Why I Love Vinyl – Reason #372
I am not one of those people who goes on and on about the quality of vinyl and the sound it makes and so on and so on, because I am just not an audiophile, really. I’m not saying that I can’t hear the difference, just that I have no real objection to listening to badly recorded songs on 92Kbps mp3s or on a shitty old tape recorder or anything like that. It just doesn’t really colour my enjoyment of a song, particularly, is all I’m saying.
This came up on the Fresh Air Radio show yesterday though, and I thought I might write a post about it: one of the things for which I love vinyl, more than the sound, is the way it changes the actual process of listening to music. I have no CDs anymore, just digital and vinyl. Because of the Biblical quantities of new music I listen to and the fact that I am jealous little hoarder, I have gigabytes worth of music on my main hard drive (and yes, before you ask, it is scrupulously backed up). I don’t know the exact number, but I think you could start my digital music collection playing, walk away from the stereo for two months, and it still wouldn’t have to repeat a single song.
That kind of thing, along with Spotify and naughty downloading really does change how I listen to music. I can find myself deciding I like something, shunting it into my music library, and then not listening to it again for years because I am so caught up with my inbox. That a bit sad, really, and it is also where vinyl comes in.
Collecting vinyl is an expensive and painstaking process. Between online purchases from small indie labels across the world (well, the US, Canada and here, let’s be honest), browsing through second-hand shops, the odd new thing purchased in actual record shops (remember them?) and occasionally going mental on eBay whilst plastered, it takes time and effort to accumulate vinyl. It’s also bulky and expensive, so you just can’t buy that much of it. I know some people might challenge that, but they are mental people, like Ed from 17 Seconds, who has a whole room of the stuff. Compared to digital though, it’s just impossible to own that much music on record simply for practical reasons. This restriction means that your collection tends to stay manageable, and also tends to cluster around the things you really, really love, with a few random second hand purchases thrown in to mix things up.
Secondly, of course, playing the stuff is a very high-maintenance undertaking. Records need to be sifted, selected, piled up and, most importantly, turned over at least once every forty-five minutes or so. This makes the act of listening to vinyl so much more deliberate and selective than sticking your stereo on random and letting it play what amounts to a relatively closely selected personal radio station from your collection of digital files. You have to actively choose what you play, and you tend to listen to it more because you can’t just walk away and let it look after itself.
For myself I find it tends to slow me right down, and take the haste out of listening to music. A little like the Slow Food Movement, by its very slowness it’s not that it forces me to concentrate exactly, more that it prevents me really concentrating on anything else all that much, so I tend to just absorb the music more. It stops me treating listening to music like a job, stops me thinking about too many other things, forces me to concentrate on a much narrower selection of music and in doing so allows me to form a better relationship with it.
So never mind the audiophile sound issues, what I think I like most about vinyl is its very inconvenience. It is a demanding and awkward format, by today’s standards, and this forces you to listen to music in a certain way, a more deliberate and receptive way, and that is what I love the most about the stuff.
The Magnetic Fields – Time Enough For Rocking When We’re Old
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I couldn’t agree more…and the album’s visual and sometimes physical artwork translates so much better…it manipulates more of the senses…sight, sound, touch, and smell
What about taste?
edible record sleeves would surely be like edible undies….disgustingly brilliant!
My taste is better than yours, Madcow, that’s the single solitary point I am trying to prove with this whole website!
What about taste? In terms of personal preference of sound? I do like the crackle of vinyl, which is why I included that Wedding Present song. But that’s far from objectively ‘better’, more like a particular kind of ‘worse’ which we’ve all decided we enjoy.
I’m a fairly rampant audiophile but I have to say I sort of enjoyed vinyl. It just sounds familiar.
Funnily enough we just did a piece and the choreographer asked me to make the musicians sound like ‘an old record’.
The problem is when media like this when they are used as anything more than a museum piece. We have large amounts of media all over the world archived on lossy formats and once that quality is gone it’s gone forever. It’s one of the reasons I don’t hate MP3 as much as I should. No one archives on MP3 and because no one can really record to it, an MP3 implies that somewhere there is a higher quality wav. version of whatever song you have.
However, if you are collecting, vinyl is a terrible way of doing it.
And for the defence
45’s on vinyl are great fun when you get back from the pub pissed. As long as there is at least one other person with you willing to dance around and fish through the record boxes its a party. Getting through whole songs can be tricky though as the enthusiasm for the manual intervention and the next song takes over.
You can have the OMG feeling in the morning too, when you pray you didn’t open the really collectable stuff and leave parts of it scattered on the floor with This Charming Man.
I’m not sure vinyl should neccesarily be edible, as in completely consumable.
However, I do think it should have a pleasing flavour when licked.
Matthew, Matthew, Matthew. Tsk, Tsk, Tsk. Your campaign to prove your taste is better than mine is as fruitless as your loins. (I hope not actually. I hope you have an abundance of frogspawn waiting to be deposited in the nearest dirty puddle down Stockbridge…you mink). I feel flattered, nee’ AROUSED, at this online monument you have created to your hidden and constantly gnawing understanding that my love of the Spin Doctors defeats all your anti-folk mumbo jumbo into a cocked hat.
