DEATH of VINYL, Record SHopS, Real Djing

[ivanboy]

I played an outdoor gig over the summer and my audience CONGRATULATED ME for using vinyl. I always thought the dancefloor doesn't know the difference - but some do! There is NO WAY you can get that loud, clear, warm sound with digital audio. My records were like a warm hug to their ears. And it was all a smashing success, by the way. In fact ... I gotta run to Rock 'n Soul in an hour to pick up my repaired turntable - spilled a drink on it a few weeks ago. My life hasn't been the same since!

[deepspell]

i think embracing all the technologies available is key.

and if u code your CDRs correctly and burn them DIRECTLY off vinyls.....90% of audiences cant tell the difference unless they are audiophiles and know their shit. a proper club system is eq'ed so that it all sounds proper....playing at a dive bar...then u might be able to tell the difference....key word is MIGHT....320 bit rate mp3 is the way to go. but u can still the closes vinyl sound off .wav. beatport charges extra + shipping for buring wav's onto cd for you if im not mistaken

[oldtimer]

Rank Name Quote

02 - Tiesto - "I've moved totally to CDs this year - vinyl is dead"

05 - Ferry Corsten - ...."I've pretty much switched to CDs"

08 - Deep Dish - "We're touring with a bank of Pioneer equipment and toying with Ableton"

10 - Carl Cox - "I have changed over to using three Pioneer CD players, EFX-1000 and a Cycloops sample machine and can now remix music and create more of my own sound live while I'm playing"

13 - James Zabiela - "I'll do loops/editing on the CDJs and the EFX-1000, sometimes with a loop grabber too."

16 - Marco V - "I've started using the Pioneer DVD players, which is a fantastic way to make the visuals really fit into the tracks"

17 - Eddie Halliwell - I've been using the Pioneer 909 and doing my own re-edits and tools"

20 - Sander Kleinenberg - "I'm incorporating DVJ and imagery into my sets"

22 - Benny Benassi - "I'm fond of Pioneer stuff, their CD players, mixers, new FX rack. I like to remix tracks that were not originally club tracks, to be more original if I can"

26 - Infected Mushroom - "Using the CDJ-1000s and laptops for remixing on the road"

30 - Steve Lawler - "Last September I converted entirely to CDs. So I'm using the CDJ-1000 along with the Pioneer EFX-1000. It's changed the whole way a DJ can mix, you can basically re-edit and remix tracks on the fly"

40 - DJ Vibe - "Besides the EFX-1000 / EFX-500 units and C-Loops sampler, nothing at the moment"

42 - Bad Boy Bill - "I'm taking it more digital and visual with Pioneer CDJs and DVJs"

46 - Andy Moor - "I use Pioneer CDJ-1000s and FX from a laptop. To keep it visually entertaining. I'm creating a custom FX unit to control the laptop FX whilst mixing on the CDJs"

48 - Ricky Stone - "I'm now 100% digital. I really love the Pioneer CDJ-1000s. I do have Ableton at home but doubt I'll use it in a club environment just yet"

64 - Jeff Mills - I'm using the Pioneer DVJ-X1, but the most important thing is that people have a good time"

'Source: DJ Magazine Top 100 DJs 2005'. http://www.djmag.com

[robbiewoodside]

Rank Name Quote

02 - Tiesto - "I've moved totally to CDs this year - vinyl is dead"

05 - Ferry Corsten - ...."I've pretty much switched to CDs"

08 - Deep Dish - "We're touring with a bank of Pioneer equipment and toying with Ableton"

10 - Carl Cox - "I have changed over to using three Pioneer CD players, EFX-1000 and a Cycloops sample machine and can now remix music and create more of my own sound live while I'm playing"

13 - James Zabiela - "I'll do loops/editing on the CDJs and the EFX-1000, sometimes with a loop grabber too."

