Is the Vinyl Revival well and growing?


I never gave up on vinyl. October 1988, I bought my LP12. We were being told CDs were perfect sound forever. People were dumping their vinyl. Thankfully, I cleaned the best that I could find. Now, TTs at all price points are coming on the market. Is the the vinyl revival real and where will we end up?

nkonor
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The Vinyl Revival™ has:
caused an increase in prices of older LPs;
invited pikers to offer used records for sale that should be trashed;
inflated grading standards;
in conjunction with the Internet, has provided a vast resource for records outside of the geographic area in which I am located;
stimulated the reissue of many obscure records that would otherwise have remained costly and rare;
encouraged an associated hardware market for tonearms, phono cartridges and turntables, new and vintage, that is probably larger than at any time when the vinyl LP was a mainstream medium;
put even more focus on improved playback quality through separate phono stages, step up transformers, phono cartridge technologies (old and new), turntable design and cleaning processes.

The quality of the pressings remains about the same, the source material for the vast majority of non-audiophile issues is no longer analog, and the sound quality varies considerably.
On balance, I’m happy for the revived interest in the medium, but apart from the reissue of real obscurities at far cheaper prices than rare original pressings in top condition, and the ease of finding records through the Internet, it would not matter to me. I would soldier on, and if that market crashes, would continue to do so.

Good post Bill (whart). Having begrudgingly lived through the dark days of the 1990’s, when the availability of new music on LP was effectively nill, for me the greatest benefit of the LP revival is the resurgence in new music and recordings being released on LP. The second is that there are a lot of albums that were offered only on CD at the time of their initial release, some of them only recently finally becoming available on LP. Who’d a thought we would live to see that?!

If Terry had ever heard an LP and CD of the same recording played back-to-back on quality players (as have I and others, possessing both LP and CD copies of a fair number of favorite albums), he would be in a better position to have an informed opinion on the subject of their relative strengths and weaknesses.

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