Is the Digital Music Better Than the Vinyl Music?
The use of polyvinyl chloride and the appearance of the equalizer enabled researchers at Columbia to improve the discs with 78 rotations per minute and to develop the LP disc (Long Playing), which rotates with 33 revolutions per minute and lasts 20 minutes; this information comes from Mencity.
Although the vinyl was stable, its life was not unlimited. The vinyl discs are made of polyvinyl chloride, which degrades with time when exposed to ultraviolet and heat. Still, there is something to be done: the stabilization can be done by adding a chemical during the disc production. This does not prevent damage, but it controls it, making the disc resistant to fungal attacks and high humidity. Although we’re a thousand light years from vinyl records, they are still popular today in some degree, too bad that only a few collectors have this pleasure, and the DJs, who easily obtain the desired effects through their vinyls.
Our grandmother listened to gramophone music, then the grandparents and parents cannot live without a pick-up or gramophone. Entire generations have been fascinated by the resonance of the vinyl disc. How many couples were formed, then united in the holy matrimony thanks to the various dances, the music coming from the arrangements of the round plastic ?
Today we are listening to music on different media: compact disc (CD), audio cassette, DVDs and others. 80 years ago, there were no such things, but there was nothing else on the market, except the vinyl, which has experienced a long period of glory. At those times, when the MP3 was nonexistent, the music supplies did not come in various ways and simply to own a discs was something extraordinary, because they were rare and costed a fortune.
There are companies that still produce vinyl discs, but exclusively for private collectors or clubs. The flowering period was between the 60′s and 80′s. The sound on vinyl is warmer, more pleasant, although there is that well-known background noise, the sound coming from a compact disc is colder, less friendly. A pickup pin has a conical shape and the ditch has a form of irregular sinusoids. The contact is made point by point, thus the noise appears by friction. When you play a CD, the contact is not direct, it is made with a laser. A vinyl disk can be listened, with a neat pin, from 200 times up a thousand times, without affecting the surface.
In theory and in practice often a pickup disc sounds better than a CD disc that has the same musical information. Why do you think that great musicians like to record with a real violin and do not what to do use a digital tool that can imitate a violin? The idea is that the analog sound is “hotter” and more “round” than the digital one. Music is made of sounds, and real feelings are made of warmth and harmonic sounds coming from a music device. A pick-up can be one of those devices. The problem is that people, for convenience, prefer the CD.
Pick-up discs are much better in terms of sound than the CDs, simply because the analog songs (to call them so) have all the sound frequencies, while the CDs sounds are are cut to be processed digitally. To explain the difference between digital and analog let’s start from the term “waveform”, which means visual representation of the signal (amplitude / time). An analog signal is represented as a wavy line and the signal is represented as a broken line. The problem is not just the representation. The analog signal varies continuously … this means that at any time we can find various values of amplitude. At the digital signal, the amplitude value is taken at equal time intervals and predetermined. As the intervals are smaller, the sound will have a higher fidelity, but it will not reach fidelity given by the analog signal.
Although in the 1980s, the information of any kind and, especially the foreign music reached harder to its lovers, the people who loved music those times were aware of any new track. Nowadays, the music lovers can download, mostly from free, the music they want from the Internet. This is about to stop, because many organizations try to stop the abuse of downloading music directly from the Internet without paying a single cent to the music production house or the artist. It is regrettable that the vinyl records have disappeared from the market and certainly, despite the requests of small clubs, discos and all the collectors, they will never be revived.
