Putting A Needle On A Vinyl Record
| Field | Music |
| Went Obsolete | Late 1980s - early 1990s |
| Made Obsolete By | Compact Discs, Digital recording |
| Knowledge Assumed | Lifting, lowering |
| When useful | When one yearns for the pure fidelity of vinyl, or when direct manipulation of the music is required |
Prior to the advent of magnetic tape recording devices (shortly after World War II), music was traditionally recorded directly onto wax discs. Artists performed live and on a single take - a mistake usually meant having to re-record a new disc again. The audio information was stored in the form of a long, spiral groove on the vinyl disc surface. By a special process, thousands of copies of these discs were produced and sold to music enthusiasts all over the world.
To reproduce the recording, a playback device named a turntable is used. A tonearm fitted with a stylus or needle at one of its end points is required to reproduce the music contained in the vinyl grooves. The turntable revolves the record at a determined, constant speed. The stylus, or needle, is placed into the beginning of the record (usually the outer edge) and, as the disc spun clockwise, the microscopic perturbations in this groove are picked up by the stylus, converted into an electronic signal, amplified, and played for the user via a speaker.
To play a determined song on an album, the user has to lift up the tonearm manually and place it back where this song begins. Empty groove marks done by the original recording device make it easy to determine the beginning of a song. Sometimes this would also imply turning the record over (a vinyl record is recorded on both sides).
The introduction of the Compact Disc in the mid-1980s marked the beginning of the fall of vinyl as a mainstream format for music. By the early 1990s, most music stores sold CDs? and cassettes only.
Vinyl records, however, have made a steady comeback as an alternative niche market format since the late 1990s. Many underground punk and hardcore music bands still release their music as 7” records which turn into instant collectibles. Vinyl is also still highly sought after by audiophiles and other sound-conscious music fans who prefer the inherent “warmth” of its sound to the usual harshness of digital.
The vinyl record still represents the basic unit of DJing?, although the rise of digital replacements has led to the close of many specialty record stores such as A1 Records and Breakbeat Science in New York City. Not quite willing to abandon their vinyl roots, increasingly popular digital DJing? technologies like Serato Scratch Live work to incorporate or emulate vinyl as much as possible – in SSL's case, a special vinyl record containing a timecode and a USB audio interface are used to “map” control of MP3s? to a vinyl interface, giving the DJ the best of both worlds. Ironically, while vinyl record sales are on the decline, sales of DJ-quality turntables are higher than ever, solidifying the place of vinyl (or at least, the look and feel of vinyl) in every DJ's toolkit.
