Metallica Is Selling so Many Vinyl Records It Bought Its Own Factory:
Despite technology bringing new recording media formats and improved compression algorithms, there is certainly a growing demand for vinyl again despite its death being announced several times over recent decades.
Metallica has bought a majority stake in Furnace Record Pressing, one of the biggest and most important vinyl records companies in the U.S. If anyone had any doubts about the growth of the vinyl sales, which last year outpaced CD sales for the first time since 1987, Metallica's new purchase just gave them a very loud reminder that what's old is new again.
Vinyl records are experiencing a renaissance among music lovers. Although Metallica hasn't released a new album since Hardwired...To Self-Destruct in 2016, it sold more than 387,000 vinyl albums in 2022, according to data from Billboard. That year, it ranked sixth on the list of most albums sold in the U.S., topping the 337,000 albums it sold in 2021. The price Metallica paid for Furnace was not disclosed; members of the band will now sit on Furnace's board.
Metallica is expected to release its first album in seven years sometime over the next few weeks, setting the stage for the band to sell to many, many more vinyl records in 2023.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2023, @10:55AM (5 children)
Metallica hasn't released anything worth listening to since 1991, obviously they needed a new revenue stream after Napster robbed them of their income.
For years, it has been clear Hetfield doesn't enjoy their old work any more, and whenever I see him performing a classic, it reminds me of a vomiting cat.
To quote James: open legs for a different view, nothing else matters.
Oh, and Lars wants to buy new paintings.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MIRV888 on Wednesday March 22 2023, @11:46AM
Everything after Justice is garbage.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday March 22 2023, @12:14PM
Genre preferences aside, most of Hetfield's best vocal work came out in the mid-90s and following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFYoQKaD_vM [youtube.com]
Personal example: Between the black, death, jazz/flamenco and classical I listen to, the few hard rock tracks on my playlist are almost all Metallica and the usual grunge / alt.metal hits you'd expect. So, for me, value wise, their early material didn't hold up as good metal while their later material did but not in the context of metal.
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(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday March 22 2023, @01:50PM
But they're touring again (very soon), and i guess this 'purchase' is creating buzz for them?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday March 22 2023, @04:05PM (1 child)
I've never really liked them, but I haven't heard all that much. At least one of their songs seemed interesting. I don't fault them, they are what they are, but I kind of wish the general population liked somewhat better music. Sometime within the past 10 years I learned of Dream Theater, and many other bands and performers of that genre. Saw the rekindled "Yes" last fall and they were amazing. I wish more people liked better music.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Thursday March 23 2023, @08:09AM
I went through a strong Metallica phase in my teens, and I learned to play bass by learning their songs. Albums 1-4 were awesome, particularly 2-4. My favourite of all is the Justice album. Despite its poor production (no bass. terrible drum sound, dry guitars) it has the strongest material. I didn't know the word for it at the time, but it's quite "prog" in places. The black album was a major emperor's new clothes moment for me. I listened to it intently for about a fortnight and got really bored with it. The production is magnificent and sound is awesome but the content is very weak. My band did Enter Sandman. I nearly fell asleep playing the bass part. They've had one or two good moments since then. Other bands of the era like Slayer, Megadeth and Testament are still very listenable and put out some strong material.
I mean this as no disrespect to people like James Hetfield, who is a far better musician that I could ever dream of being. He's awesome. His guitar playing is amazing. Metallica always has the best bass players too. Lars is Lars. He gets it in the neck, but I couldn't play the drums, so respect to him. Kirk can widdle with the best of 'em.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday March 22 2023, @12:05PM (19 children)
Because it's the last form of music you can actually own, without anyone ever being able to decide that they don't want you to listen to it anymore.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RamiK on Wednesday March 22 2023, @12:31PM (18 children)
Except for CDs...
Vinyls are the 4x4 SUVs of music mediums: They're empirically worse [youtube.com] but the sleeves look better on the shelf / in a frame and people only buy physical albums to virtue signal anyhow so here we are.
Basically, they're t-shirts alternatives. Not CD/FLAC alternative.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Gaaark on Wednesday March 22 2023, @01:48PM
When i bought albums, i usually enjoyed reading the 'inserts' (whatever they're called) with the lyrics and info about the band and members: a lot included pics and images. It was nice listening to the album whilst reading the 'liner/insert'.
Then a lot stopped having them included and it wasn't so enjoyable.
