Lorde releases 'discless' album to help environment (but still does vinyl)

[Sebastian Cobb]

Are there advanced imaging/scanning techniques that could be employed to read the pitts/troughs that could be employed to recover a rotted disc, possibly with multiple passes (almost like how people can recover teletext from vhs by averaging repeated reads of the same pages) rather than reconditioning the disc?

[Pauline Walnuts]

Or just shove it the bin and download it off Soulseek?

[steveh]

I have a few PDO discs that suffered the problem which unfortunately I never got replaced at the time they were offering that service, though I doubt they could do anything for the Rising High ones as they'd gone bust a long time before. The PDO CDs in plastic cases are generally fine or just have minor errors you can't hear on the last track but the original Global Communication 76:14 album where it's a paper case right up against the CD is a discoloured unplayable mess. Rest of my collection going back 30+ years all play fine and when I've needed to rip stuff Exact Audio Copy reports almost all as 100% or 99.9% accurate.

Most annoying thing with the decline of CDs and the rise of MP3s / streaming has been the same mastering being usually used for both so even if you're forking out for a CD you get a horrible brickwall mastered release that offers no benefit over buying MP3s instead. We've done that thread before though...

Some months back there were quite a few stories about the environmental impact of streaming but I think they were making out it was way less efficient than it actually is in terms of how many streams a server can handle and ignoring the use of edge servers and device cacheing. Probably the more obscure your tastes are and the more you want to listen to new music, the greater your environmental impact.

[The Mollusk]

Or just shove it the bin and download it off Soulseek?

You could just place it in the bin. No need to be so aggressive. Practice compassion you dickweed.

[buzby]

Are there advanced imaging/scanning techniques that could be employed to read the pitts/troughs that could be employed to recover a rotted disc, possibly with multiple passes (almost like how people can recover teletext from vhs by averaging repeated reads of the same pages) rather than reconditioning the disc?

The pits on a CD are in the hundreds of nanometer to micrometer size. it would take some scanning capabilty to pick those up amongst the clutter of silver sulphate dendrites (not to mention the fact the track arranged in a sprial, the enemy of all pixel-based image representation systems). It would probably be cheaper to licence the original master tape from the record company and get a private pressing made.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I was just curious from a last-resort feasibility thing really.

On the master tapes thing - I know someone who has a side job at a label that also does professional archival to DSD for other companies including some majors, quite often they're not interested in getting the masters back after they've been digitised.

[purlieu]

Articles like this really bug me, focusing entirely on vinyl revenue being higher than CDs, plenty of lines about the vinyl resurgence and such, and then quietly closing with the sentence "In terms of actual numbers, CDs are still outselling vinyl records in the UK by an estimated factor of around 5:1. It remains the country's dominant physical format." Given the amount of column space given to the vinyl resurgence in the past five years, the fact that CD "remains the country's dominant physical format" should be more of a headline grabber, to be honest.

[Malcy]

Saw a BBC piece about Vinyl and sustainability yesterday.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-57572663

Apparently it's in the region of 27 streams of an album to equal a vinyl purchase. All for vinyl these days and split myself between CD, Vinyl & my vast downloaded music. I hate the fact that streaming is included in sales now because that's so much easier than physical sales to manipulate.

I'd still rather illegally download an album, listen once and buy it on vinyl if I like it, and it's available on the format, than just exclusively stream it as the artist gets even more fuck all. Happy to support certain artists on Bandcamp or through their own independent ventures.

[Shaky]

I keep misreading the thread title as "Lorde releases 'dickless" album...'".

[steveh]

Apparently it's in the region of 27 streams of an album to equal a vinyl purchase.

It's not that low. The 2021 figure for one hour of streaming video is 36g of CO2. If you assume audio is 40 times less than the video bitrate and it's a 40 minute album then that's 0.6g per stream. The carbon footprint for a vinyl album is 500g so you'd have to stream it 833 times. And if you were repeat playing an album regularly then most likely it would be cached on your local device so the footprint would be considerably smaller.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Yes, it's true. This album has no disk.

[Sebastian Cobb]

It's not that low. The 2021 figure for one hour of streaming video is 36g of CO2. If you assume audio is 40 times less than the video bitrate and it's a 40 minute album then that's 0.6g per stream. The carbon footprint for a vinyl album is 500g so you'd have to stream it 833 times. And if you were repeat playing an album regularly then most likely it would be cached on your local device so the footprint would be considerably smaller.

