There was a really interesting and thoughtful article in The Guardian recently about the return of vinyl as a… Well, what? As a medium? As a fetishistic object? As another way of detecting hipster wankers and or hi-fi snobs?
One of the article’s most cringe-worthy sections is a description of vinyl groups where about 70 people get together and sit in silence whilst ‘appreciating’ the albums such as Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ in total silence whilst the record is turned over reverentially by some hipster record priest, like a parody of a Nathan Barley character.
Call me judgemental but my immediate reaction
to that on reading about it could be summed up as: ‘Twats’. For all I know those events could be great
fun and not at all like the pretentious snob fests described in the
article. But all it reminded me of was
John Lydon’s ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ t-shirt, which was aimed not so much at the
band themselves but at the type of smug and complacent audiophile listener they
attracted.
Anyway all of that is a matter of personal preference. A more general observation made by the
article specifically (and by a hell of a lot more generally) is that vinyl is
back. In some quarters it is claimed
that this is the death of the digital format, something which is clearly
nonsense. New vinyl albums are ridiculously
expensive, for a start. A plus point
often raised by vinyl-converts is that the artwork is so much better (ie,
bigger); well this is true to a degree, but the artwork is only so big and
detailed to disguise the cumbersome object within the packaging.
The thing is that yes, yes, vinyl is ‘coming back’ but
hardly to the mainstream. I mean it
never went away for people such as DJs, or bona fide record collectors. It’s ‘coming
back’ in the same way that clothes in fashion magazines come back to kind of
people that care about that kind of thing.
It is perhaps not so much ‘coming back’ as it is ‘in’. A comparison can be made with artisan bread
and craft beers. It is an obsolete
format that holds a certain allure for people who like to feel superior.
Our family household when I was growing up were late to the
advent of CDs, for the most part sticking with cassettes and my parents’ record
player and reel-to-reel tapes. When I
first learned how to use the record player I can remember coming home from
school and having the house to myself for a bit, and so would play
records. I did enjoy the process of
putting a record on, swapping the side half-way through, watching the record
spin whilst listening to the music. I
enjoyed that kind of ritual. For about a
month. Then I found it irritating. It was an obsolete format for the mainstream then,
and it still is. Looking at comment
sections on that Guardian article and other Vinyl v Digital ones around the
net, here’s some of the things people like about vinyl:
Having to swap the
record halfway through. People claim
to enjoy having to swap the record over halfway through, but god knows
why. The claim that it forces you to
listen to the album “as a whole, as the artist intended”, is nonsense because
believe it or not it is possible to listen to an album as a whole on a CD
too. In fact, it’s possible to listen to
an album as a whole on Spotify believe it or not, you just have to not skip
forward a track and Bob’s your uncle. I
believe a lot of artists in the 70s would have loved it if you didn’t have to
have a break through the album (indeed, I’m willing to bet Pink Floyd would
have jumped at the chance of having ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ played as a
continuous 40 minute suite the way we can listen to it now with our fancy
binary codes).
Snap, Crackle and Pop
Vinyl inevitably begin to have background pops and crackles when you play
it back. There’s even the faint
swooshing noise of the needle against the record whilst it’s spinning. Personally, I prefer listening to music
without this – I can’t imagine this sound improving (using the first example to
hand) the clean atmopspherics of Martin Hannet’s work on the Joy Division
albumns. The fact is that LPs degenerate
at a far faster rate than CDs (or even cassette tapes) even when cared for
really well.
Lack Of Versatility
Personally I like listening to albums all the way through. But it’s nice to have the option to skip on
forward, or selecting one individual track to listen to. On digital formats this is literally done at
the touch of a button, and even cassettes found a way of fast forwarding to the
next track without too much hassle. Trying
to do it with a record is a faff. Being no DJ, and quite cack-handed, standing
over a record trying to drop the needle into the ‘blank’ groove inbetween
tracks is more trouble than it’s worth.
Warmth One claim
that is made for vinyl is that it has a ‘warmer’ sound (which is a crap
description but the most common). This
is all in the ears of the beholder, and probably only in the ears of a beholder
with expensive equipment. And what does
that supposed ‘warmth’ add?
Authenticity? Does it make a bad
song and make it better? Is it the ‘warmth’
a nu-Luddite needs to keep warm from being way cooler than me? This warmth is technically the “introduction
of distortion” anyway, as this Pitchfork article makes clear and so makes the music a
less authentic reproduction of the artist’s music.
I think a lot of the hipster fad of vinyl has less to do
with appreciation of sound and more to do with playing with expensive
toys. You could argue it’s a
reverse-snobbery backlash against iPods and MP3 Players which used to be
terribly chic but unfortunately everyone’s got one nowadays (except presumably
the people in the factories that produce them – that’s another rant). I don’t think there’s any question that
digital mediums can capture sound quality at least as well if not much better
than analogue sources and that claiming otherwise is posing of the smuggest
order. And you certainly won’t find me
having to stand up halfway through an album simply to carry on listening to it. I don’t own a record player for a start…
