If DJing with vinyl and turntables was the only way to DJ today.......

[Dave Porter]

whats vinyl?

[RaySwift]

whats vinyl?

Something DJs use. Skilled DJs can work with this tool alone while some digital/controller DJs have no clue on how to use them.

[Adzm00]

......would you still be a DJ?

Yes.

And you wouldn't get half of the "I DJ for fashionable reasons and wear hipster jeans that are too tight for cock and balls" wankers trying to get gigs.

I'd think a good percentage of this site cannot actually DJ with turntables + mixer.

[Mahatma Coat]

Something DJs use. Skilled DJs can work with this tool alone while some digital/controller DJs have no clue on how to use them.

And you wouldn't get half of the "I DJ for fashionable reasons and wear hipster jeans that are too tight for cock and balls" wankers trying to get gigs.

QFT

I'm tellin ya, vinyl was a bullshit filter. It wasn't perfect, but I think it's apparent to most that it did keep the no-hoper-talentless-don't-give-a-fuck-about-the-skills factor down. You simply cannot get on stage with two turntables and a mixer, trainwreck all night and have anyone expect to book you/go see you again. Even if you were shit, you were at least kinda good.

Make it nice and easy so anyone can do it and watch your sales of hardware rocket.

[mostapha]

Everybody knows vinyl sounds better. More natural sound than digital.

Vinyl sounds like crap.

The only reason it's still useful as a DJ medium is because it's awesome. A lot of its shortcomings don't matter now that we're ~40 years into the loudness wars and everything is compressed to <12dB of dynamic range anyway (compared to vinyl's ~50dB and 16-bit digital's ~120dB for anything but full-spectrum noise). But, vinyl is not capable of playing back stereo signals in bass even if your speakers are set up to allow it because of the way the audio is cut onto the record…and by bass, I mean about 250-300Hz and below. It usually has a HF rolloff lower than digital audio, again because of physical limitations (which is why digital audio sounds more "clinical"…it's accurately reproducing more higher order overtones that were in the original instead of smoothing them out). It wears out (starting with stereo image and transients). It's unplayable if the truck/plane/boat it was shipped on got too hot. It's brittle in the cold. And based on numerous threads over the past several years on more than one forum and a lot of nights seeing counterweights on backwards……very few DJs have a clue how to set up a tonearm, which (among other things) collapses the stereo image towards mono, wears out the record faster, and might impede transient response. At the very least, most DJs cause a DC offset without having a clue why (rep to the person who tells me which setting being wrong causes this). And that warmth you hear about…that literally means noise caused by nonlinear distortion during the manufacturing process.

Vinyl is a shit medium when it comes to sound quality. It's worse than well-encoded mp3 in a lot of cases. You want digital to sound like vinyl…you can get damn close. Run your audio through a light distortion plugin…apply about a 12dB/Octave LPF @ around 10K…turn the stereo spread to around 80%…and put a transient designer/controller on the mix bus with the attack turned down just a tad…run it through an M/S EQ with the side signal high-passed at 300Hz…more like 600Hz for a DJ's badly set up needle…add a slight DC offset…and then run it through a tiny touch more distortion and compression.

They should all be pretty subtle on their own. And when you get to the point that it sounds okay…turn all the effects off and hear what it was supposed to sound like again.

The only thing that vinyl has going for it is that it's a lot of fun. Frankly, I think that's worth a lot. And lets face it…even though I have pretty good ears…I sure as hell can't hear nuances at club volumes on the shitty sound systems that the vast majority of us will play on. Neither can any of our patrons/clients/etc..

But in isolation…raw comparisons between a wav/aiff/lossless file that's straight out of the mastering engineer's hands and a record straight off the pressing room floor……vinyl just plain looses if your ears are good enough.

I'd probably still spin with vinyl if I could justify the expense…but I'd be consciously choosing to sacrifice sound quality for awesomeness and fun…….

Also…all of this is moot for those of you that run your mixers into the red. You might have killed your hearing, but the rest of us think you sound like shit (unless you're running something with a pre-DAC attenuator…also known as a "the live sound engineer thinks that DJs are fucking morons" switch). I know Pioneers have them. Not sure if anyone else has gone to that ridiculous extent yet. On the xone:62 (and I believe 92), A&H normalized their meters to -10dBu instead of +4dBV because they knew DJs were going to run into the red anyway and wanted to minimize the damage and give the next step in the signal path the level it was supposed to get instead of a clipped, overdriven turd.

And you wouldn't get half of the "I DJ for fashionable reasons and wear hipster jeans that are too tight for cock and balls" wankers trying to get gigs.

Yeah you would. Just not on the internet. The real world (that thing outside your bedroom) is full of vinyl-only hipsters. A lot of them don't DJ, but there's a huge hipster-lead vinyl resurgence.