That's a great article, thanks for posting it. I've seen a few articles opining on how bad streaming is, but generally they rarely show their working and include quite woolly quotes from researchers, and rarely acknowledge things like caching either.

Impressed it takes things like viewing device into account as well since obviously you probably want to account for the display devie itself when making rough comparisons to linear broadcast, dvd etc.

[Pauline Walnuts]

Yes, it's true. This man has no disc.

Yes, it's true. This album has no disk.

This is the worst I've seen yet, this man has no disk.


(I went for the Ion Fury version, for reasons.)  https://youtu.be/MlLzbaLpAfE?t=12

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Clearly, Popcorn should have thought ahead.

[purlieu]

Interesting stuff about streaming, and at least somewhat heartening. With continually advancing technology, servers will obviously become more efficient and streaming's carbon footprint will go down. Now just to sort out the 'paying artists' issue.

I wonder if Lorde's album will be released on CD in Japan, where, as recently as last year, CD accounted for 70% of all music consumption.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Interesting stuff about streaming, and at least somewhat heartening. With continually advancing technology, servers will obviously become more efficient and streaming's carbon footprint will go down.

Yeah, it'd be very hard to put the genie back in the bottle. And any regulation aimed at them would be daft anyway, regulation should really look at targetting data centres / providers as a whole to incentivise renewables or dis-incentivise non-renewables, not least because I imagine a lot of it is rented from amazon/google et al.

[Captain Z]

Interesting stuff about streaming, and at least somewhat heartening. With continually advancing technology, servers will obviously become more efficient and streaming's carbon footprint will go down. Now just to sort out the 'paying artists' issue.

I wonder if Lorde's album will be released on CD in Japan, where, as recently as last year, CD accounted for 70% of all music consumption.

Never mind CD, will it be released via fax?

[purlieu]

Nah, Pete Namlook died in 2012.

[steveh]

The bit that's currently less environmentally friendly is the machine learning stuff behind the recommendation engines used by streaming services. Techniques improve though and specialist hardware to support it will help too.

Japan has fixed prices for CDs like the UK used to have for books:

One reason Japan has been slow to streaming is "saihan," a government system that allows labels to set retail prices for CDs and other physical products. Introduced in 1953 as an anti-monopoly law exception, saihan (meaning "resale") ensures copyrighted material's availability by reducing price competition among retail outlets.

As a result, most CD albums sell for 2,000 to 3,000 yen ($18.32 to $27.51) — up to 80% higher than in the United States. That guarantees a 25% to 30% per-unit profit margin for Japanese labels, while streaming services' monthly subscription fees average about 1,000 yen ($10), say industry sources. "As long as there is physical demand, it is natural for a profit-seeking company like a label not to abandon it," says Masanori Ohori, executive officer of Tokyo-based label Toy's Factory. For that reason, Japan's powerful talent agencies have also kept their acts off streaming services, but even longtime holdouts like Johnny & Associates, which represents Arashi, are now overcoming those concerns.

https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/streaming/9550477/japanese-music-industry-cds-streaming-saihan/

[kngen]

I wonder where the LP is getting pressed. I've noticed a lot of bigger labels have begun to use GZ in the Czech Republic (the Black Sabbath Vol 4 Superdeluxe box set from Rhino was pressed there, much to my annoyance). There's a reason that place is so much cheaper than other EU and US pressing plants, and can handle such high volumes with fast turnarounds, and it's certainly not by adhering to anything as inconvenient as 'environmental standards'.

[Sebastian Cobb]

A lot of those Czech places use digilathes and cut things with little in the way of mastering so they sound shite.

[Pauline Walnuts]

I wonder where the LP is getting pressed. I've noticed a lot of bigger labels have begun to use GZ in the Czech Republic (the Black Sabbath Vol 4 Superdeluxe box set from Rhino was pressed there, much to my annoyance). There's a reason that place is so much cheaper than other EU and US pressing plants, and can handle such high volumes with fast turnarounds, and it's certainly not by adhering to anything as inconvenient as 'environmental standards'.

Or sound quality standards.

At the risk of getting all SteveHoffmanForums here, the only place worse for pressings seems to be Jack White's Third Man, and they always cost a fortune when you've had to import them from the US.

