[Mike is on vacation until 1/2/24. To tide you over, a few "Winter reruns" for your amusement, a little jaunt through the past.
Since we've been visiting old posts about photography all week, I figured there should be at least one off-topic rerun. This one is from Friday, March 24th, 2017. Seems recent, doesn't it? But we were almost seven years younger then.
Curiously, although vinyl album sales were up again for the 17th straight year, a research firm called Luminate polled 3,992 people over the age of 13 who had purchased a vinyl LP in the previous year—and only 50% of them said they owned a record player. Wish I knew what that surprising factoid means! But I don't.
Any stats in this article are from back then.]
N.b.: I am not saying "vinyl is better"!
In fact, I don't listen to vinyl much. Even given the well-documented "vinyl revival," vinyl accounts for just under 6% of worldwide music sales. I currently have a funky, steampunky stereo system set up in my family room, and I've rather arbitrarily decided—I dunno, perhaps because false parallelism pleases me—that my vinyl listening should comprise slightly less than 6% of my music listening. As a real fact, that could be off by a few percentage points.
There are, however, some things about listening to vinyl that I continue to like.
• One is that one song comes after another. It's not very convenient to skip cuts, and it's certainly not convenient to design your own list and ordering of songs—even from one album, and still less so from multiple albums. In practice, you're more or less forced to listen to everything on the side, in sequence. This has several effects—it gets you to listen to the "lesser" cuts on an album to get to your favorites, and sometimes, cuts that didn't grab you at first begin to grow on you. Or you might begin to get over the ones you liked best initially. I like the fact that my feeling about various songs—their relative value—morphs and changes over repeated listenings.
• Sequencing has an odd effect. Ever listened to a song on the radio, and, when it was over, immediately "heard" in your mind the opening bars of the song that followed it on the album you've listened to sixteen times? Even when the album is not a deliberate unified sequence, placing cuts one after the other has a cumulative effect that one song in isolation might not have. Maybe it's similar to seeing five or six photographs in a row on the wall instead of one in isolation.
• I like the fact that a "side" is a discrete period of time. I have 12" records with sides as short as 12 minutes and as long as 28 minutes. It's easy to understand listening to a side as a discrete occasion, one that has an expected duration. I think this tends to make me alert, as if it were an event. I understand it subliminally as something that's happening now and will be over soon.
• I like the fact that some artists design sides as programs of music*.
• I like that the end of a side is a break. (Personally I insist on semi-automatic turntables...that means a turntable that picks up the arm and needle and turns itself off at the end of every side. They're very uncommon today, apart from a few cheap mass-market models.)
• I like the fact that a vinyl record is a physical object that has some weight and some cost. This is entirely artificial; the same music as a digital file has no object-presence. It's easier to "treasure" an object. It anchors or tethers the music (which is, after all, just evanescent vibrations in the air) to something tangible. It makes the music less abstract somehow—not terribly similar to, but also not entirely dissimilar to, the act of watching a musician create sounds with an instrument.
• You may sue me, but sometimes I kinda like groove noise, and even, sometimes, pops and ticks. Yeah, I know. But these imperfections emphasize the mechanical origin of the event. It's possible to find it charming. It's not like I have to listen to it.
• As is widely shared by other vinyl lovers, I like the 12-inch square "canvas" of the record cover as a field for a visual design or for printing lyrics or notes. The music gives the ear something to do, and the album cover gives the eye something to do. Again, it's entirely artificial to link these two things, but whatever—I still like it. I usually set up the cover of whatever album is on the turntable on a ridge that runs around the wainscoting of my family room.
• This might sound strange, but I like it that a record "lives" on the turntable for a while. I'm normally either enjoying hearing the same record (or even the same side) over and over again, or else I'm too lazy to put one record away and get another one out. Familiarity has an effect too—it clarifies your feelings. So I really get to know a record intimately, hearing it multiple times before it's relegated to the shelves again. This is even more true because my listening at the computer ranges so widely and freely; I get my fill of variety there and don't feel the need to get variety from the turntable in the family room as much as I would if it were my only source of music.