Now, i couldn't be bothered flipping a record over and over when i can have hours worth of albums accessible through my plex server (with lyrics), whilst reading about the band on-line if i want.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday March 22 2023, @02:41PM (2 children)
You can actually DRMify CDs, or at least the players. Not possible with records.
(Score: 5, Informative) by RamiK on Wednesday March 22 2023, @03:35PM
Music CDs aren't DRMed nor are the players. At least, they haven't been in the last 20 years or so since the Sony thing... Either way, the standard itself doesn't have DRM and you can trivially tell if there's DRM involved by comparing different outputs from different copies and drives.
Analog mediums are all naturally DRMed by their respective defects as they function as watermarks. Like, digital transfers of vinyls are trivially told apart by looking for common skips and such.
By comparison, a rip of a CD is identical between different copies. Or, at least, it could be verified as identical by buying 2 copies from different stores.
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(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday March 22 2023, @04:11PM
Which is why I will always keep my older players.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Zinho on Wednesday March 22 2023, @03:00PM (12 children)
You are correct that the CD format has much broader capabilities than vinyl: CD has about a 26dB dynamic advantage over Vinyl and about 40-50dB better stereo separation. [audioholics.com]
Unfortunately, the music industry chose not to use the full dynamic range, and instead uses audio compression to squeeze most songs into a much smaller dynamic range. This increasing trend in the music industry got named the loudness war [soundguys.com] and resulted in a long period when the version mastered on vinyl was taking advantage of the full dynamic range of the LP and the version mastered for CD was not. When your copy of an album sounds worse on CD [theguardian.com] than it does on either vinyl or when playing Guitar Hero you can be forgiven for saying that the limitations of vinyl may, in that case, be an advantage.
According to that second link I posted above, iTunes is ending the loudness war. When your electronic music library can scan your music files and tag them with appropriate gain so they all sound equally loud, the ones that use dynamic range better sound better.
Well encoded digital music files can sound better than the best CD, and well engineered CDs can sound better than the best vinyl LP. The trick, for we the listeners, is availability of the "well-engineered" version. Hopefully the industry will collectively go back to good audio engineering practices for all the formats, then comparisons of various format limitations will be meaningful again.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RS3 on Wednesday March 22 2023, @04:44PM (9 children)
Very interesting. I dabble in the audio world- mostly live mix, but have done some recording, mixdown, mastering. I got into it late in life, but probably would have been my main career if I had gotten in early. I've had the privilege of knowing and somewhat working with/under a Grammy-winning recording engineer. He doesn't share all secrets, but over the years I've learned a lot, here and there.
For sure the "loudness wars" are a huge factor in all of this.
But also, my perception is that the limitations and sort of natural compression of magnetic tape, and dealing with magnetic saturation, has a lot to do with it. In fact the definition of "0 dB" has changed over the years due to the evolution of magnetic tape (-10, 0, +4 dB).
Also, I mis-perceived that an LP has a greater dynamic range, if you tolerate some inevitable dust clicks.
I blame much of the difference on using fairly hard limiters on CD mastering final stage, due to the very bad result if you clip in digital. Whereas in pure analog, if all of the stages have good headroom, anything close to a clip will be naturally, and much more softly limited by the magnetic tape, or the LP master's cutting head. But I may be guessing.
I may be misunderstanding CD audio: if you have a low-volume section in CD music, you're only using maybe 8 or 10 bits, and the quantization distortion (staircase steps) become a greater percentage of the content, and you start to hear the (unpleasant) harmonics due to the square quantization- which does not, and can not happen in pure analog world (unless something is broken).
From what I know and have seen (Grammy-winner), they like to use some pretty hard limiting in the final plugin for 16-bit CD mastering. It doesn't clip, but saturation happens fast. Audio envelope, track-to-track, looks like linked sausages. Just yesterday I was thinking about some (very) different compressor profiles- not just a linear or logarithmic slope, but something different- slope varies on some other kind of profile, and using a much gentler final limiter (lumpier sausages!)
HD audio disks were going to be a thing, but don't seem to have caught on. It's simply the CD audio format, but in 24-bit / 48 KHz, on a DVD. Many players will play them, but I don't remember ever seeing them produced commercially.
(Score: 4, Informative) by RamiK on Wednesday March 22 2023, @05:21PM (1 child)
Most big labels produce for radio and television where speakers buzz in high treble / low bass so they're forced to cut-off hard and low. There's a similar issue in iTune where the target is bluetooth earplugs that physically can't deliver bittniess or dynamics which repeats itself for streaming... Basically, anything that's popular is made to run on car stereos regardless of the medium.
