Sir Barken Hyena writes:
After many years in an all-digital audio world, the one we all inhabit now, from cell phone to DVD, I’ve recently been listening to vinyl again. I’ve got a lot of company too, and it’s a trend that should be well known to any culture follower. New recordings are being released on vinyl again, shops are opening, and they’re even making turntables again.
My nephew, who’s a music freak to humble all music freaks, has become a convert to the vinyl brigade. He’s had me over a lot lately for evenings of record listening, something that used to be common for me and my friends but had gone the way of the dodo with the iPod. It’s been a welcome return for a lot of reasons.
Now, I don’t want to get into tech-audio talk much, but in my opinion it’s not really questionable that digital audio is the more accurate medium. I’ve recorded multi-track music in both formats extensively so there’s just no wiggle room for me in that opinion. But the experience of vinyl listening – and I say experience, not sound – is so distinctly different from digital audio that I believe there are clearly human hearing faculties that are not understood or known to current science, and hence not measured in tech specs. Which brings us to the issue of presence.
It’s a word audio people use a lot, and it refers to the ineffable sense of mass or weight behind a sound. It’s a highly desirable attribute that makes sounds come alive in the room with you. And it’s here, and only here to me, that vinyl wins out. It’s not quite communicable, but when I close my eyes and listen a more concrete, distinct, weighty, and *present* image of the sound forms in my mind than I get with digital sources, no matter how good.
Other issues: why is that I find myself hanging out and listening now when there’s no reason at all that we couldn’t do it with streamed music from, say, Spotify? I think it has partly to do with the above reasons of fidelity, but also perhaps the mechanical nature the sound source is involved, somehow making an impression from actual movement of mass while fizzing bits on a chip are just not really imaginable in any meaningful way. And the physicality of the item must play a role as well.
I think we’re seeing the limits of digital media here, and as sometimes happens, new and old learn to live in a new arrangement, side by side. Electric guitars didn’t replace acoustics, and there are hundreds other similar examples. Things are preserved when they are useful and useful can mean a lot of different things, especially in this age of tech miracles.
So Book People: take note. The music industry went there first, and the example of vinyl might point the way to your future of digital/physical compromise.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
There’s something about sitting in a room with someone, and being forced to physically get up and change the media, that changes the whole listening-to-music-with-friends dynamic. With iPods, it’s too easy to just switch from song to song, and the concept of the album doesn’t really mean anything. But back in the day, it was fun to have a stack of records (or even CDs) and flip through them as you found the songs you wanted to hear. There was a hunting-and-gathering aspect to it that, probably, lit up some primitive rewards center in the brain. Purely digital music is all instant gratification.
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Lots of truth to this. Changing records was also an ideal time to get a beer, go to the can, or ask that hot (or groovy, or foxy, depending on whether this was the sixties or seventies) chick you wanted to get to know better help you find an album. As you pointed out, a totally different dynamic.
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I, for one, welcome the convenience of our new digital music collections. It is chiefly anxiety about selling something that might be valuable to my children that keeps me from selling the remaining couple of yards of vinyl I still have moldering on the top shelf of my office closet.
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The best case for vinyl, especially concerning “catalog” releases from the 50s-early 80s, is that you avoid the horrible remastering jobs that were put on CD starting in the late 90’s. These are mostly the versions that are on iTunes, Spotify, etc. If you’re listening on earbuds or computer speakers it’s not a big deal, but on a good stereo, it makes a huge difference (and “good” doesn’t necessarily mean expensive–my vintage Marantz receivers were bought pretty cheap on ebay).
I don’t really get the fetish for modern recordings on vinyl, though. If you recorded your album front to back with digital (mixers, effects, ProTools, etc), I think something’s lost by the time it gets to the mastering stage anyway. I don’t really listen to much contemporary music anyway, partly because I think it sounds terrible vis-a-vis earlier technology.
Vinyl aside, I’ve often wondered why there’s such a strong negative bias towards physicality when it comes to recorded music. “I got rid of all my albums, good riddance!” has been a common refrain the last decade or so. But without a physical object to relate those sounds to, something gets lost. For me, it devalues the listening experience.
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You’re totally right about those early CD masters, they were appalling.