And finally,
• I like the "toy" factor of mechanical turntables. Again, this is silly and (these days) unnecessary, but I like it all the same. I'm currently using a 40+-year-old turntable (restored) and an even older cartridge (with a new stylus).
Child of my times, c'est moi. Or maybe I just like old stuff. Vive la <6%!
Hope you have a very nice weekend.
Mike
*Of course, one downside is that one cut you hate might ruin a side for you.
Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Mike is on vacation this week. Comments will be posted promptly, but there won’t be any ‘Featured Comments’ on these.
I have it on good authority that it is also easier to roll a three-paper joint on an LP sleeve, compared with a CD box... :)
Posted by: Steve Higgins | Saturday, 30 December 2023 at 10:37 AM
For a while in my youth (or so it seems now) I seriously thought about going down the stereo equipment rabbit hole. Just in time I was diagnosed with hearing loss. It's normal up to a point, then essentially disappears, well below the high frequencies people normally hear. (Not just the frequencies of my wife's voice, as is often suggested.) I realized there was no point to buying expensive stereo equipment to produce sounds I can't hear.
Posted by: Keith Cartmell | Saturday, 30 December 2023 at 11:31 AM
I don't like streaming video. I don't like the fact that I might have to subscribe to 3-4 services to see the programs that interest me. If they cost $2.50 per month, who cares, but they cost way more than that. And the promise of unlimited availability has turned out to be a crock. There are plenty of old movies or TV shows removed from the data base or that were never there. That should be the one great advantage of online access.
DVDs give me all the resolution I need. Driving somewhere to rent them can be a pain, otoh, it gets me out of the house which is not a bad thing. If I buy a DVD, I can average out the cost by sharing the purchase with others, either directly or via used DVD shops. 1080p is better than what is on DVD but who cares about that when you're watching a detective series.
I like the iTunes model where I bought/rented the TV shows/movies individually. But subscription is the thing now, and I DETEST subscriptions.
All this tech was supposed to bring consumers choice but I feel like it's limiting my choices. All these systems are set up to make a smaller and smaller group of people richer and richer. I'm SO sick and tired of hearing that I live in a service economy. That's a crock of turd. I have fewer choices and have to do more things for myself. Service economy, my arse.
Posted by: Robert Roaldi | Saturday, 30 December 2023 at 01:33 PM
Ditto! And I'll add that vinyl saves me money, because if vinyl isn't the most hi-res medium available, as many insist, what's the incentive to splurge on high-end equipment? Certainly my aging ears couldn't care less. Besides, I actually like (re)using middling-to-good equipment from vinyl's heyday to listen to vinyl. Call it nostalgia. Seems to work just fine for digital music, too, and I find the materials and ergonomics more pleasant.
Posted by: robert e | Saturday, 30 December 2023 at 02:11 PM
Turntables never require a firmware upgrade, don't have to boot up, don't require an interweb connection, and cannot record data and send it for the enrichment of Zuckergatesmusk & Minions. Kind of like film cameras, now that I think about it.
Posted by: Steve Renwick | Saturday, 30 December 2023 at 02:57 PM
I’m partial to leather. 😂
Posted by: Jeff1000 | Saturday, 30 December 2023 at 05:19 PM
Between the 1970's and 1990's, I collected LPs and maintained a decent stereo to listen to them on. I still have the stereo and it sounds better than ever, but many of the LPs don't.
There is some kind of self-degeneration that many (about 50% estimated) LPs underwent over the years sitting on the shelf under good indoor storage conditions being occasionally played. They acquire a troubled sound full of noise and distortion, as if some microscopic junk oozed out of the vinyl compound and is now clogging the grooves. This degeneration has occurred to LPs of different originations: American made, European made, cheap and expensive.
My conclusion: The LP was poor system for long-term storage of music recordings and I'm glad I only collected maybe a couple hundred of them, instead of the thousands that some collectors have.
