Vinyl making a comeback?
"Mr.T" MrT@home wrote in message
"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
The context was clearly stated at the beginning of the
post that I replied to:
"Vinyl basically died in less than 10 years.
Which was falsely corrected by the following statement:
" Ignoring the previous 80 years of course."
The official date of the invention of the phonograph was
1877, but that wasn't when the vinyl LP was invented.
But as YOU correctly point out, YOU never said LP, and
Dick correctly states vinyl dates from 1872!
Actually, I said:
"If it existed in some lab, there still weren't any production
quantities of it. Vinyl as a production product was a product of the U.S.
synthetic rubber program of WW2."
So, Vinyl existed in some lab 1872. I allowed for that. Vinyl was still a
lab curiosity until the late 1920s, when a B.F. Goodrich scientist learned
how to mix it with plasticizers. Acceptance of the improved product was very
slow until WW2, when the Japanese captured most of the world's rubber
plantations. Anything that somewhat resembled rubber suddenly became very
interesting. During WW2, existing supplies of vinyl were gobbled up by the
military and production boomed. After WW2 there were significant production
resources for vinyl that were suddenly idled, and that is when vinyl became
a consumer product.
Vinyl LPs are very different products than the predecessor 78 rpm
technology, in my view. I was a consumer during the time when LPs first hit
the market. My recollection is that they dramatically changed what music
sounded like when played back by the typical music lover with better
equipment. All things considered, the transition from 78s to LPs was a
similar convenience and sound quality upgrade as was the migration to CDs.
Perhaps not as dramatic, but not that far off.
So trying to be pedantic, you get hoisted by your own
petard! :-)
For all practical purposes, there were no vinyl consumer products until
after WW2.
And I still claim acetate 78's etc. were similar
technology to microgroove LP's, whilst CD digital
technology was completely new.
While 78s can be made to sound good, in general the ones that were sold to
consumers in the day were poor sounding even under ideal conditions, and
were usually played on fairly crude equipment. Acoustic playback was not
unusual. The playing time per side sucked. LPs pretty well forced electronic
playback to become the rule and allowed at least one movement of a classical
piece per side.
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