16 - Marco V - "I've started using the Pioneer DVD players, which is a fantastic way to make the visuals really fit into the tracks"

17 - Eddie Halliwell - I've been using the Pioneer 909 and doing my own re-edits and tools"

20 - Sander Kleinenberg - "I'm incorporating DVJ and imagery into my sets"

22 - Benny Benassi - "I'm fond of Pioneer stuff, their CD players, mixers, new FX rack. I like to remix tracks that were not originally club tracks, to be more original if I can"

26 - Infected Mushroom - "Using the CDJ-1000s and laptops for remixing on the road"

30 - Steve Lawler - "Last September I converted entirely to CDs. So I'm using the CDJ-1000 along with the Pioneer EFX-1000. It's changed the whole way a DJ can mix, you can basically re-edit and remix tracks on the fly"

40 - DJ Vibe - "Besides the EFX-1000 / EFX-500 units and C-Loops sampler, nothing at the moment"

42 - Bad Boy Bill - "I'm taking it more digital and visual with Pioneer CDJs and DVJs"

46 - Andy Moor - "I use Pioneer CDJ-1000s and FX from a laptop. To keep it visually entertaining. I'm creating a custom FX unit to control the laptop FX whilst mixing on the CDJs"

48 - Ricky Stone - "I'm now 100% digital. I really love the Pioneer CDJ-1000s. I do have Ableton at home but doubt I'll use it in a club environment just yet"

64 - Jeff Mills - I'm using the Pioneer DVJ-X1, but the most important thing is that people have a good time"

'Source: DJ Magazine Top 100 DJs 2005'. http://www.djmag.com

WOW! 16 out of the top 100. Great counterpoint oldtimer.

[oldtimer]

WOW! 16 out of the top 100. Great counterpoint oldtimer.

it wasn't a counterpoint robbiewoodside.. just info pertaining to the topic..

[skylab]

i think the downloading of music is also a pro. Probably wouldnt have heard a lot of music if it wasnt for downloading. Hell I have over 35,000 mp3s organized by genre, artist, then album. Don't think I dont support the music though. I buy many many vinyls. Recently just spent another $50 on dancerecords.com and its on a weekly basis.

[edubz]

ANALOG baby, i wonder if you poll a lot of djs and ask them if the reason they use cds now more than vinyls is because of the sound or because its easier to carry?

well the pioneers cdj-1000's are the "technic 1200's" for the digital age... industry standard... I dont like them though, jog wheel feels funny when trying to pitch bend.. not like vinyl where you can squeeze the spindle or touch the moving plater....

the cdj-1000's have some kind of memory card, where you can save cue points for your cd's... so, no more looking for cue points.... these big name Dj's using the cdj-1000's just plop in their memory card into the cdj-1000, and boom, once they stick their cd's in, its all cued up.

the cd's 1000's cost like $1,200 for 1 cd deck.... thats alot of money for a cd player....

[silverbull]

i think the downloading of music is also a pro. Probably wouldnt have heard a lot of music if it wasnt for downloading. Hell I have over 35,000 mp3s organized by genre, artist, then album. Don't think I dont support the music though. I buy many many vinyls. Recently just spent another $50 on dancerecords.com and its on a weekly basis.

I know downloading is a great thing but only if you pay for the tracks like using beatport, the thing im against is using file sharing programs.

[dialectics]

Jeffg, you are close but on the wrong track. The medium which digital data is recorded onto doesn't matter at all, be it a CD, CD-R, flash, hard disk, etc, etc, etc. You could record digital data on a pair of underpants and as long as you have a good pickup, the quality will be the same as a CD. The noise doesn't happen when you do the analog reconstruction, it is when you encode your signal digitally.

There are three important things to concern yourself with the quality of digital equipment, the sampling rate, the number of bits used in quantization. and the gear that you use to convert from digital to pressure waves (e.g. the DAC, amplifier, and speakers).

When it comes to CDs, you're dealing with 44.1 kHz sampling rate and 16 bits quantization per channel. This is based on the psychoacoustic studies that show that humans cannot perceieve individual tones above 20 kHz. Then you add a few kHz for a transition band of an anti-aliasing filter, and double it for nyquist sampling, and then you have 44.1 kHz.

