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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