The reason studios use 24bit is to have something to compress and envelop under to avoid compressions. Even with high-impedance phones on and isolating tracks, you wouldn't be physically able to tell the difference between 24bit and 16bit.
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(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday March 22 2023, @08:20PM
Thank you. I pretty much know all that, but thank you again. Re. 16 vs. 24, absolutely agree if you're covering the bits. 16 bits gives 96 dB dynamic range- which is probably more than the human ear can hear, without damage anyway, and I doubt any speaker system could do that. It's more that recording engineers / mixers / mastering likes to use all 16 bits, and they (sometimes we) use a mastering limiter to push in the audio, and of course, you're squashing the dynamic range. Again, I've often done, and thought about a more advanced system where you'd use a non-linear compression- kind of like a limiter, but much gentler "knee" at the top. It's fun, for me, and I'm always learning.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2023, @05:55PM (3 children)
Yes, you are misunderstanding CD audio. There are no "staircase steps" in digital audio reproduction.
Quantization distortion is a thing but it still does not result in stairstep waveforms. Rather, it represents input-dependent errors introduced by the sampling process. Dithering techniques are used when recording and/or mastering to solve quantization distortion. Dither completely eliminates this distortion, entirely replacing it with (extremely) low level noise which is independent of the input signal (which is why we say the distortion is eliminated). It works for the quiet parts as well as the loud parts. For 16-bit CD audio this noise floor is way way way less than anything you'll achieve with magnetic tape or vinyl records.
The tradeoff with dither is you do increase the noise floor and therefore lose some dynamic range, but it is essentially irrelevant. At CD audio with a simple uniform dither, we can still expect around ~84dB or so between the noise floor and loudness at full scale, which is basically enough to encode the difference between what most people consider "complete silence" and "standing right next to a jet engine applying full takeoff thrust". More than good enough for normal audio intended for listening. You can actually achieve substantially better dynamic range using fancy dither that exploits characteristics of human perception, but it's really not needed with 16 bit samples for any kind of normal volume levels.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday March 22 2023, @08:12PM (2 children)
I know about dithering, and you've augmented my knowledge. Thank you, mysterious genius. :)
Let's pose this scenario: suppose we sample with 2-bits. Won't there be big stair-steps in dynamic range? Are you saying dithering fills that all in? I'm not sure how it could, but if it can, why do we worry about 16 or more bits?
I'll have to study it some more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2023, @08:28PM (1 child)
You can certainly use dither and sample with 2-bit linear PCM but the noise level will likely be unacceptable for the application. However, you will still get something out of it, pure tones will be kinda OK. I went and did this with a pure 440Hz sine wave [sndup.net] and a clip of some actual music [sndup.net] to get a feeling of what 2-bit linear PCM with dither can sound like on playback. The key takeaway is that the signal is noisy, but it is not distorted. Even with 2 bits, better results than these should be possible with more sophisticated technique (I just quickly hacked these files together with a completely uniform dither).
When dithering, the only thing that more bits gets you is less noise (and bigger files). To see how this relates to dynamic range, you can look at is like this: less noise means you can turn up the volume more before the noise becomes a problem. This means the loud parts can be louder, and thus more bits (less noise) means you can usefully reproduce signals with more dynamic range.
If we were to put everything on the same linear scale (e.g., everything in signed linear PCM, with integer samples, sign extended to the same bit depth), then each additional bit doubles the (full scale) peak-to-peak signal amplitude. Doubling a signal's amplitude is a 6dB increase. Or, on the flip side, if we make all the full scale amplitudes the same, then adding a bit decreases the noise floor by 6dB, and removing a bit increases it.
So going from 16 bits to 2 bits means, in effect, an 84dB increase in noise level relative to full scale. Without considering fancy techniques, that's pretty much the entire noise-free range you had with 16 bits, poof, gone.
Of course in the real world, low-sample-depth PCM rarely uses a linear encoding, making things more complex so the "6dB per bit" is not quite accurate for such schemes. Probably the most widespread example of such an encoding is G.711, which uses an 8-bit logarithmic scale (two different variants).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2023, @08:53PM
For a point of reference, here are the same clips reduced to 2 bits without any dither (and thus extreme quantization distortion): sine [sndup.net], music [sndup.net].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday March 22 2023, @09:43PM (2 children)
This is a good point. Some people claim that quiet cymbals sound poor on CDs for such reasons. Ideally, for digital audio, you'd want a floating-point format that preserves the precision across the entire dynamic range. However, back in the 70s when things like CDs were being invented, the hardware to do something like that was way beyond anything imaginable at a realistic price point.