Now it doesn't matter how good your analog reconstruction gear is, be it a $2 1-bit oversampling dac that they put in most cd players or $7,000 D/A, you're really not going to get any better quality out of the shitty cd specification.

Think about it like this - until your 20s, most humans can hear will into the 30 kHz range, thus 1/3 of your auditory frequency range is going to waste. There are many who have from an early age trained themselves to keep sensitivity in the higher registers so that the 20 kHz range is really overly conservative. I believe that it is a feedback loop - when you are used to hearing only low frequency sounds, your brain will focus in on those, and you will lose the ability to hear higher frequency sounds as you age. Obviously, you have to take into account how your basilar membrane and auditory nerve fibers decay with age and abuse (e.g. listening to music too loud in clubs, noise from working, etc).

Now vinyl is analog, so in theory you should be able to record as high a frequency range as you want, but instead your are limited by the physical medium in which you've recorded on, specifically (1) how fine a groove you can write into the record, (2) the precision of your needle, and (3) the amount of noise generated by the decay of the record over repeated uses or dust and crap building up into the grooves. Let's not also forget that if you have to read the signal in a club, you have to deal with people jumping around, etc, that can screw with the reading of the vinyl. For example, a few years ago tiesto was at exit, and some fan tried to give him a copy of his demo cd, and he threw it right into the booth, knocking the tonearm of the deck he was using and killing whatever record he had up there (probably flight 643 at the time). although some would say runing a tiesto track was a good thing, it wouldn't happen with more stable digital recording.

In practice, the highest quality needles can pick up 75 kHz of sound - well above the range of human hearing. This corresponds to a sampling rate of 150 kHz if the deck was digital. This is well above the range of human hearing, and can capture all of the "warmth" that we come to know and love.

This can clearly be emulated in digital, with new recording formats like DVD audio, which samples at 192 kHz, and 24-bit recording. With 16 bits of sampling, like CDs use, you can definitely hear quantization noise, even though it is generally shaped to push the noise out of the range of human hearing. With 24 bits, you have about 16.7 million discrete levels that you can represent your sound in, as opposed to 2^16 = 65,536, and that's a fantastic upgrade. (for those who really care about these things, on the production side you have to increase the quantization enormously if you have a large number of channels, to compensate for the fact that you are adding channels together. this is a huge issue for people designing DAWs and music production software).

Now the final question becomes how good your gear is when listening to music - most headphones, speakers, etc will only have a nice flat frequency response up to about 20-25 kHz, so it doesn't really matter what the sampling rate of your audio source is. But obviously the more $$$ you throw down the better the speaker you can get (or the better the scam artist the salespeople are, depending on your personal hearing levels). I think some sound designers for clubs will have more to say on this one.

I think that new digital audio formats e.g. DVD audio are the best way to go - you have the sound quality that surpasses that of vinyl, the stability and portability of digital, and also, since the files are so huge (e.g. 500 mb per song) they will not be easily shared with such high quality.

Don't get me wrong, I like vinyl - it feels like you are working with real music instead of with toys, but it is just too damn expensive to produce, too expensive to buy, too heavy to carry, and too much of a pain in the ass to work with that it just isnt' worth it.

Funny, though, because this argument is paralleled in the film community also - do you switch to digital or stay with film? I was such a purist for film - nothing is sexier then a crate with 5 fresh reels or spending week editing on a steenbeck.... now for stills i prefer my digital camera to my SLR, but for movies the quality just isn't there yet with the digitals (e.g. Lucas projected the star wars II+III atrocities on a projector that had the same resolution as your dvd player. weak!).

Digital makes things cheaper and easier for everyone, and if done properly nobody has to suffer bad sound quality.

[djkevinj]

I wanted to talk about something new... before the other thread would be bigger then the average JP threads...

So my questions is

DO U BELIEVE THAT VINYL IS dead? There for it causes the end and closing of some of the best city record shops.... thus leads to the destruction of original djing and etc

Is CD and DIGITAL gadgets from all over the world - destroying originalism and the Vinyls...

