Tag: VINYL

Got to hand it to those British Royals. In their own way, they're pretty cutting edge. In 1960, for instance, they were the first to televise a royal wedding service. (Blame them for the countless horrific wedding-related reality shows.) The royals are again acting oh-so-cutting-edge (not to mention classy) by planning a digital release of Kate and William's entire ceremony, mere hours after ...

While it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to buy vinyl records of albums that were recorded, mixed and mastered digitally, it sure is cool. Taking this observation into consideration, R.D. Silva has applied space-age, minimalist design to the age-old phonograph, and wound up with the Turnstyle record player. Thanks to what looks like parts scrapped from an air conditioner, this sucker is hotter ...

Has the digital zeitgeist blown the CD out of irrelevance and into the realm of retro art curio? We wrote just earlier this week about Tristan Perich's limited-edition chiptune array built into a CD jewel case, and now we've just stumbled upon this hybrid audio object by electronic musician Jeff Mills. Mills' new project 'The Occurrence' blends the truly antiquated with the relatively ...

There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. The pixel is the new Ben-Day dot for 21st-century Lichtensteins. Seeing as nearly 100-percent of our media culture is transmitted through the pixel, it comes as no ...

As much as we love digital technology here at Switched, we still cling to a certain amount of nostalgia for the simpler days; when the photorealism of a video game didn't matter and when we all enjoyed full-length albums instead of shuffling on our iPods like we have extreme cases of ADHD. While we're not about to pay for our hundreds of gigabytes worth of music to be converted to vinyl, we're ...

That loud, persistent drone that you've been hearing for the past few years was just the collective lament of music purists everywhere. As the CD age has given way to the MP3 era, people of generations past have been bemoaning what they perceived as the demise of vinyl, and its irreproducible sound experience. It turns out, though, that commercially, at least, vinyl is alive and well. It just may ...

We live in an age when the fidelity of our music is seemingly less important than our ability to easily access, transport, and share it. As vinyl records were eventually replaced almost entirely by CDs as the predominant music format, MP3s and other files have now become the standard. They are digitally compressed (to varying degrees), making them sound significantly 'thinner' (read: lower ...

We're not going to lie. Very few of us here at Switched are old enough to remember when buying 45s (short-playing records) was de rigeur. Still, a good number of us have spent hours poring over record- and thrift-store bins, searching for that original Wilson Pickett single, or a Beatles Decca release. Although those trips are often motivated by a collector's impulse (or attempts to get rich ...

We can already envision the flame fest on this one, so we'll just cut to the chase. Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford, has been conducting some pretty interesting tests on incoming students, and he's been recording results that'll surely make audiophiles cringe. He has been asking his students to listen to tracks in MP3 format as well as in formats of much higher quality, all while ...

When dealing with product names like FTD-HD2232HSR/BK, it's quite refreshing to come across something such as this which explains itself so well. ION's LP 2 FLASH turntable does exactly what you think it does -- it transfers your old records directly to a USB flash drive, SD card or computer without any additional equipment. It even detects the gaps between tunes and creates individual tracks ...

If you were born anytime before 1980, chances are you've at least a few records in your lifetime. But unless you're some young hipster enjoying the retro-lust for vinyl, you probably don't listen to those LPs much anymore, which is why you need to get them onto your iPod as quickly as possible. Time was that digitizing your vinyl took some complicated computer configuration, but over ...

Hooray! As we reported last year, vinyl, our favorite music format, is rumored to be making a comeback. A recent CNN article asserts that from 2006 to 2007, manufacturers' shipments of LPs increased by 36%, while shipments of CDs dropped over 17%. In your face, CDs and MP3s! Hard-core music aficionados laud the analog sound delivered by records as more continuous and superior to digital ...

Unplayed since the dawn of the CD era, your Dad's pile of vinyl is just sitting there, collecting dust. Those records look good, smell good, and sound even better. But the potential for wear and tear has relegated them to conversation pieces. Now, if your Dad (or other vinyl-loving person) had the Audio-Technica AT-LP2D-USB digital turntable system, he could capture the audio of those old ...

There's a small group of us who, in this digital world, has developed a fetish for all things analog. This obsession is particularly strong among musicians and music lovers. Vacuum tube amps, vintage synthesizers, and, of course vinyl records. Optimal Media Productions is appealing to this fascination with good ol' records by adding a little value and novelty to your average CD. The comapny's ...