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Turntables are still manufactured, but in very small numbers. While there are many people who prefer vinyl records to digital music sources, such as CD's, they represent an enthusiastic minority of listeners. The quality of the available record players, tonearms, and cartridges, has continued to improve, despite a diminishing market, allowing turntables to remain competitive on the high end audio systems market.

Update versions of the 1970's era Technics SL-1200 have remained an industry standard for DJs to th present day. Turntables and vinyl records remain popular in mixing (mostly dance-oriented) forms of electronic music, where they allow great latitude for physical manipulation of the music by the DJ.

In hip hop music, the turn table is used as an instrument. Manipulation of a record as part of the music rater than for normal playback or mixing, is called turntablism. The basis of turntablism and it's best known technique known as scratching, was pioneered by Grand Wizard Theodore. However it was not until Herbie Handcock's song "Rockit" in 1983 that the turntablism movement was recognized in popular music outside of the hip hop context.

The laser turntable uses a laser as the pickup instead of a stylus in physical contact with the disk. It was concieved in the late 1980's, although earlier prototypes were not of usable audio quality. Practical laser turntables are now being manufactured by ELPJ. They are favored by record libraries and some audiophiles since they eliminate physical wear completely. Experimentation is in progress in retrieving the audio from old records by scanning them the disc and analyzing the scanned image, rather than using any sort of turntable.

Although largely replaced since the introduction of the CD in 1982, record albums still sell in small numbers and are available through numerous sources. in 2008, LP sales grew by 90% over 2007, with 1.9 million records sold. Many audiophiles believe that all-analogue recordings made using a traditional tape recorder, simple microphone arrays and few overdubs, have a more natural sound than digital recordings.

There are also many turntables on the market designed to be plugged into a computer with by USB port for needle dropping purposes.

Source: wikipedia.org
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