When did vinyl stop making sense?

[Roman Empire]

I´m just curious about when it all became digital.

What you're looking for is the first CD with a DDD Spars code. Well, that was from the beginning already
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARS_code

But it's moot. Every step in the process is not 100% transparent. But the 99.9,% transparency available in both analog & digital is good enough for Rock'nRoll. You cannot tell, so why worry.

If it´s a CD it´s already 100 % digital as its been converted into bits and bytes so that you are able to play it on a CD-player. We´re talking about vinyl here.

[BertKoor]

Read the whole article, there are vinyl LP's made 'DDD' since it was possible. Makes sense...

[Roman Empire]

Read the whole article, there are vinyl LP's made 'DDD' since it was possible. Makes sense...

Yeah ok, but you only said CD´s The article however doesn´t give a hint about which year that the market started having an overload of music labelled "something with a D in it", as that´s all it would take for all tracks to have been digitally processed at some point.
Besides, it was implemented in 1984 so if using this pointer it would be impossible to determine if the year of digital overload was earlier, and it´s also not mentioning if each and every label from the beginning would actually adhere to it.

[BertKoor]

Yeah ok, but you only said CD´s

Fair, but how do you think the vinyl edition of
Ry Cooder's Bop till you Drop was made in 1979 ?

The article however doesn´t give a hint to which year that the market started having an overload of music labelled "something with a D in it", as that´s all it would take for all tracks to have been digitally processed at some point.

It was a gradual change. Also it depends on which market. The classical market tilted earlier, having more benefit of the extended dynamical range.

I estimate the consumers massively dropped vinyl in favour of cd around 1988-1990.
No idea when even the small studio owners massively threw out their written-off tape recorders.

And here we are now, beeing worried about the most significant bit beeing 1 all the time while back then it should have remained zero all the time.

[Roman Empire]

Yeah ok, but you only said CD´s

Fair, but how do you think the vinyl edition of
Ry Cooder's Bop till you Drop was made in 1979 ?

The article however doesn´t give a hint to which year that the market started having an overload of music labelled "something with a D in it", as that´s all it would take for all tracks to have been digitally processed at some point.

It was a gradual change. Also it depends on which market. The classical market tilted earlier, having more benefit of the extended dynamical range.

I estimate the consumers massively dropped vinyl in favour of cd around 1988-1990.
No idea when even the small studio owners massively threw out their written-off tape recorders.

And here we are now, beeing worried about the most significant bit beeing 1 all the time while back then it should have remained zero all the time.

Yes, Cooders album is known as the first all-digital, and was released before the time of CD´s. Hence it´d not make sense to look at CD´s alone which I had the impression that you were saying.
Indeed it happened gradually, so I´m after when the whole market hit the sweet 50 % spot.
I would think that CDs instead of vinyls happened a bit later than you think, but majority of digital instead of analog was way earlier than that I´d say...

[BertKoor]

I'd say the exact moment cd eclipsed vinyl depends on where you lived, what you earned and who you hang out with.

So I asked google: when did cd sales surpass vinyl?

Answers differ from 1986 to 1988. So even a bit earlier than even I thought. Interesting to see these are recent quotes from articles stating vinyl sales have surpassed cd again.

I could go through my cd collection and tally AAD vs DDD per year, but it's too much work and my collection is not representable.


In your first post you mention audio purists. 30 years ago these were the ones buying everything on cd again.
The analog purist: I doubt (s)he really exists. Browsing through the vinyl section, seeing a title worth getting. But on the way to the counter check the CD issue of the same title. Happy when its AAD, but putting it back when DDD. Never seen thar happen, never heard of...

It kind of presumes these are snobs that think digital stuff makes audio steppy. Which is not the (stair)case.

[stimresp]

I stopped buying vinyl around 2000 because the quality of pressings went to shit.
The upside is that I don't have to lug boxes of records around any more, just a hard drive. Anyway, digital DJing is just way more flexible and fun.

[dirtysnow]

Later on the old stuff is renamed "vintage" and a new market emerges.

One of my profs called this 'repurposing cultural waste'. Artifacts that are mainstreamed are consumed until exhausted before being discarded. Down the line they are reintroduced for further consumption.

[xtp]

In your first post you mention audio purists. 30 years ago these were the ones buying everything on cd again.

^ I think things like this get forgotten. Classical music was one of the big sells at the time. I had a friend in the 80's who had a stereo repair shop. I remember him telling me the 1812 overture was creating a lot of work for him by blowing speakers up because of the greater dynamic range with the new CD technology as compared to Records. People were cranking up the volume and when the cannons went off, so did the woofers.

Did anyone actually call Records, vinyl back then? Here they were either Records, L.P's, 45's or 78's

For people interested in the Analog/Digital thing, you might enjoy this video, if you have not already seen it.

https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

[Skupje]

I estimate the consumers massively dropped vinyl in favour of cd around 1988-1990.

Youre probably right. Still we went and listened to vinyl well into the 90's. Always with the technics, it was a great machine