YOUR THOUGHTS !

didn't read any posts but urs. U gotta enbrace technology. i def could never afford enough vinyl, so my track selection was very very limited. mp3 are cheaper , so more tracks, and a better selection. vinyl u can see the grooves and change the pitch and some turntables play in reverse thats it. My cd players got so much shit i can do i love me. A dj has to entertain the crowd. the crowd dont care what u use. I find it stupid that people still care about this topic, i still got my turntables and i use em sometimes just for fun but not for a gig. I find people sayign using cds aint reall dj'ing to be just as dumb as dj's saying promoters dont hire talent and hire dj's that bring people. thats just the way it is.

[djkevinj]

well the pioneers cdj-1000's are the "technic 1200's" for the digital age... industry standard... I dont like them though, jog wheel feels funny when trying to pitch bend.. not like vinyl where you can squeeze the spindle or touch the moving plater....

the cdj-1000's have some kind of memory card, where you can save cue points for your cd's... so, no more looking for cue points.... these big name Dj's using the cdj-1000's just plop in their memory card into the cdj-1000, and boom, once they stick their cd's in, its all cued up.

the cd's 1000's cost like $1,200 for 1 cd deck.... thats alot of money for a cd player....

400 for a turntable that has like 3 fucntions plays and stop and pitch change.. I find that wack though to have all ur cue points saved. I got numark axis 9 and supposedly it stored ur cue points it stores alota just like pioneer either 1000 or 3000 but u dont need a memory card, but i neva use it. thats part of live dj'ing and fun to me. and then again my memory is too cloudy(guess y lol) i wouldn't remember a cue point if u told me for 10 days striahgt. i liek to set it on the fly and different times i mite wanna start the track at a different cue

[skylab]

did you guys read the new behrouz interview?

"DJing is still about two turntables, two CD players and a mixer; it’s not about a computer. "

[mtmartin]

vinyl rules but it's slowly being shown the door out...

CDS are the new technology for djs ..sad but ACCEPT IT!

THERE ARE pros and cons to both ...ACCEPT IT!

WE ARE ON OUR WAY TO A CASH-LEES SOCIETY AND WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT YOU WILL OBEY , LOL!

SAD BUT TRUE.

[ivanboy]

CDS are the new technology for djs ..sad but ACCEPT IT!

Yeah .... and everyone's a DJ these days. And the NYC club scene is LAME. Have you seen guys in various places "working" their laptop mixes. DULL!!!!!

[skylab]

laptop mixes are the hottest...

:roll:

[mtmartin]

laptop mixes are the hottest...

i bet your favorite LTDJ sucks! mine is better he can hit the return button

faster than anyone else in the world! he doesn't even use cuepoints and doesn't carry around a memory card!

compete with that!

[skylab]

i bet your favorite LTDJ sucks! mine is better he can hit the return button

faster than anyone else in the world! he doesn't even use cuepoints and doesn't carry around a memory card!

compete with that!

NASTY!

I heard Atomix is really really really hard to use. Beatmatching on Atomix is like....

[iamsamurai]

someone was using this at sullivan room one night.... his laptop froze..had to wait a few minutes til' he re-booted everything....real smooth, lol

NEVER load all the mp3s on the laptop, run them from a seperate external drive. I use my laptop strictly for serato n school reports . No freezes ever, cuz i dont fill it with junk. Also its gotta have really good ventilation, overheating does happen. Other than that Serato ownz

oh also, its easy to switch back to normal records using serato so his fault for not taking some back up records ;op

[moe03]

edubz: If you think I'm going to read your entire post, then you're crazy.

[moe03]

Yeah .... and everyone's a DJ these days. And the NYC club scene is LAME. Have you seen guys in various places "working" their laptop mixes. DULL!!!!!

Dude, if you're actually watching the DJ the whole time, you're dull.

[skylab]

When I'm doing a not so serious event like a company party im doing next week. I'd rather bring my computer as its easier to use and has a hell of a lot more music than all my cds and vinyls.

