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Proving sadly CDs are indeed a Dying format.and in the future its possible vinyl will again lose its dominance as it did in the late 80s perhaps Something else will become dominant not to say vinyl or CDs are going away completely they will be more of a Niche product However this is just an opinion always subject to revision. But as the old saying goes "Time will Tell".From the RIAA report, for physical units sold. Columns, left to right, are 2021, 2022, and % change from 2021 to 2022.
LPs only increased 3.2% (which isn't much), but CDs had a very large drop of -28.4%. It isn't so much a surge in LP sales as it was a much larger drop in CD sales.
Also with the used and out of print are that some of the older records were cut from the original master tapes, which for one reason or another (junked, lost, high licensing prices) are unavailable, so the current “digital” masters are sourced from LP or reel-to-reel, 8-track, or in some cases 1/4-inch audio cassette, so the old LP’s sound better. Recently I just downloaded most of The Archies albums from iTunes, the “Digitally Remastered” ones, and on my iPhone’s built in speakers I can hear, especially in between tracks, the sound of the needle scraping the grooves and the occasionally pop and click (I can’t hear these flaws on my stereo when I play them through my Apple TV and TV into my stereo).
And there was that interesting transition period when cassettes eclipsed LPs, just prior to CDs building up steam and overshadowing both. I bought few pre-recorded cassettes. I did go through a period in the mid 70s when I'd gotten a proper cassette deck and had a couple of years of getting cassettes, but the fidelity was never there and I gave up. Eventually replaced all of them on LP or later on, on CD.
It's appalling how bad some of those needle drops are--it's interesting how I can do better vinyl digitizing at home than the labels can. Sometimes it seems as though they don't bother to find clean copies of the records they are digitizing--I hear groove burn (wear) in addition to faint other noises in the background, much of which can be cured by finding a clean copy. As far as scratches go, in this day and age, studios should own a SugarCube and properly clean up those ticks and pops. They should also find it within their studio budget to get a cartridge that will properly track the grooves; inexpensive, not by any stretch of the imagination, but even an Audio Technica VM740ML or VM760SLC will out-track most others out there. It goes without saying that a solid-quality turntable, properly set up, will get the most out of it. Using a center weight and a peripheral weight or, in their absence, a vacuum platter, would mostly eliminate even minor warpage, and reduce the resonances of a record not properly contacting the platter surface.
Besides cleaning the record, why don’t they use one of those laser-record players, like a Laserdisc player read analog video and audio, for mastering from vinyl? I know some people don’t like the sound quality of those turntables, however that would be one way to get rid of the sound of the needle going through the groove, and possibly make a quieter master.
I’m aware of that with the Beach Boys “Student Demonstration Time.
Overmodulation. Or, electronics overdriven to clipping. Both are unlike digital exceeding 0dB where the A/D converter runs out of bits to represent the signal--it can sound quite nasty when that happens. Analog signals driven past the limits are much easier on the ears and not as catastrophic, and it was very common on earlier recordings, prior to the 70s when studios had much better equipment and plenty of tracks at their disposal.
Unfortunately that's the sad state of needle drops at someone else's hands. And I've heard so many poor ones on CDs and in digital formats. An engineer EQing it to get rid of noise really isn't doing the music any favors.
I also have to wonder how much the iTunes compression is also adding to the sound issues. I just checked and the files are MP4-audio 283kbps. I’m assuming AAC—-but 283, that’s pretty compressed.
I would disagree with AAC and WMA being better than MP3 or FLAC or ALAC. All of them are essentially the Type 1 cassette audio of the digital age.It's probably not adding too much in the way of sound issues. I've found lossy digital compression to have the subtle effect of slightly "garbling" the sound (if that makes sense) or adding a slight "gauze" to the sound (a slight loss of definition and detail). 283kbps is still fairly respectable for lossy, as many can't tell the difference between 256kbps and lossless. AAC and WMA are better CODECs than the old MP3, so that's a plus also. The differences are more easily heard in direct comparisons between a lossless source and a lossy file, and using "pure" music that has few instruments which are recorded cleanly. Something "busy" like rock or popular music has the effect of covering up the artifacts of a lossy CODEC.
I've found it's common for an engineer to roll off the highs if a record has a lot of noise and/or wear ("groove burn") in an attempt to cover it up. Others use digital noise reduction, which has its own negative effect of making the music sound muffled and closed-in. My guess is that one or both of those are what you are likely hearing.
One of the best CDs I've ever heard from a series of needle drop was the 2-CD Rhino set of Spike Jones and his City Slickers. Rather than use RCA's tapes (many of which were "rechanneled" aka "fake stereo"), Rhino went back to either original acetates or the original metal parts to dub them in 78 RPM. There is slight noise, but the sound is as good as it gets and everything is heard cleanly.
