Turntables outselling cd players 5 to 1?
LokoOne
1,823 Posts
Off smh.com..... I need to lift my game and get myself one of those $215,000 turntables.....!Turntables are back in favourThe turntable has returned to favour with a resurgence of vinyl music, writes Rod Easdown.THERE are all sorts of theories explaining the return of the turntable: baby boomers with big record collections; young people getting into dance music on vinyl; DJs; DrHouse using one in the television series. And there are the legions of folk who say records sound better than CDs.Greg Borrowman, the editor of Australian Hi-Fi magazine, has another one. He thinks we're yearning for what was lost when analog music yielded to digital."CDs have no personality; they're set and forget," he says. "With vinyl, it's ritual. You slide the LP out of its sleeve, then deftly remove it from the inner dust jacket, making sure not to touch the playing surface. You place it on the platter with both hands, like an offering. You clean the record's surface and perhaps the stylus. Only then do you lower the tonearm to be rewarded with the music."This covers the full gamut of anticipation, the careful, practised flourish of implementation and the ultimate reward, no different from pulling the cork out of a 10-year-old Hill of Grace.Whatever the reason, turntables are back in favour.Michael Thornton-Smith at importer International Dynamics says for every CD player he wholesales, five turntables go out the door. They are "the most consistent, most reliable product we have - month in, month out"."And it's not like we don't sell CD players. Given the resurgence in two-channel stereo music, CD players sell steadily."We've noticed this resurgence over the past couple of years and not just with turntables. Two-channel amplifiers also sell strongly. People with home cinemas and iPods aren't happy with how they handle music and want to get back to hearing it reproduced faithfully."Craig McNeil, general manager at retailer Tivoli Hi-Fi, politely scoffs at talk of a two-channel resurgence. "Really, stereo never went away. It's the best way to get the most out of your music," he says.Mr Borrowman believes turntables have become objetsd'art. "Gone are the old, square, teak boxes with perspex covers," he says. "Turntables are now beautiful and they're beautiful to watch. They've become a feature in living rooms."An Austrian turntable maker called Pro-Ject has been extraordinarily successful in Australia, and the biggest seller in its range is the cheapest model, the Debut, starting at $549. Unlike many more expensive ones, it's ready to go straight out of the box, supplied with both tone arm and cartridge. Premium turntables frequently have neither, leaving buyers free to customise with offerings from manufacturers specialising in them."Pro-Ject turntables up to $850 come with cartridges and tone arms. After that, buyers want to make their own choices," MrThornton-Smith says.Mr McNeil says most turntable sales at Tivoli are between $600 and $2000. "But the sky is the limit ... there's a Goldman from America supplied in a 100-kilogram isolation rack that needs part of its componentry placed in another room. It's around $215,000 and we've never sold one, but we sell turntables up to $15,000."An important factor is the availability of spare parts, like cartridges and styli, and MrThornton-Smith says ancillaries are big sellers. "Phono preamps are big movers, both with and without USB outputs, and we also sell speed regulators, wall-mount brackets, cleaning equipment, anti-static mats and strobe discs."Phono preamps? All amplifiers used to have an input marked "phono" where the turntable plugged in. Unlike other inputs, it was specially amplified because signals from turntables are weak. But with the rise of CD, and especially home theatre, many amplifier makers have dropped them. Plugging the turntable into an amplifier's auxiliary input doesn't work unless you have either a phono preamplifier or a turntable with one built in. These boost the signal into something the amplifier can use, and they start at about $200, going up to $5000. If your amplifier has a phono input, you won't need one.What about USB outputs? These allow you to plug the turntable directly into your computer so music can be transferred onto the hard drive, a CD, DVD or iPod.MrBorrowman believes the popularity of iPods and whole-of-home music servers is yet another driver of turntable sales, with people wanting to access their vinyl music through them.Transferring records to digital media involves software, some of which can be bewilderingly complex. He suggests Xitel's INport Deluxe, selling for about $150 through xitel.com.If you're hankering for vinyl music you haven't heard for years, some notes of caution. Today's music production is far more sophisticated than it was 25 years ago and nothing brings this home faster than listening to old records. Many sound flat, boring and almost crude. Also,there's surface noise, the clicks and pops always present with records that disappear withCDs.But, as Mr Thornton-Smith observes, the warmth and dynamic range of a vinyl recording is still compelling.
Comments
not anymore
Exactly. Nobody buys stand alone CD players anymore - people play them on their computer and those who don't already have a CD player. I have a couple nice used ones in the store, units that were around $200 new, and nobody's touching them for $25.
i think it's an anecdote from one store.
Why does this give me the impression that the person who wrote this was born in 1990?
Records have SURFACE NOISE? No WAY!
wonder if you can put one of them $15,000 decks on lay by....
Any one ever used one of those ultra expensive turntables? Ive only ever seen them in magazines etc...have yet to meet anyone that owns a turntable thats worth more than a 1200...
Now the other interesting thing would be to find out what these new tunrtable consumers are 'feeding' their turntables...
It really went out of style for awhile.
Confession time: Which one of you bought a turntable after you've seen Dr House using one? C'mon don't be shy
Article's mad
It's like most things where the super deluxe option is 90% status object, 10% actual (noticeable) increase in quality.
yeah, its diminishing returns...I doubt anyone could convince me that a $10,000 turntable sounds 100 times better than a $100 used 80s technics (cant remember that really popular model, not the 1200, but the one everybody had in the 80s)...Ill perhaps buy that the $1000 jernt might sound 10 times better than the $100 one...but the gap in quality between the lower price one the one above it decreases as the price goes up.
ha!
only a squashed, compressed MP3 can handle all the power, brilliance, subtle nuances and sophistication of today's recording masterpieces
I haven't been able to sell an NM+++.5 used turntable in almost two months.
Most companies don't sell stand-alone CD players anymore, so most people are buying DVD players that play CD's. That's fine, but that also means the technology to improve CD playback is at a standstill, and essentially the quality of standalone players has gradually become worse.
Of course, some are discovering that a certain make of the Playstation 1 apparently plays CD's in a much better fashion than other CD players, including those made by Sony. In other words, some stand-alone CD players may be of value to some.
We also know that you don't need a CD player if you're digitizing your collection to FLAC or another lossless format, and by doing so it eliminates some of the CD jitter/error issues that players were known for.
Have to disagree, the turntable is the most important. If the turntable isn't happening the rest is wasted money.
The $ amounts in the article are Australian? About hlaf US?
I bought my little Goodman speakers in 1990, love them.
I bought my used 1200 in 1998, love it.
(Which replaced my Gemini imitation, worse turntable I have ever owned.)
I have had many amps, all of which I hated. Current Sansui AU 717.
Some guy with a 40thousand dollar system was trying to tell me $100 a foot speaker wires would solve all my problems.
My friend owns a high end audio store.
I have sat in her store in listened to $10,000+- turntables.
Nice.
First you need the perfect room.
Then you need to place the perfect chair in the perfect location (sweet spot).
Then you spend ten thousands on equipment.
But most people don't go out and spend that.
You buy it one piece at a time and constantly trade up, always looking for sales and quality used items.
I'd rather put my money into records.
As for the article; I am predicting the death of CDs with in 5 years.
i'm not saying to skimp on the tt. but you don't need to spend 10k to get something really good. if your whole budget was 10k, i'd spend no more than 2k on the tt.
I agree, above the $1500 mark the returns are pretty slim.