Posted by: Keith B. | Saturday, 30 December 2023 at 08:41 PM
Timely post. This evening, before I read this, I put on one of my wife’s favorite albums, one that I had only heard from her iPhone playlist until now. I unearthed and so first discovered that she owned a vinyl copy of it, and decided to give it a spin. The record was a little warped, sadly, and I played it on our kinda crappy portable turntable. Nothing was ideal and yet…
The slight warp wobble warbling made it a bit like a calliope playing. And the tinniness and “clipped highlights” of the lo-fi gave the album a new life to my ears. She played the digital files so much but this time I heard it differently and I took notice in a new way. All the imperfections made it sound more real, truly a found thing, sounding off with a texture that made it feel like a performance from a past time, and it played out almost ghost-like. I know this is all silly, but I was really pleased.
There is something about pulling out and then playing a record, I agree.
Posted by: xfmj | Sunday, 31 December 2023 at 12:15 AM
I still have most of my classical LPs dating back to the late 1960s. From what I can tell, they have not degraded at all. They have always been in climate-controlled houses and stored vertically. I just moved and had my Linn turntable reassembled and tuned by a specialist in Seattle. I love the mid-century precision and excellence, like using a high end film camera with a classic film stock.
Posted by: Kodachromeguy | Sunday, 31 December 2023 at 01:32 AM
Vinyl seems just good enough for human ears to satisfy, as far as dynamic range goes. I just put on an old copy of Buckingham Nicks, and while it has some pops and clicks, it really sounds great. I have a kind of strange Denon turntable from the eighties I found used in town, automatic, even auto weight (you turn a dial to a number, and the arm presses into the groove with a certain force). Right now, I'm listening to Nina Simone through Roon, and that also sounds great. I think what streaming has done is removed some of the social aspects of listening to music, but that also could just be me at 58. Who knows, if I were 20, maybe I'd get together with friends and listen to streaming albums just like we listened to vinyl ones in the 80's.
Posted by: John Krumm | Sunday, 31 December 2023 at 12:25 PM
As you probably remember, Mike, I love vinyl, and for many of the reasons you cite, not least of which is the “objectness”. And I have a “vintage” turntable which I totally rebuilt and upgraded myself - it’s a Thorens TD-160 that I bought around 1974-75 at Bay Bloor Radio in Toronto. It’s currently fitted with a vintage AudioQuest (née Jelco) tonearm and a Shure V15-IV with a Jico SAS-Z stylus.
The solidity, weight and “wholeness” of playback is a joy, and with good recordings on well-maintained discs, there is no lack of resolution and detail.
My accompanying gear has been carefully curated and while not ultimate “high end”, it competes favourably in my listening environment. The rig is one of the joys not named grandchildren.
Posted by: Earl Dunbar | Monday, 01 January 2024 at 10:37 AM
@ Keith B: I think you’ve reached an incorrect, but understandable, conclusion regarding LP storage and degradation. Two things are more likely. Those LPs may simply need a proper cleaning. Even under what may be considered adequate storage conditions mold can grow in the grooves, especially if the release compound found in the manufacture of all vinyl records was not removed after purchase. (Further, pressing plants are NOT clean rooms!)
Second, the age and condition of the cartridge and tonearm has a huge impact on reproduction. A pickup chain that has not been maintained (including stylus or cartridge replacement) will result in seriously degraded playback. Everything in that chain is mechanical or, in the case of wiring, electrical. From the stiffened suspension of a cartridge that has not been used in years to alignment of the cartridge, to tracking angle to tracking weight to anti-skating adjustment, to oxidation on electrical contacts will result in distortion and a poor experience.
Posted by: Earl Dunbar | Monday, 01 January 2024 at 10:51 AM
I have a turntable, but streaming Tidal or Qobuz through a streamer like the inexpensive WiiM Pro ($149), through a very good DAC (I have a Denafrips ARES II) is just as good if not better, Great music at my fingertips and I don't buy physical music anymore.
Posted by: Dan | Thursday, 04 January 2024 at 02:03 PM