Josh-da-man

I don't think there have been any new laserdisc players made in the last ten years. (Can one still buy a new 8-track deck? I remember that Radio Shack used to sell them around '90 or so.)

A few things have kept vinyl alive. One, I think, is the whole DJ thing. Thanks to DJing, new turntables are still being made, and that has served to keep vinyl a niche format.

Another is that new LPs are still being made, most of them aimed at collectors and the like.

A third, it's a durable, good-sounding format. The sound quality is excellent (many would argue it is superior to CDs), and with proper care records will last a lifetime. The same can't be said for other audio formats like 8-tracks and cassettes.

Dan Average

Pioneer continued manufacturing players until at least 2004, but the last new model came out in '98. The actual discs haven't been pressed since 2002.

Another factor that hasn't been mentioned yet is that it's orders of magnitude simpler to cut and press vinyl than it was to cut and press LDs; vinyl is a lot more forgiving of minor variances than LD, where the tolerances are almost infinitesimal. This isn't to say pressing vinyl is child's play, but it's simple (and cheap) enough to make small-scale production economically viable. Laserdisc, not so much.

Jay G.

Ahem
It's a point that bears repeating though.

wm lopez

Doesn't laserdisc have way better sound than dvd?
I know DIE HARD and PHANTOM MENACE audio kicks butt on laserdisc.

DVD Polizei

I used to spin vinyl back in the 90's, and I would tend to agree it was because there was a huge market for turntables as the DJ market was massive--especially in Europe and the UK. And I would also tend to agree vinyl actually sounds better than CD--but there's a huge bell curve on this debate. In my experience, we had extremely idiotic sound engineers who transferred music to CD, and didn't really know what they were doing. Vinyl allowed for a rather large volume range where you wouldn't have distortion--basically because of the nature of vinyl itself--but when looking to CD, there were strict audio boundaries if you wanted to master a CD for playback.

With Denon's dual-cd DJ consoles and Pioneer's unique design on dual-cd consoles, vinyl was eventually being phased out amongst DJs around 2000 or so (maybe earlier, but at this point in time, many of us DJs didn't use CD players as our main gig, we used them as backups and background music when we took our breaks--creating our own mix of about an hour or so before the show and playing it on CD as we kicked back was nice after several hours of live DJing--and we didn't have to turn over the fucking cassette to SIDE B after a half hour!). I was in the minority of DJs who started using the first Denon dual-CD consoles, and it was hard at first, but damn, I really loved them after I got used to them. Hell, I've even been looking at them now and may get one instead of a Blu-ray player, just because they are so fun to play with. Of course, we have software programs which can do the same thing to a completely different level, but hands-on is always fun.

And then samplers and high-end mixers became more affordable, as well as increasing their amount of on-board storage of samples grabbed from CDs which could be done lightning fast compared to a turntable.

But anyway, I would prefer a vinyl cut of a track over CD and would prefer to master it from vinyl than taking it directly from a CD, because so many "recording engineers" are oblivious to sound levels and the equipment is set to a specific threshold where hundreds of artists are pumped through without regard each musical artist requires specific sound levels and adjustments.

Jay G.

It's a bit of a generality to say that LD audio was better. LD's could hold 2 channels of analog audio and 2 channels of Digital. The analog audio was FM modulated. It could theoretically be better than a digital track, although I think most LD enthusiasts preferred the digital tracks.

The digital tracks were usually used for stereo uncompressed PCM, with possible dolby surround encoding. DVD has PCM as an audio option, one all DVD players are required to be able to decode, but most DVD releases opt for a lower-bitrate DD track instead.

DD 5.1 Surround was added to LDs later in its lifespan, maxing out at 384kbps. DD 5.1 Surround tracks on DVDs max out at 448kbps, so with DD, DVD has the advantage.

So, for example, with Phantom Menace, the DD 6.1 EX audio on the LD can't match the bitrate of the same DD 6.1 EX track on the DVD.

With DTS, on LDs this track would use up the digital audio channels, and always be "full rate" at 1536 kbps. DVD allows for full bit-rate DTS, but most disc use "half rate" at 768 kbps. So the DTS on a LD has the potential to be better than a DVD.

One big limitation of LD was the number of available tracks, which was two channels each of analog and digital. If an LD had DTS, it didn't have PCM. DD on LD took up one analog channel, leaving only one other analog channel for a mono track, possibly a commentary or mono soundtrack.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laserdisc#Audio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video#Audio_data

Also, the possible audio advantages of LD have largely been wiped out by BD, which allows uncompressed digital multi-channel surround, at bitrates higher than LD could manage.

For example, for Die Hard, neither the DTS or PCM soundtracks on the various LD releases can match the DTS-HD MA track on the BD:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095016/laserdisc
http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/movies...57&show=review

beebs

$49.98 list for the LD back in 1995. What's that like $67 adjusted dollars? Makes the ~$9 deal I got on this from Amazon (B1G1 + Price Corrections) feel like a complete steal.

-beebs

Josh Z

Just one note of correction. The version of DTS used on laserdisc was actually 1235 kb/s.

Jay G.

Thanks for the info; the wikipedia page on laserdiscs didn't mention the bitrate for DTS on LD. So DVD has the potential of having a DTS track with a higher bitrate than LD, although in practice this doesn't occur often.

mick0016

I have a DVL-700 that I think my parents are still using as a DVD Player. Sold my my LD's a long time ago. Made some decent coin on some of the big box sets (Like Star Wars) and the Disney LD's before they decided to make DVD's.

The big killer for me was the AC3-RF to get the Dolby Digital sound. As soon as I sold my Denon AVR-3200 (which had an input jack), I wasn't willing to pay $100 or more for a RF Modulator. I still remember how great T2 sounded the first time I listened to it on LD. Good times, Good Times.