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I’m with Chucho. I still have 300+ vinyl albums packed up in my warehouse. (No room or the right stereo here at my current living quarters). I have lots of obscure or weird albums there that will most likely never be on CD or “the cloud”, etc. Plus, there’s all the great cover art and info on the albums and sleeves. I think having good tube equipment also contributes to the warm sound and the “good vibrations”. I still have a decent Kenwood “integrated amp” and it’s matching tuner (non digital) that you must turn a knob to get to the various stations. I used to play all of this through a huge pair of Altec A7 Voice Of The Theater speakers that are SO loud that you can’t turn up past “3” without hearing damage.
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The age of “hi-fi” was fun, the obsession with getting the best sound, the perfect speaker placement, etc. My friends and I were always competing fro who had the best stereo. Good times!
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The FM on those old tuners is just stunning. I turn on the classic rock station for friends who stop by my place, and they are blown away. It makes songs you’ve heard hundreds of times sound new.
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Here’s a website that’s handy for checking whether a certain CD release has good or poor dynamic range, searchable by artist or album:
http://www.dr.loudness-war.info/
If you poke around or sort by year, it looks like the mid-’90s was the beginning of the Loudness Wars, and it was game over already by the late ’90s. On the good side, because bland/loud sound is so in-demand these days, you can get the far better sounding old releases dirt cheap (unless they’re out of print).
I think I picked up the original release of Graceland by Paul Simon for $2 “used,” vs. however much they want for the new remaster with bonus tracks etc etc that nobody cares about. Check out the difference between the ’80s and 21st-century releases (yikes!):
http://www.dr.loudness-war.info/index.php?search_artist=&search_album=graceland
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Terrific site! Of course, I looked up “Raw Power” first.
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Nice piece. Here is my feeling:
If it was recorded for the digital age, post 1988 or so, it works fine on CD. Anything before that needs to be listened to in the medium for which it was recorded and mixed, vinyl.
But the reason vinyl comes alive is because there is more of it, sonically speaking.
Even the most professionally-mastered CDs don’t get the compression or EQ right on old recordings and it reduces the sonic scope of what you hear. You can discover how badly the music is damaged by doing a side-by-side with the vinyl. The EQ is never quite as splashy at the top or boomy at the bottom.
If anyone bought the 2009 Beatles reissues, compare “She Said She Said” to the one on the vinyl “Revolver” if you have it. Where did the cymbals go? The top end is almost completely gone. Ditto the bass on the “Abbey Road” songs. It used to boom through floorboards. It’s now boxy and neutered.
And don’t get me started on Motown reissues. My $1 mono copy of “Sixteen Tamla-Motown Hits!” has a thousand times more punch than the most expensive Four Tops or Marvelettes reissues I’ve bought. The CDs, in fact, made me question whether this was ever passable dance music. The LPs always get turned way up.
Also, regarding compression: CDs rob old mixes of their “breathing room,” and this causes audio fatigue over the course of an album. In conclusion: so long as guitars, drums and voices remain analog, so should their recorded medium.
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It would also be cool if we could make a list of artists to avoid on CD. These tend to be the ones who “really cared” about what their reissues sounded like and went the extra mile to remix their work into digital-sounding junk. Gag.
My top two offenders are The Who (especially avoid the first four or so albums on CD) and NRBQ, who decided to add now-dated 1980s digital reverb to their drums on some reissues and best-of collections. The only way to hear “Riding in My Car” the way nature intended is to dig up and old copy of “All Hopped Up.”
Finally George Martin deserved special anti-props for adding (get this) metallic-sounding *digital gated reverb* to the a cappella intro to “Nowhere Man” (it’s actually used on the vocals throughout the song but most obvious on the intro). Revising this mix was beyond tasteless; there was nothing wrong with the “dry” sounding intro. If it didn’t need reverb in ’65 why did it need it two decades later? Was Phil Collins serving as musical consultant?
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ZZ Top re-recorded the drums and added heavy reverb to the CD reissues of their 70s albums. They sound ghastly.
You really can’t win with CD reissues, because the early issues were plagued with inferior or alternate masters, or they mucked about with mixes. The later issues have DR problems.
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“Finally George Martin deserved special anti-props for adding (get this) metallic-sounding *digital gated reverb* to the a cappella intro to “Nowhere Man””
ACK!!! That’s horrible.
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