The NYT joins the “Vinyl is Back!” motorcade, which is led by a pristine AMC Gremlin. If you recall, Time magazine heralded the return of vinyl some months ago with the news that the format, among other attributes, had the improved “social interaction” of “getting up to turn over the record.”

The Times finds that this was just the beginning, leading off the piece with a tempestuous tale of modern teen courtship:

During his freshman year at Point Park University in Pittsburgh a couple years ago, James Acklin, now 20, felt lost among the social cliques on his new campus until he got to talking with a student who was in some of his classes. She seemed unusual, and it wasn’t just her look: thick-framed eyeglasses, bangs and vintage dresses. Then, one rainy day in February, the two skipped class and went to her apartment. As soon as she opened her door his instincts were confirmed: she had a turntable. So did he. They both spoke the language of vinyl.

Their bond was sealed as soon as she placed the stylus on an LP by the band Broken Social Scene, he said in an e-mail message. “There was this immediate mutual acknowledgment, like we both totally understood what we define ourselves by,” continued Mr. Acklin, who considers his turntable, a Technics model from the 1980s that belonged to an aunt, a prized possession. “It takes a special kind of person to appreciate pops and clicks and imperfections in their music.”

The article kindly does not name Acklin’s retro soulmate, but I’m pretty sure the resulting scene looked a lot like the Dick Shaw/Barrie Chase pas de deux in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, some of which can be seen at about the 1:30 point in the clip below:

As for the rest of the story, as is usual with these pieces, if you do the math you see that the rise of vinyl sales represents only the tiny fraction even of the decline in industry sales each year, and is positively minuscule compared to overall sales. All the writer can do is cite esoteric statistics–like the fact that Newberry Comics has sold 400 turntables. Apple has sold nearly 200 million iPods.

More stories about how old-fashioned LPs are coming back. A blip last year is said to be continuing in 2008. According to this story in Rolling Stone, as many as 1.6 million albums may be sold in 2008, about double what were sold in 2006. Cnet uses that story as an excuse to visit an LP-pressing plant, saying “the format has made a big comeback, with sales skyrocketing and turntables moving off store shelves like they haven’t in years.”

The trouble is that instead of labeling the phenomenon as a fad, we’re told it’s that full-on comeback. And what the stories don’t supply is a direct comparison to the rest of the industry’s sales. Consider that compared to the 1.6 million LPs that might be sold last year …

… 1.1 million digital albums are sold each week …

… plus 20 million digital tracks, the equivalent of two million more.

In other words, if the trend holds, LPs might edge up to a level that would equal one percent of digital sales.

(Except that digital sales themselves are increasing 50 percent a year.)

And then you can add in the other seven or eight million hard-copy CDs sold—again, each week.

The stories are doubly dopey because they purport to be about a quest for better sound. On a nice stereo system with a good turntable, a decent needle and a new disc, fine, the sound is good. In the other 99.9 percent of the cases, it’s a lot crummier. The digital age (along with cheap equipment, notably speakers) has democratized fine sound, even taking into account the compression (which will be temporary) of mp3s.

——–

Many years ago, during the early CD era, Hitsville traveled to the Sony CD-pressing plant in Terre Haute  to learn about how CDs are made, a process that remains technologically amazing. That story is here.

Previously in Hitsville:

T-Bone Burnett and the drawbacks of digital sound—hooey!

Is the LP coming back? Uh, no.

 WNYC’s Soundcheck talks to T-Bone Burnett, who waxes nostalgic about audio quality:

BURNETT: Between 1949 and 1952 […] the sound organizations finally published the RIAA equalization curve, which equalized all recorded music. […] Before that, every manufacturer had its own set of standards, so broadcasters and listeners were constantly having to adjust their sets to try to guess what the artist intended. And from about 1950 until the mid 1980s, everybody was speaking the same language. The audience and the artists were speaking the same language. And this extraordinary musical culture developed out of it—Elvis Presley came very shortly after that and the Beatles and on and on.

INTERVIEWER: So literally the sound of the industry was standardized.