I love my Pre-Loudness Wars CDs. I have them all backed up to FLAC. CDs were a revelation when they came out.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Wednesday March 22 2023, @10:49PM
Just bear in mind that a 16-bit integer has the same resolution as a 16-bit floating-point number.
When you are programming audio, you can often choose the internal storage format and the sound library will do the conversion for you. This frees the programmer from needing to consider how the audio is stored. If you like working between zero and one: use floating point. If you like working between 0 and 65,536: use integers. If you have floating-point hardware and are writing an audio application (rather than; say; a scientific application) you might as well use floating point, and then it is of no consequence if you get an 8-bit or a 24-bit file.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Thursday March 23 2023, @04:30AM
Another huge issue is "aliasing". Most here probably know about sampling theory, the "Nyquist" rate which says your sample rate must be a little bit higher than your highest incoming frequency. If higher frequencies come in, they will alias, which essentially looks like a folding back- the stuff above sample / 2 will heard as lower and lower, as if there was a frequency mirror.
A great example, that again most here probably know about, is the old movie with a wagon wheel that looks like it's going backwards.
The letter "s" is generally enunciated as band-limited noise (lots of spectrum) and can have some pretty high frequency content. If you ever hear someone talking, especially on podcasts and other stuff done by audio amateurs, you might hear a terrible splattering- the "s" sounds like frying bacon (or whatever).
(Some speakers and singers have a very pronounced whistle in their "s" and that can be helped by mic choice, narrow notch filter at the annoying frequency, a "de-esser": an audio processor that tries to squash (compress) the audio when it "hears" that frequency- it's tunable.)
So yes, cymbals have much high frequency content than almost anything else (in normal music) and would be the most prone to aliasing. I should measure cymbal spectrum sometime. Of course it depends on the microphone's ability to hear those upper frequencies- many mics' response drops off above 12-15KHz.
A popular cymbal mic is a Shure SM81 (I use them very frequently), and they're good to 20KHz, which means they're still producing output well above 20K, but dropping off.
There are 2 fixes:
1) "oversample", which means use a much higher sampling rate (which many of us do- I usually use 96KHz), or
2) use an analog "brick wall" filter [wikipedia.org]- one that has a very steep slope to cut off the highest frequencies.
(use some of both)
I'm not sure if you meant "floating point", or more likely "variable sample rate". Either way it takes more processing power than they had in 1980-ish, when the CD format was being developed. Yes, the variable sampling seems to work pretty well.
I have some pre-loudness wars CDs and honestly, I wish I could re-mix and re-master them! One is a Pat Metheny "American Garage" (iirc) and I just don't like how some things sound... Some things sound over-compressed, some sound expanded / gated (sort of the inverse of a compressor).
I still think the lower volume sounds aren't using enough bits and get distorted by quantization. I'm hoping someone here sheds more light on this. I mean, if you have 16 bits, and a quiet part only uses 4 of those bits, all higher-order bits are zero, it _has_ to distort. I mean, you have 16 levels of loudness at that point- that's got to do something to the sound. I should just try it...
(Score: 5, Informative) by RamiK on Wednesday March 22 2023, @05:07PM (1 child)
1. Vinyl mastering cuts off the frequency range so even the average quality CD (16bit 44.1kHz signal (so 22.050Hz for stereo)) is superior to vinyl barring mixing/mastering mistakes. See previously linked video.
2. Compression done for loudness refers to waveform compression (basically adding gain, like a guitar compressor pedal), not archival compression. It was also relevant to vinyl (Led Zeppelin's Mothership) and it doesn't have anything (intentional) to do with file/track size. There's a simple how-to for mixing giving an explanation on how and why here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbIC7B4BU6g [youtube.com]
3. Digital music files encoding/compression (mp3s vs. flacs vs. whatever nonsense Apple is pedaling nowadays) and how they're used internally in streaming formats in the various services (youtube... spotify...) is an important but irrelevant issue to CD vs. Vinyl.
4. Again, vinyl also had/has loudness war issues. But, the costs of botching up a master vinyl is far more expensive (cents and hours of work vs. hundreds of dollars and days of work) so they were "gatekept" away while vinyl was unpopular. Now that's no longer the case and loud vinyls are common again. Fundamentally, CD and vinyl are both un-normalized in playback so they're both victims of the drive for more amps.