[Rich Uncle Skeleton]

Ha is that so? Thats interesting, I don't know the first thing about Third Man but the way people spoke about it / the fuss over special pressings I assumed it was some super meticulous operation.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Yeah that is interesting, given it was supposedly an old plant and he was involved in the (good) meticulous reconstitution of the American Epic stuff.

It's been a while since I've heard a really good pressing. It's not that I find modern pressings amazingly noticeably bad (that was certainly the case with even big releases occasionally about 5 or so years ago), but if I dig out a fairly average LP from when vinyl was common it suddenly stands out.

I guess a lot of that was just mastering - not many of those guys left, and the vinyl market has massive backlogs... even a fairly average mastering engineer from the 80's could probably make a lot of stuff sound better.

Which is why I sometimes worry when I see repressed albums state they've been remastered - unless it was a bad pressing originally I'd have more confidence if they were cut from copies of existing master plates.

[kngen]

Or sound quality standards.

Indeed!
Seen a lot of folk moaning about RTI too, given that it's supposed to be one of the better pressing plants in the US - got a remastered version of Dead Boys - Young, Loud and Snotty the other day, which trumpets that it's pressed at RTI on the cover, and the guitars sound like they are clipping in a rather nasty, digitised way. Ho hum. I guess I'll stick to my original (if a wee bit muddy) one, then.

[purlieu]

In terms of mastering, it's really telling that these days a lot of people seem to think that you can't fit more than about 15 minutes per side. I remember an album I bought being promoted by the label on the ground that the mastering engineer managed to squeeze 18 minutes onto a side. Every time I see things like that I just think some of the biggest selling albums of all time are way longer than that. Abbey Road and Tubular Bells are both 49 minutes. If they were released today they'd both be double albums (although fuck knows how you'd manage that with Tubular Bells). Is this just affected audiophilia, or is nobody able to cut a really good sounding record that lasts longer than about 35 minutes these days? I'm not an audiophile in any sense - I couldn't tell a 192kbps mp3, a 24bit FLAC or an LP apart, sound wise - so I'm interested to know how much truth there is behind this apparent necessity to make albums shorter and shorter to fit.

[steveh]

The albums with 25 mins per side never sounded that great but people just accepted it and turned the volume up. The QA wasn't always great either - I started buying records regularly in the early eighties and quite often had to return one for a replacement because of some pressing fault.

There used to be specialist companies licensed by the labels that would sell audiophiles copies of albums on quarter inch 7.5ips tape for a massive price so you could appreciate the full sonic majesty of Dark Side of the Moon.

[kngen]

Is nobody able to cut a really good sounding record that lasts longer than about 35 minutes these days?

I think that might be the crux of it. That process is almost entirely automated now, and the days of master craftsmen from The Mastering Lab[nb]We're straying into Steve Hoffman territory again, but if you've got an old press of DSOTM or something similar from that era and it has TML on the run-out groove, you're laughing. [/nb] using their expertise to get the optimum quality on the stamper are long gone.

[purlieu]

It's just another reason I tend to prefer CDs. I know there are people who get a bit sneery at anyone who doesn't think flipping sides is as integral part of the listening process, or say that it's just being lazy, but for me an album has always been a case of getting absorbed into the music start to finish. And that comes from getting into music via CDs, and especially through artists who used the CD format as a way to make long, gapless records. So in general, and for any atmospheric music in particular, I find having to stop the record in the middle only detrimental to the listening process. So now there are albums that would in the past have been single LPs that are now doubles, it only makes it worse. Huerco S's For Those of You Who Have Never is a lo-fi ambient album running to about 50 minutes, and the only physical version was a double LP. Every time I began to really get into it it would stop and I'd be wrenched out of the experience. I eventually just stopped listening to it as it was exceptionally unsatisfying.

Inspired by this discussion I just popped on FSOL's Environments 2 LP which is 58 minutes long on a single disc. It sounds as good as the CD to me.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I think in some cases 'automated' mastering just means running the .wav's through the riaa curve.

I'd noticed most modern records have quite varying sizes in runout. I feel like back in the day this tended to be adjusted so shorter records had fatter grooves and could be cut louder, perhaps they just leave it at a default setting now and waste the leftovers?