BURNETT: That’s right. So everyone had two speakers and a turntable and an amplifier and we were all plugged in, we were all together. With the advent of digital sound all those standards were thrown out the window.

And the inertia from those old days, of making things louder to get over surface noise and brighter to mitigate the effects of the characteristics of tape or vinyl, caused people to make things brighter and louder and brighter and louder and more compressed until music’s gotten to a place where a lot of records are hard to listen to more than a song or two.

And from then, it’s step down and stepped down from tape to digital to compressed digital till now people are listening to a Xerox of a Polaroid of a photograph of a painting.

[…]

I got to the point where I did not want to put records around anymore in the way they were being put out because they didn’t represent what I wanted to hear. So I solved the problem for myself.

And the way I solved this problem for myself […] is to release all our records multi format. So that we’ll put on DVD and on the DVD will be a version that you can just put in a DVD and play on a DVD and there will also be WAV files […] that you can download on your computer. There’ll also be AAC files and MP3 files  We’re gonna sell people multiple formats for the same price as whatever people are paying now.

(Link via Cnet.)

This is all interesting, and Burnett is obviously a sophisticated guy, but isn’t a lot of this hooey? Sound quality (and, incidentally, the quality of playback equipment) has improved imeasurably for decades, with only occasional slight steps back. (The cassette era, for example.) The MP3 era that we’re in is arguably another step back, but it’s plain that it’s just temporary. Burnett’s idea about using DVD audio isn’t new or radical or anything else; it’s just the logical extension of the power of the digital convergence.

Listening to him talk confirms for me the impression of him as a nostalgist, with all the accompanying tics, the world-weariness, the wacky historiography. (”The RIAA published a paper and then … the Beatles appeared!”) Radios have static. Car radios had tinny speakers. Forty-five players sucked. Vinyl was just so-so for the vast majority of its audience and had inherent sound reproduction limitations brought on by its design as the needle moved to the center of the turntable. And then came cassettes and 8-tracks! (And he’s concerned about generation loss in the digital age?!)

Things are far better today, with CD quality being the standard and pretty good, after a few years where engineers learned to deal with the form. You can make an MP3 ripped from a CD sound slightly less good if you save it at 128kbs, or just about fine if you go to 160 or 192. And the vast increases of storage space means we’ll all soon be using the equivalent of full CD-quality WAV files in any case, with even better quality coming.

Burnett is saying that the world is about to change, again, for the better. So why does he sound so mopey and defensive?
———

There’s even an upside in all this for the industry, as I wrote some time ago:

The good news for Apple and the music companies is that now they can embark on a new campaign, telling us that all our digital music just isn’t up to audio snuff—but fortunately we can now rectify it by buying from the fabulous new “Lossless Store” on iTunes!

In a few years, mp3s will be the 78s of the digital age. The genius of this is that the music industry has made a big chunk of its money the last few decades reselling us music we already have. But how can they resell us digital tracks? This is one answer. And they might even get some money back from the poor souls who digitized their CD collections into mp3s and sold off their discs; they can be guilt-tripped into buying some of it back once again.

A posting on Slashdot lets us know that Time magazine is jumping on the “vinyl is back” bandwagon. (Billboard ($) did the story first, back in November.)

Writes Kristina Dell:

From college dorm rooms to high school sleepovers, an all-but-extinct music medium has been showing up lately. And we don’t mean CDs. Vinyl records, especially the full-length LPs that helped define the golden era of rock in the 1960s and ’70s, are suddenly cool again. Some of the new fans are baby boomers nostalgic for their youth. But to the surprise and delight of music executives, increasing numbers of the iPod generation are also purchasing turntables (or dusting off Dad’s), buying long-playing vinyl records and giving them a spin.

Wow, what a trend! Why, LP sales went up more than 15 percent last year, it turns out. The only problem is that that increase–some 130,000 total–represents about three-hundredths of one percent of the 500 million CDs sold last year.

Time ends the short piece with a list of three benefits the LP has over CDs. The third details the “social interaction” of “getting up to flip over a record.” The utter marginality of this trend will not stop the story from being a staple of boomer news outlets for the next few months.