Then again, that fad would be easy to kill. Say vinyl is cool, start releasing top40 hip hop on vinyl again, and plant some stories about how reel to reel tape machines sound better but aren't worth using because they're too much of a PITA. Problem solved.

You simply cannot get on stage with two turntables and a mixer, trainwreck all night and have anyone expect to book you/go see you again.

Theo Parish.

The guy's obviously passionate, but I haven't heard him not trainwreck…and I've tried.

[Sigma]

Vinyl sounds like crap.

[Liam]

I started on vinyl and i still do a lot of vinyl sets! So hell yeah! I don't mind the future of DJ'n, just hate all the guys that came from instant laptop/controller setup to taking the piss out of people that have been trying to earn stripes since the vinyl days. Ego's are at an all time high..

[Finnish_Fox]

Vinyl sounds like crap.

The only reason it's still useful as a DJ medium is because it's awesome. A lot of its shortcomings don't matter now that we're ~40 years into the loudness wars and everything is compressed to <12dB of dynamic range anyway (compared to vinyl's ~50dB and 16-bit digital's ~120dB for anything but full-spectrum noise). But, vinyl is not capable of playing back stereo signals in bass even if your speakers are set up to allow it because of the way the audio is cut onto the record…and by bass, I mean about 250-300Hz and below. It usually has a HF rolloff lower than digital audio, again because of physical limitations (which is why digital audio sounds more "clinical"…it's accurately reproducing more higher order overtones that were in the original instead of smoothing them out). It wears out (starting with stereo image and transients). It's unplayable if the truck/plane/boat it was shipped on got too hot. It's brittle in the cold. And based on numerous threads over the past several years on more than one forum and a lot of nights seeing counterweights on backwards……very few DJs have a clue how to set up a tonearm, which (among other things) collapses the stereo image towards mono, wears out the record faster, and might impede transient response. At the very least, most DJs cause a DC offset without having a clue why (rep to the person who tells me which setting being wrong causes this). And that warmth you hear about…that literally means noise caused by nonlinear distortion during the manufacturing process.

Vinyl is a shit medium when it comes to sound quality. It's worse than well-encoded mp3 in a lot of cases. You want digital to sound like vinyl…you can get damn close. Run your audio through a light distortion plugin…apply about a 12dB/Octave LPF @ around 10K…turn the stereo spread to around 80%…and put a transient designer/controller on the mix bus with the attack turned down just a tad…run it through an M/S EQ with the side signal high-passed at 300Hz…more like 600Hz for a DJ's badly set up needle…add a slight DC offset…and then run it through a tiny touch more distortion and compression.

They should all be pretty subtle on their own. And when you get to the point that it sounds okay…turn all the effects off and hear what it was supposed to sound like again.

The only thing that vinyl has going for it is that it's a lot of fun. Frankly, I think that's worth a lot. And lets face it…even though I have pretty good ears…I sure as hell can't hear nuances at club volumes on the shitty sound systems that the vast majority of us will play on. Neither can any of our patrons/clients/etc..

But in isolation…raw comparisons between a wav/aiff/lossless file that's straight out of the mastering engineer's hands and a record straight off the pressing room floor……vinyl just plain looses if your ears are good enough.

I'd probably still spin with vinyl if I could justify the expense…but I'd be consciously choosing to sacrifice sound quality for awesomeness and fun…….

Also…all of this is moot for those of you that run your mixers into the red. You might have killed your hearing, but the rest of us think you sound like shit (unless you're running something with a pre-DAC attenuator…also known as a "the live sound engineer thinks that DJs are fucking morons" switch). I know Pioneers have them. Not sure if anyone else has gone to that ridiculous extent yet. On the xone:62 (and I believe 92), A&H normalized their meters to -10dBu instead of +4dBV because they knew DJs were going to run into the red anyway and wanted to minimize the damage and give the next step in the signal path the level it was supposed to get instead of a clipped, overdriven turd.



Yeah you would. Just not on the internet. The real world (that thing outside your bedroom) is full of vinyl-only hipsters. A lot of them don't DJ, but there's a huge hipster-lead vinyl resurgence.

Then again, that fad would be easy to kill. Say vinyl is cool, start releasing top40 hip hop on vinyl again, and plant some stories about how reel to reel tape machines sound better but aren't worth using because they're too much of a PITA. Problem solved.



Theo Parish.

The guy's obviously passionate, but I haven't heard him not trainwreck…and I've tried.

Are you being facetious? Why would audiophiles prefer it?

What is a better medium for analog reproduction?

[DJ Headkick]

Absotively, but I prefer CDJs.

[ben mills]

Let's all put our penises out on the table and measure them!