Why vinyl took the nose dive in the late 1980s - early 1990?

[Barry]

Really? No errors flagged up by Microsoft Office.

[Arkless Electronics]

Good post Jez, much of which I agree with wholehartedly.

I'm so distrustful of the security of e-everything, that I will ALWAYS and ONLY deal with a human being when it comes to booking tickets, or dealing with my bank.

I'm also resentful of the fact that modern consumer electronics are deliberately designed to be irrepairable. One reason why I'm attracted to professional audio gear.

Even most of the latest pro gear is irreparably modern high tech now! By and large if it's digital it can't be fixed... try replacing a 200 pin BGA (Ball Grid Array) IC! Or getting hold of source code for and reprogramming a faulty EPROM that's part of a DSP engine.... With this sort of thing only the manufacturer could fix it and they would probably put a complete new board in anyway. Try getting it fixed after 5 years...

I will more often than not forgo all sorts of fiendishly helpful modern IC's when I'm designing stuff as I know only too well that the part will probably be obsolete in a few years time. Texas Instruments have just dismayed many audio designers by obsoleting half of their range of "high end audio op-amps" which they inherited from National Semiconductors when they unfortunately bought them out a few years ago. It seems like no time since I saw trade ads pushing the latest "NEW! Only 0.00001% THD op-amp is new leader of the pack!" type ads for these! (probably about 6 years ago actually). Hi Fi etc at the highest quality level is such a small seller for semiconductor makers that already the best ever examples of low noise FET's, op-amps, transistors are obsolete and haven't been replaced!

The test gear I use is largely from between around 1960 and 1982 or so but is of a quality such that the very same instruments were used by the likes of NASA, The National Physics Lab, university research depts etc. Test gear has got vastly smaller and cheaper but the modern stuff is far less intuitive to use and in the main no more accurate. The stuff I have can be repaired though and without access to "factory only" diagnostic tools etc!!

[Marco]

Really? No errors flagged up by Microsoft Office.

Well, it must be broken, daftee... Even without a spellchecker, I know that "wholehartedly" is spelled 'wholeheartedly', and "irrepairable" is 'irreparable'

Marco.

[Jimbo]

I lump the whole of the digital 'revolution' along with the computerisation of anything you can put a chip in. The whole industry is a great capitalist idea to make money out of everything you do via a computer and digital music and equipment runs parallel with this. I too am maybe from the dark ages but in 1976 before we had digital or computers I did almost everything I can do now apart from what I am doing now which is typing this on a forum. So what did I do before digital?
I could go into a travel agent and book a holiday, loads of choice, buy a ticket and fly to Spain. I could pop down to the train station and buy a ticket and travel to Euston station which I did yesterday and I can tell you I don't think it's changed much since 1975!

I could go to a record shop and peruse a vast collection of music and even listen to it before hand, purchase it and take it home. My system in the late seventies sounded as good as many of the state of the art digital systems now. My holiday to Spain was cheaper and more satisfying, free from the massive security time delaying stuff you get now. I even got a nice free heated meal! My train journey was less overcrowded in the late 1970's and not much slower and I could buy beer and sandwiches on the train.

What I am getting at is now you can interact with all these things via a computer because some bright spark realised you could write a programme that would become a website on the tinternet and make you believe you had to do it this way as with everything else so computers took off and the cash rolled in for the whole industry and keeps rolling in as you are quickly superseded by obsolescence. So you are told. None of my life was worse for not having a computer, mobile phone or CD player. There was a deeper satisfaction from interacting with the world and real people rather than reverting constantly to a glass screen in different sizes to view the world. Computers and digital music are nothing more than technological ways of capturing you and extracting cash from you repeatedly.

Just look at the zombies wandering round staring at their phones and the couples who go out to dinner and keep checking their phones. There is a nasty addiction almost like a drug working here which ensnares the masses and instead of looking at the world around them they see it all through a screen.Their social life is now accessed via a screen and music comes from a streamed load of digital files.

What did I do before Internet Hifi forums? I went round to mates houses and listened to music and systems. I went to Hifi dealers and spent many hours their listening to actual kit. I was not a virtual audiophile and I certainly listened to vinyl

I may be wrong, I maybe talking bollocks but I think there are a few grains of truth in there.

[Olddiverman]

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. This thread has become Grumpy Old Men. " It wasn't like that in my day", "things ain't" etc, etc. The OP asked why vinyl took a nose-dive in the late '80s- early '90s. Well, it is pretty obvious, and I was there. CDs. It was obvious to anyone who could see and hear, that CDs would wipe out "vynil". Vynil was a faff (?), fussing about handling fragile LPs, cleaning, watching for the needle to drop in the right place, short sides, crackles, pops, distortion,getting up and turning them over half way through, and all this multiple times if you liked opera. Now, I had, in 1982, a quite nice "hi-fi" system, and enjoyed good sound from my LPs, but the majority of people who weren't music lovers or hi-fi enthusiasts, had pretty shitty BSR deck type record players. And even a cheap CD player sounded FANTASTIC compared to that. That's why "vynil" took a nose dive. It was as if everyone drove Model T Fords and suddenly the Ford Focus appeared. Who would want to drive a Model T as their every-day transport in 1990? Of course everyone adopted CDs. Meanwhile, of course, some of us had better record playing systems, hi-fi even, and , speaking for myself, I was attracted to the new medium because of the user-friendliness of it, and the total lack of surface noise - forever.
Well that was over 30 years ago. I kept my LPs. (Thank God). And today I listen to my LPs, still sounding as good as ever ((I've just bought my first new LP in 30 years), I buy CDs in charity shops and (used) on Amazon for pence, and I find I have accumulated about 400 FLACS on my network hard-drive. We've never had it so good. My grandson is 19. He plays bass guitar in (quite a good) group. All his music is digital. All downloaded. It's a different world. But it definitely isn't a worse one.

[RMutt]

Exactly. And pretty soon CD's were portable in discmen, car radios etc. and still sounded great. No wonder they took over from records.

[Arkless Electronics]

Dyson now make an, allegedly, "digital" vacuum cleaner FFS!!! Quite how a vacuum cleaner can be "digital" is beyond me...

[Olddiverman]

Absolutely right Andrew. Steam railways anyone?

[Olddiverman]

Ha ha. I quite agree with Jez. But what has that to do with the OP's question?

[Marco]

Just look at the zombies wandering round staring at their phones and the couples who go out to dinner and keep checking their phones. There is a nasty addiction almost like a drug working here which ensnares the masses and instead of looking at the world around them they see it all through a screen.Their social life is now accessed via a screen and music comes from a streamed load of digital files.

Ah yes, affectionately known as iZombies!

I'm with you all they way there, and it boils my piss in a major way. Quite simply, becoming a slave to technological gadgetry does not represent progress, and it's killing many aspects of our human development, as evidenced in so many different ways today, it's frightening...

Thank goodness both Del and I are largely divorced from 'normal life', as lived by most these days, and so don't need to be 'connected' 24/7. I mean, we're so weird that we can go away for 2 weeks holiday, and somehow 'survive' without any mobile phones, laptops, tablets, iPads or Kindles - and get this - we sit and TALK TO EACH OTHER, too!!

Yes, I know, a psychiatrist would have a field day!

Marco.