Uncouth Reflections

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.