Crackle on vinyl…..its kind of like having a hairy film print copy of your favourite film as opposed to a ?lovely? upscaled digital remastered dvd/bluray beast is it not? I would still watch a hairy film print. Just so long as it wasnt so bad it missed sections out like when I saw an old print of Poltergeist at the Filmhoooooose.
It doesnt really ruin anything if its mild. I would say in music appreciation you can get away with a lot more rough and ready distortion than if you had to watch a distorted film. Bawz to that, says I.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8331106.stm
This wouldn’t have happened to popsmiths like the Spin Doctors. There would have been two dead coyotes roasting on an open fire.
But in seriousness…..that story is really horrible. I hate dogs.
completely agree,
I was at a show two days ago and they asked who all had record players, I was the only one who raised my hand.
Sheesh, I thought it was becoming more popular.
The post that has to follow this one (even though it’s already been done and done and done to death and beyond) is Why Compilation Tapes Are Better Than Playlists and vinyl is a crucial part of that – I apologise if I’ve said this on here before (though I know I’m just repeating myself from elsewhere) but a good compilation tape is about The Journey – you get out a pile of records, you scatter them a bit, you start to pick out significant points, you realise what the first and last songs of each side are going to be, maybe the odd point inbetween, and then you just start walking. Playlists can work out fine but they can also be seriously lacking in any REAL emotional narrative because You Haven’t Gone On The Journey. And also the temptation is to bung more and more on until they’re much too long and you’ll never listen to it all the way through anyway – the limits of a cassette are useful there too.
Adam
But can we please switch to a mix CD. Tapes sound like arse.
The problem is that the whole point of making tapes is that you have to listen to them whilst you make them, so one song really does lead to another and things happen in real time. If you promise to listen to every song as get to it and only choose what comes next whilst the previous one is on then you’re allowed to make a CD.
You’re absolutely right, Adam. Sound quality doesn’t really come into it – the whole process just isn’t all that special anymore.
I purchased a second turntable to convert to mp3 so I could have the best of both. We enjoy the social element of digging through the vinyl here at my house on the weeknights. Plus it’s a lot easier to roll a j on an album cover.
I really like vinyl, but it stresses me out because I have 6- and 8-year-old boys who typically tear through the house like a herd of rampaging buffalo, swinging their arms and legs and throwing things. I live in fear of their smashing into the stereo and setting the needle screeching across a precious record that I just dropped a small fortune on.
“I know some people might challenge that, but they are mental people, like Ed from 17 Seconds, who has a whole room of the stuff.”
heh heh…thanks for the shoutout -much to the long-suffering Mrs. 17 Seconds’ despair the picture above could almost be our front room…It has taken me over twenty years of collecting.
hard to tell on popularity though: last year, when we pressed the Aberfeldy ‘Claire’ single, we took the decision not to do CD singles on the grounds that vinyl seemed to be back, and the CD single was dead in the water. Then at the gigs people asked for a CD single. On the other hand, having pressed the X-Lion tamer EP only on vinyl, the other day I went into Mono in Glasgow who said that they would only take one on Cd but they would have taken more on vinyl! And when you are a tiny label like 17 Secs, it’s generally going to be one or the other! Sigh…
I know a mix tape is a labour of love but, but frankly I look forward to getting a CD every bit as much as a tape.
Where the mix tape has the biggest advantage for me is that you have to listen to a tape all the way through in order. A CD gets ripped onto your MP3 player and may never be heard in the correct order. Now that this a sin.
C&B, then why the fuck did you just shell out on the Builders/Loch Lomond Split 12″ then? I’m not sending our fine vinyl to a household where it may be brutalised!
Ed, I don’t think there’s a good answer, really. I reckon for a single vinyl is a good bet. Someone will always be disappointed with the format though, especially these days.
Ben, I am never making you another fucking mix ever again in your life if you do that. You can just listen to the podcasts, dammit.
Matthew, I think you touched on the key element (aside from the reduced ear fatigue you get from vinyl versus assaultive mp3s):
It is about the *ritual* involved with playing a record that makes the whole experience more immersive and special. Rather like a Japanese tea ceremony…
Cd’s just don’t have the whole other side element either.
Matthew
1) I did point out that it was a sin.
2) The last time you make sent me a mix it was right after you heard of a great new band called Broken Records. I’ve been using the podcast for years champ.
Dev – kind of like why I prefer a cork in my wine, rather than a screw-top. I think wine buffs have decided that screw-tops actually preserve the wine better, and I am sure they may be right, because I certainly have no idea. But dammit I like the foil-removing, cork-wrenching, back-spasming part of that ritual and screw-tops will never be able to match that.
Great Post!
I think the vinyl revival is interesting. It’s both nostaligic as well as indicitive of a desire for a more authentic life. I;m glad cds are dying out, I never really liked them. I have always enjoyed getting to know an album one side at a time. My desire for novelty kicks in about every half hour – average length of most lps – so it has always worked for me. I tried to break cds into sides but never got used to it. There are many cds i own in which I don’t know the last few songs as well as the rest.
Couldn’t resist that sweet LL/B&B 12.” I promise to bring it out only after bedtime.
C&B, you and DC have both bought one – good lads, good lads. Now, if you could just find another 288 pals…