5. Software and MP3 music players been doing normalization almost from day 1 and certainly before Apple was ever a factor. The "iTunes solved the loudness war" bit is simply saying that when the music industry stopped selling CDs and started targeting streaming and iTunes sales, they were forced to give up on the compression since the players just dialed them down.
All-in-all,, a botched mastering job is a botched mastering job. It can happen in any medium and it's still fairly common in low cost productions across the board. The only advantage vinyl has in that respect is that the various cutoffs and mono-fications of the various ranges hurts the quality so bad that creating distortions and losing details to over-compression is too cost of a mistake to experiment with. However, that still leaves you with an inferior medium in the end that's only claim to glory is that "it's better than the crap the musicians put together themselves on their laptops". Well, with a few notorious exceptions (Metallica's Death Magnetic being one).
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Zinho on Wednesday March 22 2023, @06:56PM
Yup. I was going for brevity in my post, thanks for filling in the details. Especially regarding waveform compression, it's easy in an IT-heavy crowd like here for people to completely misunderstand what's being talked about since the word compression is used for completely different things depending on the context.
Speaking of waveform compression, in another post you mentioned that most popular music is targeting radio/TV which need compression due to competing with loud environmental noise (e.g. road noise). I've heard that the radio stations already have equipment for volume normalization and waveform compression that gets used to solve those problems whether or not the record company engineers their radio releases for winning the loudness wars. As a result, the audio waveform frequently gets run through two waveform compression stages between the band's performance and the audience's listening experience. *sigh*
I'm still going to argue that mass sales of MP3s is having a larger effect on the availability of well-engineered music than you're giving credit for. Back when I was ripping my own MP3s to play on Winamp the quality of my digital music was invisible to the record company. Once the engineers were given the job of mastering tracks intended for direct sale as digital files, they absolutely would take care to ensure it sounds good in the format and listening environment it was being marketed to. As you say, "they were forced to give up on the compression since the players just dialed them down." That's all for the good, in my opinion. And if they decide to give up on "winning the loudness war" in one format, we can dream that they'll stop insisting on it in the others, which is where this ties into the CD-v-Vinyl discussion.
Of course, that won't stop people from making bad audio design decisions, as you rightly pointed out. And vinyl will always be a technically inferior medium vs CDs and most digital audio formats. Whether the "better" media produces a better listening experience is the responsibility of the sound engineers, who too-often have their decisions overridden by the people signing paychecks.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Thursday March 23 2023, @12:06AM
That's not entirely true, I have about 400 vinyl albums in my collection and enjoy listening to them frequently. Every time I go to the flea market I look through all collections being sold to see if there's anything worthwhile to add to my library. I ripped all my CDs years ago and haven't bought a CD in a very long time.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Rich on Wednesday March 22 2023, @05:41PM (2 children)
I had the great joy to see Shonen Knife last week. As usual, the ladies had their merch open after the show. Of particular interest was this comment sign from Naoko that might potentially end the CD vs Vinyl debate for good:
"CD is better than Vinyl! Because it's shiny!"
https://imgur.com/a/CwczdF6 [imgur.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2023, @06:20PM (1 child)
They are still around? Don't think I heard any of their stuff since the 90's.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Wednesday March 22 2023, @09:47PM
Yep, it was their 40th anniversary (or rather, 41.5th, due to the pandemic) tour. Still going strong, tight as a clockwork live, and the new millenium knife can be way more punky than what was signed to Sony in the 90s. The new drummer is a fan of Cryptopsy's Flo Mounier. ;) Aside from the 90s classics ("Riding on the Rocket", "Twist Barbie") they played everything from fun stuff ("Capybara") over classic Ramones-style ("Buttercup") to borderline hardcore ("Cobra vs Mongoose"). The previous two albums ventured a bit into 70s hard rock territory, but the new release is back to power pop / fun punk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXiWmTRByaA [youtube.com]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2023, @06:49PM
You people have driven them into working in a factory with your Napsters and stuff!
How can they survive now? The poor, poor bastards. I see it with my mind, how they work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, have to shop in the company store and just keep getting more into dept. They have no time to enjoy the mantions, jacuzzis and their 25 cars, so sad, so sad.
You people should be ashamed of yourselves! I personally won't listen to them even on the radio for free, so that i don't accidentally pirate their music and cause them any agony and suffering. Have some mercy people, it's not their fault. Oh the humanity! When will their nightmare end?!
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday March 22 2023, @09:45PM
Metallica became a hipster Country and Western band for Bon Jovi and Def Leppard fans back in 1991. Hipsters like vinyl. Bah! Justice for Jason...
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].