Would vinyl even be invented today?

Zd542, I respect your posts in general but I can think of nothing to say but just look around you in a consumer mad society .
Perhaps why someone will spend 10K more for a Passat if you puy 4 ten buck rings on the front? Or 30 bucks more for a shirt with an alligator on it than same from the same Asian factory.
X 10,000 .

That said, from the numbers that were supplied, we can say in excess of 300,000 turntables sold last year and that means if you add the Numarks, Ions, Audio-Technica sales, it is safe to say approximately 1,000,000 turntables sold last year. Add Crosley and the number would probably double. We claim it is "safe" to say 1,000,000 because a few years ago Ion did reveal that it sold that many turntables.

That is taken from an article on analog planet. The 300,000 number is of "high-grade" manufacturers, basically anybody whose name is not mentioned.

So assuming that at most 30% of sales are decent TT's and the rest are junk is the resurgence of vinyl a sound thing. Then if we add in Crosley it could be as little as 15% of TTs are decent stuff. Is that a vinyl sound loving resurgence or something else?

The highest selling LP of the year was Jack White's Lazaretto. These are the TTs Jack White sells on his website. http://thirdmanstore.com/merchandise/turntables Except for the pro-ject that is really really terrible stuff.

Then there is this from Urban Outfitters. http://www.urbanoutfitters.com/urban/catalog/category.jsp?id=A_MUSIC_TURNTABLES#/ A store that is clearly targeted to younger people, but has a wider variety of TTs than any audio store I've been in recently.

Finally, how many people on the board have been to RSD which is easily the biggest day for record sales in the country (USA). People are lining up for hours outside before the stores open. I've done this and can easily say I was possibly the only person over 30 there.

Yes there are young people who have good systems and good turntables, but the majority of turntables that are being sold now are probably some of the worst ever produced. These people are not buying the TTs or vinyl for sound quality.

I think I have done a decent job of laying out my argument, for those that disagree please show me a similar story why I am wrong.

For that matter, would two-channel even be invented today? Unfortunately two channel is here to stay, for (at least) two reasons:
-The billions of recordings that were made in two-channel
-The immense popularity of headphones

The resurgence of vinyl is not about sound quality it is about hipsters being ironically cool.

Distilling the vinyl renaissance down to one minor cultural phenomenon is simplistic and ignores gobs of evidence that moves in several different directions.

At this point, the vinyl resurgence is too big and too long-lasting to be a fad. The vinyl resurgence started getting noticed about nine years ago. Evidence of the resurgence suggests several different markets. Current pop artists are issuing vinyl versions of their albums, mostly from digital sources. One could say that market serves the hipsters.

But what about Acoustic Sounds? It's the biggest single vendor of new vinyl. Or others in the same market--MusicDirect, ElusiveDisc, SoundStageDirect, etc.? $35 reissues of 1958-1964 RCA, Everest, and Mercury classical recordings (and Verve, Prestige, Columbia, and Concord Group jazz albums) are hardly aimed at hipsters. Nor are the new Beatles mono vinyl releases.

Also, since the vinyl resurgence, we have seen McIntosh come out with a turntable for the first time, Marantz came out with its first turntable in a looong time, and the few turntable manufacturers who continued through the dark days have exponentially expanded their lines: Rega, Pro-Ject, Music Hall have all gone from 2-3 item product lines to many times that.

Do you think for a moment that hipsters are fueling the expansion of audiophile turntables, cartridge offerings, phono preamps and step-up devices?

In fact, even vinyl-spinning hipsters couldn't prevent Technics from discontinuing the SL12x0 series of direct drive turntables. It's caused the boutique belt-drive companies to expand their product lines and thrive.

To say it's all hipsters or a consumer-mad society is narrow-focus and dismissive. Most of the turntables come from Europe, even the USA-branded ones. The McIntosh and Marantz models were sourced from Clearaudio. Other makers are Rega, Linn, Naim, Funk Firm, Music Hall, and Pro-Ject. All those makers continued and thrived because European music lovers refused to abandon vinyl. That's not hipsters or consumerism; it's finding the intrinsic musical value amidst decades of digital hype.

The trendy crap is Crosley, Numark, Ion, etc. Those would satisfy the hipster market, but the sonically driven quality stuff is for the rest of us. Let's not forget that the aging baby boom is a lump of 75 million American consumers, and many of us (me included) are having one last analog hurrah of our beloved music while we still can.

Oh? Was the sale of 300 million hula-hoops in 18 months a "minor" phenom ?
If Americans had the SLIGHTEST interest in the intrinsic value of music the jazz and classical market would not be 2-3 %.

IMO you just don't understand the tsunamic effect of the "next thing" in USA.