offers great sounding music (assuming it wasn’t made “louder” through compression), no DRM, in a relatively portable format that can easily be transferred to other formats (MP3, analog cassette, other CD’s, etc.). Vinyl is not quite so easy to transfer to those other format, though it is definitely an open format, but that’s because it’s not digital. Until there’s another convenient open format like the CD, this music purist will continue to buy CD’s. There’s no need for me to buy a turntable.
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