[edubz]

400 for a turntable that has like 3 fucntions plays and stop and pitch change.. I find that wack though to have all ur cue points saved. I got numark axis 9 and supposedly it stored ur cue points it stores alota just like pioneer either 1000 or 3000 but u dont need a memory card, but i neva use it. thats part of live dj'ing and fun to me. and then again my memory is too cloudy(guess y lol) i wouldn't remember a cue point if u told me for 10 days striahgt. i liek to set it on the fly and different times i mite wanna start the track at a different cue

so I am in this club life out in queens, twisted. I get there early. House music is playing. I went because the people I was with were into hip hop and reagatoon. They cringed as they heard house and dance music.

Anyways, DJ camelo was Djing that night. He's a hip hop reagatoon DJ. He wasn't there when I got there, obviously since dance was playing. Anyways, hip hop starts to play and more people come in. Anyways, all of a sudden I see people coming in with 2 technic 1200's, and at least 10 creates of vinyl on a hand truck.

well, turns out there was no turntables at life in queens, only cdj-1000's. But Dj camelo was a madman behind the turntables, working hard and mixing hip hop...on a rane 2016 rotary mixer. I went to the booth and gave him props because he was using vinyl and mixing hip hop on knobs.

I remember like 3 or 4 years ago I was Djing at my friends club out in LI, and we hooked up the rane 2016 mixer I had, and I spilt the night with the hip hop Dj and he was crying that the mixer had no crossfader.

basically, my point is, a REAL DJ is going to be able to work with what ever is in front of him. Not cry and bitch that there is no cross fader or a laptop.

also, tiesto comment saying vinyl is dead is troubling.... a hip hop DJ would say he looks dead just pushing buttons behind the booth and being called the number 1 Dj in the world. What would that say about the genre of music he plays? If he is to be the # Dj in the world,dont say a format is dead, when alot of other Dj's still use it. I mean, maybe for dance music its dying, but not so much for hip hop.

The problem with everyone being DJ now is, anyone can be. Just download a couple tracks online and bam, your a DJ. But then we go back to the so called "death of dance music" where as the quality of music, DJ's, producers, and even clubs as been dying after the turn of the millennium. Look around, there is no more originality, even clubs nowadays are just carbon copies of other clubs, chain clubs.... music defenently is NOT as good as it was in the past...

also, there are hardly any REAL DJ's.. by this I mean, a Dj that plays ALL genres of music. to many times I go out only to be disgusted by a Dj playing ALL techno all night long, or all tribal... I mean, I hate it when I go out and I feel like I am listening to one real LOOOONNNGG song... this is probably the reason why people are turned off by dance these days, the DJ's have no idea what they are doing.

[dialectics]

As far as dance music getting worse - that's true and it isn't. What's happening is that it is much easier to produce music, and with the web it is so much easier to promote and distribute your music. Since the barrier to entry (e.g. the expense of a studio, pressing records, etc) is much lower, there are more people making dance. That can only be a good thing for the scene. The trouble is that so much of it is crap - just like so much of the bullshit pressed onto vinyl. Also, with digital it is much easier to jump on the bandwagon of whatever is hot now (e.g. the first time i heard a mashup with an 80s track it was amazing, now we're all so sick of it) and beat it to death. A good dj will have to filter through the crap in order to keep the crowd dancing and remain a working dj.

[silverbull]

I liked the days when a dj would play a track for a good 6 months to a yr b4 it was finally release to the public. I dont see why an average person should have all the new music a SUPERSTAR DJ has right away. It makes that particular dj that more special to go and hear cause you know only he/she will play that song. And ya know when its release you will go get it eventually. I remember when david morales would make tracks in the mid 90s and no one could get their hands on them until a yr later when he finally released it. Thats why i like what danny tenaglia is doin with DIBIZA.

[iamsamurai]

Dude, if you're actually watching the DJ the whole time, you're dull.

yup, its not always how the music is presented but the music itself. Everyone just shut the fuck up and dance.

Friend of mine uses serato, he got me hooked, lays out 6 hour sets using a mini laptop, serato and external drive. Its sick and the track selection is bananas, its shit he would never think of bringing on vinyl but its there so its like last min decisions, its more personal in a way and allows for a unique set if the dj knows how to work it proper.